Critique the June 2010 GDS games here!

Originally when I read through the entries, I was uninspired. Maybe because there were so many and I stupidly tried to read through and interpret them all at once. Maybe because I didn’t really feel good about my own entry in terms of adhering to the GDS design goal. In any case, now that I am commenting on them I see a bit more to appreciate in the entries.

Tower of Babel - This one is 3D (or implies that it is), and I can appreciate that. In fact it sounds like it would be a fun use-what-you-got-the-best-you-can game. I think. I see a rule for now many new tokens you draw, but not if their random or if you pick and choose from segregated piles. The game also doesn’t feel very deck-building to me, or seem to have an obvious slippery-slope mechanic, so I couldn’t give it my vote. Designer? Can you shed some more light on this one?

War of the Ancients – This says nothing about the game, just my tastes, but I couldn’t get behind the theme at all. Without playing it to see the potential beauty of mechanics, I just wasn’t inspired to play another drafting based dueling game. From the designer, I’d like to know what your inspiration was – what gets you excited about this one? I do like the little designer note at the end of the game description. It helped me know what to look for. In terms of the GDS, the deck-building was obvious, but in context felt very standard.

Gentoo (vote) – Clearly this game has gone through some development, and has benefited from it in terms of clarity, cohesiveness, and completeness. That’s why I voted for it, especially because it so subtly met the slippery slope part of the GDS. The transference of the nesting stones to other players is a brilliant way to keep the runaway-away. I do have one question for the designer – the 5 fish limit; is that the only fish you get? Obviously that’ll give some tough choices to make on how you spend your fish, although you’d obviously need to spend at least one on Hatch. I’d really like to play this one. Simple, quick, and with good choices to make. Nice one!

Super-mega-ultra-gladiator party (vote) – I dug the layer of deck building here that let you build up a roster of gladiators all players could see, and then force you to play with only one of them at a time, but with abilities that activate only if you DON’T use them. That’s what drew me to this – the play in knowing when not to use someone as much as when to attack. I wonder if it would lead to the same attacking/non-attacking combo each turn, but that’s in the details. I didn’t quite follow the wording in the description for when you defeat a gladiator. It seems that you defeat an enemy gladiator and you shuffle that gladiator and equipment into the opponent’s deck. I don’t see how that would alter their deck for the rest of the game, since they must have had that gladiator originally anyway. Designer, help? Also, it almost seems taboo these days to have player-elimination games – how long a game is this supposed to be?

Mind Duel – I liked this game. I don’t know why it got overlooked when I voted. Maybe because it felt like such a delicate balance I didn’t know how it would play out? I don’t know. Sorry designer; if I could I would revote for this one. I assume you don’t discard your cards when you play them for an action, and instead try to optimize your 10 card hand for how you want to play. And at that, you have constant access to all your cards – which some may say takes away from the deck-building aspect (if you say that deck building is more than just increasing/optimizing your options as the game progresses, and is more about increasing your chances for getting the action you want). This game removes the luck element, and I think it works for a duel game like this. I also like the slippery slope reversals by discarding to the endgame decks. Good stuff.

League of Artisitc Wizards (vote) – Wow, building a 20 card deck every round? Is that like a Magic the Gathering draft every turn? That was the most off-putting part, and if that’s it, then the rest looks good. If you plan on developing this, I’d say put a limit on how many spells a player can swap out each round. I like how the players play spells on other people’s routines; reminds me of other suit-matching games like…Uno? Except in this case, you’re scoring increasing numbers of points. As in many card games, the details on the cards here are what makes it, since otherwise the strategy is limited to suit-play as in the aforementioned Uno. Since that opened a lot of doors, I gave this my vote. I’d like to hear more from the designer on how the slippery slope is implemented.

Cliques – This is another one that, regrettably, I couldn’t get behind. I don’t think it’s the theme this time, but I wasn’t inspired while reading it. Again, playing the game might make me feel differently, but I’d put this game in the vein of Pimp: The backhanding. Neat theme with appropriate mechanics, but nothing that stands out as “hey, cool.” In fact, the deck-building is a pretty standard implementation, and the slippery slope mechanic isn’t readily apparent. I’d like to see some designer notes on this one to see the inspiration for mechanics choices!

Alma Mater (vote) – This one really captured the feel of the reality of capitalism in private universities. Everything seemed to fit in place without feeling mechanically contrived with artificial stats for professors or facilities. And I liked the tiles in a bag, so much so that I used them too. It keeps there from being too much information on the tiles, which can happen on cards. Cards sometimes make games less accessible or slow them down with the intricate strategies of lining up synergies. Here, it’s line up “Art with Art” for the best combo. Simple. I imagine the slippery slope comes in when bidding, since you bid with prestige and get more prestige when you win – and the event cards are what keep it in check, allowing other players to steal from the prestigious schools. Another one I’d like to hear from the designer on.

