Design Diary: Cooperative Deckbuilder

[Jason Waddell]

So, do you have a shared energy pool, or does each player have a personal one? And how big is it for each turn?

Currently it's the standard '3 energy per turn'. Each player gets it, but ALL players have a shared 'turn' with no order restrictions. So I might play one card, then the next player does some stuff, and then I spend my final 2 energy on cards.

Your ideas about the color pie stuff and secondary effects are great and definitely something I should explore more.

Having another player discard a card is also a good one.

re: containers, currently each player starts with this:


Any ingredient can go in them, but only one ingredient type at a time.

There are also effects that generate 'single-use' containers. They work like a piggy-bank version of the above. You can put as much as you want in them, but if you want to withdraw from it, you destroy the container.



Currently toad cards do a lot of the container passing, but also do some of the rule bending (you can add an ingredient directly to another player's container, you can pass containers that aren't in your play area).

 

[Jason Waddell]

Also, if I read it correctly, middle right of the last pick costs 1 energy to cast, and gives you both a feather ingredient token and has you draw 2 cards?

Yes, this is correct.

 

[Jason Waddell]

@Onderzeeboot you inspired a card design.

(1) Mushroom. Draw a card. If it's a feared ingredient card, lose your phobia this turn.

 

[Jason Waddell]

We have a board game night at work tonight. I have a very untested new version of the game packed with me.

Changes
Individual decks. Going to see how it feels.
Starter decks have new 'feared ingredient' cards.


The skull symbol represents your feared ingredient. So if you would pass this to another player, it then will be their feared ingredient. But, you get rewarded for getting rid of them. I'm curious to see how it will play out though, with the phobias. Will the player with a fear of feathers get stuck with these because they can't pass the cards away to others if they get them? Maybe this playtest will be a total trainwreck for that reason.

I've tested with a couple colleagues before, so curious if they play it tonight, and if they have thoughts on individual decks vs shared decks.



Recipes have gotten a tune-up. Many more recipes now have boons or hexes attached to either the whole recipe or a given step. I've also cleaned up some of the reward structure. There were a number of bonuses (gold, bonus energy cards) that I tried implementing, but they all felt fiddly and not worth the complexity cost.



The single-use containers played well, but having them be generated by cards wasn't working well. You sometimes got flooded with them, and there were too many occasions of your hand getting clogged with things that couldn't actually generate the resources you need. Now the single use containers are given as part of the rewards from Small Orders.

 

[Jason Waddell]

Game Flow

One of the big questions for me is how the game flow should work. Currently the game works in rounds, with a set schedule of orders coming in:


For example, in the above:
Turn 1: Two regular (blue) orders
Turn 2: One small (green) order
Turn 3: One regular (blue) order

One of the drawbacks this has is that if you finish your order quickly (the goal I guess?), you might be left with no order left to work on.

Currently there are trackers on the individual recipes (see the above post), but this may actually be kind of annoying. You have to progress them all individually, and sometimes we forget.

A system I'm considering is that you have a preset batch of recipes (say, 5 regular, 3 small, 2 VIP) that get shuffled at the start of the round. Then you have an overall Round timer ticking away, with bonuses and penalties based on how long it takes to complete the whole batch. Then you don't have to track the individual orders, or be left twiddling your thumbs while waiting for new ones to arrive.

One thing that system lacks is the urgency of 'we need to ship this order THIS turn', which has been one of the most fun dynamics so far. Unsure on how to handle, but open to ideas.

 

[Onderzeeboot]

One thing that system lacks is the urgency of 'we need to ship this order THIS turn', which has been one of the most fun dynamics so far. Unsure on how to handle, but open to ideas.

Why don't you have orders spoil if you're taking too long to cook them? After all, how long is a frog really going to stay tender if you keep heating the kettle? That would work with any kind of order system, I think, and you can have multipe orders open at the same time, as long as they're not spoilt.

Maybe you can give feared ingredients an additional use by having them be a way to accept a new order? But only if you've collected a bunch, so you've got a way to get rid of your feared ingredients, but at the cost of having another order to fill, which potentially brings you closer to a bad rating if you can't fill it.

 

[Jason Waddell]

Four player playtest in the books.

Things that worked
* Individual decks! "This was the first time I felt like I was building a deck". Passing cards was really interesting in this context. In the new rule, cards you draft go on top of your own deck, but once you pass a card it will stay in the recipients deck (unless passed again, of course). The starter decks are color coded, so by the end of the game your deck had a hodgepodge of other people's starter cards mixed in.
* VIP orders! The hexes/boons on these were working well mechanically.
* Card design. Things are getting more layered and synergistic, and drafting cards always felt fun.
* End of round grid draft! I set up a grid draft where you had treasures on the diagonal, and cards on the off diagonal. So whatever you chose you would get 1 treasure and 2 cards. It was a little weighty (lots of cards to see at once), so maybe in the early rounds I will have to adjust things, but the idea had potential.

