Working with a developer, and updates on printing!
about 7 years ago – Fri, Mar 03, 2017 at 06:19:55 PM

Hey!

We just sent the first batch of files to the printer! It’s much later than I would have liked, but I’ve learned a lot from the experience. At this point, all I can do is apologize, assure you we’re doing all that we can, and promise to apply the lessons learned to our next project.

Speaking of which…

The Lady and the Tiger is launching on Kickstarter this Tuesday! It’s a gorgeous little micro-game for two players. Our first review is already up - the campaign launches on Tuesday, at 10am EST, and will be available at theladyandthetiger.com

I hope that you'll go and check it out when it's live. I'm super excited!

In Dracula’s Feast news, the rulebook is almost finished! We’re having an editor triple-check everything before it goes to print, but we thought you might enjoy a sneak preview of the rules:

Dracula's Feast Rulebook

While the rest of the team finalize the graphic design (I have no talent in that area, and am thus annoyingly unhelpful) I thought I’d share another designer diary:

The origins of Dracula’s Feast, and working with a developer

Dracula’s Feast's developer is the one and only Tom Lang - I first met Tom while we were both working in Melbourne comedy. We found out we were both into board games, and soon formed a gaming group.

 

Shortly after we met, he moved in with my best friend - also called Tom. They’re still happy housemates: two Toms who are into board games and comedy. It never gets confusing, nosirree.

I don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned this, but originally Dracula’s Feast was a very different game - it was an exactly 6-player game (always a great idea) which had dozens of fiddly tokens, and 6 massively unbalanced roles:

Tom tells me I was originally inspired by Two Rooms and a Boom (I don’t remember this at all) - the original game was about an attempt to assassinate the president. It involved tracking exactly who had asked you what, by placing tokens on a board in a ludicrously complex “social deduction game”.

In my defense, it was my second ever game design. Tip for new designers: your first half-dozen games (at least) are going to be terrible. Lower your expectations, iterate quickly, and be prepared to throw them out.

After the disastrous first playthrough, everyone concluded that it was nice that I’d tried, and that there were some fun ideas, but that it wasn’t really a game. Tom and my cousin Gavin stayed behind, and we threw around ideas for a while.

I’d like to claim that I was the one who came up with the idea of retheming the whole game to horror, but it was likely either Gavin or Tom. I do remember that the “dance” mechanic (originally - and for a weirdly long time - called “rendezvous”) was mine, and once I had that, a lot of the game fell into place.

At this point, Jellybean Games didn’t exist. I wasn’t even thinking of myself as a designer - I’d just had a fun idea to fix the problem I kept running into in social deduction games (perpetually being dealt the “villager” role).

And so at that stage, Tom Lang wasn’t officially the “developer” - he was just a friend I was bouncing ideas off. I didn’t even know the term “developer” existed!

Over the next year or two, I continued working on Dracula’s Feast. I came up with other game ideas as well, but none of them stuck in my head like Drac’s Feast did.

Through the redrafting, Tom was my go-to dude for any thoughts and ideas; there are pages and pages of Facebook chat discussion, much of which is actually incomprehensible to me now, reading it back:

Cut to: April 2016, almost exactly one year ago.

After Scuttle! overfunded by almost 3000%, I knew I wanted to get the rights to Dracula’s Feast back from the publisher who'd signed it, and do it under Jellybean Games. It’s my favourite of all my designs, and I'd long had plans for how I would run a Kickstarter campaign for it. 

At that point, Tom had been helping me with proof-reading and balancing Scuttle!, and since he was already familiar with the Dracula's Feast, it made sense to bring him onboard for that as well.

There are only a few decisions in life that you can point to and say “That was the best possible move I could have made”. This is definitely one of them.

Tom, like me, is obsessive in the best possible way. When he gets involved with a project, he doesn’t just do the bare minimum that he can to get it done - he will tear it apart, question every decision, make sure that everything has been done for a reason. Not just for stuff that isn’t working: Tom looks at the stuff that is fun, and makes you revisit that as well.

It’s an exhausting process, but the end result is always a much, much better game. (If anyone out there is looking to hire a developer, Tom works freelance, and I can most thoroughly recommend him.)

After we’d gone through and redrafted each character two or three times, tightening up mechanics and removing ambiguity, Tom turned his attention to the core of the game. Particularly: the “accuse” mechanic.

I’ve spoken about this before, but to recap: 

In the version of the game that went out to reviewers, Accuse meant “accuse one character; if you’re correct, they’re out of the game. If you're wrong, you are.” The current "accuse" was called Grand Reveal, and if you failed it, you were out of the game.

