Design Lessons from the D&D Next Playtest (Part 3)

The last post in this series examining the design overlap between tabletop roleplaying and strategy games will discuss the third installment of the Against the Slave Lords playtest from July 19 and podcast from July 23. Catch up on the first and second posts in the series if you missed them earlier. As always, we'll focus on interesting design decisions reached over the course of D&D Next playtest and how they might relate to more general design principles.

1. Expendable and constant-effect abilities need to be balanced carefully and in general, the formula of "effect equals probability times consequence" doesn't necessarily hold true. An effect that always works but is nominally less powerful is often more useful in practice than one that has a massive effect if successful but only a small chance of working. Therefore, effects that incorporate mechanical variance--die rolls, card draws, or whatever else--need to both be substantially powerful and have a way to mitigate that variance (or have a lesser effect even on a "failure") to be worth using in comparison to "always works" abilities.

The classic D&D example of this sort of balancing is the low-level wizard spell magic missile, which always works when it's used. Often, there's no need to use any other spell of the same level because magic missile is so reliable that it's automatically preferable--even if there are other spells that might be nominally more powerful. Among strategy games, Ascension does a pretty good job of constant-effect (construct)/expendable (hero) balancing: not only are construct effects not overwhelmingly powerful compared to heroes, but they do a good job of complementing hero abilities in creative ways.

2. The "flow" of a complex game has a large effect on its perceived complexity. Even though the same time might elapse over the course of one very long turn as in a few shorter turns, more shorter turns tend to feel faster as there's less time spent waiting for another action. There's an implication for actual complexity as well: fewer actions can be accomplished in a shorter turn than in a longer one, making turns more straightforward but at the potential cost of some strategic depth.

In both roleplaying games and strategy games, the best designs have enough turn-by-turn strategy that each turn features interesting and important decisions but little enough time between turns that time doesn't feel wasted. And regardless of how long a game actually takes, it's rare to walk away from the game wishing it had felt like it lasted longer. Rodney and Mike discuss this point in the context of a particularly climactic fight that took a few hours, but through sufficiently short turns to keep the action moving, the fight never felt bogged down yet offered enough complexity for the players to accomplish their goals.

3. Gaming should be fun. Always. It's a fitting point to end on because it's the most important design rule of all. Mechanical, strategic, and aesthetic considerations exist only to make the game more enjoyable. While designing a game, every decision should be made in the spirit of increasing how much fun the game will be to play.

Design Lessons from the D&D Next Playtest (Part 2)

Continuing from last week's post, today we'll talk more about some of the design decisions made in the D&D Next open beta playtest and how they relate to strategy game design or design in general. This post will cover the live stream game from July 12 and the ensuing discussion on the July 18 podcast.

A well-designed game is reasonably intuitively able to be played even without looking at the rules. It's an interesting point, one that dovetails nicely from our recent discussions of approachability. Rodney and Mike assert that a marker of good game design is that if you open the box--literal for board games, more figurative for roleplaying games--you have at least some idea of how to play the game. You don't necessarily grasp all the complexities of the rules, and you certainly don't understand optimal strategies. But you have a decent idea of where pieces might go and how the board might look in its setup, early game, and end game.

There are two important implications of this design principle. First, it explains the enduring popularity of certain motifs in game design: moving spaces around a track by die rolls, winning tricks from hands of cards, completing sets of shapes or colors. Games that contain those elements make it relatively easy to predict the rules or gameplay just by looking at the parts. Second, making sure that games play the way you think they should play simply by looking at them removes barriers to approachability and encourages players to dive straight into the mechanics.

Two strategy games that do very good jobs of this intuitive leap into playing are Kingdom Builder and Carcassonne. Both games have boards that are easy to set up and pieces that clearly go places on those boards. If a new player opened the box to either game for the first time, she'd be able to reason through what the game was supposed to look and feel like almost immediately, even if she didn't instantly grasp the scoring or strategic nuances.

