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Design Notes
James Ernest
Caribbean Star
Stage 1: General Constraints
Usually when I create a new game, all the notes, variations, and failed attempts wind up in the garbage. This article chronicles the development of a new card game, including all the decisions and dead ends involved. June 18, 2001
My wife and I are cruising to Alaska aboard the Norwegian Sky, on our first full day at sea. A vacation seems like a good environment for creating this new game. Considering that the only available playtester is my wife Carol, I think I'll write a two-player game. I have no means to make custom components, even custom cards (which I usually use for inventing new games) so I'm going to write this game with the "bare essentials." Those materials include: two packs of playing cards, several 6-sided dice including ten dice in each of two colors, and one each of 4, 8, 10, 12, and 20-sided dice. I also have four Pawns, one Poker Chip, blank paper, pens, and pencils. Certainly this is enough material to develop a new two-player game. Whereas some game designers prefer to create a game mechanic first and then adapt that mechanic to an appropriate theme, I prefer to start with a theme wherever possible. This gives me more creative ideas when trying to invent the game mechanics, and it makes for a game whose mechanics seem better to suit the theme. When a storyline gets added after the game is designed, you can really tell, especially when a play that seems reasonable in the storyline is not allowed in the game. When I invent a game for sale I must consider the marketability of the theme, but I'm not so constrained here, because this will be a free game. In this case, I can come up with a very basic premise and move forward, rather than agonizing too much over the story. I have an extensive list of "good ideas" that I have compiled over many years. I usually go to this list when choosing a new game design project for Cheapass Games. A good game idea should not only be entertaining, it should also provide the basis of a good system. Some good jokes make terrible games. Here is a short brainstorm of possible themes for my game, inspired by my vacation:
Bellhops angling for tips.
Cruise directors booking acts for their ships.
Passengers collecting raffle tickets.
Travel Agents booking trips.
Let's examine the game possibilities of each of these storylines. You will notice that in each story I name a type of character (the players) and some sort of competitive activity (the game). Bellhops Angling for Tips: Who are the players in the Bellhop game, and what is their goal? Are they the bellhops, competing with one another for the best tip? Are they the hotel guests, trying to tip as little as possible while still getting their bags? Or, if this is a two-player game, can we create an imbalanced game in which one player is the Bellhop, the other is the Guest, and each has his own objective? These aren't the only options. In a game involving bellhops and bags, there's nothing that says the players can't be the bags. Maybe the Bags have a game objective that's almost completely unrelated to the goals of the Bellhops and the Customers. For instance, maybe they get satisfaction from being moved around. Or from staying packed as long as possible. Or even from sitting in the dark. Perhaps the players manage the hotel. Perhaps they manage hotel chains. This could go on forever. But let's move on to our next scenario. Cruise Directors Booking Acts: Who are the players in this game? Are they cruise directors working on multiple ships? Are they multiple acts working on a single ship? Are they trying to get a job, or keep the job they have? If we wanted to use the Cruise Director scenario, but think further outside the box, where would we go? The players might be passengers trying to get the most entertainment on a one-week cruise; they might be land-based talent agents trying to make the most money booking the best acts on the longest cruises. They might be jokes trying to propagate through the acts of Cruise Ship comedians, whose acts are really basically all the same. Passengers Collecting Raffle Tickets: On our cruise ship, a variety of activities earn you a raffle ticket. The players in this scenario would probably be Passengers, and there would be a whole game of collecting tickets followed by a raffle at the end. This isn't the only way to present this story, though. The players could represent the cruise staff whose job is to give out the raffle tickets. The story could revolve around fixing the raffle, or stealing tickets from other players. Or there could be several raffles, and this could be a game about trading tickets in one raffle for tickets in another.
Travel Agents Booking Cruises: In this game, players would probably try to make the most money by booking the best trips at the most competitive prices. If you charge more money for a trip, you will make more when you sell it, but you might not sell as many. If you were a travel agent in this game, you might be trying to make the most money at the end of the game. Or, you might be trying to make the most people happy, with the money being less important. Or you could be trying to book the most trips to a particular destination to win a trip there yourself, and so on.
