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Design Challenges
Sean Ross
Canada
North Vancouver
British Columbia
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This geeklist contains my response to a question asked by Haly Jade in the Board Game Design forum. It grew larger than I thought it would, it didn't seem appropriate to dominate her thread by posting my response there, and besides it starting looking a lot like a geeklist entry, so I decided to go with it.
Haly wrote: what are some of the challenges you've had to overcome in your game designs, and how did you do so? .... Also, why do you design? Obviously there is love and passion involved, but other than that, what are your goals and motivations?
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1.
Board Game: Tichu
[Average Rating:7.72 Overall Rank:41]
Sean Ross
Canada
North Vancouver
British Columbia
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From the limited experience I've had so far, it seems that one of the main activities in game design is coming up with solutions to self-imposed challenges. When I set about designing my two player climbing game, Zhubu Shengji (now called Haggis), it was because I wanted to be able to play a game that gave me some of the same kind of enjoyment I got from playing Tichu when there were fewer than four players around. In some ways, I also did it to try to disprove what seemed a prevailing notion in the community - that it couldn't be done or that it wasn't worthwhile to try ("just play something else"). I didn't want to play something else and I thought that it could be done so I had to try. I've succeeded in solving the first problem to a degree I'm happy with, whether I've solved the latter problem will be up to others to decide.
Why "Haggis"?
The name has nothing to do with the game, it's an inside joke between me and a friend - we both have Scottish heritage and we would occasionally use "Haggis!" as though it were a curse word. Originally, I'd given the game a Chinese name, Zhubu Shengji (meaning, "step-by-step raise the level"), but I found it awkward to pronounce and, besides, I'm not Chinese, I'm Scottish, so I thought "Why not have a Scottish name?". And that's about it, really.... Oh. And I like the way it sounds. Haggis. It's just fun to say.
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Sean Ross
Canada
North Vancouver
British Columbia
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There were several challenges and, it seemed, that solving issues in one area often raised new issues in another - like playing Whac-A-Mole on a waterbed. The first problem to solve was deck configuration - how many ranks, how many suits - and that depended on selecting a manageable hand size and determining how many cards to leave undealt and unknown (with two players, if all of the cards are known, the game is solvable). But different deck configurations affected the frequency of getting certain card combinations and, depending on the frequency and size of those combinations, this impacted the hand emptying speed or shedding pace of the game. Again, because there were only two players, the pace of the game, the "feel" of how it played would be faster than what people who'd played similar games four-handed would expect.
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3.
Board Game: Haggis
[Average Rating:7.23 Overall Rank:308]
Sean Ross
Canada
North Vancouver
British Columbia
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There were many possible ways to slice the deck, and several reasonable hand sizes and numbers of cards to leave unknown to choose from. This glut of choice and the requirement to test each, led me to discover the well-trod path that so many had found before me - the "Path of Too-Few-Play-Testers" (woe betide the unwary...). Even now, after two years, I have only managed to play the game 34 times. Not nearly enough.
Obviously, I needed some way to assess the pace of play when using different sets of playable combinations in several different decks, but doing it solo - shuffling decks, dealing out hands, and playing against my shadow - wasn't going to work in a reasonable amount of time. Fortunately, I'm a software developer, so I was able to write a program that could assemble the different decks I wanted to test, deal thousands and thousands of hands, and count how often different types of combinations showed up (statistics and probability calculations are not one of my strengths). To compare one deck against another, I came up with a metric I called a "shed index" or "shedding potential" based on the probability of getting certain types of combinations, weighted by the size of the combination, so that decks that tend to deal out larger combinations more frequently would have higher shedding potentials and, in general, higher hand emptying speeds.
I set Tichu's shedding potential as my frame of reference and looked to find a configuration that yielded a pace that was lower than this yet still provided enough variety to remain interesting. There were several possibilities, including increasing or decreasing the minimum or maximum size of allowable combinations, but I chose a different path: suitedness. By requiring that all ranks in sequences, including multiple sequences (consecutive ranks of pairs, triples, etc), must share the same suit(s), many of the most frequent and larger combinations were eliminated or curtailed and the hand emptying pace was greatly reduced; yet the variety of available combinations to play remained high enough to keep the game interesting (IMHO). And, so, I had found my deck. Now I needed to decide how to score the game....
