Wrenna Dev Journal #3: Starting Small

To get things started quickly I decided to make a quick Minimal Viable Product. Version 1.0 looked something like this:

• 2 players
• A central 5x5 grid as a playing board
• 6 pieces per player, called birds
  • 2 larger Rooks (as in the bird, not the chess piece)
  • 4 smaller Sparrows
  • Players are separated into two colours — 1 set of Rooks and Sparrows are blue, the other red. (These colours are what I had in my stash, but will probably change)
  • For the prototype I'm using large discs for Rooks and small discs for Sparrows, but might change eventually
• A player may have 4 of their birds on the board at any time.
• 4 entrance and exit cells to sub pieces in and out.
  • I call these gates
• Score 10 points for win
• Certain arrangements of a player's own pieces score certain points
  • I call these Plays. There are 9 Plays to choose from
  • These are listed on a playsheet for reference. Both players have a copy of this.

For Plays, I made up a few (mostly) symmetrical arrangements based on a loose avian theme of Sparrows and Rooks sharing a garden.

The first 9 plays, scribbled in a hasty brainstorm.

I figured most of the above list items would change after playing it a few times. But the system has mostly held up, so far, over quite a few games.

Gameplay

The For this version, the gameplay proceeds thus:

The game is played in 2 phases: Flock and Hop.

Flock (Phase 1)

Players take turns to place one bird on the board each turn. This may be any combination of Ravens and Wrens. Flock ends when both players each have 4 birds on the board.

Hop (Phase 2)

Players take turns to move 1 of their birds exactly 1 square (both orthogonal and diagonal are permitted). Players must make a move on their turn. There may only be 1 bird in each square, however there are no other limits to which square a bird may move.

Players may also move birds off or onto the board (see flying below).

Flying
Players each have 6 birds, but are only permitted a maximum of 4 each on the board at any one time. It is possible to move birds on and off the board by flying them.

A bird may only be moved off or onto the board through a gate.

To Fly Birds

1. Move bird onto any Gate (1 turn)
2. Move bird off board (1 turn)
3. (Optional) Move new bird onto any available Gate (1 turn)

Points

Points are scored by arranging one's own birds into pre-defined arrangements — or plays — found on the playsheet. Once a player's own birds on the board match a play on the playsheet, they announce which one they have formed and record the associated points. A player cannot form the same play twice in a row.

When a player has scored at least 10 points they are declared the winner and the game ends.

Example Play Sheet (prototype)

A cleaner image of the playsheet notating all possible plays. The gates are the hashed squares. Special rules you might not make out are:
Lone Rook: must be the player's only piece on the board;
Thief: Player only needs 3 Sparrows on the board, but they may be in any of those positions.

First Results

Gameplay is fairly quick (10–15 mins), and there is a tension between whether to score points or block the opponent from scoring. I was satisfied at this point with the number of pieces. The close quarters meant no move felt insignificant as a bird made it's way to form a new play.

The game may be a no-brainer for a seasoned chess player — but the target audience is probably a light–mid weight player. My biggest concern remains that the game is easily solvable, and will be reduced to a pre-set sequence of plays too easily. Though I definitely need to expand the play-test circles to see if that concern is realistic.

Becoming Version 1.1

My first real change was the position of the gates from centred to asymmetrical.

Changing the position of gates has two advantages: it's harder for pieces to reach certain cells from the gates, and some Plays I really like thematically aren't blocking the gates. And the board still looks the same from both sides of the table.
Note: This happened before the first play tests. But writing it down here is unobtrusive to the flow of this write-up.

My first actual change was to adjust the theme slightly from Sparrows and Rooks to Wrens (because my wife loves Australian Fairy Wrens) and Ravens (also because Australian Birds, and to differentiate between birds and castles).

After a couple of games against my wife it became clear that I needed to restrict where Ravens are placed during Flock. I was able to score easy points by placing a Raven into the middle of the board (especially during these earlier sessions where the Thief scored 4 points and Hræfn commanded 8!).

I'll be writing more on the next iteration in the next journal entry…

*EDIT: Clarified some images, added a better explanation of rules and gameplay thanks to questccg's suggestions :)