Mechanics should feel like tools in the hands of the players and not limitations. In some ways, this is an expansion of the previous point; if you feel like you should be able to do something in a game, the best games give you ways to do that. In roleplaying games, this is relatively simple: even if a situation isn't covered by the rules, the game master can pretty easily make a decision or institute a rule on the fly. For strategy games, though, rules tend to be harder coded, meaning good design requires a better forecasting of what naturally follows from a game's theme and mechanics.

For example, Settlers of Catan is about building a civilization, but it's not really a war or conquest game. There's no way to invade someone else's territory or steal their cities--but given the focus of the game, players don't really expect there to be, so it's not a limitation. At the same time, it does feel like there should be a way to defend your territory, which is why the knight/soldier card is so common. Settlers also handles resource trading exceptionally well, since it's natural for competing civilizations to want to specialize in what goods they produce. In contrast, when other resource management games that don't allow trading, that mechanic (or lack thereof) feels like an artificial limitation on something you'd naturally expect to be able to do. In this example, disallowing trading isn't necessarily a wrong design decision, but it's one that needs to make both mathematical and thematic sense before it's included in the game.

A game's numbers should mean something inside the game. Here's another nod toward theme, without which we'd just be throwing dice or drawing cards with increasingly abstract and complex rules constructions on top of them. Many, perhaps most, design decisions are made simply because it makes mechanical sense to do so. Maybe you draw three cards at the beginning of your turn to deplete the deck and to replenish your hand. That's fine; to be a good or even a great game, not every element of every turn needs to have deep thematic significance.

But it never hurts--and often greatly benefits--a game for its mechanics to have an in-universe, narrative reason to happen. In La Citta, citizens move from city to city because those citizens think they'll be better educated if they live elsewhere. In Tongiaki, ships sink if there aren't enough experienced captains among them to navigate the seas, and some routes are tougher than others. Perhaps Antoine Bauza designed 7 Wonders to have three ages because he thought that gave the right combination of brevity and strategic depth, but as a player, it's a lot more fun to think of it as pre-modern history getting divided into the ancient, classical, and medieval eras.

Next week, I'll be back with the third and (for now) final post in the series as the live stream game wraps up and the D&D design team offers its perspective on the game's conclusion.

Complexity Redux

In his recent post, Matt covered a few thought provoking items about complexity in game design that I hadn't considered before. One of the most significant was that realization that a game design can approach a point of optimization and after this a plateau can be observed where increasing complexity really only increases complexity.

The idea of the plateau in design is quite intuitive in hindsight, and at some point all designs form (and should form) an asymptote where they have achieved the design goals and by adding more, one in receiving diminishing returns at the cost of overwhelming the audience. Once we've "maxed out" a game design we can approach it with an emphasis on parsimony - the idea that all else being equal, the simplest explanation (the ideas and mechanics) that can be used to interpret the data (the game design) is best.

Since depth and complexity are two sides of the same coin and abstract in nature, how can one measure how a design fares? There are many variables to account, but a game analysis can largely be formed by a consensus of many players in the aftermath. A successfully balanced game leaves players thinking "I didn't do it quite well that first game but I can see how my decisions can have benefits and repurcussions for next time". A poorly balanced game leaves players failing to see the forest for the trees and feeling that they just didn't know where they went wrong.

Approachability Redux

As a follow-up to Matt's article on Approachability, I wanted to add a few additional thoughts.

Approachability can be evaluated in many different ways, but somehow each measuring stick is as intuitive as the conceptual idea behind it. When instructing a game, how often do you receive befuddled looks, or a person interjects with a question as there is no simple interpretation?

The idea of approachability is visible in teaching games. Some of the greatest games have the simplest rules, allowing new players to find their bearings and head in the right direction on their first play. What about the games where everyone needs a practice round? A practice game? In searching for the next great innovation designers often lose sight of approachability as it fades into the horizon.