Racing Games vs.Fighting Games
Most games can be sorted into two categories, based on their scoring system: racing games and fighting games. The distinction makes the most sense with multiplayer games, because in a two-player game the two types are essentially interchangeable. In a racing game, players are trying to get the most points, and can't directly interfere with other players. Scrabble is a good example of a racing game. Everyone acquires points, and the object is to have the highest score at the end. Golf is actually this type of game also. Even though the object is to score the least, the players are still collecting their own points with no influence on the scores of the others. In fighting games, the object is to take away the other player's points, or to do him as much damage as possible. Chess is a fighting game, with both players bent on capturing their opponent's pieces, especially the King. Hearts is also a fighting game, though the scoring is inverted. In Hearts, points are bad for you, and when one player breaks 100 points, the player with the fewest points wins. This is functionally equivalent to starting everyone with 100 points, and deducting from that score until someone reaches zero.The difference between Hearts and Golf is that in Hearts your actions affect your opponents' scores. The salient difference between racing and fighting games is that fighting games make great two-player games, but aren't always good with more than two players. When you can decide whom to hit, the game becomes political, and often the most strategic move is to hurt the player who's closest to being eliminated. That player can be driven out of the game early, and will have to sit out the rest of the game. The last two scenarios, the Raffle Ticket and Travel Agent games, seem like racing games. So are some versions of the first scenario, the Bellhop game. These might be good multiplayer games. But because I'm interested in writing a two-player game, I'm inclined to look first at the game that allows me to do damage to my opponent. This looks like a good argument for Scenario 2, the Cruise Directors and Acts. Let's look again at the story of acts trying not to get thrown off cruise ships.
First Rules Draft
When I have a half-baked game idea, I will usually just start writing down the rules. This helps me work out some of the more mundane aspects of the game, such as the mechanics of card drawing, piece moving, turn sequence, and so on. If I haven't settled on game mechanics by this point, the exercise of writing a rulebook tends to force me into something. I can always change it later, but I need something to change. Here is the first draft of the rules for our new card game, with notes in italic explaining what's going on in my head.
Caribbean Star
A Card Game for Two Players Almost every cruise line has a "Star," such as the Star Princess and the Regent Star, which are both ships I've worked on. Before I became a game publisher, I was a professional juggler for about seven years, so I have a bit of experience with this subject. I like the idea of calling the game "Caribbean Star" because it has a double meaning, with "Star" referring to the performers. For our story, imagine a cruise ship on which the cruise director has accidentally hired too many acts. Player One is the ventriloquist, Player Two is the magician. One of these two acts is superfluous, and will have to go home at the end of the week. It will depend on how well each player performs his act, and his other shipboard duties. And of course, interfering with your opponent will be the key to winning. I'm currently thinking of this as a card game, played with a standard deck. The Magician's cards are the black ones; the Ventriloquist's cards are the red ones. After one pass through the deck, the player who has given more good performances while destroying his oppo-nent's credibility wins, and keeps his job on the Caribbean Star.
Equipment: You need a deck of playing cards. Story: Welcome aboard the Caribbean Star, Caribe Cruise Lines' most luxurious cruise ship. It's chock to the gills with newlyweds and nearlydeads who have ventured to the Caribbean to see the Panama Canal and drink Piña Coladas from the source. And you are here to entertain them. You and your opponent are performers aboard the Caribbean Star, two acts doing the work of one. The line has accidentally booked both a Magician and a Ventriloquist on the same boat, and…
At this point, I'm already thinking it's funnier if you are just two magicians, rather than a magician and a ventriloquist. Writing the intro from scratch like this always gives me good insight into the main joke of the game.
The Caribe line has accidentally booked two magicians on the same ship, and you've got exactly one week to prove that you're better than the other guy. You both have the same bag of tricks, so it's up to your cunning and skill to get your opponent thrown off the boat before he does the same to you. Happy sailing! The idea that you have only a week ties in with my plan to make this game end after one pass through the deck. Incorporating a time limit and a sense of urgency on this contest should make it more fun. At this point in the first pass of the rules, I really have no other mechanics in mind other than the idea that one player will "own" the red cards, while the other player owns the black cards.
Dividing ownership of the cards makes the same cards do different things for each player, which in turn leads to more variety in the games. Because this is a two-player game, it's easy to divide the deck fairly. When I see a chance like this, I jump at it!