A Hero’s Tale – The rules description makes me think of a grind-fest, trudging through decks of monsters to get loot. Might be funsies over a short time, but through three decks with the only real variation in how varied my character is? How long are these decks? I like the way of leveling your character through gaining spells and abilities into your deck – if you develop this you may want to include a way to remove cards from your deck so you’re only left with the “higher level” cards. Would stink if you are toward the end of the game and you draw a hand of your first-level cards (which I can only presume would be weaker?) If the cards are all the same relative strength, they’d not have the feeling of leveling as much. Does the slippery slope come in that as you beat a monster you get more experience cards and therefore can beat more monsters than other players?

Mow Money – Tis a swell name, gangsta’. Really a bidding game, with a deck-building element to get the goods to make your bids. I like that; keeps the focus on something besides the deck-building, which is treated as a means to get a means to another end. (Deck building to get lawnmowers to get property…to get rep). I like that the runaway is avoided by having the lowest bidder win like a real contractor. I hope it works how I think it will – with lousy bidders losing their lawnmowers and having decks full of redraw-able currency to buy more. I wonder though, if a runaway happens with the tie-breaker. Say I stink at bidding and lose my mowers. I buy a few cheap ones because I figure I can win bets buy bidding lower, and frankly I’m desparate. Another player, who has won a few properties, also has a few cheap mowers. We both bid low – because that’s all we CAN do…we both bid only a $100 mower, but he wins because he had the reputation points. Does this work with a “lowest reputation wins” too? I like the minimum # of mowers on some properties, but I wonder if players might always bid the lowest possible and let their tie-breaking reputation points win it. Especially if it costs more to buy higher-value mowers, which I don’t really want, right? Please let me know if this is all backwards!

Gone Viral (zero votes) – This one was mine – and might be bigger in scope than was appropriate to try and lay out for a GDS. Design goals were: 1. To make the deck-building a decision in the game, but as a means to another goal rather than the focus. 2. To make the slippery slope obvious and always on the mind of the player as something to avoid by planning.

I chose viruses as a blatant runaway-mechanic. They multiply quickly and so made an obvious choice. First I laid out how a slippery slope unchecked would procede, and chose a territory-conquering style to emphasize both the physical spread of infection and to allow unchecked growth to get out of hand easily. The next step would be to put a check on it so it is a conscious slippery-slope without being able to runaway.

Gone viral tries this in two ways: First by only allowing players to multiply 1 territory on their turn (if they even take that action). This adds a level of strategy as to when and where you multiply to take over other virus’ territory when they aren’t ready (because they’re focusing elsewhere). Secondly by making growth that’s too fast actually be a detriment. This way, if a player multiplied too much before conquering he would destroy the spoils instead of scoring for it – with a small bonus of removing some opponents’ viruses too. If I was to remake this, I might remove that part to allow the runaway, because I think the limited Multiply action might be enough to keep it in check.

The deck-building is in the form of tokens in a bag (hooray, Alma Mater!) – because I wanted to avoid shuffling and cards with lots of text and numerous abilities. I think a half dozen or so abilities is appropriate to remember, and simple enough to print on tokens. Also I think tokens fit better on a board, since here they’re prizes. I liked the draw three, play one, discard one, replace one mechanic because I thought it gave a simple choice to the player while allowing him to plan ahead (knowing what he put back in the bag). And since you don’t start with a great number of tokens (8) recycling them often with a bag seemed easier than a deck of cards.

The deck-building comes in play as you choose which territories to infect, since conquering that territory lets you later multiply and mutate to buy that action tokens, or by being second best when a territory is conquered. Hopefully this will play out with players who play poorly still being able to gain new actions. Although I think what will actually happen is a kind of secondary infection, where a poor player will conquer an old territory while the leader is focusing elsewhere, and thus be able to buy the action token on that territory. I’m interested in developing this game a bit more to see where the balancing is actually needed.

Thanks Ewain, for clearing that up. I think you’ve hit on something by simultaneously defining what you mean by “deck” and stating that your feeling on “slippery slope” was perhaps different than the others. These concepts have pretty open interpretations, but I wouldn’t have thought any more so than some of the earlier GDS’. But judging on the 38 post count on the contest rules thread, there’s a few differences in opinion!
Looks like in Tower of Babel you made it a goal to keep layers relatively even, and thereby avoid the ‘slope.

And I do think it would be great in 3D!

Due to characteristic lack of organisation, I failed to get votes in on time this month!

I’ve written my critiques in the following format:

Name of game

Notes:

How I remember which game this is.

Slippery Slope:

Which elements in the game feed back into themselves, and whether there’s a built-in way to avoid runaway leader.

Deck Building:

How the game incorporates Dominion-style deck building. I’ve interpreted this as: the gameplay involves you exercising ongoing control over which cards are in your stock, and you cycle through your stock frequently enough for this to matter.

Rules:

How clear the rules were, and any rules issues or gameplay issues I think are in the rules as I understand them.

Overall:

Pros and cons.

Tower of Babel

Notes:

Build the highest ziggurat by placing tiles in the correct order on top of each other.

Slippery Slope:

The player who is behind gets punished by being forbidden to build more than 1 level. This is certainly slippery slope, but it has a runaway loser dynamic. Feels tacked-on to meet the design consideration, and I would imagine it detracts from the game.