These two actions had been a part of the game for as long as the game’s existed, so I was quite reluctant to mess with it: firstly, because I’m a human and humans fear change, but also because of how much design space it allowed.

Tom’s issue with it was that it was almost never the correct move. Designer tip: if there’s something that your players should never do, it shouldn’t be an option in the game. (Or, to put it slightly differently: don’t give players enough rope to hang themselves.)

He fought through my reluctance and started devising alternatives. Instead of knocking people out of the game, he came up with the “reveal” system - you continue to play face up. My fear was correct that this massively reduced the design space in the game...but as we worked under the new constraints, I discovered we were still able to come up with plenty of fun and thematic roles.

A few plays revealed that the new system was more fun, more elegant, far easier to learn, and removed the need for a number of annoying exceptions we’d had to include. I’m not exaggerating when I say it improved the game by half again; everyone who’s played both versions has been stunned at what a big difference this small change made.

Without Tom, Dracula’s Feast would certainly have been fun. It was playable, interesting, addictive - the game I’d played for several years (and originally put on Kickstarter) was something that I’m still very proud of. But now, it’s a far better game.

Working with a developer is tricky. You need to find someone who matches your sensibilities (else you’re going to spend the whole time arguing) but not too closely, or they’re not going to see stuff that you don't.

But I think it’s something every designer (and certainly every publisher) should do. Games don’t improve in a vacuum; you need people poring over them, not just fixing obvious mistakes but doing what Tom did - improving even the stuff that’s working.

“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” is a saying that I firmly don’t believe applies to game design.

Of course, the flip side of that is: when do you stop? When is a game’s design “done”? Everything can be improved, after all…

I would love to write a designer diary about that, but I’m still looking for the answer myself.

That’s all for this week! If you have any questions about any part of the game design process (or any comments on the rulebook), let me know! Also, Tom Lang tends to hang around the comment section (we just can’t get rid of him) so if you have any questions specifically for Tom, he’ll be happy to answer them here or on Twitter.

Thanks so much for your support,
-Peter C. Hayward
Constantly trying to improve.

P.S. In each of these updates I like to link to a currently-running Kickstarter that I think you might be interested in. This week, it’s Murder Most Foul - it’s an infinitely replayable murder mystery party game: the murder is always different, and it comes with hot sauce! Intrigued? Check it out!

Cons, a small delay, and an indepth look at the promo pack!
about 7 years ago – Fri, Feb 24, 2017 at 12:27:13 AM

Hey!

First of all, I want to apologise for the lack of update last week. Whenever I go to a con, I’m always so surprised when it eats up all my time. Last week I was at Dreamation in New Jersey (which was wonderful!) - this week I’m at Expedition Prototype Con in Florida (which promises to be wonderful also!)

This week, I come with some bad news. Nothing too major - we’ve run into a snag with the rulebook, and so we haven’t been able to send everything off to the printer yet. Tania and Darrell are working on it now, and I’m confident we can get the files ready to print soon without losing too much momentum.

Until I actually send everything off, I’m not going to update the timeline - once the printer is printing, I’ll revise all the estimates and have a much better idea of when everything will get to you. At this point it looks like we'll still hit the deadline, but once everything is off, I'll be able to say for sure.

The game itself is 110% done: we’re so happy with every rule, every card...the only thing we’re working on now is the layout of the rules. I’ve actually found this pretty stressful - I hate adding more delays to everything - but I am still aiming to get everything out on time, and I know that you’ll all agree that it’s worth an extra week or two to make sure that it’s all of the highest possible quality.

To make up for it, here's another designer diary! Remember, if there's anything you'd like me to cover in these, mention it in the comments!

Promo Cards

As a gamer, I really like promo cards. They’re extra (but non-vital) content, and if I love a game, you better believe I want additional content for it.

My favourite kinds of promo cards are the ones that add a twist of some kind - maybe a piece of design space that was too weird for the base game, or something that makes you think about the way you’re going to play quite differently. 

As soon as Dracula’s Feast moved from “an idea” to “a game”, I knew that I wanted to launch it on Kickstarter, and I knew that I wanted to include promo cards. The base game and the Cthulhu and Friends expansion are going to come with four each - today I’m just going to talk about the Dracula’s Feast promo cards, but I’ll be back next week with the backstories of the Lovecraftian bonus cards.

In alphabetical order!

This was the first promo card I ever came up with. Between Alucard (always answers Yes to being Dracula) and Van Helsing (wins by finding Dracula) there’s already a bunch of “Are you Dracula?” being thrown around - this card takes it to the next level.

