Game #48 Barbarian's Wrath by Trickydicky

Thanks for sharing your game with us! I’m working on a Civ building game myself, and it’s interesting to see someone else’s take on the genre.

First, I agree with Johan that the rulebook is not well organized. There’s far too much information about the special buildings too early in the book. First tell me how to play the game, then tell me about the exceptions to the rules (from buildings and such).

My overall impression is that this is a game without a very clear sense of what it’s trying to be. From the name of the game, and your intro, I really thought that this would be a game about staving off barbarian hordes, trying to withstand their devastating attacks, but it’s actually a fairly standard Civilization building game with one barbarian mechanic tacked on. And as a Civ game, it’s hard to say how it holds up, but my guess is that it’s long enough (my guess would be a minimum of 4-5 hours) that it could be hard to justify playing this as opposed to Civilization. (And I say this from experience, developing a Civ building game that had some similar concepts. My game lasted about 5 hours on average, and it was just too long.)

To me, a barbarian game should be about having to make tough choices how to handle the threat; do you try to build strong fortifications to withstand the threat until it passes? Do you improve your military might to try to fight back? Perhaps you try to band together with the other players to cooperatively resist your mutual foe. This kind of stuff may be in the game currently, but to me, it’s just buried beneath the “collect resources, build buildings”, and the extraneous stuff like “Wonders” that don’t appear to have anything whatsoever to do with barbarians.

So, my overall suggestion is to decide what kind of game you’re trying to create. If you want to make a Civ-building game with an occasional barbarian raid, great! You’re close to having this, although I still think you have far too much complexity. If you want a truly Barbarian themed game, I’m afraid that I think you have a lot of whittling to do. Here’s an example of the thought process I would use were I in your situation. “Currently, I have 3 types of terrain. Does this have any influence on the Barbarian aspect of the game? Nope? Out it goes! How about resources; do the 4 different resources contribute anything to the Barbarian aspect of the game? Nope? Out it goes!” And so on. Get rid of all the clutter, and make the Barbarian threat more real, more devastating; use it to force the players to cooperate, but also put them in competition with each other so that cooperating has its downside as well. In other words, increase the level of interesting decisions in the game, and let those decisions be based not on developing a culture, but on the kinds of things you’d have to do if you were worried about a barbarian invasion.

Good luck!

-Jeff

Some nice ideas, but I can't quite see what the victory path is, apart, presumably, from not getting wiped out by the invaders!

I'm not quite as bothered by the arrangement of the rules as others (although I would note that you have serious apostrophe issues!) but only because I didn't bother reading the Buildings/Wonder stuff until I'd finished the rest of it, because that's where I'd expect that sort of thing to be. But some parts of it are very confusing.

I like the separate development board idea but it doesn't really go anywhere interesting. Again, look at any trading game and see that one of the basic tricks is to ensure that no-one can produce everything themselves (at least not at the beginning.) Likewise, the barbarians just feel like an abstract threat when they should feel more like an extra player slotted into the turn sequence.

I would also observe that IMO the game resembles "Cities and Knights of Catan" more than Advanced Civ; and C&K is a game which, in my view, packs all the interesting one-hour gameplay of Settlers into a three-hour tedious drag. But YMMV (hey, a 3-hr drag is nothing compared to Advanced Civ after all :-)

In other words, I'm inclined to second Jeff and say that you need to make the Barbarians much more the focus of the game, and ditch some of the superfluous stuff. I, for one, would quite like to see a 2hr version of Republic of Rome - a game in which all the players had to fight the system as well as each other - rather than yet another attempt at a 2hr version of Advanced Civ, and this could be much more interesting if directed more towards the former than the latter.

Oh, there's much more I want to comment on.

I'm really not too hot on games where the players decide before the game how long it will take. I want the designer to say to me: "Here, this is how I think the game is best". If I want to tinker with the design, I can always do that anyway. So, I would prefer if you just state that the game lasts four scoring rounds and then you can describe in "variants", the last chapter of the rules of course, how one could make the game longer or shorter.