Things that need work
* Game flow. There's a lot to discuss here. In the previous version (with the schedule), there were many potential issues. One non-trivial issue is table space. We had to keep the piles of recipes nearby, and the schedule itself. Then, when we flipped a number of recipes at the start of the turn, we allocated them amongst the players, but to do that we had to put them somewhere on the table. Allocating them was always kind of a chore, and had other issues (which we'll get to in a second). AND, sometimes people were left without a recipe.

The new system will be that at the start of the round you shuffle together your set of recipes that you need to complete. Players can take new recipes whenever they want (and have up to two simultaneously), and recipes can spoil (@Onderzeeboot). Having two orders in front of you means you have more flexibility in terms of where you put your ingredients (get around bottlenecks). BUT, any order you flip off the top can have a hex that really messes with your gameplay, so there's always some risk.

So we remove:
- the need for space for laying out recipes before assigning them
- the schedule
- the recipe allocation step of the turn (which wasn't fun)

Also, I think the recipe allocation is just bad. We would assign them to whoever was best suited to do it, but this a) removed some of the need for teamwork and b) made the game too easy.

The playtesters did comment that the game was too easy, which for a cooperative game I think is probably a cardinal sin.

For each round you'll now have a card that tells you how many of each recipe type need to be completed, and a table giving score bonuses and penalties for how many turns it takes your team to complete the entire round.

New Ideas
Since we're not allocating the recipes anymore, I think there is now design space for the ability to pass recipes. I'm thinking that this can be a mushroom ability, and I would make the most basic form of this effect be.

You may pass a new order (an order that was revealed this turn).

This lets the players do some regulation of the allocation, and there are incentives on when to (or not) reveal a new order based on the contents of your hand. Then you can decide to make some progress on the order before passing it. Will have to playtest that though, maybe you will only with the basic effect be able to pass an order that has had no progress made on it.

 

[Jason Waddell]

"I already like this game more than a lot of the games I own."

Had a 3-player playtest a couple nights ago with two first-time players. There was some confusion from one of the players about the distinction between ingredient cards (the cards you play) and ingredients (the things you put in orders and containers). For most players it's been clear, but in any case I thought I'd make a quick-start reference for the game.



Guide might be a bit too verbose, but I'll use it next time I have new players and see if it smooths the initial learning curve.

The mechanics and the systems of the game are basically finished. I've spent a few iterations trimming unnecessary features, and the focus from now on will (I think) be on building the card pool (glue cards and build-arounds!) and tuning the difficulty. Players commented that it was still too easy, so I'm looking to bump it up another notch without adding too much frustration.

Today I spend a couple hours trimming cards I didn't like and replacing them with cards that were more synergistic. Through these iterations I've been forced to focus the design. The nature of how the game works dictates that there be a high density of cards that perform the basic actions (passing cards and containers, dealing with your phobia and feared cards), so I'm looking to design cards that make building around these actions as fun as possible.

 

[Onderzeeboot]

"I already like this game more than a lot of the games I own."

Honestly, that's such great feedback to get <3

 

[Jason Waddell]

Honestly, that's such great feedback to get <3

Yeah, it is nice to hear, I will add a caveat:

I don't think these playtesters had played Spire or a Spire-inspired deckbuilder. So I wonder how much of it is them just not having exposure to Spire's design philosophy before.

That said, they commented that their favorite mechanic was everything to do with containers, which is wholly original (I mean, maybe not, but I haven't seen it elsewhere). I've also playtested with somebody who has ~50 hours in Spire and they didn't mention the game at all during either of our two playtests, so I hope I've created enough novel stuff for it to not feel derivative.

 

[Jason Waddell]

I've been putting a lot of work into my card design schools, which before now I've never trained or put to use at all.

One of my goals for this update was to make passing cards more fun. I had a two-player playtest over lunch where we drafted tons of feather cards (neither of us had a feather phobia), and got overwhelmingly positive feedback on it.

 

[Jason Waddell]

Solving Starter Phobias

One of the big design problems I've been churning over in my head is how to make the phobias impactful without making it a pain point.

There's a push an pull behind:
a) wanting to make the ingredients feel mechanically unique (i.e. color pie, toads do container passing)
b) the design NEEDING all players to be able to pass containers and cards (even if some are better than others)

@Onderzeeboot had suggested previously some ideas for tackling this, with ingredients being secondary for certain mechanics.



I was a bit stuck on the starter deck though, but had a breakthrough this weekend.