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Sean Ross
Canada
North Vancouver
British Columbia
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From the outset of my efforts, I had been using Larry Levy's Teech for Two as a guide. From Larry's game I had "borrowed", with his blessing, the ideas of distributing wild cards equally between the players and of giving the lead at the beginning of a hand to the player who was trailing in points. As one of my too few play-testers wrote, "In most games, luck determines whether you get wild cards or not. In this one, the guaranteed wild cards balance the luck of cards dealt to some extent, and also greatly affect endgame strategy". You're still going to get good hands and bad hands, but one thing I wanted to have in my game was a way to fight back, even if only to gain some small measure of ground, and this mechanism led to a means by which I could provide that (using them as bombs). Giving the lead to the trailing player served a similar purpose. There is an advantage to having the lead in climbing games; ceding this advantage to the trailing player provided a "catch-up" mechanic, a way to help reign-in a runaway leader and keep the games close. This choice of Larry's, to help the trailing player, is innovative within the genre (though it is done in one variant of President) and directly opposite to the norm. It may seem like a minor thing - changing a positive feedback mechanism to a negative one - but, to my mind, this was brilliant and it helped steer many of my later decisions by making me focus on how to help the player who's been dealt a bad hand or is behind in scoring. So, I am indebted to Larry and have told him so. And yet, while I took several things from his game, what I did not take was its scoring.
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Sean Ross
Canada
North Vancouver
British Columbia
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In Teech, based on its parent game Zheng Shangyou, scoring is binary: if you go out first, you score one point, otherwise, you score zero. This didn't sit well with me. If I struggled valiantly, played cleverly, and clawed away at an especially bad hand but was still left holding a single card at the end, I would score the same as if I had done nothing at all and just sat there with my hand full of cards saying "Pass", "Pass", "Pass". I wanted a way to reward players who played well despite the odds, so I looked to games that based their scoring not only on going out first, but also on the degree to which you failed to do so; games that scored based on the number of cards you were left holding after all was said and done. And that led me to Gang of Four and its parent game, Big Two.
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Sean Ross
Canada
North Vancouver
British Columbia
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In software development there is a saying that goes something like this, "If you have a problem, use a regular expression... and then you have two problems". Looking towards Gang of Four to help solve my problem, presented me with another: its scoring system was in need of repair. Richard Irving expresses colourfully some of the issues that I had with Gang's scoring:
rri1 wrote: Mediocre climbing card game that nonsensically requires only getting down to fewer than 8 cards left in hand rather than ridding yourself of all cards.
The scoring system severely penalizes the player for having a lot of cards left--which usually happens when they get a bad hand or someone else dealt a superb hand. IOW, through no fault of their own.
What this means is you rarely have a difficult decision whether to play cards for fear of getting stuck with tough to play cards--play the card!. As long as you can get down to less than 8, you did OK.
This list shows how many you score for the first card, second card, etc. (If you play your first card, you'll score -60, instead of the -80 if you played none. Therefore, the first card you play worth 20 points to you.):
20 4 17 3 3 13 2 2 9 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 The other issue with Gang's scoring is the worst-case longest game that it makes possible (not probable, possible): If each player, successively, goes out first and leaves the three other players each holding one card, then over the course of four hands each player will accrue 3 points in penalties, for an average of 0.75 points in penalty per hand; at that rate, it would take just over 133 hands(!) to reach the game ending score of 100. Now, obviously, that is an exceedingly rare case; but even to get the number of hands down to Tichu's worst-case (barring missed bids), 20, you would need to be leaving your opponents holding 7 cards (6.67, rounded up) for every three hands out of four. Against strong opponents, and barring disastrous hands, it could take quite awhile to finish a game at these rates.** And, so, I figured, as long as I'm out here tilting at windmills, I might as well have a go at this one as well.