I'm of the school of thought that Chess cannot be improved upon and I'm certainly not alone. But if it was designed today someone might try to make it more complex than necessary, losing the beauty of it. What if when the black pieces end their move on a darker square on the chess board they gained a special ability? What if when the white pieces entered a lighter square on the board the player draws a card. This sounds absurd but it is the direction some designers are moving and it may not be forward. Designers are increasing complexity and often by relation there is an increase in strategy, but the deep end of the pool is quickly becoming a "no diving" zone.

Is it possible to achieve perfection on a the scale of approachability? Should beginners have a reasonable shot at winning? Should a game be so intuitive that there are no technical questions such as "Can I do this?"

I think the answer to all of these questions is simply "no," as approachability does not extend into the learning curve of a game. Approachability is simply the hike up to base camp, and it says nothing about the height of the mountain or the rate of incline. Beginners don't need a reasonable chance to win, and we all learn differently - rarely do we see a set of rules that is comprehensive enough that we don't even try to break from constraints.

Approachability should be the gentle ascent preceding the real challenge, not phase one of Mount Everest.

Board Game Design: Identifying Multiple Paths to Victory (Part III)

Conclusion of Part I & Part II.

Card games offer a special approach to game driven chaos through a randomized deck. An individual card will often have a range of usefulness relative to the other cards in your hand. In a game of five card draw, there is a straightforward desire for higher value cards and a single deuce can often be discarded without thought. If given an initial hand beginning with a pair twos, suddenly an additional two would add tremendous value. Card games all utilize this to some degree.

In Dominion, many players are impressed with the ability to “build your own machine” deck construction mechanics. I was enamored with the idea that it embraced the aspect of unproductive cards with an all or nothing approach of victory cards. In the base game victory cards are a hindrance for the duration of the game until final scoring in which they are the only means in order to win. Everyone who has played even one game of Dominion has experienced the dreaded mostly green hand for which the actions on a turn are severely diminished. Dominion was the first instance of an all-or-nothing approach to the usefulness of cards I had observed in game design.

The brilliance of the design of the Pokemon Trading Card game is often overshadowed as it was glanced over by many and dismissed as merely an extension of the Pokemon brand. Cards were collected and traded based on the notoriety of the Pokemon, the holographic Charizard being the Holy Grail for many. If you were anything like me in the 1990’s, you never played a game of the Pokemon TCG by the written rules. If that is the case, chances are that trainer cards were passed over and energy cards were trashed completely.

Many collectible card games require an element of structure in the pregame ritual of deck building. Pokemon was unrestrained as the only requirement was that the deck must be comprised of 60 cards. A balance deck needed several categories of cards but there were no restrictive guidelines as to what could be included. Cards ranged from basic pokemon who were your primary method of representation in the battle arena; energy cards which fueled attacks and special actions and trainer cards which allowed common card game actions such as access to your discard pile and drawing additional cards for future use.

The Pokemon TCG is another prototypical example that falls within our framework for multiple victory conditions. Over the course of the game basic pokemon cards are played into your "bench", of which one is selected as an active pokemon. The primary strategy involves switching your active pokemon with those on your bench in order to utilize key advantages and minimizing weaknesses. Upon depleting the hit points of one of your opponent's pokemon, you receive one of six "prizes" which consist of 6 random cards dealt from your deck before the game.

Our first victory condition in this series of articles is our tactical victory, taking advantage of the primary actions in the game. In the Pokemon TCG this victory condition is met by knocking out all of your opponent's active and benched pokemon, in such a way that they have none available during a game. This condition can be more easily achieved with a deck designed to get a lot of pokemon out quickly onto your bench that have moderate attack strength in order to take down an opponent who builds up to that powerfully evolved Charizard. An interesting risk is made if a deck is based on a low quantity of powerful basic pokemon, risking those cards being stuck as an out of reach "prize" or on the bottom of the draw deck.

The prize function operates as an interesting method of facilitating chaos in the game. As not all cards can be drawn through normal play, for the risk averse players it insists upon a deck built on duplication and multiples of the most crucial cards for a given strategy. Achieving all six of the prizes is a simplified element of the set collection victory path in our design structure. It certainly doesn't express the expected aspects of set collection such as like-kind accumulation and zero-sum depletion but it does fit the criteria in a loosely defined manner and satisfies the basic requirement of set collection of a particular item.