Deck Building:

More ziggurat-building than deck building. No control over your hand, and no recycling of what you draw.

Rules:

Some errors in English, but the rules are clearly explained and I'm not going to penalise non-native entrants. The win condition for this game wasn't specified; I assume that the player with the highest ziggurat wins. With the rules as stated, a player can indefinitely stall the game by refusing to build, since the game ends only when all players have built 5 tower levels.

Overall:

Pros: nice simple tower-building game

Cons: weak on slippery-slope and deck-building; some minor rules omissions

War of the Ancients

Notes:

Dominion meets Magic the Gathering. Medium-to-heavy complexity card game.

Slippery Slope:

Monster dominance is an advantage, but your monsters take cumulative damage in beating up other players' monsters. Combined with the damage to players mechanic, it might be a little too unfair. It also looks as though it might be difficult to collect all the right cards at the right time to research or use your spells, particularly at the start of the game. If you can buy spells which smooth and accelerate your deck, an early run of bad (or good) luck might cause runaway-leader issues.

Deck Building:

It's like Dominion. With 2 different decks, each with its own purchase mechanism. Action cards are bought from the bank by discarding any 2 Action cards; spells are bought from a rolling selection by discarding specific combinations of Action cards.

Rules:

Explained clearly, though the number of players wasn't described and one or two example cards would have been nice to see. Not obviously broken. The game is moderately complicated as described, and that's without even knowing what the spell cards do.

Overall:

Pros: Slippery-slope (but possible runaway leader). Deck-building with potentially interesting variation. Subject to final design, this could be a fun game.

Cons: I imagine balancing this game will be a challenge.

Gentoo - A game of penguin procreation

Notes:

Hatch your penguins by collecting Nesting Stones, Eggs and Hatch cards. Disrupt your opponents and improve your deck with other cards.

Slippery Slope:

The author writes that stealing Nesting Stones makes for a slippery slope. I'm not convinced, since more Nesting Stones don't make for yet more Nesting Stones. They look more like an important bottleneck resource to me. If there's any slippery slope, it's the possibility for one player to supercharge their deck with Gone Fishing and Thaw cards.

Deck Building:

Card drafting. A really interesting variation where the resources used to buy new cards are replenished when the deck is cycled. I was impressed by this idea.

Rules:

How many players? Otherwise, pretty fully described including all cards. Dominion players will be initially confused by "discard" meaning what they think of as "trash". Confusing Blizzard and Gone Fishing might be frustrating if you are repeatedly denied turns. Need to balance the number of "Thaw" cards compared to "Snow" cards.

Overall:

Pros: Penguins! Playtesting! Maybe a minor slippery slope. Good deck-building element with an imaginative twist. Nice light elegant game.

Cons: Skipping your turn frequently is not fun. Slippery slope not very pronounced.

SUPER-MEGA-ULTRA-GLADIATOR PARTY!!

Notes:

Anti-Dominion! Fighting. Dice. Card dumping.

Slippery Slope:

The fewer hit points you have, the fewer actions you take. Straightforward runaway leader, mitigated only by "pick on the leader" in multiplayer.

Deck Building:

Debatable. You design your deck to start with. During play you get to offload cards from your deck into your opponents' decks. And you get to remove random cards from your opponents' decks. As far as I can see, decks are not recycled. (If they are, this causes rules problems since you can never run out of cards as specified in a game end condition.)

Rules:

The rules imply book-keeping which is not worked out fully: need to track who last hit a gladiator, and remember what you last did when you killed a gladiator. Rules as written are probably broken, because it looks like "never playing a gladiator" is a viable strategy. It's not clear whether a player loses when they run out of cards; I presume not. The card dumping mechanic is of dubious merit: you don't recycle your deck, so even giving an opponent a bad card allows them to have more cards in the end game. You might as well just keep the bad cards in your ever-increasing hand.

Overall:

Pros: creative thinking. Cool cards.

Cons: multi-player game with player elimination. Unmitigated slippery slope. Rules need a bit of work.

Mind Duel

Notes:

Use actions and attacks to make your opponent so angry and fearful that they lose.

Slippery Slope:

Interesting. Becoming fearful and angry restricts your access to more powerful attack and defence cards. But when it's gone too far, you get a windfall (if I've understood right).

Deck Building:

Selective drawing and recycling of cards. Recycling (endgame) mechanism not spelled out clearly.

Rules:

Hard to follow: pictures would have been a big help here. Various small omissions: no indication of when you draw endgame cards from the Fear / Anger track; setup a bit ambiguous (you deal out ALL the offence/defence cards); no components list. Bookkeeping issues with how many turns you've been on the highest Chi level. Not clear what initiative system adds. Not clear what concealing cards on the Fear / Anger track adds. Are attack / defence cards on the track face up or down? Do you draw the top one, or can you choose any of them?

Overall:

Pros: interesting ideas. The slippery slope with a pot of treasure at the bottom is cool.

Cons: rules (or explanation) need work. Not certain how strong the deckbuilding element is.