One of the things I like about promo cards is that you can use ideas that are too strange to be part of the base set. This card radically changes the pace of the game - for the first few rounds, everyone is either asking “Are you Dracula?” or “Are you the Bride of Dracula?”; suddenly, no one cares about Zombie, Werewolf, even Trickster…

It’s too punishing to new players to go straight into the box, but it’s super fun to play with. Perhaps my favourite part of the card is how well it combos with Dracula; it makes sense that his wife's ability would hurt him slightly less than everyone else.

Hoo boy. This was the promo card that’s by far gone through the most changes. I’ve already spoken (at length) about the development process for Zombie; for a while, Zombie’s ability was moved to Captain Bluebeard (in fact, he’s still that way on the Kickstarter page).

Originally, Captain Bluebeard was “You may reveal to join any dance”. Two people dance? You get to look at both cards.

This ran into two problems - firstly, it disincentivized other players from dancing. For a while, we were already having trouble encouraging players to dance; this just amplified the issue. Secondly, it was rarely useful.

Revealing your card in this game is huge (which is part of what makes the Bride of Dracula so interesting) - if it doesn’t win you the game, it’s almost never worth doing.

(Writing this up has made me wonder if “You may reveal to join any dance and then accuse” would have solved the problem. Maybe I’ll jot that down as an idea for a future expansion…)

For a while, we were toying with the idea of letting Captain Bluebeard immediately use the power of anyone he dances with. I’ve long loved the idea of a “chameleonic” character, who can imitate other people (somehow) but we’ve never managed to get it working. This one was rejected before it even hit the table - it does nothing against Trickster, Alucard, Dracula, Werewolf, Beelzebub, and it causes weird timing issues against most everyone else.

(I will get it working some day, I swear!)

Whenever I’m stuck on a character design (for this or any game) I tend to go thematic - what do pirates do? They steal, they plunder, they dance (at least, this one does) and they...well, pirate. For a while we were letting him force dances, but again - it didn’t really get him any closer to victory.

Finally, in the middle of an long brainstorming session, we came up with the current text. It’s unusual in that it doesn’t immediately guarantee a victory...but if you time it right (by using it on the turn of the player immediately before you), it doesn’t get anyone else closer to victory, and it might get you that one (or two) vital pieces of information you need to win. 

It’s flexible, too. I think it's best used immediately before your turn, but if you have a perfect use for it before that, go for it! And no matter what action your neighbor is taking - dancing, querying, accusing - you can make use of it (Whisper cards are returned when a player is queried OR accused). 

As you can imagine, I have a vested interest in making sure that our blue-bearded promo card is fun to play. After a few playtests confirmed that it was, we locked it in!

For a long, long time, Magic Mirror was in the base game. This character has a weird history - when I was first working on Dracula’s Feast, I was considering approaching Bezier Games and seeing if they wanted to do some crossover characters; Magic Mirror was originally a homage to “Seer” (or “Psychic”) from Werewolf.

The single piece of information you get - who’s not in the game - can be vital. If it’s Trickster, for example, you don't have to worry that the query responses you get are going to be inaccurate. If it’s Van Helsing, you have to worry substantially less about accidentally giving away Dracula’s position.

The issue? It requires a whole separate phase at the start of the game. “Everyone close your eyes. Magic Mirror, look at the Mystery Guest. Put it back. Everyone open your eyes.” For a game that was boasting “no night phase”, it was too cumbersome.

And so for a while, we tried playing it as “Magic Mirror may look at the Mystery Guest immediately before accusing.”

The problem? Doctor Jekyll.

To fix THEIR weird interaction, we made it “Magic Mirror may look at the Mystery Guest immediately before accusing, even if it’s no longer in the centre of the table.”

Blech. No. If you find yourself adding subclauses to clarify weird rule exceptions, you’ve done something wrong.

Even with the weird subclause though, we found that this slight change weakened the card too much. Getting the information that Trickster isn’t in the game at the end is totally different to playing the whole game like that.

And so Magic Mirror was given its “start of the game” ability back, moved to the promo pack. Promo cards are great for weird little rules exceptions like that.

(The best way to play it, by the way - and this is going to be mentioned in the rules - is to have someone hold up the Mystery Guest while everyone has their eyes closed. Then you don’t have to worry about scuffling or hearing them pick up the card etc.)

There are two types of players - those who love Swamp Thing, and those who don’t get it.

The ability is weird. If I’m being perfectly honest, it might be very slightly underpowered (or at least very difficult to play efficiently). But for the right kind of player, this card is FUN.

