As we begin the Tabletop Game portion of Game Design I, our
first assignment was to put together some random games from the internet and
see how they worked. After combing
through a couple websites, I got together with a few friends, each of us
bringing a couple games to the table.
The two games I contributed were called Bad Grandmas, a
card game, and Splut! which was more of the boarded variety. We only played Bad Grandmas, but I’m gonna
comment on both because I read enough of Splut!’s rules to understand it.
First off, Bad
Grandmas is hilariously irreverent.
I mean, just look at these cards:
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| Back in my day, we had feet for faces |
I could just tell that this game was developed for fun, and
the general reaction to the cards was one of shocked, horrified amusement. There’s honestly no other way to respond to a
picture of a grandma wielding a chainsaw.
I also enjoyed the goal modifiers—as long as they didn’t cancel each
other out, which happened a lot.
Splut!, on the
other hand, is designed to be abstract and minimalist, but the silhouettes are
extremely easy to read. There’s a dark
sense of humour to them as well: the game’s title derives from the sound of a
rock crushing the heads of your opponents (also happens to be the goal of the
game):
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| Rock, Wizard, Troll, Dwarf |
At this point, it’s pretty obvious I chose my games for
their senses of humour, and it’s true. I
like humour in games. If you can’t laugh
while playing a game, what’s the point?
The other three games that we looked as a group were 12 Realms (I guess it was a board-style
RPG?), Unbound (I don’t even know how
to classify this, but it was pretty sweet),
and some vampire game that I never found out the title to so we’re just
gonna call it That One Vampire Game (card
game). All of them were rather pretty to look at.
Unfortunately, now I need to rip into some of these games
with fierce, Tyrannasaurus Rex strength. We didn’t play three of the games
mentioned (one because of time constraints).
For the other two, we tried, but gave up, for one reason and one reason
only:
The rulebooks.
I can only describe some of these rulebooks as the spawn of
Eris, Greek goddess of confusion and strife.
They were rife with long bouts of text with no diagrams, awkward
phrasing (“exploit” instead of “use” for instance), and just incoherence. One book, 12
Realms, had an entire section on a group of cards that weren’t even
available for download. That One Vampire Game barely explained
how to set up your cards at all.
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| If your manual is longer than 6 pages without significant diagramming, just stop. |
The concepts for these games were compelling and made me want to play...until I read the rules. I am playing your game to relax and have fun, not achieve a
higher state of enlightenment. If it
takes longer than fifteen minutes to explain the rules game to a group of three
intelligent women, and not even the person reading the rules has a clue what is
going on because of a completely different vocabulary, you need to rethink
yourself. I will not subject myself to
this torture, even if one of the characters’ name is Siegfried.
Unbound and Bad Grandmas ended up having the best
rule sets, because they fit on tiny cards that were easy to reference and
understand. Unbound’s designer was even kind enough to have enough rule cards
for multiple players, as well as a handbook.
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| Both of these were smaller than 3"x5" |
The one problem with this “half a page” method was that the
designers often forgot to add in important rules. What happens when your Grandmas’ powers
tie? If the rule modifiers cancel
out? In Unbound, how many actions are you allowed per turn? These are pretty important things, but are
mysterious left out for either the sake of space or just airheadedness. I’m not going to give Unbound the choice of space, because there was a main manual as
well. That needed to be taken care of.
On the other hand, leaving those things out lets the players
have a choice in how they shape their game.
Which is nice except when you sit around for five minutes pouring
through a manual before saying “Screw this let’s just do it this way”.
As far as playing pieces go, Unbound and Bad Grandmas once again were pretty superior in my mind (Ok, That One Vampire Game was on the same lines, but I'm just ignoring it because no idea what was going on with it whatsoever). Card games were easy to look at and easy to assemble. Unbound had smaller pieces, but they were at a minimum, the majority being giant hexagons (not as hard to cut out as one might think).
Splut! was a different story. The board itself was way smaller than 8.5"x11" when printed out, and the pieces smaller than a quarter! My clumsy fists cannot hope to God to be able to control those pieces accurately.
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| WHY |
12 Realms took small pieces to the limit. There were pieces equivelant to dime-sized there. Easy to lose, easy to disturb and destroy the game, especially for a print-n-play where everything's made of slightly sturdy paper at best.
In
the end, were the games we played fun? Unbound definitely was, even though I
sat out of the two-player round. Seeing
the reaction to turning over a trap card and losing a significant amount of
progress was hilarious, and sabotage was ripe for the taking. Bad
Grandmas definitely had potential. I
would’ve suggested more cards and sabotage mechanics, as it was pretty straightforward.
The other games, however?
Considering we lost the will to play them before even getting started, I
can’t really say much about their fun factor.
What I can predict, though, is this: very few people derive joy and
entertainment from building nuclear power plants or running the world’s largest
filing cabinet. Don’t make your game
that kind of fun.
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