So, I wanted a system where the worst-case longest game was no greater than Tichu's, where bad hands were not overly penalized (and, conversely, good hands not over rewarded), and where the scoring incentives for shedding cards were increasing, rather than decreasing, for each card being shed. There are several ways to solve this problem: one of the simplest is to assess a base penalty of, say, 7 points plus one point per card for players left holding cards; this gets your longest game below 20, your worst penalty down from 80% of the final score to 22%, but uses constant incentives to shed cards rather than increasing ones. I could have gone this route, but I had other problems to solve at the same time, and I needed my scoring system to handle them all.
** Which is why there are so many comments about the game taking too long to finish. In which case, players find the other, simpler solution to this problem - they play a fixed number of hands.
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Sean Ross
Canada
North Vancouver
British Columbia
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Around this time, I read a blog post by Jonathan Degann called The Art of Scoring where he discusses the use of majorities or triangular numbers (1,3,6,10,15,21,...) scoring to create what he calls a bomb - "a disproportionately high scoring opportunity that focuses players' actions and creates tension". Normally, this type of scoring would be applied to games where the main activity was to accumulate something. But, the way I saw it, accumulating and shedding were two sides of the same coin: shedding, from a certain point of view, is the accumulation of fewer. This got me thinking that what I wanted to do was to reward players for their steady accumulation of fewer cards by giving them increasing points for each card shed: one point for the first, an additional two for the next, add three more for the next after that, and so on. I wanted to reward people using the triangular numbers progression, but for an opposite purpose; what I wanted was, to coin a phrase, "minorities scoring". And, so, I invented it:
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17
0 17 33 48 62 75 87 98 108 117 125 132 138 143 147 150 152 153
The easiest way to see how the majorities scoring applies to this table is to imagine that you start the hand with 153 points in penalties stacked against you for holding 17 cards; if you don't manage to shed any cards, this is what your opponent will score. If you get rid of one card, getting your hand down to 16, you reduced your penalty by 1 point (152 down from 153); if you get rid of two cards, your overall penalty is reduced by 3 points (150 down from 153); getting rid of 3 saves you 6 points; getting rid of 4 saves you 10 points, and so on. Each card you get rid of reduces your penalty by a larger margin than the last. And, as pointed out by Richard, this is the opposite of what is happening in Gang of Four:
card # being shed 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
its worth in gang 20 4 17 3 3 13 2 2 9 1 1 1 1 1 1 1
its worth in zhubu 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16
Using my system, you need to get your hand size down to 5 or fewer cards to reduce just half of your potential penalty; in Gang you only need to get down to 13 to accomplish the same goal. Which system provides more incentives for, and rewards you more for skill in, getting rid of cards?
This graph shows the pressure to shed cards being exerted by the scoring systems of Zhubu Shengji (now called Haggis) and Gang of Four (extending Gang's hand size to 17). One item to notice in this graph is how the pressure to shed your very last card in Zhubu is greater than to the pressure to shed your 7th card in Gang. Essentially, in Gang, if you get down to 7 cards, you've done "okay"; in Zhubu, you still need to get rid of six more cards to do "okay".
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8.
Board Game: Tichu
[Average Rating:7.72 Overall Rank:41]
Sean Ross
Canada
North Vancouver
British Columbia
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With my system to supply increasing incentives for shedding cards in place, I needed to determine a game ending score where the longest possible game would be less than 20 hands, and the damage dealt to a player who's been dealt a bad hand was less severe. Again I turned to Tichu for guidance. The most amount of damage you can inflict against your opponent's in that game is to get a Grand Slam (Grand Tichu + Going out 1st and 2nd) which is worth 400 points**. That's 40% of the game ending score. I set this as my absolute limit, since, if people thought this was fine in Tichu, then they'd no basis for complaint if I did the same in my game. Taking that as a guide, the end game score would have been around 380 (actually 382.5). The difficulty was that the worst case longest game, with each player alternating leaving the other holding one card, scoring an average of 8.5 points per hand (17 points over two hands), would be 45 hands. Again, the simplest thing would have been to assess a base penalty (or in my game's case, reward - as it uses positive scoring). In this case, 17 points would have done the trick. Unfortunately, as I mentioned earlier, I still had other problems to solve.
