I love it when...

The exact thing happened to me last weekend. I was play testing with a couple friends and one of them suggested a way to ratchet up the tension/suspense. It made the game much more interesting. All of a sudden, we then realized that this new element also simplified the previously awkward play order. It was boggling. We ADDED something new and it made the game both more fun and less complicated. It was fantastically elegant.

I'm improving an adventure game for kids that I'm going to be pitching pretty hard at GTS 2009. The game has a problem that many of my games have: The cards are very wordy. I've been working on it with my wife, and we simultaneously came to the conclusion to condense oft-repeated phrases into icons. I was very worried that this would increase the complexity of the game (by obscuring the messages) instead of reducing it, and it did – when I iconified the cards my way. When I iconified the cards Sharon's way, it was great!

Y'see, I was condensing entire concepts like, "Roll a die and compare it to your health. If the result is less than your health, discard a card," into one icon. Sharon wanted to condense just nouns or verbs to transform the lengthy instructions into rebus-like phrases: "[picture of die rolling] < [picture of health heart] (new line) [picture of card being discarded]." That worked a lot better.

The end result is cards that are just as mechanically rich, but a lot less intimidating. Not exactly the same as a mechanical revision leading to game improvement, but similar.

Yeah, I do love it when that happens. It doesn't happen nearly enough to me. Of course, I'm one of those odd gamers that pretty much worships complexity (a bad thing if you aren't targeting other people like you, but whatever,) so simplifying the game isn't a priority. However, I do love it when I change one thing and it fixes a bunch of problems.

I got this piece of advice once on complexity, that I always try to follow:

-Keep your game as simple as possible (or as reasonably possible, the wargame I’m working on right now is 60+ pages, though that seems somewhat appropriate for the genre, and only about 10 or so are the core rules). Each time you add a new rule (and thus add to the work required to learn a game, and the chance that someone will misunderstand or forget it), it needs to be worth it.
-When a problem arises during playtesting, do not add a new rule. See if you can tweak your current rules so that it becomes less of a problem. If that doesn’t work, do not add a new rule. Often, it is a result of a combination of other rules, and can be fixed by removing other parts of the rules. If that doesn’t work, then maybe, maybe it’s time to consider adding a new rule.
-Occasionally you will want to add some kind of flavor rule, something which doesn’t do a whole lot to affect gameplay, but adds an interesting twist. Try not to add more than one of these. And, when possible, try to avoid this all together by making the flavor come out of your other rules (his example: lets say you have a combat game, and you want to add a “Bleeding” rule; it is often better to alter your other rules in a way that it is obvious that bleeding is occurring, rather than clip and extra rule on the side).

That said, depending on the scope of the game, sometimes I try to build up. For example, in my current wargame, my original playtest did not have magic, summoned creatures, animated creatures, or most special abilities. I only wanted to test the core game idea. When I saw that this worked, I really tried to get the melee combat system down. Once I had a functioning and roughly balanced melee system, I added in summoned creatures. Once I could see that they were at least roughly balanced, I added in magic, and so on. This is similar to how I was taught to write computer code, make sure the first part works before adding the second part, and so on.

However, as stated before, this is a rather complicated game, and I wanted to have a game that could work, even if someone decided not to have a wizard, or a summoner. Some games simply would not work without all of their elements present, in which case you couldn't do this.

Also, on advice from my roommate, whenever possible I look for places where I can get 80% of the gameplay for 20% of the rules.

Simon

However, sometimes after you exhaust all tweaking and still find that it doesn't solve the problem, adding a rule is sometimes the best option. When you do need to tack on that rule try to make it flow well with the rest of the game, cause interesting interactions, and above all be simple. It should look like its been there from the beginning.

And sometimes the players say 'Let's play again, please!'. And you say 'Ok, but we can change this a little bit...'. And they say 'DON'T CHANGE ANYTHING! Can we play again this afternoon, too?'

...and then you feel you're the next Knizia for a few minutes. ;-)

It is not the first time this happens to me. Removing money from the game actually improves it and solves a lot of problems.

Money causing problems? Sounds familiar? ;-)