Our final strategic pathway of an hourglass victory is a common structure in card games in one form or another. In many collectible card games when a player's deck is depleted this triggers victory for this player or more often, the opponent. In the Star Wars Collectible Card Game, when a powerful character card is defeated it has a "damage" number which causes additional attrition beyond that card. This function consists of discarding a number of cards equal to the "damage" number indicated on the card, usually relative to strength and functional as a balancing mechanism. In Pokemon, this is much more simpler and deck management is more often under control of each player based on drawing and reshuffling discarded cards back into the deck with special actions. Once a players deck has been exhausted, that player has been defeated.

I look forward to seeing how these three primary methods of victory will continue to be explored and expanded going forward in game design. I thank you for reading and I hope this series of articles has enriched your analysis of these game types, and thus encouraging a bright gaming future. 

Board Game Design: Identifying Multiple Paths to Victory (Part II)

In Part I we reviewed some multifarious victory conditions in board games, specifically victory conditions that complemented one another and allowed for a deeper strategy as players attempt to achieve victory.

As a quick summary, we assessed three primary conditions often used in board game design that allow for overlap and multiple paths to victory:

• Tactical Victory - The Tactical Victory path often utilizes a map and offers an opportunity to win in a war of attrition (Having the last pieces on the board in checkers) or by achieving a high standard control over the board (Running your opponents out of business in Monopoly or capturing your opponent’s flag in Stratego).
• Set Collection - The set collection mechanic can consist of either a carefully orchestrated set of requirements (Completion of each category in Trivial Pursuit and collecting all the different colored wedges) or an agglomeration of sorts (The frantic collection and redistribution of the right cards to teammates in Pandemic)
• Hourglass Victory - In Part I we identified the Hourglass victory as a means to bring a tightly contested game to conclusion, often consisting of a turn limit or an inevitable achievement that a player will make within a designed duration the game is intended to last.

In Part II we will take a look at the first of two games that utilize all three conditions and examine the differences in the application of each victory condition.

Rarely  have the opportunity to enjoy a game as finely crafted for a specific player count as End of the Triumvirate. Designed and balanced ideally for three players, it has often been described as “A knife fight in a phone booth” and its description does not disappoint. End of the Triumvirate is always fiercely contested until the end and by structural design does not suffer from runaway leader syndrome or the complementary apathetic loser syndrome.

End of the Triumvirate consists of each of our predefined victory conditions: a militaristic dissection of a map of the Roman Empire, a scale of military & political prowess and an annual Roman Senate election of which a player attempts to win twice over the course of the game.

In every design I've ever worked on I've found that it takes more than to develop great mechanics, adding an interesting theme or making players feel empowered. A game needs tension. The easiest way to do that always seems to be "add a map".

The End of the Triumvirate has a very well defined map that as one my expect takes up the majority of the game board as well as the majority of the game play. Consisting of 15 provinces, the Roman Empire is separated during set-up and each player begins with 5 provinces. Players lead large armies around the board gathering additional provinces and gold using a limited quantity of action points each turn.

Over the coarse of the game, provinces change hands many times and empires rise and fall. In order to achieve the tactical victory, a player must control 9 of the 15 territories during their turn. I have rarely seen this achieved and although it is certainly possible, it requires one of the three players to nearly bow out of the tactical victory condition entirely. When I have seen it achieved, often one or both of the other players are about to win using another victory condition in their very next turn; a wonderful sign of an intensely competitive game.

Our second victory condition for examination is the Senate election. Depending on how players plan out their turns, they may use their gold in order to persuade influence in the Senate. This can involve moving (yellow) unaligned citizens into their section of the forum or out of an opponents forum and back into the unaligned section. After each player has made two or three turns, the player with the most influence wins the election and their citizens are "reset" for the next election.

