Critique the August 2005 GDS Challenge Entries

That's actually because it's NOT a food fight... I knew doing the pudding business was a mistake, but I was just rushing along (it actually sort of fell into being pudding, I didn't really think about following through on my yogurt-related threat). It goes like this: somebody threw a pudding, this got them all mad (as it says in there, they're all very on edge), and they proceeded to slaughter each other with their magical attacks, no food involved beyond the initial throw which caused it. The players are divvying up the 'school' into two 'cliques' and you see which clique survives the ensuing brawl.

I picture that most of the time, you'll lose 1 of your 3 fighters (which is why you draw 1 card per turn). If it's not clear from the rules, the idea is that every round you lose more than 1 guy, you're inching closer to defeat. Every round you don't lose a guy, you're recovering and becoming less vulnerable (your hand gets bigger). You don't lose by being wiped out (though unless you've gained cards earlier, that would leave you one card from death), you lose by being gradually depleted over a series of battles.

So since you typically only lose one guy, and occasionally two, and never draw more than one, your opponent will gradually come to know what you've got in your hand to an extent, and he will try to counter based on that. Further, you both know almost the entire contents of each others' decks, due to the drafting phase. Now, I wouldn't expect players to memorize that, but you know, if he managed to outbid you for That One Guy, you're going to remember he's got him, because That One Guy is very useful! You also would know the general makeup of their deck - did they go heavily on Fire, or was Water their thing? So you would counter based on that as well. That presumes that they applied some strategy during the drafting phase. If they didn't, well, then maybe you'll win due to their bad picks!

I do see it being pretty random, but with the deck building built into the game itself, there's enough strategy there for a good competition, I think. I think the drafting is a good part of the game, since it's actually possible at the end of it for one player to have a significantly better deck than the other, because they handled it wisely.

I know in the end it's a pretty generic game (VERY generic theme), but I think the drafting is something new, and it just plain sounds fun to me overall. I feel like I really failed on theme, and on rules (and on "know your audience", but I *did* know the audience when I was writing it, I just didn't care!), but I think the actual game would be a fun one if completed.

It's probably more of a kid's game really, where they can get excited over the different abilities and argue over how badly they're misinterpreting the rules (and their moms can breathe a sigh of relief that there's only one box to buy!). I knew it wouldn't do well in the contest, but well, it's what came to mind! Of all my entries in the GDS, this actually may be the one I'm most interested in pursuing a little bit. I'd like to come up with something more original next time though!

...

It's probably more of a kid's game really, where they can get excited over the different abilities and argue over how badly they're misinterpreting the rules (and their moms can breathe a sigh of relief that there's only one box to buy!). I knew it wouldn't do well in the contest, but well, it's what came to mind! Of all my entries in the GDS, this actually may be the one I'm most interested in pursuing a little bit. I'd like to come up with something more original next time though!

First off, we posted at nearly the same time, so I missed the bit about Yogurt. Sorry to have misinterpreted that.

Second, the game is much deeper than I realized, which is usually the case (I did the same thing to you with "Little People"). I should've known, most designs are. I should bump "Pudding" up to the top half of my list...

K.

Okay, going over my notes:
#1 Posit: A nice simple game that can be easily played by amost any ages, with a deck of cards, in the back of car while moving. Even though there might have been games with a little interesting theme, or depth, or play mechanics, something about the simplicity here captured my attention. And, conceptually, it's a game that clearly works.

#2 Bitter Creek: relatively simple, nicely themed, and doesn't seem to take up too much room on an airplane tray. (Maybe gotta get rid of the dice rolling and put a random number on the corner of each card or something to concerve space).

After these two, I had a hard time finding a third favorite that met my criteria. I finally decided on:

#3 Haul Assets: Primarily because it was fairly straightforward, even though it's sort of familiar (Mille Bornes). And, for some reason, the theme didn't really appeal to me this much (but it didn't scare me away either).

The runner ups:

Belemmer: Pretty much was disqualified from my voting based on the amount of table space required.

Four Cards: I felt that there were no intersting decisions to be made. However, it's probably a good kids game.

In The Time of Art: This falls into my category of "overly complex," even though the actual rules are simpler than my first reading of them. Probably a graphic example of the caards would've helped, especially the project cards. in addition, the table size requirement scared me away.
American Revolution: I was bouncing back and forth betwen this and Haul Assets for my third choice. I decided on Haul Assets instead because of the CCG-like elemets this game had (each leader and location card having it's own ruleset), dice rolling, and numerous card stacks started to seem to make this game un-wieldly for travel play.

Arcadia: I found my self not being able to vote for this game because the main gimmick of the game is borrowed too heavily from Gloom, but also a few other things bothered now now that I looked over my notes. The scoring system seems overly complicated and would require a notepad. Also, upon reading the original concept, I envisioned a more strealined ruleset (which I'll have to post in another thread). AND the additional CCG Wanderer guys bugged me, just to complicate things more.

