Category Archives: Game Design

I played some games on my days off!

Fenland Gamers, Game day, Game Design, Sunday Afternoon Gaming

Last Friday was the start of three days off work after a nine day tour of duty.

Which just so happened to time nicely with the fortnightly Fenland Gamers club night.

So Friday was one of my now rare appearances at a club night.

I was on a table with Colin, Charlene, and Annabelle.

We started off playing Scooby Doo the board game from CMoN. Which Annabelle loved the Scooby and Scrappy minis.

It’s a co-op game Pandemic like where you are trying to stop the monster.

The game has great table top presence. Lovely painted minis.

It’s fun, and despite us only lasting three or four rounds before losing to the zombie.

We followed our defeat at Scooby Doo with a game of Splendor. I did crap at this. Scoring a single point! It’s a good job I enjoy the game.

After being totally humiliated at Splendor it was time to redeem myself with a glorious victory playing Spots. I don’t think it will be too long before I add this to my over crowded collection.

Next I introduced Colin to what is fastly becoming a filler game of choice Ship, Captain, Crew.

My final game of the evening was a new game I got LCR. Which is a nice quick filler too. Which also doesn’t have player elimination. Even when you run out of chips you are still in the game because you might gain some on a subsequent round.

I had a great evening game. It’s been a while since I’ve had a chance to game with Colin. So that must be the highlight of the evening for me.

Sunday saw Charlene and Annabelle join me in a pre-arranged game of Tapestry.

Sunday Afternoons Game of Tapestry

This was an all in game using all the expansions and the new balanced civilisations. So no need to take into account any adjustments.

We dealt each player three civs to choose from. There are so many when using the expansions. Just wanted to give everyone a greater chance of seeing something they liked.

This is how our starting civs, cities, and blueprints went.

  • Aliens/Forest blueprint- Windmill – me
  • Renegades/Tropical blueprint-Birdwatching Perch – Annabelle
  • Urban Planners/Mesa blueprint- Villa/Urban Farm – Charlene

Also when we had to draw a Tapestry card we drew two, chose one discarded the other.

Somehow in this game it ended up being my most aggressive game ever. Previously I’ve rarely gone conquering but this time I got to the middle first and conquered two territories to get that bonus also. Plus I got to the end of the military track to get the second place bonus for reaching the end of a track. So that was also a first for me getting all three bonuses.

I did take an early lead on the score and kept it all game. Although during the end scoring Charlene came from behind to give me a big scare that she might snatch victory. However my lead was big enough to absorb that late surge and hang in there for the win.

It was great to get Tapestry to the table again. And a great way to end the three days off.

Is it reasonable to expect…?

Game Design, Maths, stats, Stonemaier Games

One of the criticisms by some reviewers about games from Stonemaier Games is that they are unbalanced, not play tested enough.

But how fair a criticism is this?

For this post I’m going to look at Tapestry. Which is a game that has this accusation made against it. And recently had a pack of rebalanced civilisation mats released. I may also use the odd game from their catalog to illustrate a point.

Before I go any further I need to give a disclaimer of some sort. Firstly I have no idea how many play testers, how much play testing was done, or what the play test process is at Stonemaier games. And I’ve made no attempt to find out. I’m also not a mathematician or statistician. So there are likely major flaws in my maths and logic. Please feel free to correct me in the comments. For this post I’m going to ignore solo play testing because I don’t play solo, and I don’t want to look up the solo rules. Oh and I have been accused of being a bit of a Stonemaier Games fanboy.

In Tapestry and it’s three expansions we have 41 civilization mats broken down as follows:

  • Tapestry – 16 civilization mats
  • Plans & Ploys – 10 civilization mats
  • Arts & Architecture – 5 civilization mats
  • Fantasies & Futures – 10 civilization mats

So to look at how feasible and reasonable it is to play test Tapestry and its expansions I will be working out the number of combinations of civilization mats. For this exercise the order doesn’t matter. Hence combinations instead of permutations.

To work out the number of possible combinations of civilization mats I’m using the following Binomial coefficients formula:

Where n is the set size or in our case number of civilization cards, and r is size of sets we are choosing, aka player count for us.

What follows is the number of combinations for Tapestry and its expansions based on player count.

As expected it’s going to be a lot easier to play test all the combinations once at the lower player counts than the higher ones.

But you need to repeatedly play these combinations to make sure that what would appear to be an unbalanced civilization mat is in fact that, and not just appearing to be so due to other factors.

I would argue that at the higher player counts (4 and 5) it’s unreasonable to expect all the combinations to be play tested. Just from a time and number of play testers basis. Let alone any monetary factor. I’m almost tempted to add in 3 players with the expansions to this statement as well.

So how would you even attempt to spot unbalanced or as some like to call them broken or over powered civilization mats?

You could use feedback from the lower player counts to focus in on particular civilization mats. However this over looks the fact that certain civilization mats might be better against others at lower player counts, but when played in higher player counts actually weaker or on par with others. Or that certain civilization mats are better at higher player counts but poor at lower counts.

Plus in all of this we aren’t even factoring in the random elements of the game such as tapestry cards.

In reality play testing will not just focus on one player count but be a mixture of all of them.

I think the big take away from this is it’s just not possible to play test every combination at all player counts. Just on the base game approximately 8000 games that would need playing to do it once.

There has to be a certain point where you say “we’ve tested as much as we can”. Or the game would never get released or be so expensive to cover the increased testing costs it won’t make any money.

It’s only once the game gets out in the wild and in the hands of lots of players that things start to come to light. I do like that Stonemaier capture play data and feedback this into the design and provide updates to the games.

I can see a follow up argument that some of the civilization mats were obviously unbalanced, just too powerful. That I don’t have a response to. I’d need more info about the companies testing and feedback.

What are your thoughts on the feasibility of testing a game?

  • Elwes, R. (2010) Mathematics 1001: absolutely everything that matters in mathematics. London: Quercus.