Category: Games

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Color Space

A Colorful Game: What’s Next?

Hello everyone, it’s been a minute! Sorry for not posting in a while. I am, as we all are, navigating the virus and other passion projects. (I’m working on a creative writing career—go figure.) Now, my project has entered a phase where I’m playtesting the same build heavily to make sure that it’s balanced. This is important to a strategy game. Both players should be on the same playing field and players executing a fun move shouldn’t be defeated by random chance.

Every game—not just strategy games—needs to make sure that a particular player doesn’t have an unfair advantage. Sometimes this could mean that designers might need to tone down the benefit of a mechanic. You can sometimes have an unfair advantage just by being the starting player, though. I aim to make sure that isn’t the case in A Colorful Game.

I’ve got four things on my plate right now for A Colorful Game:

  • More balance playtesting
  • Design for physical game assets
  • YouTube tutorial video
  • Tabletop Simulator version (with scripting)

The bottom two items are still in their infancy, and I don’t have much to show for them. As for the top two:

More balance playtesting

This is from a most recent playtest. The grey meeple signifies the tile that was just moved. (Players can’t move the tile that was recently moved.)

I’ve been rigorously playtesting with my wife or sometimes playing against myself. It’s coming along smoothly. My big worry right now is that there’s a first player advantage. More testing will see if that’s the case.

Design for physical game assets

I’ve been wanting to make the components out of wood for the longest time. But I’m warming up more and more to the idea of making them out of resin (similar look and feel to modern sets of dominos). Resin is typically heavier than wood, and may have better longevity. Also, resin is typically less expensive to manufacture and generally easier to work with. The difference would mean more rounded corners as well versus wood. Here’s a quick side-by-side.

Resin mockup (left) versus a wooden mockup (right) of the assets for A Colorful Game.

The differences might look minor in Illustrator, but they’ll feel major when holding the physical components. I’ll still stand by my love of wooden components though. I just think they look neater and more unique.

Anyway, that’s it for now. Until next time!

Categories
Color Space Game Design

The Many Trials of A Colorful Game

I’ve been heads-down refining the mechanics for A Colorful Game. Here are some of my discoveries from the 10 playtests that I’ve had so far:

Issue

Games were way too long. (1+ hour)

Resolution

I took care of this by minimizing the card count. Put the game at a smooth 30ish minute playtime. That’s the goal!

Issue

The game was also far more complex with decisions than I wanted it to be. You have to place AND move a tile—ugh! Too much brain juice to spend on what to do best. (I watched a player’s life flash before their eyes for more than 10 minutes, hoping to glean some forgotten wisdom to help them make a decision.)

Resolution

This was advice from another designer: Don’t make players have to add a new primary color tile to the play area AND have to move another tile. That’s a lot to deal with during a turn.

Note that doing this also helped to reduce the playtime to around 30 minutes.

Issue

Scoring points is just altogether difficult sometimes.

Resolution

Wild cards and bonus points! I added some cards to the game that let you fill in any blanks with a color of your choice. For example, if you have a contiguous path — orange, orange, green, purple, purple — you could play a wild with that to treat the green as a part of your path.

Also, if you scored with three or more cards, you get a bonus point; four or more and you get three bonus points!

IMG_0910
Wild card; but no bonus points for you!

This new format for the game helped shape it into the quick abstract strategy game that I was looking to make. That’s a huge milestone!

I’ve playtested this new version quite a few times and have found some new challenges to work through:

  • Games are a little too short now. It’s difficult for a player that’s behind to see a chance to come back and try to take the win.Idea to test: I’m going to add cards to the point deck or have the discard shuffle back into the deck.
  • With the introduction of wild cards, games feel like they’re not strategic enough (a little too luck of the draw).Idea to test: I’m going to add more wild cards and make them have a greater negative impact on players who use them.
  • Once you score a path, you remove all of the roads that you used to score that path with. That reduces momentum and gives too great an advantage to the first player to score.Idea to test: I think a “pick a color, remove all roads for that color” method can give the right balance of changing the play area in a fun way and not making players feel like they’ve got to start from scratch.
  • I need to work out how the game ends a little more. Right now, the game ends once the point card deck is depleted and neither player can score on their next turns…it just feels like an odd way to end the game.Idea to test: A “first player to x points” win condition should fix this. I just need to test whether this is fun and try to discover what “x points” value is best.

That’s all for now! Until next time…