I don't like how you distribute the scoring cards. If I'm right they are just shuffled randomly through the barbarian deck. This could mean that there are a bunch of scoring cards at the top and that either the game is over really quick and/or that players who happen to have some good scores in the early round have a huge advantage. Of course, the scoring cards could be clustered at the bottom and then the reverse would be true. I would advise someway to "stack" the scoring cards in the deck so that they still come up somewhat unexpectedly, but at least a bit spread out.

Also, what's up with the "whoever draws a scoring card, scores points" rule? I presume this is for balance, because that player didn't draw a barabarian card to annoy other players with? Perhaps, it is really, really necessary, but it's clunky and I don't like it in principle. Why not have a scoring round and then let that player draw another barbarian card?

You have way too many components. If you intend to ever sell this game one way or the other, you need to find a way to trim down the amount of components. One way to do that would be to replace the wood, gold, stone and food units by tracks on the board with 4 different markers on them. Another way would be to reduce the number of players from 6 to 5, or even 4. I'm doubtful this game is really playable with 6 players anyway. Have you tried that already? And how does the game play with 2 players?

As I said in my previous post: limit the players in what they can do. They may only play 1 card during their turn: that is a good example of setting a limit on what the players can do. They have 3 cards, but may only play one. That forces them to make a choice. Same with the limit on different buildings and wonders. This creates tension and competition. Why not limit the gold/stone and wood a player may have as well? If they want a higher limit let them buy a special building.

If you don't go with the resource tracks on the board, you might want to consider to make the number of food/wood/gold and stone tokens a "hard" limit. If it is gone, its gone and you'll have to wait until another player spends it again. Perhaps you could introduce some barbarin cards that raid a player's supply of resources when it is over a certain amount? That would force players to spend their resources and not hoard it and it would be a nice source of tension.

Finally, you may want to divide a player's turn into seperate actions. Now each player has a "big" turn and then it's the next player's turn. Why not hack up this big turn into smaller, seperate actions? For example, the starting player chooses one action (say, build a building, or produce something), executes this action and then it's the next player's turn who also chooses an action. Play continues around the table until all players have executed all of the actions and then the last player draws the barbarian card. Of course, each player may only carry out each action once.

This adds a bit of a game-y mechanic to the game and could make for some nice dilemma's. For example, a player really wants to produce gold now so he can build building X during his next action, but he is afraid that by the time he gets to execute his next action that building might be gone, in which case another action might be more prudent. Perhaps you could make the mechanic so that an action executed by one player may not be executed by another player this turn. That would add a bit of player interaction as well.

OK, I think you have enough food for thought now! ;)

Again, good luck.

- René Wiersma

There's one clarification I'd like to provide on this issue. As you can see, many of us prize "originality" very highly. But even more important than originality is playability. If you have a good, playable game, it doesn't matter if you borrowed every system from somewhere else -- PR is a great example of this. It also matters what your aspirations are. If you just want a fun game to play with your friends, again, originality matters little. But if you hope to publish, it becomes more important to differentiate your game from others more dramatically. I can sympathize with you not having played a lot of games. But if you hope to publish, you must make friends with "The Geek" (www.boardgamegeek.com). You'll find rules and comments there for every game in existence, and you need to read up on the ones that are close to your own before trying to sell a game to publishers, who will know the games already on the market quite well.

But why not just let the players decide for themselves if they think that 4 score cards is "the game is best"? It wouldn't hurt my feelings if someone played the game and always decided on 4 score cards to play. But why take away the options from the players?

I'm totally with zaiga on this one -- I want the designer to test the game enough to tell me how to "best" play the game. That's not to say I can't customize if I want to -- indeed, that can be a good thing. But I don't want to have to "guess" how best to play right out of the box. It's too much of an investment of time to figure out which way works best (especially with a 2-3 hour game!), and I personally am not willing to make it for a game I haven't played; there are relatively few games I've played and loved that I'd want to customize.

