Game Design Analysis – Orleans

Written by Alex Harkey

We’re diving into one of our recent favorites this week as Orléans was our top “new to us” game on the site for 2015. Since then, our opinions have drifted in different directions and we thought it would be fun to look at how the game has aged for us only a few years later.

If this is your first time visiting Games Precipice, our focus is on game design theory and ideas that can make games great. In writing about Orléans, the large majority of our conversation is a deep dive into this brilliant game applying the game design frameworks we’ve been writing about recently. To help frame the discussion, this is more than just a write-up about Orléans; this is an article about Orléans in the greater conversation of pool building games. So let’s jump right in.

Prototypical Pool Building

Orléans is best classified as a bag building game and it shares a number of familiar concepts with a deck building game like Dominion or a dice building game like Quarriors. We recently covered these various mechanics collectively in a series on pool building games.

Despite the similarities on the surface, these games can be tricky to break down as a group. One approach we’ve taken to look in-depth at these mechanics has been to identify the common skills and tasks players are carefully considering while building their deck in Ascension or filling their bag in Orléans.

In Pool Builders… players manage long-term efficiency

A common bond among pool building games is that these mechanics relay a marathon mentality to players. Orléans is a game of putting one foot ahead of the other in order to string together a strategy over the long-term. By the end of the game, a player will rarely be able to pinpoint the exact moment or turn that pushed them toward victory, since each turn the player moves the needle forward just enough to see observable progress in a race of efficiency.

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2016 Year in Review Mailbag – The Return of the Mailbag

Written by Alex Harkey

As the clock struck midnight and we transition into an exciting new year of board games, there is something unsettling abound. True, I’m still writing 2016 on every document, but no, that isn’t it…
“I’d like to collect on a debt on behalf of your readers. You’re overdue for a mailbag.”
-Eric
As I’m still trying to settle on a New Year’s Resolution, I take a moment to catch up on some email…
“If you’re looking for something to do over the holidays, maybe you could get around to publishing some of those emails.”
-Alex’s To-Do List
Out of no where, a crowd suddenly forms; torches and pitchforks in hand. The chant begins:
“Mailbag, Mailbag, Mailbag”
-Aaron
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Game Design Analysis – Keyflower

Written by Matt Pavlovich

keyflower3

Image use courtesy of @UpliftAndrew

Since our last batch of Design Analysis articles, we’ve started two ambitious, multi-month article series. Our Game Structures articles are meant to explore the design decisions that matter most at the beginning, middle, and end of games and to answer questions like “who goes first, and does it matter?” and “what time horizons do players plan their actions across?” Our Mechanic Archetypes series takes deep dives into some of the most popular and prevalent game mechanics, beginning with worker placement and pool builders. Both of these series are ongoing; look for late-game structures soon and more mechanic archetypes for as long as we keep having interesting things to say about them.

Once we’ve covered a wide range of game design topics, we really like to take what we’ve written and apply our own analytical frameworks to recent successful games with the goal of trying to determine what a game does well, how it implements these concepts in a creative and novel way, and ultimately what makes it great. Keeping in the theme of our Mechanic Archetypes, I’ll be taking a closer look at Keyflower, a worker placement game (and then some), and Alex will follow up with a pool builder.

keyflowerKeyflower is a few years old now, and it isn’t particularly difficult to get ahold of, so it might be familiar to many of our readers. For a quick introduction in case it’s not: Keyflower is a tile game that takes players through a year of growing and managing a fledgling village, with the game playing out over four seasons and having the in-universe goal of building up enough resources to survive through the winter. Its most notable feature is its clever approach to worker placement, where workers can be used either to perform actions or as currency to bid on improvements to the village. It won or was nominated for a handful of awards from 2012-2014 and maintains a strong presence as a top-20 strategy game at BoardGameGeek since its release in 2012.

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Pool Builders – Observations & Innovations

Written by Matt Pavlovich

poolbuildersTo wrap up our mechanic archetype series on pool builders, I’m going to trace a history of builders and try to hit the highlights of some of the most important developments in builders. Naturally, it’s impossible to describe every single strategy game that has ever used a builder mechanic, but I’ll aim to analyze the modern builder lineage and try to anticipate some innovations in the future of the format.

