Critique the November 2005 GDS Challenge Entries

You sure everyone only had a week? Or did I miss a
pre announcement a month ago? :)

Very impressive just from a quick scan, too tired
to start digging in to the rules.
I'm proud of what I came up with but even with a cursory
look it's painfully obvious I won't be in the running this month either.
But what a great mental challenge/exercise!

Looking forward to hearing other comments.

DN

This is probably not the forum to place this. But it is not discussing any
games in particular.

Would any of you now incorporate(sp?) double dice into any future
game designs of yours?

Most of these games (mine included) seemed to be not significantly better
by the inclusion of double dice. Most seemed pure luck drive.

Any non entry specific related comments on this?

DN

ps I originally forgot the not.

DN

Oops that should be NOT significantly better..

That sounded pompous on my part. :)

Some of the mini-game entries I've read aren't really "games" in that they can't be played -- they're just actions that happen to the players.

K.

That seems a bit much for juddging the mini games. According to Brykovian, I thought that the mini-game was just a confrontation among players with some action to determine a winner and loser:

Think of changing Shadows Over Camelot so that when a knight gets to a challenge -- say fighting the Picts -- there is a quick series of dicerolls or card-play to determine whether that challenge has been won/lost before the game continues. In this example, the dicerolls/card-play would be the mini-game.

Of course, I may just be saying this because my mini game falls into this short and simple style (or maybe it doesn't :) ).

Nope, not me. There's one entry I've read (I'm up to #12) where the double dice really meant something in an interesting and unique way. Every single other entry would be just as well off (better in my mind, just because I can't picture it being easy to read an outside number and an inside number) with multiple dice.

The double dice don't float my boat any better than they float themselves (despite Bryk's engineering team's efforts!).

There's always a bit of a judging dilemma for me. I like to give points to games that do a better job of meeting the specific constraints of the contest (mini-games, Double-Dice, etc.). If we all ignore those constraints, there's no point to the contest. But of course the ultimate goal is to produce a good game rather than just to stitch together a dictated set of mechanics, so that must be considered also.

So I look for games that accomplish both goals: they meet the contest parameters in non-trivial and clever ways, AND they are games that seem attractive and playable regardless of the contest parameters. Usually there are at least a few stand-out submissions that manage this, and that fact saves me (somewhat) from making difficult choices.

This time around I gave games positive points for particularly interesting minigames and creative use of Double-Dice; negative points for omitting any contest criteria; and "zero points" for falling in between: meeting the criteria in uninteresting ways. Then I went back over the entries and assigned more points to the games I thought would be most fun to play overall.

That's left me with a smallish number of finalists, and now I'm in the tough part: choosing favorites.

Oh, I just realized that we are also voting for best mini game. :) In that case, I agree with you that the mini game must have something special to it to get my vote.

I was just concerned that it was getting too much emphasis in terms of judging the entire game as a whole. I view a mini game as a very modular piece in a game. If it is flawed , it can most likely be swapped out for another mechanic later in development without having a huge impact on the rest of the design.

In addition to this good point, has anyone else noted that some of the entries don't seem to capture the concept of a "Scavenger Hunt"? Not to say that mine is a perfect example, but it seems that some of the games are just moving around collecting items, not really having a pre-determined "group of things" that you have to collect. Maybe I'm just tightfisted, but I was considering for subtracting big points for games that don't set out a specific collection of items to be retreived that, as bryk brought out originally, would be different every game, yet have a chance of overlap. Two games I reviewed either had no list-type setup, or didn't make gathering the items the PRIMARY aspect of the game. Any thoughts on this, agree or disagree?

I also agree, though I fear my entry is a prime offender of the "wasn't really a scavenger hunt" problem. I believe that 1 small rule tweak would fix this problem, but I liked it as written, so I let it stand.

K.

OK, I posted my scores and comments for this month's entries here.

SPOILER -- I didn't evaluate my own, so you can figure out who I am by visiting this page.

DISCLAIMER -- I judged the first 3 entries while I had a cold, which usually makes me pretty harsh. I finished the rest a couple days later when I felt better. The first three entrants should probably spot themselves 3-5 points.

ALSO -- to compute the final scores, take the "total" value and subtract any penalties listed in the description section.

Overall, I thought everyone did a pretty good job juggling some hard limitations. However, I was a bit disappointed in the number of "pick a list and place 'n' tokens face down on the islands" variations. Usually, we do a better job of coming up with interesting variations on the genre. I chalk it up to the amount of effort put into making a cohesive game out of so many disparate requirements.

Well done, everyone!

K.

Doh! You're right! I forgot about #15! I'll do that right away.
The other one I didn't do was my own entry.

Oh...and to clarify...each rating is out of 5 with 5 being highest.

Thanks for correcting me!

K.

Thanks for the tip, Mike. It works fine as long as you use only Microsoft products (so much for compatibility, but then, Mr. Gates has never really worried about that...).

I updated the reviews to contain all 15 entries, so now you can't tell which was mine (hopefully).

Also, this is the first time I used a point system. Normally, I use a system like yours, Mike, but this time I found myself coming back to several rating categories so I tried an explicit system.

K.

For the record, I don't use a nifty point system either.

First, I go through the list and remove the entries that I don't feel meet the requirements, don't interest me, and/or aren't a unique/creative solve of the design limitations (of course, these three aspects crossover quite a bit). Typically, this removes over half of the possible entries.

Then I can start to focus in on the remaining ones. Where i start to look for things that jump out at me as being really interesting or different. This is a bit tougher this month since the main constraint of the theme also suggests a specific game mechanic, so all the games have a quite similar main motive/action to them.

Usually, I wind up giving my top two votes to what I feel are the best games that I would want to play, while my third place vote goes to the game that, while might not be as strong or as interesting, but has a really unique take on the problem (such as the "pushing the carts around the map" game from last month).

Yeah, what I mean is... here are 2 games:

1 - There are 20 different kinds of items. Each player is given a list of 5 of the items. Whoever finds their list wins.
2 - There are 20 different kinds of items. Once someone has collected 10 items, the game is over and you tally points. Each item type is worth a different number of points.

Game #1 follows the rules (according to me), #2 doesn't. Because in #2, you're not given a specific list to find, it's just "find anything, and plenty of it!"

The contest rules state that players are given a list to find, and that their lists should be unknown or random, and that they should be likely to overlap somewhat. If every item in the game is "on your list", then there's no list (and if you want to call it a list, it's definitely a known list)!

Bryk could have said the theme was "Collection", which we've done before I seem to recall. But he didn't, he said "Scavenger Hunt" and then detailed specifically what that meant, with remarkable exactitude.

I think there's a grey area and case to be made for Mors Atlantis and Evolution, both of which give you lots of mini-lists that change over the course of the game, but other games like Antiquarium completely violate the rule (sorry to single that one out, it's not the only one). Great game (and best use of double-dice in the contest), but it has no list at all, you just get points for any items you collect.

That's just my judging criteria, yours may be quite different, and that's the beauty of multiple judges.

In defense of my game (I guess I've outed myself), I do have lists in my game, but I guess it is more subtle than an actual card with a list on it. The "lore" chips in the game were meant to be so plentiful that you would find a lot of them. When you went looking for "artifact" chips, you would then be seeking out those that matched your "lore". Of course my implementation of that idea isn't very well developed: I should have a lot more lore chips in the deck, and have them worth more points when they are matched up with the artifacts. This is more noticeable when you play the game and not that clear when you read the rules.