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Design Notes
Richard Garfield
Sibling Rivalry
Stage 1: General Constraints
The first thing I did was consider the constraints of the project, which included the audience and equipment. The audience I understood to be adults but not necessarily game players. As a result, I was leaning toward a light game, but not one without strategy. In terms of equipment, I had some pages in a book. There was the offer to include die cut counters, but I knew that is a pain both for the publisher and the book owner, so I rejected that option. I decided to limit myself to the use of game materials that people commonly have available (dice, counters, standard decks of cards, writing paper, and so forth). I would use the pages for rules and perhaps a simple board, which could either be copied or perhaps played with inside the book.
Stage 2: Concept
I am constantly toying with game design concepts and game motifs, using them to make little games for my own enjoyment and growth. I only attempt to publish a very small percentage of these games. This means that typically I have a lot of ideas to draw on when I am given a commissioned project.
Motif: One idea I had been mulling over was a game of Sibling Rivalry, with kids trying to bother one another, while not getting caught (or while getting someone else in trouble). I had been thinking of it as a card game with a specialized deck, or a board game with an elaborate board that included all sorts of environments in which the kids might bother each other (back of the car, in front of the TV, at school.) In order to use this motif, I would have to cut back on use of this specialized equipment. I found the flavor fun though, and appropriate for a project like this, so I toyed with ways to address these changes. Mechanics: I have been interested in press-your-luck mechanics for a while, and have designed a few games based on them.These games are characterized by the choice to keep going or bank your profit. The classic press-your-luck game is Can't Stop, by Sid Sackson. Another example is Six Man Zonk, which was marketed as Cosmic Wimpout. I have used the core mechanic in several of my own games, my favorite being a game I call Gonzo. In Gonzo, players roll five dice, count a particular result—say, 4s—and set aside the 1s, and choose whether to re-roll or bank. If the player ever accumulated three 1s, they lost their turn. I like this mechanic because it always feels like you can get lucky and come back.
Once I had both these concepts in my head—the motif of sibling rivalry, and the game mechanic of Gonzo—I realized I had a combination that probably worked. The idea of my trying to do more and more outrageous things to my sibling while risking getting caught (three 1s), was an appealing idea for a game.
Stage 3: First Prototype
The earliest version I playtested was called "But She Started It!" designed specifically for two players. I tried to make it so that someone "started it"; the player who got caught by mom or dad was in trouble. If the player who got caught wasn't the player who started it, then the victory was especially sweet (that is, worth a lot of points). The game had no board, and players alternated rolling five dice until someone rolled a 2, which indicated that they had "started it." This original design was very similar to the final version, except there was no scoring track, players scored many more points (four 3s were worth 12 points, not the final game's 4 points), and there was a bonus for "starting it" and not getting caught.
It was quickly apparent that "starting it," though a neat game mechanic in principle, required too many rules: it made the game far more complex for only a little play value. Keeping track of points was also a pain, involving a lot of addition and subtraction. This observation led to the construction of a board, which served both to keep track of the score and the current challenge.
Stage 4: Evolution There were many elements that evolved along somewhat independent tracks:
Evolution of Challenge Board
I've included the design of an early board for reference. Once a board is added to a game, some things become more natural than others. For example, it became natural to give points from the challenge board, because players could write the points on the board. This method was less obvious than "the total number of pips" that I was using before. For a while, I didn't want the challenge tracks to be finite, but obviously they had to be finite: physically if not logically. So the question arose, how big a challenge track is there and what happens when a player reaches the top? Eventually I settled on seven squares (down from an initial ten). With ten squares, if people hardly ever reach the top, then the board is needlessly crowded. Typically, with seven squares someone would reach the top during the course of a game, but not always, so it seemed like a good length. Originally I had a kind of lame rule that when you reached the top you could beat another player at the top. This rule was analogous to the original game in which you could always beat the previous player if you got lucky enough. The rule kept the game as close as possible to the original boardless version. With the use of a board I believed that the natural rule was to reward the player who made it to the end with a bonus: an immediate victory plus an additional turn seemed to be a pretty good idea. In particular, this rule makes it so that a player can win on any turn if they are lucky enough, which has a wild feel to it. Evolution of Scoring Track
The scoring track shrank in size throughout development process, which not only made the scoring more simple, it also allowed the score track to acquire a special play function. For example, the rule that a player must slide backward when the player lands on another player's pawn is a real irritation when the track is 100+ squares long. Sliding back is so minor an idea, and it happens so seldom that it really isn't worth the space the rule takes up. As the board shrank, however, this rule became interesting, in that it would often modify how conservatively a player would play on the challenge board. Similarly, on the smaller track the Little Angel and Little Devil squares affected strategy and play on the challenge board in an interesting way. On the long track it would just be too annoying and difficult to aim for a particular square. Evolution of Scoring
The system of scoring started out quite cumbersome: a player would have to add the total of all the pips rolled and add or subtract that from their current score. I really wanted to make the scoring simple, so I tried using the opposite extreme: one point received for winning a round, regardless of what number was rolled. As expected, this system was simpler—but also a bit dry. Players were motivated to press their luck, as the higher the number they rolled the less chance they had of being beaten—and losing their point. In the end I settled on a solution somewhere in between, with fixed points for the first three ranks, and points ramping up slowly after that. Evolution of Number of Players
My philosophy was that as a two-player game, maybe it could be adapted naturally to accommodate three or more players. Playtesting showed that at these numbers the game worked surprisingly well. I am not even sure if there were ever changes made to the game to accommodate groups of more than two players—just changes made to the way I generalized the rules. For example, with two players, I thought that when one player was caught by Mom or Dad, the round would end. With more than two players, it worked best if just the player that was caught was punished and the round continued, until the challenge board was clear.
Evolution of Play Ergonomics
Play ergonomics is how I view the mechanical process of playing: what is awkward, what is too complex, which manipulations take too much time or spawn too many mistakes. An example of a change to the play ergonomics is advancing your pawn along the challenge track during the course of a turn, and removing it if you haven't passed your opponent's pawn. Originally, you only placed the pawn on the board if you beat the other player's pawn, so we could make the rule that a challenge track only ever has one pawn on it.This change didn't affect the game in any way other than allowing players not to mentally keep a tally of their turn's result. It is a very natural outcome but it didn't actually occur to me until about halfway through development, when some players started doing it as a matter of course.
Richard Garfield was designing and tinkering with games and game design as a kid, a hobby that stuck with him through his schooling and early career. He earned a doctorate in Mathematics from the University of Pennsylvania, intending to live the life of an academic mathematician. Richard's first published game, Magic: The Gathering, was a game that allowed players to choose their own cards, in effect sharing the role of game designer with the players. The phenomenal success of Magic allowed him to become a full-time game designer. Now he studies and designs games ranging from party games to the trading card game, a genre of paper game that he created.