The specific problem here is that with a system that permits games of various lengths, there are almost certainly problems that will emerge with the different lengths. I would say with some confidence that your game system almost certainly has flaws that games of the "wrong" length will expose, if it is played enough. This could allow "best" strategies to emerge when those lengths are being played. To balance the system against all those eventualities will be impossible. To have a game that is imbalanced because of failure on your part to test fully is game design suicide. So, you should really pick an "ideal" length and balance the game against that.
If you then want to think about how to make the game longer or shorter, you can, but if you start out with that goal in mind, your game will have flaws no matter how long or short you play it.

It sounds like you're a fan of Eagle games. The most common criticism of their games is that they aren't playtested enough. It seems possible to me that part of the problem is the presence of too many different rulesets. I suggest you pick one ruleset for your own game, play it to death, and balance it. A well balanced game is always better than a customizable, but broken, one.

-Jeff

I don't think it is necessarily a bad thing that some or even most of the mechanics are similar to those from other games. It can be a bit of a bummer when you discover that that cool mechanic you come up with isn't original after all, but that's something we designers have to live with. The first game I designed was a tile laying game and I thought that the free form way in which players could lay their tiles and form the board during the game was something completely unique... until I played Carcassonne. Nowadays, I'm much more familiar with existing board games and their mechanics, so I know beforehand that a mechanic is not truly unique and I don't worry about it.

Anyway, I wouldn't worry too much about originality at this stage. Most likely, you will encounter many problems when you are testing and developing this game further, and these problems will require new, creative solutions and it is quite likely that the end product will be a much more unique and original game than it is now.

Sometimes its good not be subtle. You say it never made a difference. What happens if you drastically reduce the number of resources in the game? Perhaps it ratches up the tension and increases the interaction between players. Perhaps it doesn't work at all. Most likely it will raise new problems. Perhaps those new problems can be solved in some creative way and you have added a nice new layer of strategy to the game.

I actually only meant the trading between the players. I can see why you want to keep trading with the storehouse. Trading between players has already been done to death in other games and it just doesn't seem very appropriate for this game. Of course, you can keep that aspect if you really like it, but I think you have to wonder if it really adds anything substantial to the game.

... But why take away the options from the players?

Because I think it is our job, as designers, to figure out the preferred way of playing the game.

Really, this game will be a bitch (pardon my English) to playtest. You already have so many variables: a variable number of players, a random scoring deck, different buildings with different abilities, special cards. Making sure that the game works and is still balanced and fun for every different permutation of those variables is almost impossible. If you make game length another variable I almost certain you cannot make it work properly in all cases, since game length is such a substantial factor in how people perceive a game and how tension is build up and released. A game that goes on too long will become boring and repetitive. A game that is too short might leave the players with an unsatisfied feeling. This is something that you want to prevent and therefore game length is so important.

In your game, what is there really left to do once you build a wonder? You note in the rules that after a certain time a civilization can simply not grow anymore, because there will not be enough food anyway. I think building a wonder should be the climax of your game. You might want to tweak the game in such a way that it will be a race to try and build a wonder in time. Of course, you have to make sure that there is another way of winning as well, so that it is possible to win without a wonder. It is very hard to tweak the game in such a way that it ends with a climax if you let the players themselves decide when the game is over.

You could simply note on the track on the board what the maximum is for each resource. Granaries and such could extend this limit.

OK, so it works for 3-6 players. That's fine, there aren't that many games that work well with 6. Was downtime ever a problem with 6? It seems that you could easily go out for a walk whenever it is not your turn, because you have "big" turns and there is no interaction between players... I'm I right?

Try it. I think you'll be amazed.

I don't think the game is too complicated. The kernel, the base mechanics are pretty simple. What makes this game complicated are the special cards and special buildings and the different costs for everything. Printing visual hints on the components and using player aids could be of great help here.

I also advise you to try and develop the game without the special cards first. I think they add a layer of complexity that you can do without, at least for now. If you are satisfied with how the base mechanics of the game work in a later stage of the development, you can add them in again, but for now you want to know if the kernel of the game is interesting by itself and that is much easier to determine if you don't have special cards murking the waters. Otherwise you never know whether the game was not fun because a certain special card ruined the balance, or because the base mechanics aren't properly balanced. The reverse can also be true, sometimes the special cards help disguise the fact that your base mechanics don't really work and you were just lucky that the cards came out in the right order.