How to Begin: Shuffle the deck and determine randomly which player will be the Red Magician, and which player will be Black. After shuffling, deal a hand of five cards to each player. Determine randomly who will go first. After writing "determine randomly who goes first," I'm starting to think of the card functions, and also wondering if I can make this game a simultaneous-play game rather than a turn-based game. A game this simple can sometimes be significantly better for the player who goes first, or second, depending on the mechanics. Simultaneous play solves this problem, but presents some others. Let's try simultaneous play.
After shuffling, deal a hand of five cards to each player. Turns will be simultaneous. On each turn: Players choose one card from their hand and play it face down on the table. This card will determine their action for the round.
Card functions: Each card has a unique function, as described below. Both players have the same bag of tricks, but the order in which you play them can make a big difference. Also, each player "owns" half of the deck. Playing your own cards has a different effect than playing the same cards for your opponent. This section is not really very clear, but it is mostly there to help me remember what I'm thinking. It will probably be trimmed up or removed in the final rules.
Card precedence: Although they are played at the same time, cards always take effect in order from lowest to highest. Aces are low, and Kings are high. Furthermore, the order of suits from lowest to highest is: Clubs, Diamonds, Hearts, Spades (alphabetical order). You can tell I haven't figured out what Aces do yet; in the final draft Aces don't figure into the play order at all. The general purpose of giving each card a priority is so that resolving the simultaneous play is always easy. It also allows me to fine-tune the functions of each card based on the order it falls in the series.
Face cards: Face cards are "rehearsal" cards. When you play a face card, you are practicing tricks for your next performance. Each player will have a maximum of four performances during the game, and the point value of those performances determines your score. When you play a face card, set it aside in your Practice pile, a set of face up face cards that denote your set for the next show. A perfect set is 30 minutes, which means three cards. If scored for full value, a Jack is worth 2 points, a Queen is worth 4, and a King is worth 6 points. I have picked the values of 2, 4, and 6 because I'm planning to make rules that sometimes cut these values in half. This means that for simplicity's sake I want them to be even numbers. At this point, I'm working with the idea that a perfect show is three cards, and running longer or shorter than that will penalize you.
If you play a rehearsal card that is not your color, you put it in your opponent's Practice pile instead of your own. Here is why the perfect show length is the critical mechanic: If you play a Rehearsal card for your opponent, you will be able to lengthen his show beyond the perfect length. So, if he's practiced a three-card show but can't convert it to points until you make it longer, he'll suffer a penalty. This makes the same cards better or worse at different points in the game, which is a great way to get a complex game out of a simple set of cards.
Tens: Tens are Big Tricks. They count as two cards when measuring the length of a show, and are worth 10 points when scored for full value. Nine and Seven are Showtimes: If you play a Showtime, you discard your Practice Pile and convert it to points. Conversion of the Practice Pile works as follows: Now I'm formalizing the show-length penalties I was thinking about when I wrote the Rehearsal cards. If you have three cards (Tens count as two) you get full value for your entire act. If you run long or short, you lose points. If you have two or four cards, score half points for your largest card. If you have one or five cards, score half points for your entire act. If you have no cards or more than five, you score no points when you play a Showtime. If you play a Showtime for your opponent, he must perform his act right now. This is true even if he just performed, and even if he has no cards in his Practice Pile. Eight: Dinner Buffet. You can do an additional show at a dinner buffet. When you play an Eight, you can perform (discard) one of the cards in your Practice pile for half value. You don't have to, however. You might play an Eight and then, seeing what your opponent has played, decide to skip the buffet. If you play an opponent's Eight, he may convert one of his Practice cards or he may do nothing about it. Eights are added to give you the opportunity to fine-tune your show if it is running long.
Six: Rehearsal. You can "rehearse" your act before you perform, and double its value. When you play a Six, add it to your Practice pile.You will score double points the next time you play a Showtime. If you have two Sixes in your Practice Pile, the show will be worth quadruple points. This is a language problem: I'm unknowingly using "rehearsal" to describe both the FaceCards and Tens, and the Sixes. This is fixed in the final draft.
Five: Afternoon Nap: When you play a Five you must discard your hand and draw four new cards. If you play your opponent's Five, he must do the same. Fives will be the spoiler cards. I want people to be able to discard their hands in order toclear out cards that are especially bad for them. The aspect of killing your opponent's handturns out to be unbalanced, and I will later revise the function of the Fives.