Origins of Deck-Builders

mtgThe most important and far-reaching mechanical innovation of Magic: the Gathering was that it introduced both variance and a means to mitigate that variance in the same mechanic. In any format of Magic, you’re responsible for creating a deck and drawing cards at random from it during the game.

It was the original prelude to deck-building: the genius of Magic is that randomness is a core part of the game (as it is with any game where drawing cards is involved) but because you can decide what cards go into that deck, you control the likelihood of drawing any given card. Indeed, the biggest variations in how Magic is played even today come from how that deck is assembled, whether through a draft or sealed packs or your own invention at home.

Like poker (which shares an enormous overlap with Magic’s audience), Magic inhabits a fertile middle ground between perfect information games like chess and perfect randomness games like war, where dealing with variance is an important part of the game’s skill. Again, success in Magic comes not necessarily from being able to see six moves in the future or from how to react to a surprise card draw you didn’t see coming, but from thinking through how to manage the randomness and optimize your chances of coming up with the exact card that you need.

DominionIt might be trite to describe Dominion’s brilliance as “Magic in a box,” but that’s exactly the innovation that it brought to strategy gaming. Magic’s brilliance as a business model and source of frustration for many a potential player is the financial commitment required to play it competitively. We tend to focus on mechanical design in this blog, but the democratization of the deck-building model into one box from which all of the players can build their respective decks, rather than having to invest time and money to bring their own decks to the table, is surely one of the many reasons for Dominion’s strong following. In this sense, Dominion is a fantastic example of how collection value is every bit as important as balance or approachability in making great games.

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Pool Builders – The Algae of Game Mechanics

Written by Alex Harkey

pbaquariumWe launched a new series over the past year of what we call “Mechanic Archetypes”, an opportunity to examine mechanic-by-mechanic what differentiates successful game designs from the rest when we’re thinking about ones that fall under a label, such as Worker Placement.

Recently we’ve been thinking about “Pool Builders”, a collection of related mechanics like Deck Builders, Dice Builders and Bag Builders that are worth exploring side-by-side as they tend to share quite a few characteristics. In this segment we’re going to step back and examine games that fall into this mechanical category as a group while covering some broad observations as to their strengths and weaknesses. Our goal is that these observations may assist game designers stepping into this growing genre.

Pool Builders – The Algae of Game Mechanics

Since the concept of Pool Builders emerged on the tabletop scene, it has been a popular choice for designers and that popularity doesn’t seem to be slowing down anytime soon. Depending on who you’re willing to debate with, the origin of Pool Builders could go back seemingly as far as you’d like it to, but the approach we’re familiar with today likely began with either Starcraft: The Board Game (2007) or Dominion (2008).

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Six things we want you to know about Unification of China

Written by Matt Pavlovich

bfiglogogreenLast Saturday we were exhibitors in the Tabletop Showcase at the Boston Festival of Indie Games. It was a terrific experience and we met so many great people, a special thank you to everyone who spent time at our booth. Among our highlights; we were able to demo our current game design, Unification of China for attendees and by the end of the event, we had a lot of visitors excited by the direction of the game (which is now in its later stages of development).

Many awesome visitors sat down and played a few turns of the game with us, and it often led to some great conversations about their favorite board games. More amazing visitors were as fascinated as we are by the history in this era of Ancient China (the time period and theme for the game) and of course we’re always thrilled when people approach us and talk game design, .

It was a busy time summer for us, as we spent it preparing for the event and playtesting a lot of games, including our own. We will be returning to our normal article publishing cycle next week with the next segment in our Pool Builders series, but we wanted to share six key things about this really exciting moment for us in gaming.

2-6 players, 90 minutes, ages 12+.

Unification of China is designed to support its entire range of player number without requiring any fiddly rules variations or creating virtual players. Smaller player counts might be associated with a relaxed and epic game, where each player can amass great influence in each region and project, while larger player counts might feel more frenetic and territorial, requiring players to specialize carefully. We enjoy playing it regardless of the number of players, and we hope you will too.

uocsummaryThe game takes place over 6 rounds that last around 15 minutes each, for a total of about 90 minutes. We recognize that there are a lot of great games out there, so we worked hard to create a game that gives a full Euro-style strategic experience without monopolizing your entire evening.

There are enough novel ideas and mechanics in Unification of China that the game might be a little tricky for our younger gamers to appreciate. That said, there are no adult themes or explicit content, and we consider the subject matter appropriate for all ages.

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