** The biggest swing occurs when both opponents fail Grand Tichu bids at the same time as you successfully complete one of your own - resulting in a scoring delta of 800 points. Ouch!
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Sean Ross
Canada
North Vancouver
British Columbia
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One thing that was missing from Teech for Two was bombs. Not scoring bombs, in the sense that Jonathan Degann used, but powerful combinations that could be used to play on any other type of combination - kind of like a trump in trick-taking games, but you don't have to follow suit. In Tichu, four-of-a-kinds and straight flushes served this purpose. Unfortunately, those could not be used to the same effect in Zhubu - because of the shortened deck, the frequency of these combinations was just too common; the result of using them as bombs would have been to make the game more chaotic than I would have liked. Also, by not making these combinations special, the variety of the ordinary combinations is increased. Other combinations, that were as rare as the bombs in Tichu, I chose not to use because they ate up more cards than I wanted a bomb to have. So, I looked elsewhere.
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10.
Board Game: Haggis
[Average Rating:7.23 Overall Rank:308]
Sean Ross
Canada
North Vancouver
British Columbia
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Remember how I said I'd borrowed Larry's idea of distributing wild cards equally between the players? Initially, I liked the idea of doing this in order to give a player who's been dealt a weak hand some added flexibility and perhaps an opportunity to fight back against a stronger hand. But, gradually, I began to notice that there were some hands where even 3 wild cards wouldn't be enough to respond and the opponent would walk off to the end of the hand playing combos to their heart's content. I wanted a way to be able to stop that, to be able to mount some sort of resistance, even if it was futile. So I thought, why not use the wild cards as bombs? Both players have them, so each player would always have that option available as a means to wrench back control of the hand. And, for the same reason, that both players had the bomb, an element of brinkmanship was added to the game that helped increase the tension and made deciding to use your wild cards for anything other than a bomb an agonizing decision. It seemed like a natural fit. But, remember Whac-A-Mole?
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Sean Ross
Canada
North Vancouver
British Columbia
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Players started holding their wild cards to use as bombs until the end of the hand. They were seldom used to help create other combinations and the variety of combinations being played overall was lessened. I wanted player's to have the bomb as an option - a last resort, if you will - but I also wanted them to use their wild cards for something other than bombs most of the time. I tried adding penalties for players who were caught holding wild cards at the end of the hand, but that tended to hit the player with a weaker hand while they were down. Also, the rest of the scoring in the game was positive, and I wanted to avoid negative scoring in the game if I could. I needed a way to help force the play of wild cards earlier in the game, and also to make the decision to use your wilds as a bomb an agonizing one. And this, perhaps surprisingly(?), brings us back to solving the issue of the worst-case longest game.
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12.
Board Game: Poison
[Average Rating:6.49 Overall Rank:860]
Sean Ross
Canada
North Vancouver
British Columbia
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There is a quote from Reiner Knizia, talking about the design process behind creating Lord of the Rings:
Reiner Knizia wrote: Often I find it harder to solve a single design problem than to address two at the same time. A single problem allows many possible solutions and - being a perfectionist - it is difficult for me to identify the single "best" solution. When looking at two problems at once, a common solution often appears more readily. He also says that a scoring system drives the behavior of the players. I'd already used the scoring system to drive and reward the shedding behaviour I wanted, and now I would use it to stem the bombing behaviour I did not want while at the same time solving the problem of not scoring enough points per hand to guarantee the game would always finish in fewer than 20 hands.
To do this, I introduced the collection of card points as is done in both Tichu and its parent game, Zheng Fen. I also took the idea of using the point cards as a bomb, called a Hand Bomb (because its the only bomb that comes out of the cards you are holding in your hand), from Zheng Fen. Originally, I'd only allowed the Hand Bomb to be suited, but later relaxed that restriction as players, for some reason, were failing to look for them. I'm still not sure about that decision, and may go back to the suited variety, as the frequency of an unsuited Hand Bomb is higher than I would like**; however, they can be useful as another lever to help force the play of wild cards earlier in the hand and that's a good thing.