Four through Two: These cards are mistakes. They are like practice cards but they are worth negative points, 4 through 2 respectively. If you play a mistake of your own color it will go into your Practice Pile. If you play a card of your opponent's color, it will go into his. The negative points are doubled by Sixes but are not halved by going long or short. They do not count as cards for the length of your act, and you cannot perform them to get rid of them at the dinner buffet.
The exact order of resolving points, negative points, and doublers, needs some work here.But this is a first pass. It becomes evident on playing this game that this math, while critical to the game, needs to be presented in the simplest possible manner. In general, whenmath gets too hard in a game it doesn't just slow down the execution of the game. It also makes forecasting, or strategic play, much harder. So good math needs to be obvious and transparent. The show-length penalty is pretty important here, so I'm not going to let it go. But I will, as I said, try to make it easy to understand.
Aces (Cancel Cards): Aces are not played face down like other cards. They are not color-spe-cific and they always belong to the player who plays them. You can play an Ace from your hand to cancel the effect of any other card immediately before it goes off. When you play an Ace, you draw a card to replace it. At the end of your turn, draw one card, or however many it takes to get your hand up to five. When there are no cards left to draw, the cruise is over and the player with the most points wins. There, that's the first pass on the rules. Now I'll write up a cheat sheet and play the game.
Playtest Notes
I was lucky enough to have Carol on hand while working on this rules draft, so we immediately played a few rounds and determined the following: Card Functions: In general the cards work well and are easy to remember. Because many of the card functions are based loosely on times of day, and others are grouped pretty logically, the whole set seems to make sense. One should easily be able to play this game without a cheat sheet. Scoring: The order in which scoring functions are carried out isn't really clear in the first pass, so we decided to define more exactly how you score a show: First, you count the Face Cards and Tens. If you think of a perfect show as 30 minutes, then Jacks through Kings are 10 minutes each, and Tens are 20 minutes. Based on the length of the show, you apply your scoring penalty (if any) by halving the appropriate cards. Next, add the negative cards at full value. Last, apply the doublers. So if a show contains a Jack, King, and Ten, as well as a Four and a Six, then it's long by 10 minutes, which means chopping the Ten. The cards sum to 13, minus 4 is 9, doubled is 18. Don't let this confuse you if you've read the final draft: I later cut all the showtimes in half to make Tens last 10 minutes.
Score Tracking: It's possible to track your score by the way you stack your tricks, but it's probably much cleaner to use a score pad and write down each show as you finish it. That will also make it more obvious who is winning, of which I'm a big fan.
Endgame: It's a little unsatisfying to finish with cards left in your hand, so I want players to play out their hands. I'm not sure what to do in the case where one player has more cards, such as when exactly one Ace is left to play. This problem is solved later. Spoiler Cards: Fives have been changed to swap the players' hands, not discard them. If you play a Five, players swap hands. The reason for this is that otherwise the deck is burned far too quickly. I don't like being able to avoid playing the really bad cards by discarding them. But most of all, I don't like the effect of saving up a really good hand only to have it burned down by a Five. The Comedy Show: We decided to add one completely new rule, based on the abject frustration of being hit with a big show that's all mistakes. This rule is called the Comedy Show. If your Practice pile contains nothing but mistakes, you can clear it with a Showtime for 0 points. This is a great way to get rid of a bunch of mistakes. The timing rules are very useful in this instance. If you have a Comedy Show and you play a Showtime, you can be sure that your opponent can't add a trick to it. This is because the Showtimes happen before the tricks. The best your opponent can do is play an Ace to foil your Showtime, but this is significantly more expensive to him. All in all, this game worked fairly well with a few tweaks. It's definitely good enough to pursue, because it was fun to play and we found ourselves wanting to play again. Now we'll play it a few more times with these revisions, and see if any more refinements are required.
Final Revisions: Friday June 22, 2001
We played more of this game and learned that aggressive play is critical. I like this aspect. Because every card will be played sooner or later, deciding when to play your cards is the key. We made one more change. Because Aces screwed up the card drawing pattern by causing one player to discard more than one card in the same turn, we decided that instead of discarding the card they stopped, Aces scoop that card into your hand instead. This means that there will always be the same number of rounds in the game, and that all the cards will eventually get played.
