Monday, January 13: Day 3

Day 3

The process of game designing.  

Class today started off with a discussion/lecture with Greg Bush and Phil Chase, two game designer friends of Prof Arnoys.  While only laymen, Phil has had two of his games published, and the five generation of their jointly-authored game is currently in the publication works, to be released sometime around this year's GenCon. 

Greg and Phil talked about their interests in gaming, what game types appeal to them personally, their favorite games, and most importantly, about the development process of games and how most games go through five to seven generations while in playtesting before being published.  The advice they gave to the rest of us laymen was thoughtful and encouraging, but also realistic; they didn't sugarcoat the fact that many, many games don't make it to publication. 

Once Greg and Phil were done talking, they had us break into smaller groups to try out some of their initial generations of the games they had put forward for publication.  I participated in playing the first generation of the game currently being published, The Fires of Rome, which turned out to be a lot more complicated than I had originally thought it would be.  There are two main strategies one can follow: kill the most people and destroy the most valuable sections of the city, or save the most citizens and entreat the gods with rescued priests for special bonuses.  We played a few turns of Fires of Rome before Greg and Phil decided to pack up and leave, at which point we all splintered off to play other games from the class hoard we have to choose from.

1812: The Invasion of Canada

I chose to play 1812: The Invasion of Canada with Rachel and Jason, a game centered around the American, British, Canadian and Native American conflicts along the Canadian border during the War of 1812.  Out of the five factions to choose from, I played as the British Regulars and the Native Americans, Jason was my ally as the Canadian Militia, and Rachel played against us as both the American Militia and American Regulars.

I have to say, the game mechanic that intrigued me the most was the randomness of the turn order each round; you would draw a colored cube out of a bag, determining as you go the order in which the two sides' factions moved troops and shaped the conflict.  The most effective way I found to offset the random turn order was to integrate troops as much as possible, because during each faction's turn they can move whatever units are in an army so long as one of the units in that army is of their faction; thus, more integration equals more troop movement, more conquest, and more victory cities/forts falling to your banner. 

In fact, I was so intrigued by 1812 that I signed it out for the night and signed up to teach it on Day 4.  After a night of playing two games and evaluating each sides' force pools and deck of cards, I determined that 1812 is best played with 2-3 players, is manageable with 4, but gets drawn out and slow with 5; I'm hoping to teach tomorrow's group with 3 if I can, but no more than 4.

For more info, check out the class page for my 1812 entry!  再见！