I have to say, my first temptation in entering this contest was to make a game where you're installing hot tubs at chalets in a ski area. Get it? Slippery slope plus deck building? Thanks, I'll be here all week. Try the veal.

Anyway, a lot of interesting entries this week. Here are my comments.

#1 – Tower of Babel
I love the theme, and the mechanics sound intriguing, although I’m not sure this would actually work if you played it out, since it seems like it would be very difficult to build and follow the rules at the same time. Also (major point) – you don’t say whether the draws are blind (Scrabble style) or player choice, which seems like a very important distinction here.
This doesn’t seem to follow one of the challenge rules (deck building) at all. The slippery slope is kind of there with the restriction on the player with the lowest pyramid, but nothing is done to mitigate it in the rules – if somebody got a level behind, I think they might end up just losing.

#2 – War of the Ancients
A dizzying array of cards here. I like the counterspell mechanic, where a player must discard spells rather than play a counter-counter, as in some games. It’s very difficult to imagine how this all plays out without seeing examples of some of the cards – what do the spells do? How strong are the monsters? I feel like the action cards would end up being super-important, since they seem to control everything you do, but without an idea of how the spells work, it’s tricky to say. Also, the goal of the game seems to revolve around building the monsters, which would seem to make the spells less relevant. I also worry that a bunch of this would come down to accounting – keeping track of all the different costs, and then doing life points on the monsters, etc.
The deck-building mechanic is present, with the choice of spells to buy and the initial spell choosing. The slippery slope thing is there, too.
I’m always going to be reluctant to vote for entries where too much is left undefined to imagine the game, and that’s definitely the the case here.

#3 – Gentoo
This is my entry.

#4 – Super Mega Ultra Gladiator Party
This sounds potentially fun, and definitely has both the deck-building aspect and the slippery slope component. I suspect that the thing would be completely and nearly immediately unbalanced once the slippery slope (the strength tokens) start to slip. You can’t give the players too many of these tokens at the start, or the turns would last forever, and whoever went first would likely get way, way ahead by playing all their cards. And if you give them too few tokens, then whoever scores the first hit wins, because then that player gets more cards, more actions, and has more life left for the rest of the game. There would also be a real problem at the start, because there’s a strong disincentive to play a gladiator, because then you can be attacked.
The sense of humor present in the cards is appealing. I just think the thing would be completely random and very short, and pretty frustrating for the loser. There’s also some weird rules that would be hard to keep track of – i.e. remembering which gladiators have been hit, remembering whether you shuffled your deck or stole cards, etc. The shuffling into opponent vs. stealing cards mechanic is weird – I guess the goal would be to give the other guy bad cards, but if you get to pick your cards at the start, you shouldn’t have any bad cards, right? This seems needlessly complex.

#5 – Mind Duel
Interesting concept – psychological wrangling before a martial arts duel. Some pictures would really help me understand how the boards are laid out. Also, the descriptions of the cards’ effects doesn’t make much sense without understanding the chi layout. The shifting of tokens sounds interesting, but it’s very hard to visualize, and the interactions between the cards (and the rules for playing them) are impossible for me to understand from the written descriptions. The slippery slope seems like it might be pretty strong, since the weaker you get, the worse cards you can buy, but without seeing the cards, that’s hard to say. I like the idea of building a communal board of cards and then playing it out – that seems like a neat mechanic.

#6 – League of Artistic Wizards
I like this idea – a non-deadly competition, where what you do builds on what other people have done. The game mechanics seem fun and sound; I like the build-up of the reward piles at the end, with the losing player at least able to get rid of a bad pile. The slippery slope is present, with the winning players gaining rewards and first choice of the new spell piles. There’s also deck building here, both at the start and as the game progresses.
A components section would help the rules. There is a bunch unspecified here, which makes it hard to imagine – we only get a few sample cards, and there’s no example of what a reward power could be, or what an overseer might want. I’d like to know more, but I like what I see so far here.

#7 – Cliques
The game’s layout is well-specified, with the diagrams and sample cards. I’ve read the rules a couple of times, and I still don’t understand the bidding process from them – at one point it says that each player will add one friend to their deck each turn, and in another, it says you may not be able to afford any friends. It seems like this is a very important aspect, but it’s not described in a very clear way – an example would help here. Also, what happens if you bid a number that your icons don’t evenly break into? That’s not specified either.
It’s a little hard to figure it all out without seeing more cards – we only get a clear look at one of them, and the rest of them (and nearly all the special powers attributed to Body, Spirit, and Mind) are undefined. Also, I don’t see any difference between core students, founder students, and friendship cards.
The deck building is definitely present, but I don’t see a very strong slippery slope, or any attempt to correct it, other than the assertion that Body icons have a catch-up mechanic.