After winning one Senate election, a player can win the game by either winning another election or by positioning six citizens in their forum. This is the hourglass victory condition of The End of the Triumvirate. No matter how the game has played out, the game will not last more than four elections, and would only reach that point if all three players are active in the Senate. The majority of games I have participated in have ended with the third or fourth election delivering victory for a particularly politically active player, and it is a neat method to ensure a timely finish without a confusing turn limit (I'm occasionally left underwhelmed when a game ends after X number of turns without any really thematic reason).

The End of the Triumvirate offers two competence tracks in the subjects of military and political mastery. These function surprisingly well as mechanics to demonstrate the power advantage of someone who chooses to specialize and the competence tracks also allow for deeper player interaction.

Players have the ability to advance their abilities at their discretion which strengthens their actions and more importantly increases the costs of their opponents. For instance if I advance my position to "III" on the political competence my opponents behind me at "II"  or "I" must pay two extra gold in order to move citizens around in the Senate. Alternatively they can match my level or exceed it in order to remove this additional cost. The competence track adds an interesting additional element in order to assist players who are really pushing for a tactical victory or political victory in order to "protect their lead" by essentially placing bananas behind them on the final lap of a race in Mario Kart. Naturally as players attempt to outperform one another in competence, they spur this set collection victory condition to completion by reaching level "VII" in both competences.

The End of the Triumvirate offers three very diverse ways to seek victory but all three intertwined with the actions a player makes. In Part III we'll take a look at an old favorite that is entirely overlooked for its design brilliance and we'll see very quickly how it fits into our design analysis of diverse paths to victory.

Board Game Design: Identifying Multiple Paths to Victory (Part I)

In 1985 Paramount Pictures released a live action comedy based on the popular board game “Clue”. Featuring Tim Curry in one of his best performances, the movie “Clue” received mixed reviews and was considered commercially unsuccessful and thus like many others I first experienced it on video. I was enamored by the perfect casting and I’ve always loved mysteries but what made the movie memorable for me was that after the mystery was explained and I expected the credits to roll they hit me with two additional alternate endings.

The version of “Clue” feature film in theaters provided the audience with one of three endings, but the home video release ostensibly made more sense to the viewer as it helped establish that the actual turn of events was not as important as the journey made to get there. This was certainly not the first instance of multiple endings used in film and it didn’t fulfill its intended commercial goal of selling more tickets to the same audience for an alternate ending, but nevertheless it was my first memorable exposure to the idea and it made an impact.

A finely structured board game relies on a satisfying endgame even more than defining mechanics, integration of theme or player interaction. Its the aftertaste players will remember whether they won or lost that will bring the game out of the closet at the next opportunity. The final outcome should reward player(s) that performed the strongest, have a consolidated final scoring that is not entirely transparent and keep those who fall behind early engaged and hopeful.

One of the best ways to make the victory of a particular design distinguished from its bookshelf competitors is to allow multiple ways for players to find their own paths to victory. By providing several options, players maintain a tense struggle for resources while waging a war on multiple fronts.

For the purposes of this article I am particularly interested in games offering very divergent victory goals. This excludes games with pass-through conditions such as High Society in which currency is used to buy items worth VP but the player who spends the most during the game is eliminated prior to final scoring. I’m also excluding games for which multiple victory conditions are aligned in the game-play: in Mr. Jack the person playing as Jack can win by escaping the board, evading capture on the eighth turn or an incorrect accusation by the inspector, but in all cases Jack’s motivation is to conceal his/her identity effectively.

Some common trends in games that have multiple paths to victory:

• Games offer low player counts (often just 2 players, while 4 players is less common and typically the upper limit of the player count)
• Fewer players allow participants to monitor progress of opponents during the game while not overwhelming players with too many potential outcomes.
• Victory Points are often not used and one player is the winner with few methods to measure parity of the game. If VP are used it is often as a tiebreaker.
• Games often have an upper limit on the length of the game but surprise victories are not uncommon when a player is ignored by opponents and crafty with their decisions. 