**Using Zhubu's deck, the probability of getting an unsuited Hand Bomb (7-9-J-K) is close to 0.600, while the likelihood of the suited variety is closer to 0.060. To compare, the likelihood of getting a 4-of-a-kind bomb in Tichu is around 0.035, and a straight flush is something like 0.015 (in Zhubu, those amounts would be closer to 0.155 and 0.099, respectively).
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Sean Ross
Canada
North Vancouver
British Columbia
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Anyway, once I had my bombs in place, it was time to solve the two problems of stemming undesirable bombing behaviour and limiting the worst-case longest game with one solution: all of the bombs are composed of card points but, if you win a trick using a bomb, you have to give all the cards and points in that trick to your opponent for scoring at the end of the hand. This is similar to what happens when you win a trick with the Dragon in Tichu.
I needed to set the values of the card points in such a way that playing a bomb, and having to give up that many points would be a painful decision while at the same time not making the collection of card points the emphasis of the game - that should still be, primarily, trying to go out first. Setting the total amount of card points available, 80 points, to just over half of the highest amount that could be scored for the cards still held in your opponents hand, 153 points, seems to have worked.
Each of the bombs is composed of point cards, and the higher ranking bombs are composed of more valuable point cards so that, depending on the bomb played, you are sacrificing 8, 12, 18, or 24 points by playing that bomb (plus any other point cards that may have been slipped into that trick). So, you need to ask yourself, "Is it worth it? Will I make more, or lose less, by playing this bomb now than I would if I didn't play it?".
The good thing about this system is that it's adjustable - if the disincentives are not strong enough at 8, 12, 18, or 24 points, then the values for the card points can be increased to make the cost of playing bombs more expensive. I still want the game to have bombs, and I still want players to have them available as a last resort, like having their own personal nuclear deterrent. But, carrying that analogy forward, what I don't want to see is nukes being fired indiscriminately and without consequence.
So, now the bombs had been reigned in to some degree, but what about the game length? Well, with 80 card points available, the worst case would be that the players split the points evenly each hand. If they alternate going out first, leaving their opponent holding one card, then they will score 17 points for cards in hand every two hands, for an average of 8.5 points per hand. Which means, in the worst-case, players will average 48.5 points per hand. The most points they could score for a hand would be 233 points, 153 points for leaving their opponent holding 17 cards plus all 80 card points. If we used Tichu's 40% highest penalty rule, then we'd set the game ending score at 580, or you could round it up to an even 600 points. Either way, the worst case longest game to that goal would take 12 hands, at most. I wanted the average game to take about 10 hands, so I raised that game ending score to 800, taking the worst-case up to 17 hands, maximum, and the highest penalty down to 29%. And all my troubles were solved. Well, not quite....
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Sean Ross
Canada
North Vancouver
British Columbia
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The base game was complete and I had what I was looking for: a two player climbing card game that I could enjoy playing. That should have been enough, but I had to take it one step further and try to get Tichu's bidding to go out first incorporated somehow. And, here, I think I may have bitten off more than I could chew. Tichu's simple bid, either go out first and get a bonus, or fail and get a penalty, didn't seem to work with this game. The trouble was that it was hard to assess the strength of your hand given that your opponent had 3 wild cards, at least one bomb at the ready, and there were 8 unknown cards to account for.
It was suggested that it might be easier to judge if bidding to go out first also guaranteed you the first lead. But, that would mean sacrificing the catch-up mechanic that was helping the trailing player keep themselves in the game. Also, I needed to provide some way for the opponent to counter the bid and be able to regain control of the initial lead. To counter, you would need to face some form of escalated risk. And so I hit on the idea of tying the bidding to the number of cards you would have to leave your opponent holding when you went out. Moreover, in keeping with the idea of lending a hand to the trailing player, I made it so that they would only have to match the other player's bid to retain the lead. This created a much narrower point of balance, which now only slightly tipped in favour of the trailing player, but I reasoned that this was a variant for advanced players and that slight advantage should be enough for skilled players to leverage.