One change I'm considering after a rather lackluster couple of endgames is to introduce a "farewell show" rule. Whatever is left in your Practice pile at the end of the game is scored like a normal show. This means every show card eventually gets scored as well.
After three days of playtesting and revision, and a second rules edit some weeks later, I arrived at the final version of the game. You'll notice I changed some terminology and numbers to make the game easier to explain. Most obviously, I've made the perfect show 15 minutes long so that Tens can be 10 minutes long. This deviates pretty strongly from real life (A magician would actually be doing 45 to 60 minutes, but verisimilitude of that degree isn't really necessary in this simple of a game). I also finally noticed that I was using "rehearsal" to mean two different things, so I changed the term for point cards to "Magic Tricks."
Caribbean Star was designed by James Ernest, playtested by Carol Monahan. If you enjoyed Caribbean Star, James encourages you to try more of his free games online at www.cheap-ass.com.
James Ernest is the president and lead designer for Cheapass Games, a small but prolific game company in Seattle, Washington. His award-win-ning titles include Kill Doctor Lucky, Give Me the Brain, BRAWL, and Button Men. Ernest is known for his quirky humor and innovative game mechanics, and he writes about 30 new games every year.
ADDITIONAL READING AND RESOURCES
Although suggested readings accompany most of this book's chapters, here we list a number of more general references that didn't fit neatly into any particular chapter. These additional readings and resources range from academic websites to visual histories of digital gaming. Obviously, there are innumerable websites and books that we had to leave off of this short list, but our hope is that these sources and the others we list throughout this book can be starting points for your own research investigations.
Computer Game Graphics, by Liz Faber and State Design Originally published under the title Re:Play in the U.K., Computer Game Graphics showcases the art and visual culture of computer games. The book's strong visual design lends itself to the subject matter, with many of the spreads functioning as essays in picture form. The writing takes a backseat to the presentation of graphics, and the primary value of the book is in its documentation of the games' visual design. Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA)
At the time of this book's publication, this fledgling academic organization was still getting off the ground. However, DiGRA promises to be the first professional association devoted to the interdisciplinary study of digital games. Its members range from play historians and media theorists to design educators and game developers. The association's website can be found at: <www.digra.org>. Electronic Plastic, by Jaro Gielens, Büro Destruct, Uwe Schütte Electronic Plastic is a visual survey of over 400 old-school computer games, including portable handhelds and cocktail table arcade games. The book offers a terrific overview of the visual design of games from the 1970s and 1980s, including retro-typography, period branding and packaging, and colorful cast plastic cases.
The 400 Rules Project
Located at <http://www.theinspiracy.com/400_project>, The 400 Rules Project is a collaborative game design project headed by veteran computer game designers Noah Falstein and Hal Barwood. Inspired by a talk Barwood gave at the 2001 Game Developers Conference, Falstein has continued the project through a column in Game Developer Magazine. The premise of the 400 Rules Project is that there are a limited number of "rules," or design guidelines, that apply to all games, and the goal of the project is to uncover them. While quite formal in scope, the Project represents a wonderfully collaborative game design initiative. International Game Developers Association
This professional organization serves the digital game development industry. The website, located at <www.igda.org>, is rich with resources for the aspiring and established game developer, from listings of local IGDA chapters to regular columns on a variety of subjects to extensive educational resources. Joystick Nation: How Video Games Ate Our Quarters, Won Our Hearts, and Rewired Our Minds, by J.C. Herz Written in 1997, Joystick Nation was one of the first comprehensive, popular reports on the cultural phenomenon of video games. A straightforward journalistic account, the book offers a good overview of the pop culture flavor of games and traces some of the factors affecting the rise of video games as a cultural form. Ludology.org
This website, maintained by game theorist Gonzalo Frasca, is one of the better clearinghouses for events and issues related to the academic study of games. It includes extensive lists of game studies blogs, conferences and calls for papers, and supports a healthy discussion community. Phoenix: The Fall and Rise of Videogames, by Leonard Herman Phoenix takes a detailed look at the history of home videogame consoles. The emphasis is technological and the focus is not on games, but on the design of the consoles themselves. While the reading can be dense, the book offers an important overview of the history of the console industry and is an invaluable reference work. Sirlin.net
An endearingly quirky website, www.sirlin.net is the work of David Sirlin, a former mathematician and sometime game designer. The site contains a large number of short articles about game design, most of them taking a formal approach to understanding phenomena like rule design, narrative, and competition. While there are many homegrown game design sites on the web, Serlin.net contains a surprising amount of thoughtful commentary and analysis. Supercade: A Visual History of the Videogame Age 1971–1984, by Van Burnham Supercade is both a visual history and a technological timeline of videogame development during one of the industry's most important periods. The book offers informative summaries of almost every videogame produced between 1971–1984, along with well-researched documentation of the games' visual design. Trigger Happy: Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution, by Steven Poole Trigger Happy posits that games are a cultural form to be reckoned with, not only because of their growing economic dominance within the entertainment industry, but because of their status as an art form. Poole examines games from a variety of perspectives, and applies a literary, philosophical, and semiotic analysis to them. He also traces the development of the form from early 8-bit games into the complex technological and cultural systems they are today. Recommended: Chapter 3. Unreal Cities Chapter 8. The Player of Games
CONCLUSION
Once you know where you can go and where it's worth going, getting there's no sweat. Just caring and nerves.—David Sudnow, Pilgrim in the Microworld Caring and nerves. That's what it took to complete this book.
