Design Goals and Victory Conditions
In moving forward with this game, I have a couple of design goals that I am keeping in mind. Somewhere in the back of my mind I remember a Ludology episode where they talk about the different things that people get out of a game. Some people connect to the game visually, some connect purely for the puzzle, some people like playing with the little pieces more like a toy. If you can provide some aspect fo your game that appeals to each type of player, then you are helping your design.
One goal that is important to me is that, in playing the game, the players ought to create a piece of art by the end. Perhaps that sounds crazy, but I think it would be so cool if the game-space itself looked interesting and appealing, like art, at the end of the game. Unfortunately I am not an artist, but I feel like I really appreciate just looking at a pretty board, and I don’t see why the playing of the game itself couldn’t produce “art” at the end of it.
To that end, in The Dark Forest, I tried to engineer the mechanics in such a way that, as life grows on different planets, the life that appears there actually LOOKS biodiverse. So I would like to use a multicolored grab back of plant and animal meeples. Thus no single player ever owns these life forms, and they can be any color you want. Not sure if it will work, but I’d think that it will look cool at the end of the game. One example of this that I just thought of is Gods Love Dinosaurs. At the end of the game, you’ve built this little ecosystem with different biomes and different little animal meeples. The end product of playing the game just…looks cool! And I definitely want that for The Dark Forest.
In the same vein, I just LOVE a board that is intricate with a lot of detail, and it's even better if the detail has gameplay significance. Some good examples are the main boards for Brass: Birmingham, Scythe, and Barrage. Scythe especially just has a gorgeous board, it’s literally a work of art in itself, and there’s tons of little Easter eggs if you spent time looking at it. I’d hang that board on my wall, and again, that’s something I’d like for my game.
In fact, that’s kind of how the whole Cosmic Tree idea came about. I was looking at this picture on my wall that my mom made. She is a very talented artist, and for my wedding guest book, she drew this big elaborate tree, and our guests each used their finger dipped in green ink to make leaves on the tree and then signed their names on it. The end result was this really cool looking tree that doubled as our guest book! That piece of art that was made by a whole community of people (that I happen to care about a lot) is just such a cool idea.
The other design goal worth mentioning is that I want only wooden meeples and cardboard for the game, so that the whole thing is biodegradable. This is a trend that has been increasing amongst boutique board games, and I really dig it. I think it is super cool to do our small part to make our hobby sustainable. Plus plastic is just gross. And games that come with mountains of plastic minis are gross. In my opinion haha.
OK, enough about design goals. The BIGGEST design problem that I am trying to tackle right now is the victory condition(s). I once watched a video entitled something like, “Victory Points Suck” where the designer was talking about the fact that tallying up points to decide who won a game is pretty anticlimactic. Of course, ALL of my favorite games are Euros, and most Euros use victory points, so I’m not sure I have a leg to stand on here, but for whatever reason, I just have this feeling that my game should unfold, tell a story, have a narrative arc, and end with a bang instead of with a calculator. Again, all of my favorite games end with a calculator, but at the same time, games like House on the Hill, which is not a “good game”, is super fun with the right group because you don't have to think. You just chuck dice, try to defeat the monster, and that's that. You beat it or you don't, no calculation required.
So I decided that I want a game that ends with a bang, not victory points. One upcoming game that does this that I've thought a lot about is Stationfall. This is a game by Matt Eklund that tells the story of the final 15 minutes of a falling space station. And I guess technically it DOES have victory points, but really the point of the game is that your character poisoned the whole space station, or strapped on a jetpack and jumped to freedom, or unleashed a technobacteria and killed your mortal enemy. That's just so much better than using a pad and pencil to see who won.
So, my victory conditions? Is a story for my next designer diary entry cause this one is too long.