It seemed like a natural solution. And, for some other climbing game, I think it could still work. The problem, as pointed out before, was that - given the nature of this game - it was already difficult to determine that you would go out first, at all. But now I was asking players to also figure out the degree to which they would be successful. I imagine there might be some very skilled card players out there who could do this with some precision; sadly, however, I am not one of them. I had just succeeded in making a game I wasn't competent enough to play! I haven't yet removed the bidding variant from my game but, as you can tell, I am strongly considering it. In an attempt to salvage the idea, I've changed it's emphasis from precision to be more of a gambling or push-your-luck mechanic, with the idea that maybe the bidding would be more about how much you were prepared to risk in order to get the lead, rather than just rewarding skilled hand analysis. I'll keep working on it, but here I may finally have tilted at a windmill I couldn't take down. We'll see how it goes.
Update: I've decided to remove the bidding variant from the updated rule set. I've decided that unless or until I'm confident that it works, I'm pulling it out of the main rules. I think that the bidding process is fine (you bid on the number of cards you'll leave opponent holding, and trailing player need only match previous bid), but I'm not as happy with the scoring. There are a few constraints I've chosen to force onto the scoring: the highest combined score (for bidding 17, leaving opponent with 17 cards, and capturing all point cards) must not exceed 40% of the game ending score; the bidding rewards need to encourage bidding at the lower end of the scale, but should not over reward on the higher end (I don't want to give points to players because they just happened to luck out and get a monster hand); the risks associated with bidding need to be high enough to make higher bids produce higher tension, but not so high as to discourage bidding altogether. If anyone out there thinks they have a solution, please send me a geekmail - I would love to know the answer. Having that extra bit of tension in place, that the bidding game can bring, is something I would very much like to see happen. I'm working on it.
Oct. 4, 2008: And, now I've decided to just go ahead with Tichu-type bidding/betting and abandon the idea of tying bids to the number of card you'll leave your opponent holding. I still think the latter bidding model could work in another game, but it doesn't work here....
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Sean Ross
Canada
North Vancouver
British Columbia
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I've now learned that another challenge to overcome in game design is development - part of which is the process of stream-lining and increasing the accessibility of your game. As a designer, fully aware of what each of the underlying systems is providing and why they are necessary, you can lose the perspective that showing all of the complexity, leaving it visible, to your players can be off-putting. What seems clear to you can seem arcane or unnecessarily difficult to others. I'd built a jalopy with a jet engine, hoping people would be satisfied to have the engine, but found that people were so distracted by all the bits sticking out that they didn't notice or care how the system performed; if they even got to the point of test-driving the game at all.... Having a fresh perspective, and players who are willing to point out that the Emperor might want to put on some clothes, is invaluable.
Following Zhubu Shengji's addition to the BGG database, I started getting more feedback from people who'd tried the game. The most consistent piece of constructive criticism was on simplifying the complicated appearance and utility of the scoring system. The arithmetic was less friendly than it could be (lower numbers would help). Several people had also suggested changing the card ranks that I was using (6,7,8,9,10,J,Q,K,A,2,X), citing discomfort with having the 2 rank above the Ace (or even with having the Ace rank above the King in some cases - go figure...). Simplifying the rules by removing the waffling nature of supporting so many variants was also brought up more than once. In other words, people have started to help me see that, despite the game appearing very transparent to me (well, obviously...), to other people the game seemed needlessly complex. Or, as Chris Beaven put it, " systems shouldn't get in the way of fun". I agree.
There's a design pattern in Computer Science called a Facade, a wrapper around the inner workings of a complex system that helps make things easier to use and understand. This system needed a facade. And, thanks to Chris' help and his convincing arguments (he used my own arguments against me...), it now has one.
The scoring system was scaled down to 2/5ths its original size, so that the numbers run from 6 to 60 rather than from 17 to 153, and the ranks were shifted down to use 2 through 10 with J, Q, K as wilds ranked above the 10, rather than 6 up to Ace with 2's and Jokers as wilds ranked above the Ace. All of the variants were dropped in favour of having a single, focused rule-set; no more distracting asides to get in the way of understanding the game. Although, surprisingly enough, at one point the game started to develop a theme?! It fit unexpectedly well, but I'm still not sure if it's more of a distraction than an aid to understanding and enjoyment.