This is a card from the toad-phobia starter deck, and I love it. It's objectively a really strong card, but it's at its weakest for the player who starts with it! It's just "make a beetle + pass a container". Ideally you want to pass this card to another player (it's a great card for mushroom or feather phobia players!), but if you do it too quickly, your team might not yet be properly equipped to handle you not being able to pass containers frequently.

It's also a card that is clearly begging to be passed at some point, which teaches the players the value of passing cards for long term goals (making the collective decks stronger) versus just short term goals (the orders you're trying to complete right now).

 

[Onderzeeboot]

Nice! You solved three "problems" with one design!

 

[Jason Waddell]

Fun play from the last playtest.

passing . Teammate plays the passed card for (1). I draw it from their played area and play it for (0).

Felt really nice to have the synergies come together like that.

 

[Jason Waddell]

The game continues to improve and I continue to be more and more unhappy with its flaws. It's a weird phenomenon.

Last night I again got the comment that the (new, first time) playtester liked the game more than many published games they've played.

My current concerns:
- the players don't get enough cards for your deck to really feel like a deck. If you think about Spire, you get something like 30+ card acquisition opportunities in a run. Probably in a typical 'run' of my game you get like 13. Not saying they have to match, but the decks last night (to me at least) felt like just loose piles of cards.
- the synergy web could be tighter, but also, more expansive? Solving this probably just takes a lot of hard work (gluey designs), and some designs that are situational.
- turn time. they are long because a) physical game b) wide decision trees that get wider with player count. Also not sure what the solution here is. Kind of hesitant to play with 4 players because of the induced analysis paralysis. 2-3 players seems to be the sweetspot.



Playtester suggested the different characters could have different starting treasures. Not against it (it's common in spire and other games), but would need to put some thought into what these would be.

 

[Onderzeeboot]

Don't focus too hard on the flaws, I don't believe for a minute there is a single game out there that is objectively flawless! The important thing is whether your game brings joy to players, and from what you're telling here, your playtesters are giving very solid feedback on that front!

 

[Jason Waddell]

Draft 1 of the Starting Treasures.

 

[Onderzeeboot]

Bennett is a bit confusing, particularly because of the activation costs and weird "Pass Bennett Ada." line. Each player starts with one container, right, which has no cost? Couldn't Bennett just be an additional container with the limitation that he holds max one ingredient and (maybe) can't be passed unlike normal starting containers? Also, the other three have generic names, you could call this one Helpful Familiar.
As for power level, without having a firm grasp on the game, the coin sounds pretty powerful, especially because it reduces the cost of the card you get (potentially by more than you spent on the activation). Having extra resources is pretty nice, and sounds a lot more useful than retaining one spell. How good would a starting treasure that just reads "1: draw a card" be? I'm assuming your limited in the amount of energy you can spend, so there's a natural ceiling to what extra cards can do, and this makes the card a bit simpler in execution. Finally, this really should be Lucky Coin for a more positive vibe and for the fact that you're relying on the luck of the draw to find what you need, but maybe that's personal
Love Intro to Potions and Found Socks, wouldn't change a thing

 

[Jason Waddell]

Bennett is a bit confusing, particularly because of the activation costs and weird "Pass Bennett Ada." line. Each player starts with one container, right, which has no cost? Couldn't Bennett just be an additional container with the limitation that he holds max one ingredient and (maybe) can't be passed unlike normal starting containers? Also, the other three have generic names, you could call this one Helpful Familiar.
As for power level, without having a firm grasp on the game, the coin sounds pretty powerful, especially because it reduces the cost of the card you get (potentially by more than you spent on the activation). Having extra resources is pretty nice, and sounds a lot more useful than retaining one spell. How good would a starting treasure that just reads "1: draw a card" be? I'm assuming your limited in the amount of energy you can spend, so there's a natural ceiling to what extra cards can do, and this makes the card a bit simpler in execution. Finally, this really should be Lucky Coin for a more positive vibe and for the fact that you're relying on the luck of the draw to find what you need, but maybe that's personal
Love Intro to Potions and Found Socks, wouldn't change a thing

I deleted my previous message, as I had written it quickly and think it was maybe a bit off from the message I wanted to convey.

First of all, thank you so much for taking a look at these designs! Means a lot!

Re: Bennett. It should say "Pass Bennett TO Ada". There's a word missing which must make it weird to read. The idea is that Ada sends Bennett out (to the other players), and then Bennett finds its way back to her (hopefully with something in its mouth).

To be honest I'm not sure which of the treasures is weakest or strongest. We have a four player playtest tomorrow so I'll be able to see them all in action for the first time, and I'm sure some of my assumptions will be uprooted.