#8 – Alma Mater
I missed the meaning of “pr” at first and found it very confusing. If you’re abbreviating like this (and I don’t think you need to) then use capital letters (PR). I like how this is laid out – the interactions of the different pieces and the overall structure/theme seem like they’d work well. I like that there’s a conflict between spending PR and needing it for victory. The slippery slope is present, with more students producing more income – I think it might get out of hand, but it would of course depend on the rest of the game, and with the bidding, it would be your own fault, partially, if you got behind.
Some concerns: There’s no specification of what happens when bids are tied for facilities, or if you have an odd number of tiles in your bag when you’re drawing pairs. The education phase could be pretty slow and awkward, drawing tiles pair-wise and choosing, but maybe that would go faster once you were used to it. Bidding for students is a bit complex, too, but I think you’d get it eventually. The event cards seem tacked on – there’s never any indication of how you get these cards, or what they are like other than a couple of examples.
Otherwise, I like this design a lot.

#9 – A Hero’s Tale
I like the overall idea – a collective, cooperative card game, complete with character development. This is a cool concept, and I think it could be really fun. The details don’t seem quite as clear – lots of cards and card types are invoked, but few examples are given – it seems pretty rough. There seems to be a lot of complexity for not so much return – channeling cards, die rolls, tables for actions, rank levels, item modifiers, tracking how many turns between monster moves, etc. I don’t get a good idea of how to play or what it would be like from the rules. If a player dies, is he/she out for the whole rest of the game? That could get annoying, particularly if you get down to one player, and from a game balance perspective, it would be very hard to keep the game balanced if players die permanently – the boss monsters are probably too tough for just one character, right?
But I like the idea. It has the deck building part built in with the experience cards, and the slippery slope is unusual, since it’s the players building their power against a common foe.

#10 – Mow Money
I like the theme and the dual-use cards – that’s neat. The gameplay seems like it might work out all right, although it seems like you could get to a money shortage pretty quickly, since you can only earn money by bidding on properties, and the low bidder wins, so I’d think somebody’s always going to bid the minimum. (I’d have to see more on the balance of cards to understand if it is balanced in this way). The four actions are interesting and cool – I can imagine you’d often have difficult choices to make on your turn.
I like this one. There seems to be a moderate slippery slope with the currency stuff, although not too intense, and the deckbuilding is definitely there.

#11 – Gone Viral
This is intriguing; it’s very difficult to have a game with exponential growth and have it remain balanced, so that would be an interesting thing to see. I think you’d need tons and tons of little counters to get this to work, and you’d spend a lot of the game counting; from the examples, you could conceivably have 500 or more tokens on the board at a time.
There are some things unspecified – e.g. what happens when a space is conquered? Does it block movement, or can you move through it? How do you decide who controls an organ group at the end? How much does it cost to mutate?
There would definitely be a slippery slope part here, as the player who drew more replicates early would get a big numeric advantage. I think the math just naturally makes this difficult to balance. There’s a moderate deck-building component with the mutate option and with restoring the pieces to the bag and discarding others. I think the spread doesn’t work quite right – it would be better/more useful to be able to spread with a fraction of your virus rather than your whole pile, but maybe I don’t understand.
This would be much, much easier to play as a computer game rather than a tabletop game, I think.

Votes:
#8 - Alma Mater: 2
#10 – Mow Money: 2
#6 – League of Artistic Wizards: 1

A really strong batch this round forced me to be extra critical, both in my judging and in my thoughts below.

As usual, I'll critique in the tradition of my theater company's playwright feedback system: "hot" vs. "cold" rather than "good" vs. "bad." This is I am only an expert on my own reactions, not on your game, and I can only tell you what I enjoyed or didn't, what left me confused, what made me want to see more.

On to the entries!

Tower of Babel

hot: the idea of cobbled together towers, the neat interactions between different materials

cold: no winning condition, no slippery slope (instead, punish the loser), unclear rules write-up

I like the idea of building ziggurats with weird materials, creating a neat slapdash tower. But the rules, as written, don’t satisfy the challenge, because they don’t create a slippery slope, but rather just punish the person in last place. In addition to failing to meet the challenge, I don’t think that mechanic would be very fun in practice.

The rules were also a little hard to follow. Here’s one notable example:

Anytime during the game, a level can be expanded 1 section, as long as the one above is also expanded at the same time. Only 2 levels at a time can be expanded in this manner.

What does “expanded one section” mean? Made wider, I assume, but that’s not specified. Can you place tiles anywhere in the level, or only on the edges? The whole thing could be more clearly and concisely written as “expand any two adjacent levels by placing one extra tile on their sides.” Presumably you’d also want a rule that says that each level must be smaller than the one below it.

Most critically, there are no winning conditions! Again, it’s up to the reader to assume that the person with the highest tower wins, but maybe it’s the person with the biggest tower overall (most pieces)?

All in all, this is a neat idea for a game but needs more polish.

War of the Ancients

hot: good temporary and overall slippery-slope ideas, cards serve as both actions and resources

cold: overuse of “may,” lacked components list to help keep track of shifting terminology

I liked this game. It feels a lot like a cross between Dominion and Magic: The Gathering. I especially like the idea of using cards for either their action, or as discard fodder to fuel other, more powerful cards. I think with the right arrangement of cards there could be a lot of really interesting strategy to explore here.

The only major downsides were in the rules write-up themselves. There wasn’t a components list, which made it difficult to keep track of all these different decks and card types as they were introduced one by one during the rules. “Spell” cards were sometimes “Research” cards, I think? With so many different kinds of things going on, a components list or picture of the table layout would go a long way in helping people visualize your game.