I would advise the same things for the special buildings, but there aren't too many different buildings anyway and I think you need them to make the game interesting. So keep them in.

I just read through the rules again and I just couldn't figure out how the barbarian mechanic works exactly. I read it over a few times, but it just doesn't click with me. Could you explain this better?

Some more ideas. Are players limited in how much buildings they may build? If not, I think that would be a good idea. Perhaps, once a player has filled his building spaces he may only build "upgrades" for a building. For example, a player may replace his "market place" with a "trading hall" which of course costs a bit more, but has a better ability.

I also think it would be a good idea to limit the players in how many they may build of each type of building. Perhaps you want to set the limit at one per building type or maybe you want to penalize players for building the same buildings. For example, if I build a second marketplace it costs 2 gold more, a third marketplace costs 4 gold more, etc.

You have 2 of each building type per player. Why not simply have 1 or 2 buildings of each type, period? This would mean different players have to build different buildings and this forces them to follow different strategies.

Would it be a good idea if people working on a field or in a building require more food than unemployed people? As a balancing mechanic you might want to add a mechanic where you could get a revolt if you have a lot of unemployed people. Perhaps you could change the barbarian deck to an "event" deck and different things might happen based on the event drawn. An event might be a revolt if you have too many unemployed people (for example, if you have more unemployed than employed people) or a barbarian raid (players suffer the consequence if they do not have enough defense) or maybe famine (if you do not have enough food in store), etc.

There are many ways to go with a civ game. I think you need to make up your mind as to which way you want to go with this game and than try and reduce the game to its most basic form that still works the way you have in mind. Then you can spice up the game by adding special cards and more complex rules.

Good luck!

- René Wiersma

Ok, it's kinda late in the week and discussion alreay are streaming. I took the time the look at the rules, but not read all the comments.

Here's my observations.

You have a lot of material. I was amazed by the list. I think you have too much to be a sellable game as it is. I would go back and ask myself what do I need to make my game work. Do you need 4 resources types, do you need that many buildings?

When reading the rules, I was felling kinda robbed. I was under the impression of buying a Defensive game, but end up with a Civilization type game. Trading, wonders, resources, population you have a derived Civilization there with some setback not from player but from the game itself.

The trading between players can greatly slow the game. I don't think the interaction is enough to keep the game.

I don't know if you shoot for a family game or hardcore. Too me this look hardcore. In that case, I guess this could work correctly.

I can suggestion you some changes that will put it in the familiy aspect of it. Only take population, gold, walls. Drop the building and wonders. Maybe keep the terrain. Have the players cooperate to have the barbarians defeated, not just the first player in order. Have them put population to defend in a secret bid by example.

If you would like to simplify the game I'll be happy to help you more. If you stay on the gamer hardcore line. I think you have something, but I might not be able to help you much.

Hope you don't take it too harsh. I'm sure you'll come up with a better game.

Good luck, take care.

I've been trying to think through more why it is that I said the game was too complex in a way that I can articulate simply. Here's one thing that comes to mind: the different resources aren't that well differentiated. For the most part, each building requires a combination of the four resources, but other than that, the only differentiation is that gold comes from population rather than developed lands, and food has one additional use. Stone and wood in particular appear to be functionally identical.

To me, this is a prime candidate for simplification, OR additional complexity. As zaiga pointed out, some scarcity could really help out. Settlers works so well because you need all the resources AND you can't be producing all of them yourself. In this game, you have access to as much as you need, therefore no need to trade for what you need. Reworking this aspect could be a good way to motivate trade. Or perhaps some other functionality could be added that makes stone and wood meaningful in different ways other than just "you need both to make this". For example, maybe stone is primarily for defensive buildings whereas wood is primarily for production buildings, or whatever.