Regarding the coin, I like how it plays with card pass and regrowth effects. You might get a card you can't even play (phobia), or a card that'd be nice to play a bunch of times, so there's some skill involved in picking your moment based on your hand, or building your deck to exploit its effect. I'm hoping it's really fun to play with. I suspect this and Bennett will be the strongest early-game starter relics.

Not sure how strong retaining one card will be, but I'm optimistic. Well Laid Plans and Runic Pyramid are super strong, but here your deck doesn't even start with spells. Spells are (implicitly or explicitly) are varying degrees of situational. At baseline, all spells cost an ingredient (or more) to cast. So you need to line those up at the right time.

My intention was that each of these would give some mild, open-ended deckbuilding incentives, that provides some context to players' deckbuilding choices.

I think in general the treasures need to be amped up from what their STS equivalent might be. A player will have fewer of them, and they have to be tracked manually. Hopefully they can be used to expand the deckbuilding space in the game.



As for drawing a card for 1 energy, I'm not sure how weak or strong it is. My guess would be on the weaker side. Arkham Horror LCG had it as one of the base actions for players, in a 'Draw 1 card per turn' system, and it never felt that great to use. I'm guessing in a 'Draw 5 cards per turn' system you'd need to bump it somehow.

 

[Jason Waddell]

Which of these two cards do you prefer (design-wise).

These cards let the player create an ingredient by discarding/passing/purging/brainstorming them out of their hand.

If your phobia is mushrooms, you could use the left card (by discarding, passing, etc.), you just can't play it.
If your phobia is feathers, the right card lets you create your feared ingredient simply by playing it.

Trying to think about these cards from the perspective of a new / intermediate player. (If it's relevant, these would be a cycle)

 

[Jason Waddell]

Another few playtests in the books.

Tutorial!
Last playtest I introduced the game with a tutorial. It's just making two potions each (from a pre-selected simplified pool), with a simplified deck (no skull cards, no treasure) and no deckbuilding. Gets the player used to the basic gameplay (passing cards, putting ingredients in containers, the idea of a phobia) before you introduce the more advanced concepts.

Had felt the previous time (jumping right into a full game) that it was slightly too many concepts to introduce all at once. The tutorial went really well, and I plan to use it for all new players in the future.


Time, time, time...
The game still takes longer than I'd like. Maybe I've spent too much time in the realm of watching expert-level deckbuilders play deckbuilders. It's not that it's ever really boring, and nobody has complained of that, but it can take a while. Especially with slow players. We did a 3-player playtest where Round 1 took ~75 minutes. I've done a 2-player test without that slow 3rd player where we knocked our Round 1 in ~15 minutes.

I'm looking for ways to simplify / cut choices where I can, to speed things up.

Even a simple card like: "Pick a player to Draw 1" introduces a choice, and a conversation. "You and the player to your right each Draw 1" is quick, automatic.

Part of me wonders if there shouldn't be some huge overhaul. Time and again players have said that containers are the strongest part of the design. We could strip out other forms of interaction (passing cards) and just hone in on that. In a way passing and discarding cards are a relic of the share-deck era of the design. They work okay, but maybe I'm stuck climbing towards a local maximum.

Last playtester said that it already felt like a "complete" game, but I'm wondering if there should be some complete overhaul.

 

[blacksmithy]

Last playtester said that it already felt like a "complete" game, but I'm wondering if there should be some complete overhaul.

stop it. get some help.

don't let perfect get in the way of great. your game already sounds great and is getting good feedback.

 

[Jason Waddell]

If anybody would be interested in doing remote print+play testing, let me know. It would probably involve printing and cutting 45-50 pages of game materials though. Send me a PM if you're interested!

 

[Jason Waddell]

We did our first (successful) full-game run last night. Clocked in at a bit under 2.5 hours, and the wife said she had fun.

The player decks still scale too hard in the later rounds relative to the difficulty of the game. Round 1 feels very well tuned, and then things become easy. Karen was drawing her whole deck every turn at the end. Part of that was definitely a function of some overly pushed cards.

Going to have a think about what next steps should be. I feel like maybe the potion design should be more dynamic somehow, but not sure yet how to do that.

 

[Jason Waddell]

Got a new idea to test... boss potions.



At the start of the boss round, you set out all 4 segments of the boss potion. If you are with just two players, the players take parts (1) and (3), with (2) and (4) waiting. After each turn, you rotate all 4 potions clockwise. And every turn they get harder (as T increases).

(so in the two player example, on Turn 1 they have (1) and (3). Then the potions rotate and they have (2) and (4)).

All the potion steps have to be completed in one turn. If you fail any, it's game over. The players must complete at least 3 turns or else it's game over. After that, it's a push your luck for additional rewards. If you start Turn 4 but fail one of the steps... also game over.