Certainly a big part of our process was learning how to see: seeing where we were coming from, where we were going, and how to move forward. Like a devilishly intricate puzzle, each step resolved another piece of the pattern, even while opening up whole new vistas to navigate. Everything, we found, hinged on seeing the hinges, and the patterns in the pattern. When we learned to see them we realized they had been there all along, waiting patiently to be discovered.
Having built the system, played it through, and exited out the other side, we find ourselves transformed. We spent so many months (years even) inside the system, playing with it, resisting it, at times breaking it. It was easy to forget that we too were being played, resisted, and at times, broken. (But this is not as bad as it sounds.) And to be honest, the transformation caught us by surprise. Although this book grew out of our experiences teaching game design, designing games, and—especially—playing them, it was not until we began writing that our endeavor found a soul. This soul is filled to bursting with the joy of play: filled with kids dueling Magic on a Brooklyn stoop, a lone runner sweating along a blistering cross country track, a pair of grandmothers trading Canasta tricks for hard cash, a LAN party up past 4 a.m. playing just one more round of Quake. The soul is colored by the passion of game designers who spend untold hours tuning a game to make play by the alchemy of rules, by level designers who invent fabulous new worlds of possibility for us to inhabit, by programmers who build game engines so elegant even the code appears pleased. It is in this soul of play that we discovered ourselves.
What we discovered is no big secret, as it is written on nearly every page. Game designers create meaningful play. Truly meaningful play. The kind that players talk about years after the match has ended, the kind that rallies loyal fans and wakes us up in the middle of the night longing to play again, the kind of play that teaches us what it means to play. And perhaps the deepest meaning for play to effect is its ability to transform. Transformative play is a moment of transcendence, in which those structures we took for granted suddenly find themselves cast as players. Grammar tells a joke. The ballroom floor gets up to dance. The rigid Rule become supple and limber and jumps into the arms of Play. Transformative play can metamorphosize the players of a game, the culture of which the game is a part, even the game itself. As the authors of this book, we were also taken hold by transformative play, altered by the hinges and patterns uncovered. It is our hope that you too have been transformed by your experience with these pages, by an ancient and sublime body of knowledge, by the newness of the questions raised, by the beautiful nature of play.
Which really brings us back to caring and nerves. What will it take to alter the face of game design? At what moment will the system be transformed by the play of designers working within it? Do you care enough to take the risk? Do you? This is an important moment, for the field is poised for change and the outcome is uncertain. We honestly don't know what kind of change a transformation might bring. But we nevertheless are unapologetic activists for a radical transformation in game design.
We know what constitutes a game; we know how they work, why they matter, and the kinds of experiences they are capable of producing. But we have barely tested the limits of what they have the potential to become. It is our challenge to you to test those limits, to find your own game design soul, and to muster all of the caring and nerves you've got to transform and discover what it means to play.
Finally: Special thanks to the teachers and students we have had the pleasure and honor of being challenged by in the course of our own evolution as students of the game. And to each other…the end, at last.
Thanks for a great game.
Shall we play again?