Tactical Victory:

The tactical victory is often the bread and butter of the game; the portion of which the most action resides and in which meaningful decisions are made. In Risk, your tactical objective is global domination. By virtue of being the primary focus of all participants this is often the least likely victory condition. When a particularly dominant player is fortifying their position an attack-the-leader syndrome from other players offers further balancing to the game and often prevents a tactical victory.

Set Collection:

Set collection could be considered the secondary condition following the tactical path to victory. It is tremendously important that a player maintain an active role in the tactical gameplay (to prevent opponents from achieving the primary tactical victory) but set collection is an alternative path that keeps players engaged in monitoring the progress of their opponents and increasing tension while bringing players towards the endgame.

Hourglass Victory:

In a hard fought game amongst several worthy competitors it is essential to bring the game to a conclusion rather than drag out the climax of the conflict and remove the unique experience. The hourglass is the tertiary objective filling the role of closer. When a victory cannot or has not been achieved in the designed time table of the game, the hourglass objective is the final act in determining the victor. Ideally this utilizes a different criteria than the other victory conditions; something as simple as the player with the most currency at the end of the eighth and final turn is the winner. This condition ensures a timely endpoint even if all players are playing optimally and still allows for a satisfying and definitive result as it is foreseeable.

If victory points are used in the design of a game, they hold special value here as they can be collected on the side by players and only have value if the turn limit or stalemate condition is met.

In Part II we will look at some of these victory conditions in action and see how their relationship creates depth without added complexity in game design. Did I miss a fourth category of victory conditions? If I did I would love to find out your thoughts.

2012 Fantasy Olympics: Finding A Competitive Balance (Part II)

Last week we decided to tackle the idea of creating a brand new fantasy league, the Olympics of fantasy competitions. We ended on a question of competitive balance; one in which we were looking for a solution to address the Olympic powerhouse trio of USA, China & Russia.

Now if we had three competitors we would have a simpler task but in our current scenario we have six lucky participants of which several are going to be left out in the cold. Let's evaluate several solutions and proceed with whichever offers the greatest benefit.

As mentioned in our introductory article last week the participants will be selecting countries in a snake style draft which will take place over the course of five rounds after which each person will evaluate their drafted national lineup and select from a limited Olympic event schedule what they feel they will perform best at. Three possible options:

            Quantity vs. Quality: Borrowing a solution from popular sports leagues around the world, often a franchise losing a player who was a major contributor will be met with some sort of compensation. In the case of the NBA or NFL these can be in the form of Compensatory draft picks. We can incorporate this into a snake style draft by having one or more rounds in between the normal sequence of draft picks for participants who were not fortunate to receive a high draft choice.
            The Upside: This addresses the issue directly by breaking our limit of five countries in order to achieve aggregate balance among competitors.
            The Downside: Deciding exactly how many compensatory picks and where they fall in the draft is difficult and there is a risk of overcompensating and tipping the scales the opposite direction.

            Change the Game: As aforementioned, we are utilizing a limited Olympic schedule and simple scoring technique. Each day participants will select one event and score points based on their own countries results in that event. Additionally everyone will score in four "Team Events" will score larger point values that will last much of the duration of the Olympics. This possible solution involves picking largely diverse and unpredictable events while still offering several more reliable options for countries beyond the Olympic Big Three.
            The Upside: In game design this is often a more feasible option than it happens to be here. The problem is the results can swing wildly and there is little semblance of balance added through this approach.
            The Downside: Potentially this method can backfire and cause a run away leader effect in a design with as much "chaos" (unpredictable results) as the Olympics if the the USA or China finds success in events they were not expected to. Surprisingly the downside isn't as dramatic as it seems. With three options per day the schedule can be called upon to limit the athletic strengths of certain countries (Excluding Basketball for the USA) while offering strong options for those with strong non-dominant countries (Including Cycling for Western European countries).