Travelin Light: I couldn't wwrap my head around the rules to this the way they were decribed.

Pudding Indicent: (as you can see from my lists above) If the CCG elements of some of the above games bothered me, you can imagine what this game does.

(more to follow eventually)

(and now, continuing)

Nippon: A fairly extravagant attempt, I must admit. Given that the game fits everything in a little box, is impressive. Somehow, the sophistication of the game leads me to believe that either this game was somehow fleshed out prior to the contest and squiched into a little box, or the designer is quite mad in attempting to do something like this given the constraints of the contest. But again, the CCG and lotza lil tokens, and general fiddlely-ness of the game removed it from my list of being playable on a bouncy car ride.

Are We There Yet?:This would be a fun multi-player game game around the table, I imagine. But, I'm guessing, not a good two-player game, which was sort of the target goal. Sort of reminds of something that Cheapass Games would put out. Also, having to leave each player's stacks of cards out with the addition of dice rolling probably makes the playing area to un-wieldly.

Several people have called out Arcadia as being a rip off of Gloom (not that harsh really, but "too similar"). Now, I know Gloom uses transparent cards and all. But when I first saw Gloom, I thought that concept was so cool and I immediately started thinking of what else could be done with it. Are we really supposed to throw out the idea of transparent cards because one game has already used them? Should we disallow dice in games since Yahtzee already uses them?

Or am I misunderstanding (not having seen anything of Gloom beyond a listing on a game site), and Arcadia actually PLAYS similarly to Gloom?

I think there are many miles of game design territory to be covered with transparent cards before they're used up. I would love to see them as a GDS rule one of these months!

As far as judging goes, I feel like you fill in the blanks yourself. You're really judging the basic idea of the game, not the details of implementation (as many people keep trying in vain to tell us all, you're really only supposed to submit a rough idea in the first place!).

It's interesting how people come at the games from different directions and come up with different issues! You make an excellent point that could end up a balance problem. I actually did think about what would happen if you got down to having two teams that couldn't hurt each other and had no more cards in their deck to draw (best answer I had was that you continuously battle at that point - they both attack, they both attack again, and keep going until SOMEBODY drops dead).

The flipside is that, in theory, most Fire cards should be able to defeat most Earth cards. So you may want to hold on to a mighty Fire card to use to cut through a 'turtling' opponent. And the nice thing is, even if your Fire guy isn't strong enough to do the job, being so weak on defense, he's fairly sure to die in his attempt. That means that your second string will also get to attack, so the addition of even a weak second attack makes his leader almost sure to die. In fact, that might be the answer when your opponents' team is just so high on defense that you can't seem to do anything - move a guy with low defense into your front row to sacrifice him so that you get two attacks.

The other saving grace in that issue is that whoever you are using as a cheerleader is almost guaranteed to survive, so I think you'd find a variety of cards always surviving, not just Earth cards.

It's all theoretical of course, I've only even come up with the contents about 4 cards.

"Are We There Yet?" was my entry, and the first time I've ever designed a card game myself all the way to prototype :) Thanks to everyone that gave me a vote, I thought all of the other entries were great and it was hard for me to narrow it down to three. I'm definitely the neophyte here!

I really want to thank those of you that took the time to comment on the game. I am pretty good at coming up with theme's and adding flavor to games, but I'm just starting on the actual mechanic design. In fact, I know next to nothing about that right now. I plan on diving down into every one else's entry and looking at their mechanics in more detail to try to learn. The resources on this site have been great, but I'm still plodding through them all. Anyway, if you have feedback you didn't want to share in the forum, please PM me with it even if it is negative -- it's all a learning experience for me.

Anyway, AWTY? was my attempt to come up with rules after coming up with half the cards. It turned out to be more of a kids' game than anything else, but I have to say that it is very playable and I didn't run into any real problems in the half dozen games I played with my wife and a friend. My friend is much more knowledgeable than I in the gaming world, and he really didn't find any mechanical problems with it... except the fact it is a bit boring :)

I also was one of the ones that concentrated on needing a small area (we easily played on a small TV tray) rather than in a car.

Some comments to comments:

I wish I could do a good critique on the other games since there were many that I thought were great. But I need to learn a bit more before I can start disecting other peoples games in public (ooh, that sounds dirty).

Anyway, sorry to ramble on. I really want to thank the people who gave detailed feedback again. And thanks to the Admin for running the contest. Hopefully you'll see me enter more of these, and I'll get better as time goes on.

The more showdowns to which I submit, the more I agree with you on this. The only problem is that, for me at least, it's much easier to describe the game I'd like to make than to put together mechanics that actually produce that feel. A lot of people have great high concepts for games, but can't work out the details at the end.

Your suggestion of submitting entries that are more like design notes would allow for a gradation between mechanics descriptions and explanation of intent. I like this a lot, but I fear that most of us (including me) tend to zero in on mechanics during judging. Look at what happened to Jeff's American Revolution. That was a great game, but a lot of us docked it because he left some rules unexplained.

K.