Additionally, the rules suffered from what I call “may-itis”. Overusing the word “may” confuses the reader, making it unclear when something must happen, and when it is optional. If it’s optional, there should be a reason for not choosing to take that action; if a rational player would always choose one, or the game breaks if the player fails to do something, then “may” is inappropriate.

Here are some examples:

“If you pay that cost in research cards, you may pick up the spell card... Whenever you play a rest card, you may draw a card from your Spell Deck. When there are no cards left, you may reshuffle your discarded spells.”

Why wouldn’t someone pick up the spell card they paid for? Why wouldn’t they want to draw from their deck? If they choose NOT to reshuffle, where will they get their cards from? All of these rules should be written in the imperative – “whenever you play a rest card, draw a card from your spell deck” etc. – to let players focus on the rules that let them make real choices, of which (as I said) there will be many.

Compare to: “Each turn, you may discard any 2 action cards to add an action card of any type to your Action Deck.”

This is an appropriate use of “may” because here, there is a real choice to be made: use those action cards for their actions, discard them to fuel another card in your hand, or discard them to draw one you want more from your deck.

Still, with a bit of cleaning up, this game has a lot of potential. I’d love to see you take this into development and see what you come up with for cards. Balancing it would be hell, of course, but there’s a lot of potential here. If the field wasn’t so strong I’d give this a vote for sure.

Gentoo

hot: penguins! great slippery slope! clearly lots of work put in

cold: downtime?

Hard to say much that I didn’t like about this game. The penguins hatching theme is neat and not overused, the rules are clear and concise, and the pictures show a lot of work was put in. The slippery slope mechanics are effortlessly part of the game.

The only thing I’d have concerns about is downtime: you have both phases happening before moving to the next player. The game probably moves pretty quickly anyway, though, but if you get into a situation where there’s a lot of cogitating, since some cards talk about considering all the other visible cards in play, the other players might get a bit impatient.

Overall a sold choice. 2 votes and a strong desire to hear how that play-test went.

SUPER-MEGA-ULTRA-GLADIATOR PARTY!!

hot: hand-drawn pictures, sense of humor, “classic” deck building, messing with opponents’ decks is a really neat idea

cold: grammar errors, player elimination, poor slippery slope, hard to produce in real world

And on the other side of the “nice to see” visual coin, we have an entry that showcases the wild exuberance of the GDS with some crazy hand-drawn cards. Battle chickens? Smiley face buttons? A stick figure sucking blood out of another stick figure? Yes, please!

Also nice to see was the “classic” deck building. It’s useful to remember that before Dominion, the deck building happened before the game started, rather than during it. The identical decks idea is neat too, since it keeps this game from going down the road of M:TG and being about who can buy the most expensive and overpowered Rares to blow the other players out of the water. So, points for the “non-collectable card game” design.

However, there are three issues that keep me from really loving this game.

First, it’s described as “for any number of players” (awesome!) but comes in a set of six-differently backed decks, so it seems like either you’re really talking about six players, or you’re talking about creating different SKUs with different sets of colors (major colors pack, pastel pack, whatever). If it’s the former, you should just say “2-6 players.” If it’s the latter, which would be cooler in theory, this game suddenly becomes very difficult to create and market in the real world. How would you print this game? How would you sell it? The obvious choice for a game like this is actually by individual deck, rather than six-packs, but how to you ensure that everyone at the table has a different colored back? You could print identical decks, and sell them in packs with a set or two of sleeves, perhaps, and then vary the sleeves (which would be cheaper than varying deck backs), but then players are going to have to do a lot of sleeving every time they want to play...

Obviously this is the Game Design Showdown, not the Game Marketing Showdown, but I think real-world concerns are important here (a game with a million pieces would also be problematic), especially when the field is particularly strong, as it was this month.

Second, in a gladiator game you’re almost required to use player elimination, but I’m not a fan of that as a mechanic. It’s just a fundamental flaw of the theme – some might even prefer it – but I’m more of a euro guy and I like my players to have a shot at victory right up to the end, rather than simply win by virtue of being the last one standing. Or, if there must be elimination, I want it to result in a massive swing of power so that the game ends quickly thereafter.

This relates to the third issue I have which is that I don’t think that this game used the GDS requirement particularly well. The idea of “strength” being alterable, allowing you to take Fluxx-style actions, is a nice start at a slippery slope, but I don’t think it’s nearly enough. I’d want the gladiators to become stronger with experience, for instance, or if you take a player out to gain access to his cards. Something that really builds to an epic final showdown where two really powerful players slug it out.

Finally, I have to ding the design for the classic SAT errors of confusing number/amount and affect/effect. I know it’s annoying and pedantic to point out, but as an SAT tutor it bothers me to see these errors persist. And I’m not just being picky for the sake of being picky, either. If you want to take a design to someone else to print, or hope to get people to buy it, it helps to follow all the rules of grammar, just as it helps for any other business scenario. Someone who spots grammar errors will question the integrity and thought put into the rest of the design, even if it’s actually a great design.