            Change the Scoring: The implementation will change for this option from one design to another but in this case our scoring is based on Gold/Silver/Bronze medal finishes with a possibility of a dominant country sweeping all three medals in a single event. In order to limit the dominance of a country we will allow only one medal to count for each country in an event.
            The Upside: This restriction evens out the field and with surprise upsets happening frequently in the Olympics the failure to get the Gold stings a little more even if your country earned you the Silver and Bronze. Additionally it opens up the strategy: as you can only pick one event per day it makes sense to draft natural complements to your previously drafted countries (A Kenya/Ethiopia combo for distance track events).
            The Downside: While a simple rule, it does add complexity. It deviates from our first design goal "Simplicity over all else" but does contribute considerably to our second design goal "Allow participants to create their own strategy". 

So how do we proceed? Which direction do we take? As one might imagine if there are three reasonable solutions that can be used in moderation we should try to utilize all three.

• Participants unable to select USA, China, Russia & Great Britain will be given compensatory draft picks following the first two rounds and again after the fourth round. Great Britain will be given a compensatory draft pick only following the fourth round. This is in anticipation of Great Britain hosting in front of a home crowd with more athletes than anyone else and projections of 62 medals to as high as 95 medals. This could be the Olympics that we see the Big Four. If this is indeed the case a 6th country at the end of the draft won't effect much and if Great Britain doesn't turn out as optimistically its a little bit of added insurance.
• Selecting diverse events in different event categories allows strategic draft selections where participants can create their own strategy to best position themselves for scoring each day or overall.
• With a scoring limitation we create opportunity rather than purely limitations and strengthen the prospects of smaller countries in unpredictable events. Hoping to break through with an extra Bronze medalist every week is what the Fantasy Olympics is all about.

The 2012 Fantasy Olympics: An Introspective Look at Game Design (Part I)

Earlier this year Matt was in town and we were were catching up while enjoying some delicious frozen yogurt. We discussed our previous Fantasy Football season results and the upcoming Olympics in London. As our conversation evolved we realized the enjoyment that could be added to the Olympics by creating a Fantasy Olympics League.

As we are approaching the London games later this month it seemed natural to incorporate a brief blog series encompassing our very own quest for the Gold at the 2012 Fantasy Olympic Games. This will be a blog series beginning with the preparation of the rules and design framework moving through the competitive process identifying unforeseeable challenges and measuring the balance of the game design all the way through the final scoring.

Now that has been said, we need some design goals. These help us shape our mechanics, identify our audience and game weight and help guide our decision making along the way when we find a fork in the road with two equally enticing directions. Matt and I enjoy the Olympics and our goal is really to create a compliment to the excitement, something that gets us invested in more countries than our own and isn’t too large a time-commitment that it removes us from actually watching the events.

I’ll propose three primary design goals:

• Simplicity over all else
• Open-ended decision making allowing participants to create their own strategy
• Generate millions of dollars

Wait, no... that last one isn’t quite right, but we’ll move on with the first two goals and I’m sure the third will come along eventually.

Now Matt and I want to be able to root for the Lithuanian Sailing team or the Mongolian Water Polo team to win medals so our focus will be on the final podium in a limited but diverse sampling of events which will provide a simple and manageable scoring system everyone can follow. We also need everyone to have plenty of small countries on their roster that expand our fanatics to our many fellow competing countries. I would expect 5 countries to be a very manageable country amount so that no one needs to carry around a list to remember who cheer for everyday.

To follow the theme of the family of Fantasy sports we will have a snake style draft of countries with five rounds. We’ve now hit our first two design obstacles. How many players can Fantasy Olympics handle? What can be done about the competitive dominance of the Olympic medal big three of USA, China & Russia. Now keep in mind we are going to use a limited schedule of Olympic events to reduce analysis paralysis and allow each event to be more meaningful. In looking at recent Olympic results, I’d estimate there are roughly 40 countries that can be routinely be counted on as medal contenders in numerous events. So for competitiveness purposes we should limit ourselves to 7 or 8 players max or reduce the countries-per-player to accommodate more participants.

Now the larger issue, what can be done about the sheer dominance of Russia, China and the USA? What can be done for players who draft 4th overall or later to maintain balance in our ongoing game design? We’ll answer this question next week and continue creating the structure in which our game design can both flourish and meet its design goals.