Game Design: My theory, which is mine.

Okay, recent comments arising from Richard Garriott's somewhat inflammatory statements have led folks to ask "What is game design and how do you teach it?"

This has no single answer, but here's my take.

Game design is behaviourist psychology 101: what behaviours do you want to encourage, what behaviours do you want to discourage? In more basic terms: what does the player do? What do they want?

• How do they interact, in the broadest terms, with "the game"?
•  with their avatar (if any), 
• with other players (if any)
• with the console / board / pieces (if any)
• etc

• What do the players want?
• To get points
• To defeat the opposition (human or otherwise)
• To complete the story
• etc.

The first is the "what" of playing the game, the second is the "why".

Continuing (the "how"),the rules and operations of the game can make any behaviour explicitly or implicitly

• Compulsory ("you must roll the dice each turn")
• Rewarded ("If you break the jar, get 10 rupees")
• Punished ("If you enter the room, the vicious beast attacks!")
• or Forbidden ("You may not move another player's piece")

Compulsions and prohibitions are heavy handed, and are in fact often implied in many games without being explicitly stated (and "presumed conventions of board games" are meat for another post). Rewards and punishments are the main link between what players do during the game and their pursuit of the goal.

The form of rewards and punishments, their relationship to each other (often typified by the relationship between risk and reward), to the final goals of the game, all form the backbone of the economy of the game, defining which resources are scarce, which plentiful, which can be exchanged, at what rate. This is true not only of baldly economic games, but any game which has resources and limits. There is an economy to the damage absorption capacity ("health points") of avatars in online shooting games relative to their speed and capacity to deliver damage which many games exploit for greater tactical interest.

And that relationship defines the meaning and the message of the game (of which more another time)

And that, to me, is the meat and potatoes, bare bones of game design. Picture what you want you players to be doing. Design a game that lets them do that, that encourages them to do that, that puts obstacles in the way of them not doing that.

Still, what do I know. Please, everybody tell me what's wrong with this picture.

Review: Mythic Battles

Mythic Battles aims at some fairly crowded gamespace: it's natural home seems to land it amongst the likes of Summoner Wars, the Commands and Colors games (BattleLore, Battles of Westeros), Heroscape and the Clix games (particularly Mage Knight... but not the latest iteration).

Self proclaimed as an intersection of miniatures games, card games and board games, it seems to be making a grab at a lot of separate camps. To break down where those come from:

MINIATURES GAMES: As far as I can tell, this influence essentially boils down to "point build armies with variable powers", like Heroscape, for example.

CARD GAMES: Well, there is certainly the influence of Summoner Wars here: with a sufficiently enlarged board, you could even play your unit card stacks in the place of the little circular unit tokens... But the main influence is in the command cards, giving more of  a hand management focus a la Commands and Colors, with perhaps a modicum more control.

BOARD GAMES: Err... it's played on a board?

So how does it work, and how well does it work?

For the rest of the review, I'm going to be talking pretty much about the standard game, rather than scenario play: even the introductory campaign in the book futzes around with makeup of armies and victory conditions (though, interestingly, rigidly sticks to point balanced forces) in such a way that it's not representative of the "standard" game.

Army Building:

Pretty easy and straightforward: You have 100 points, need to spend at least 95 of them, have to buy at least 5 units and no more than 10. Given the presence of some honkin' big huge units, this last goes a little way to mitigating the problem found in some point build games of sinking all your points into a few (or one) unit: unless the game's built around such mismatches (OGRE springs to mind), it can lead to either the non-behemoth side being to do nothing but whittle a tiny amount off the monster, or the behemoth being vulnerable to one lucky dice roll*.

Oh yeah, and faction building rules make no difference whatsoever unless you're using more than one set, and amount to "only use the bits from one set per side".

Also, the command card rules balance numerous against small forces nicely, which brings us on to..

Game Play:


So it's draw cards, command the units you have cards for right? Eh, not so much. Each manoeuvre card has three uses: Manoeuvre, counter-attack or discard for energy. Each Art of War card has three uses: Multiple moves in one round, hunt for cards, discard for energy.

Given that the first two uses for manoeuvre cards rely on you having the right cards for the right units, you may think that gives the advantage to the player with fewer units: fewer units, smaller deck, more likelihood to have cards that match the unit they want to use, right?

Except here's is where we hit one of MB's brilliant little rules that balance the game through emergence: The discard decks don't get re-shuffled until BOTH draw decks have exhausted.

If Mister Hades has sunk all his points into the Five Monsters of Rock, after the fifth turn he's going to be waiting at least one more turn for Miss Athena's hordes to creep up the board and throw pointy sticks at him TO DEATH.