Regardless, theme or not, the thing to notice is that the underlying game, the engine, remained unchanged, the pressure being exerted by the new scoring system was and is almost identical to what was happening with the older "scarier" looking version. The difference is, now, having had a bit of a makeover and bought a better fitting wardrobe, the game is more approachable and, hopefully, more accessible to a wider audience. Which is great.
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16.
Board Game: & cetera
[Average Rating:7.69 Unranked]
[Average Rating:7.69 Unranked]
Sean Ross
Canada
North Vancouver
British Columbia
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In the previous entry to this one I talked about how I eventually was persuaded to simplify the scoring in my game. Apparently, I didn't simplify it enough - nearly one year later and I'm back with an even simpler scoring model - 5 points per card. That's it. No sliding scale, no formulas, no awkward numbers to remember or to add up. Just, 5 points per card.
At first, I didn't want to go here. I'd put a lot of effort into designing my original scoring system and I'd found it difficult to accept scaling it down. Now I'd been asked to abandon it completely. At first, I tried to resist. But then I was forced to recognize that, as far as it mattered, after the scoring had been scaled down it might just as well have been linear for all the differentiation in numbers it provided. I played the game with scoring 5 points per card in hand and it made no discernible difference whatsoever. So, at last, I was forced to abandon my brain child. For what it's worth, I still think the original scoring is brilliant  but having already made concessions towards simplification, there really was no reason to turn back now.
While I was mucking about in the rules, preparing to post an update with the new, even simpler scoring, I decided to adjust a couple of other areas that had been nagging at me in the design. I decided to revisit the betting, which I'd borrowed from Tichu and change it to better reflect the realities of this game.
In Tichu, it's actually not terribly difficult to tell, after receiving your first 8 cards, if you should call 'Grand Tichu'. That's not true in Haggis. Tichu has special cards and powerful Aces that serve as heuristics for calculating the power of your hand. With Haggis' wild cards in place, and both player having their own set, it was much more difficult to assess whether you had a good hand or not. You could do it when you had your full hand, but not so much when you'd only seen 8 cards. So, I decided to just deal out all of the cards and let people decide just how many points they were willing to risk. They could risk 0, 15, or 30 points. It was entirely up to them. If they felt confident, they could go for the Big Bet, if they were a bit leery, they could hedge with the Little Bet. This, I think, works very well in Haggis. In Tichu, it would be too powerful as there is less uncertainty in that game after you've been dealt your entire hand of 14 cards (people would be calling Grand pretty often).
While I was adjusting the betting procedure, I decided to give the advanced players a little additional freedom in how much they wanted to risk when betting during the game. Some folks didn't find betting 15 or 30 points caused enough tension. So, now, they can set their own betting amounts as high as 20/40 or 25/50, before the game begins. Just remember, the betting game favours the stronger player so, if you're playing 25/50 in betting, you better be damn good or you're going to get slaughtered.
Finally, I was still bothered by the frequency of the unsuited Hand Bomb (3-5-7-9). I mentioned it earlier in this list: "the frequency of an unsuited Hand Bomb is higher than I would like". I still saw the advantage of having a bomb in place that could be used to suck out the other player's wild cards, but I felt that more often than I would like, Hand Bombs were dominating play. So, to lessen their frequency just a bit, but still have them crop up often enough to have the impact on the wild cards that I desired, I decided to make the unsuited Hand Bomb into a "Rainbow Bomb". Now, instead of being able to have any mix of suits, a Hand Bomb must have 4 different suits. This cuts their frequency down to about 0.30 or 1 every 4 hands dealt. Which, considering each player gets a hand, means you'll expect to see someone get a bomb every other hand. With the old bomb, that expectation was for every hand. I like it this way better. And, as a bonus, this new constraint can also make the choice to play the bomb more agonizing as it's more likely to disrupt the remaining combinations in your hand. Agonizing is good. At least, it is in games.