In short, having a long game with lots of rules or lots of complexity is perfectly fine, but the complexity needs to be justified. I'm not saying you're game is super-complex; it's not really that bad. But I think there are avenues by which it could be more integrated, where one system hangs on the other systems. Tightening up the resource system is one area where you could do that.

-Jeff

Richy,

Here are some more ideas...

I think Jeff's remark about differentiating the resources a bit more is a very good one. I like the idea of certain types of buildings requiring a certain type of resource. For example, defense buildings such as walls and watch towers require stone, while other type of buildings, such as the granary or hospital, require wood. This could also highlight certain strategies more. For example, one player could decide to pursue the "stone" strategy, building an impressive defense so that he doesn't have to worry about barbarian attacks much. Another player might decide to try the "wood" strategy, using those buildings to create a very efficient civilization with a large population, and accepting the occasional loss to a barbarian attack. Of course, you should make sure that the "do a little bit of everything" strategy is not always the best strategy and that it has its drawbacks as well.

I also noted that buildings can cost anything from 2 up to 20 resources. Would it be possible to reduce the average cost of a building? Perhaps you could simply halve all the prices. Reasons why you might want to do this:
- It speeds up the game. There's more action, because you don't have to wait many turns to be able to buy something.
- It makes it much easier to "see" how much something costs. For example, it is much more intuitive and easy to understand if a building costs 1 gold and 3 wood, than a building that costs 2 gold, 5 wood, 1 food and 2 stone.
- A single resource actually means something in the game this way. This is very important. It doesn't truly matter a lot if a building costs 19 or 20 resources, that's only a difference of 5%. However a building that costs 5 or 6, that's a difference of 20%. The decision to buy something for 5 or something else for 6 is much more relevant than the decision to buy something for 19 or something for 20.
- You can reduce the number of total components needed for the game.

On a related note, besides splitting up a turn into different actions, you might also want to think about limiting the total number of actions a player may do during a turn. This makes an action a very valuable resource, which I think could introduce more tension into the game.

Why is this related to lowering the costs of buildings? Because building something gets an additional cost of one precious action. So, instead of limiting the player in what he can do by giving those things a very high price tag, you can simply give them an additional cost of one action and thereby lowering the price tag (in resources) needed for that thing.

I also thought a bit about the barbarian mechanic. I think there are many things you can do with it. I think the "reveal a card, then beat them up in turn order" is a workable idea, but there are also other ways you can go.

First of all, I think you can do away with the dice. The way I envision the mechanic is this: the first player of the turn reveals a barbarian card. This card has a number on it, which signifies the strength of the barbarian attack. This number is random already, so I don't think there's need for an additional randomizer. The player to the left checks his defense against the attack number. If his defense is better than the barbarian attack, the barbarians are defeated and the attack ends. If not, Something Bad [TM] happens to that player and the defense of that player is subtracted from the attack number of the barbarians. The remaining number is the attack number of the barbarians which the next player has to deal with, etc, until the barbarians are defeated, or until the attack has gone once around the table.

There are a few creative things you can do with this concept. I think it would be nice if most barbarian attacks are within a certain range, say 5-8. A few barbarian attacks could have a higher attack number, say 8-11. A handful of barbarian cards could have a very high number, 12-15 for example. This creates controlled uncertainty and adds to the tension and variety to the game.

Another thing you could do is increase the strength of the barbarian attack depending on the round. For example, a barbarian card could look like this:
Round I: attack strength 2
Round II: attack strength 4
Round III: attack strength 7
Round IV: attack strength 10

This would mean that players have to keep working on their defenses as the game progresses and it would help lessen the effect of early attack, or at least it becomes easier to defend against them.

Finally, there are many things you could do with Something Bad [TM]. I think it would be nice if Something Bad depends on the difference between strength and defense. For example, if the difference between attack number and strength is:
1 or 2, the player loses that many victory points
3 to 5, the player loses two population
6 to 9, the player loses a building of his choice

Etc, I'm sure you can come up with something better, but you get the idea.

Anyway, good luck with the game and keep us informed!

- René Wiersma