I’ve spent a lot of time talking about what I didn’t like, but the truth is this game could be wild and wacky and fun. I’m just not totally sold as is, and I think it needs just a bit more thought to turn it into real-world workability. Another one I’d give a vote to if the field wasn’t so strong otherwise.

Mind Duel

hot: theme

cold: grammar errors and typos, couldn’t follow the action

Again, grammar errors kept taking me out of appreciating the design: amount/number and affect/effect again, also who[‘]s/whose, it’s/its, and many other typos. Proof-read your entries! As a voter choosing between 11 possible entries for only 6 votes, I’m looking to find reasons not to vote for something, and a badly checked entry is easy to discount.

That said, even if this entry was better proofed, I still don’t think I would have been able to follow what’s going on. There are tracks and chi points and attack cards, and you’re laying them down somehow, but it just didn’t gel for me. I think the problem is that these felt like jotted notes about a game rather than a fully developed set of rules. I’m sure it’s totally clear what’s going on in the designer’s mind, but we’re new to your game and need to be hand-held a bit.

I will say this: the idea of a game that’s all about what happens right BEFORE combat is fantastic. There are a million games about throwing punches; I’ve never seen a game that’s about sizing up your opponent and trying to make him angry or scared. Kudos on originality!

Alma Mater

This was my design. I hope the slippery slope aspect was clear enough, where the single engine of victory points/cash (“Prestige”) would be used to purchase further improvements, which would in turn generate Pr at ever-higher rates. The idea of a "single-engine" game (unlike Dominion, which has a Treasure/VP distinction) was really the heart of this game design, and I've been wanting to make a "college" game for a while; the two seemed to work together so I went with it.

As always, it took longer to get the rules down to 800 words than it did to design the game itself. A few elements that were cut:

1. Extracurricular activities. These would work more or less like Facilities, in that they would generate pr and might also attract students, but they’d come out only when drawn during the Education Phase, rather than being out all the time.
2. The idea that some Facilities could hold more than one class, or teachers that could teach more than one student. I really like this idea, as it’s much more thematic than a college built entirely on independent study projects, but it just wasn’t explainable in 800 words.
3. T.A.'s that were brought in as students but could be used as either professors or students. Again, not enough words.
4. Some more examples, including an admissions round with a model priority list.

Some responses to critiques I got so far:

1. The abbreviation of PR, which someone mentioned as confusing, was one of the dirty little tricks I used to cut the rules down to 794 words, since I could merge it with the numbers it referred to – “3pr” is one word, but “3 prestige” is two. Such is the cost of the 800-word limit; I would always avoid abbreviations like this in a less artificial scenario.
2. It is actually specified what to do if you draw an odd tile – you set it aside, too. But it’s easy to miss a tiny rule like that.
3. I can’t believe I missed what to do if you tie on an Institution bid! Thanks for the catch. There are two choices here: one is a game of chit/empty hand chicken, similar to the “financial aid” bidding, the other is the option for one tied player to “buy out” the others for the right to pick before them. It’s basically the choice between negotiation and blind bidding, but ultimately the idea is the same: if you tie, you’ll end up paying more to beat the other players. Thoughts?
4. Campus Events are part of the Institution tiles, so they come up during the Capitalization Phase, along with Facilities and Professors. This was confusing because I used too many nested lists in the components section, and for a while it wasn’t formatted properly, although Seth did a great job correcting the formatting errors after I pointed them out. They are very much a key part of the design, because they are the primary ways that you can mess with other players. As one person pointed out, they are the means by which a runaway leader can be targeted. You can also use them to prune your own ranks of useless teachers and students, of course!
5. I don’t think that the Education Phase would drag overmuch, because you’re making a series of either-or decisions, and then grouping the tiles in front of you. The tile arrangement part of it might slow down a bit in the late game, but I think everyone will probably be at about the same stage in terms of growth so it shouldn’t be too bad in terms of downtime.
6. The “slippery slope” part of this game, as some have noted and as I mentioned above, is indeed that each turn should generate more Prestige than it costs, and that Prestige is used to purchase ever-better tiles and outbid other players. If you fall behind in firing up your Prestige engine, it will be that much harder to climb back up out of the hole because the other players will be outbidding you, just as in Dominion a deck filled with coppers will be outpaced by a deck filled with golds. And of course, you’ll have less Prestige to win the game with.

Ultimately, I’m not entirely sure if this game is producible. You’d need a LOT of those little tokens, which would drive the price up very quickly. The original plan was to use cards, but there’d be no way to bid on the students without some sort of complicated Taboo-style card feeder, or an envelope or something, since they have partially hidden information but later have to be randomly integrated into the player’s deck. I think that bidding on students and not always knowing what you’re going to get is an important part of what makes this game tick; if you always know exactly what you’re getting, it’s less like college admissions, and I think the “messiness” will scatter the game a bit, in a good way.

I'm glad you all liked it! I might yet move forward with the design, which at least seems more do-able than my volcano-erupting tile laying co-op, Pompeii.