In the end, it's still the same game. But it is simpler and that's not so bad. Heck, I can play the game without a player aid now, which is something I really couldn't do before. That's nice. It's been a long road getting to this point (almost 4 years, on and off) but I think (I hope) I can finally say the game is finished....
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Sean Ross
Canada
North Vancouver
British Columbia
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And, now, for yet another chapter in the saga that is this rather lengthy geeklist. In Spring 2010, a limited print run of Haggis will be published by Travis Worthington of Indie Boards and Cards. Travis' announcement/public-thank-you-to-the-artist briefly describes how this quite pleasant and wholly unexpected turn of events came about:
T Worthington wrote: Last year I approached Sean to publish [Haggis] for Indie Boards and Cards on the recommendation of one of his playtesters. Haggis had everything that a publisher could want in a game submission - clear concise rules and well developed game mechanics that had been rigorously subjected to external playtesting. Shortly after Sean agreed, he recommendeded that we work with Gary based on his postings in this forum. [I'm] happy to say that working with Gary has been a pleasure, and the results of his hard work are extremely professional. Here is just a quick sample, see the game page for more: Haggis will be the third game released by Indie Boards and Cards ( Triumvirate being the first, and Filipino Fruit Market the second). The limited edition first printing will be available for sale on the Indie Boards and Cards web site in March. You can subscribe to the Indie Boards and Cards newsletter now if you'd like to be among the first to be able to get this game.
Travis' post is a public thanks to Gary Simpson, an artist who managed to take Travis' and my vague notions of what the game should look like ("a scottish tichu") and transform those into a clear vision. I would like to take a moment here to express my own gratitude by highlighting aspects of the graphic design with which I am particularly pleased.
The thing I am perhaps most happy with is the cover (pictured above). Honestly, I love it. It never would have occurred to me to make the cover look this way, but now that I've seen it, I can't imagine having anything else. I'm both honoured and proud that the artist and publisher agreed to use my family's tartan in the design (it's the Ross Ancient Hunting Tartan). I also like that the layout of the cover reminds me of the Penguin Classics series of books. There is something so "classy" about those. And that is the word I think of when trying describe what Gary has done: it looks classy. I like that. But the thing I like most is probably the font that he chose to represent Haggis, and the introduction of the red sash with the wood-cut print. These two elements, a calligraphic font and a silken band, take a decidedly Celtic motif (which reflects the heritage of the game's designer) and yet somehow manage to convey a hint of Chinese or Japanese flavour (which ties the game back to its roots in the Chinese climbing game genre). I think it's brilliant and perfect.
The card design is clean, crisp, and beautiful. I like the palette and the Celtic symbols. But it is the increased usability of the cards that I'm most pleased with. The point cards are differentiated from the non-point cards not only by having their point values printed on them but also by having an inverse appearance. You can see the difference in the cards pictured above - the middle image shows point cards (odd numbered) in the red suit, the right image shows a non-point card (even numbered). It's very easy to tell which is which. And, since bombs in this game are composed entirely of point cards, this small detail helps ease their recognition. In tune with that notion, the point value icon while reminiscent of a star is also like a refined version of a comic book "BLAM!" - which subtly re-enforces the idea that these cards form bombs. I'm not sure if that was intentional or not, but that's the way I like to see it.
I like the corner symbols Gary chose to represent the K, Q, and J. That was a nice touch. And I'm very pleased that these wild cards will be double-sided (same image on the front and back) in the published version. This will help to distinguish them even further from the other cards and it will help to make it easier to remember to pull them out of the tricks before reshuffling the deck for the next hand. That little usability improvement alone would be worth buying a custom deck... um, IMHO 
Overall, I'm very pleased. I'm extremely grateful to both Travis and Gary for all of their efforts and I'm very much looking forward to seeing the finished product. It is both exciting and anxiety-inducing to see a published version of my game being produced. More people will see it, but more people will judge it. My hope, of course, is that it will find homes with people who will enjoy it as much as I do...we'll see how it goes....
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Posted Wed Sep 3, 2008 6:27 pm