So yes, plenty of good old fashioned hand management to make sure you don't charge in with your high mobility troops and get them stranded, plenty of using AoW cards and special abilities to go a-hunting for cards for the big showy offencive... and plenty of ditching cards you can't use for that sweet, sweet energy to power up your guys. Strategy shaped by troop buys, moulded by card draws and affected by terrain, still enough in your control to take the credit when in works and still at the mercy of the cards enough for you to blame your inevitable failure.

And then there's combat: with first looks at the exploding dice mechanism, I thought this was going to be a swingy, one shot from a peltast takes out cerberus travesty, but happily, it limits the amount of damage possible to one per successful die. The chance of a single hit explodes, the damage doesn't. Sanity reigns. Strategy endures. The Dude abides.

Oh yeah, energy. That stuff you get for ditching the cards you don't want to use this turn. The stuff that lets you do the cool stuff. And that fact may make you think that the balance has now swung to the side of the large faction, churning cards for energy to power up the hordes into SUPER HORDES... only not. Because the hordes, even when powered up can't do the amazingly cool stuff the big boys can do when powered up. All that energy won't save your slingers when the Judge of Hell (Simon Cowell) comes knocking.

Bits:

The artwork is GORGEOUS, inspiring spontaneous "This! Is! Sparta!" whenever the bad boys of the Pelleponnese come out to play. However, the colour scheme is muted, which doesn't help differentiate units in less than perfect light. Also, it's been said before, little round discs, however pretty, are Not As Nice as sculpted minis. Pretty serviceable, though.

The Rulebook isn't as clear as it could be: concepts are sometimes introduced in places that don;t make much sense. Granted, the integration of multiple use cards in a fairly tightly coupled system will make it difficult to determine the best way to organise the information (and led me to write my own play aid to get it straight in my own head**), but still, there's no excuse for the way some of the rules are set out.

The only sticking point I have is with special abilities, which are a sticking point with me in EVERY GAME WHERE THE RULES FOR THEM ARE NOT WRITTEN DOWN ON THE GORRAM UNITS. BECAUSE I AM OLD AND ONLY HAVE A LIMITED CAPACITY FOR REMEMBERING THINGS, HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO REMEMBER THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN AURA OF STRENGTH, UNHOLY STRENGTH AND SKILLED MELEE? I CAN BARELY REMEMBER MY CHILDREN'S NAMES!

But yeah, the rules for all the special abilities wouldn't fit on the (great, functional, beautiful) unit cards. So yay for the official player aid.

Did I mention yet that not only do combat abilities weaken as units take damage, their special abilities change too? And tracking all that is easier than clicking a heroclick or moving chits on a character sheet? I love this system. I want RPG's that work this way.

The campaign book, though, is very clear, and provides a nice escalation in rules, though perhaps the early battles are so stripped down for which rules they're using that they sell the system short early on, and your 14 year old son is whining that he'd rather play Heroscape or Summoner Wars, even though you don't even own SW, before you get to the cool stuff, like Cerberus eating three Spartans TO DEATH. AT THE SAME TIME.

Factions:

MB comes with two factions, Hades & Athena. Which, you know, have Hades as the Demon Bad guy and Athena as the Nice fluffy woman with the humans.

Digging a tiny bit deeper, it's actually Hades with the air and ground cavalry (plus BIG monster air Cav and EVEN BIGGER monster artillery), while Athena has the hordes of guys with pointy sticks which they will totally throw at you from hillsides and the other side of chasms which is SO UNFAIR because you can't counter attack ranged fire. Then you go up close and punks have Spartans up front who not only counter attack when you hit them but ALSO THROW STICKS, unlike Hades troops who mostly can't throw their weapons because they're either part of their arms or nailed on, because HADES.

So what I'm trying to say is the two factions demand totally different tactics and hand management and this is a GOOD THING in a basic set with faction.

Verdict:

I really like Mythic Battles. It's a smart design that is not only balanced in troop strength but also force size. It's a nice weight and complexity for the length, sufficiently rewarding of strategic and tactical ability while keeping a level of unpredictability to maintain the interest of the less than absolutely hard core strategist.

It uses cards to keep a complex system very easy to manage while being more "realistic" than many more fiddly troop management systems (I'd compare it to the Warmachine minatures system for tracking unit abilities, and even then this is superior in ease of use. Compared to say, the WH40K system, it makes it look like Games Workshop are still in the 80's in game design).

I'd definitely suggest to fans of Summoner Wars, BattleLore (or Battles of Westeros),Heroscape or even minis gamers who are more into the game side of things that it's worth a try.

More than that though, I can see MB becoming an influence on future games at this "just above entry level" wargame stratum. Not only do I want more factions for MB, I want to see what else the system can handle...




*I've seen a kid in tears at a Warhammer 40K game after his super-duper I will crush you flying strike craft being taken down by one lucky rocket in the first turn...

** And yes, my version also looks like ass. Your point?