I apologize for my tardiness in critiquing the last GDS. I've been gone for the past two of the three weeks without much time for writing. I was really hoping to write my thoughts down before the next GDS challenge was posted...bummer, looks like I missed it.

I enjoyed the challenge last month. Dominion has become a favorite game of mine and is asked for frequently among the high school and college students that I work with. I've even enjoyed a few games with my 5-year-old son, who as a pre-reader can play by remembering what different cards can do. And so a challenge to make a deck building game with a slippery slope mechanism was a lot of fun for me.

I have to admit that I have never played any CCGs. So while voting for this month's entires, I was heavily biased towards games that had a Dominion-esque style of deckbuilding. I also favored games that seemed to have complete and understandable rule-set. There were several games that seemed to do well at meeting the challenge requirements, so I broke from my traditional 3 votes for favorite/best, 2 for second, and 1 for third, and gave several games 1 vote. The one game that I felt best met the challenge and was written most completely was awarded 2 votes. On with the comments...

#1) Tower of Babel – seems like the beginnings of an interesting game, especially with the rules for what items can be stacked onto each other. I think there might be an interesting choice when deciding to extend out or up based upon the materials one has. I don't see a deckbuilding mechanic, and has been mentioned by others, I wish the last place player didn't have so much power.

#2 - War of the Ancients - (1 Vote) – I like how this game has two different decks to work with, and I like the interaction between the decks and the interaction among the players. It seems like the game might be a little bit fiddly having to remove cards from decks at certain points throughout the game. One of the questions I had was what happens to the victory points when a monster is destroyed? Do the points go away? It may seem like the second game ending condition may happen first before a set number of points is scored. I felt like this entry met the challenge requirements and has some potential for future development.

#3 - Gentoo - (2 Votes) – I appreciated the clearly written rules and the helpful pictures and diagrams. Excellent job on this entry. The penguin theme is awesome! I like how you incorporate the different actions with the different themed cards. Nice job. I'm not a huge fan of the blizzard and gone fishing cards; they seem a little out of place among the other cards. Otherwise, I feel like this one meets the challenge requirements and is one that I would enjoy playing the most of all the other entries. I would be interested to hear how future development of this one goes.

#4 – SMUG Party – There are some interesting ideas in this design, namely the playing of cards onto other players' decks. Very cool. I also like the subtle humor in the cards. Looks fun. The setup of this game seems a little ambiguous as well as the game end situation. I didn't rate this one higher because the deck-building was something that took place before the game started and not as part of the game. As I stated earlier, I was biased toward entries where deckbuilding was part of the gameplay and not just setup.

#5 – Mind Duel – I like the originality of this theme. Interesting idea about sizing up your opponent before actually fighting. The rules description was a little hard for me to follow. I would have liked to have seen a clearer layout of the rules and some examples of cards and what they do. As is, I'm not sure how to go from the sizing up part to the actual fighting part. I sense there is a seed for a good game here. Keep working on it.

#6 - League of Artistic Wizards - (1 vote) – I liked this game a lot. Great job on laying out the description of the game. Some of the things I liked were the applause points (very creative), the drafting in between rounds, and the build up to the very last round. I was a little uncertain about how the set up worked (what is a standard pile mean?), but I think I got it. I would have like to see an example of an Overseer and Reward card, but I think I understood the game without seeing one. Seems like a game to continue working on. Good job!

#7 - Cliques - (1 vote) – I also liked the creativity in this game. It's not everyday you see a game themed around high school drama! Great artwork and great layout of the components and rules. I struggled a little with understanding some of the concepts, like how bidding is based on decisions rather than just luck of the draw. If I understand correctly, the major decision in a turn is to figure out which card in your hand to use as a leader and make all of the rest supporters. Anyway, lots of potential here and think it's worth developing futher.

#8 - Alma Mater - 1 vote – Yet another game with a creative theme. Excellent job! At first I was a little turned off by this game because I didn't see the “deckbuilding” aspect in a tile game, but the idea grew on me as I opened up to considering tiles instead of cards for the “building” part. I like how there are a variety of choices in the game, and I like how you prestige points are the currency. I'm not sure how necessary the “event” tiles are and would probably need playtesting to determine their viability. The game seems interesting and engaging without them. Nice job!

#9 – A Hero's Tale – This entry seems like it might be a start to a decent entry, but I felt it was rather incomplete. I would like to see a little more about how the game ends, and what the winning / losing conditions are. I thought the cooperative nature of the game was creative. I might have missed it, but I didn't really see a deck building mechanic throughout the game, which was something I was looking for in casting votes.

#10 – Mow Money – my entry. I appreciate the comments from others, and if I have time later while on vacation, I'll write more about some thoughts I've had.

#11 – Gone Viral – This is a game that I probably didn't as good a read through before casting my votes. Like “Alma Mater” my first reaction wasn't to really consider this one because I didn't see the “deckbuilding” mechanic in the beginning. For some reason, Alma Mater broke through for me, but this one didn't. As I re-read it, though, I see some nice design ideas, and some interesting choices. Good job. I'd be interested to see if you develop this one further.