Whenever you make an accusation in Dracula’s Feast, you increase the knowledge of everyone else at the table. This is 100% deliberate - once players are revealed, we wanted the game to speed up. You’re not “out” when you’re revealed, but you’re missing out on the fun bluffing half the game.

Swamp Thing is the exception. You can reveal first turn, and start making accusations without risking giving away all your knowledge. You might get 7 “No” responses, or an even split between Yes and No - no one else gets to find out. They don’t even learn who you think is who!

It’s a weird role that some people don’t enjoy. As you can imagine, “some people don’t enjoy” is not something I want to include in the base game, and so to the promo pack it was moved.

---

That’s all for this week - next week I’m back in snowy, snowy Toronto, and will - I sincerely hope - be announcing that everything is off to the printer! In any case, I’ll be back to talk about the promo cards that are coming with Cthulhu and Friends!

Thanks so much for your support,
-Peter C. Hayward
Looking forward to a weekend of gaming!

P.S. In each of these updates, I like to link to a currently-running Kickstarter that I think you might enjoy. This week, it’s Rocket Cats In Space, a dexterity game for 2-4 players. Race to send your space cats on missions, expand your fleet, or make use of devious attack dogs! Check it out!

Final playtests, an updated logo, ACLU results, and Zombie's tale: part 2!
about 7 years ago – Wed, Feb 08, 2017 at 10:49:48 PM

Hey!

We are ONE WEEK from submitting the final version of Dracula’s Feast to the printer. 

This is very exciting, and a tiny bit scary. I’ve been working on this game for more than three years now. It’s my favourite game that I’ve ever designed, and whenever I had downtime or needed to burn off some creative energy, this was always my the project I’d go in and meddle with.

The idea that in the next week, we want to lock everything off? Eep!

As such, I’m going to be running a playtest in Toronto tomorrow night (Thursday) - if you’re in Toronto and want to help me play the final version of everything, email me on [email protected] and I’ll get you the details!

As well as that, our developer Tom Lang is going to be running a playtest in Melbourne this Saturday - it’ll be running from noon until 3pm. Again, email me for details!

I’ll let you know now - if we find something to be totally busted on the weekend, we obviously aren’t going to go to print until it’s fixed. But I can tell you, the game is currently looking pretty good. I’m excited!

(And nervous! Did I mention nervous?)

If you’ve been interested in playtesting, this is your last chance to get involved! You can email me ([email protected]) for a copy of the latest files. Even running them once or twice with your friends and telling us how the game goes is super helpful.

Updated Logo

When I posted the Dracula’s Feast logo, there were some concerns about the “F” in Feast. Our handy-dandy artist Tania has gone in and had a look at that, and made some minor tweaks. A picture speaks a thousand words, even if that picture is of two words and a bat:

ACLU Sale

Last week I announced that we were holding a special sale of Dracula’s Feast to help support the ACLU. I’m happy to announce that the sale raised $135 - Jellybean Games is going to match the money aimed, and send a donation of $270 to the ACLU for their fine work. Hooray!

We also realized we missed a huge opportunity by not calling it the ACLUcard sale. For that, I feel like I have to personally apologize. That kind of pun doesn’t come across every day, and I...look, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.

Designer Diary

As long as people are enjoying these designer diaries, I’m happy to keep doing them!

Last week, I was telling the tale of Zombie - I ended just as I was about to share exactly what happened with dance tokens.

Before I do that, I want to take one more slight deviation and talk about design space.

As a creator, design space is something I’m fascinated by. As the name would suggest, it’s the space in which you can make design choices - the tighter/more elegant a game is, the less design space you have available.

The next Jellybean Games project is an 18-card game called The Lady and the Tiger. It is - if I say so myself - an extremely elegant, streamlined game. (18-card games basically have to be.) 

There are only six types of cards: Red Tiger, Blue Tiger, Red Lady, Blue Lady, Lady/Tiger, Red/Blue. They don’t have abilities or effects; their only defining features are their role and their color. 

For each of our projects, we try to offer a few promo cards - I’m in the middle of putting the Kickstarter page together for The Lady and the Tiger (launching March 7th!) and I realized that I couldn’t offer a promo card with any unique effect or game-changing ability. 

Why? Every combination of red/blue/lady/tiger has been used, and trying to add anything else simply wouldn’t work.

This is an example of extremely limited design space. (Instead, we're offering Lady Bluebeard - you can switch it out for any of the Blue Lady cards, and it has no in-game effect, just looks rad!)

The game with the most design space I’ve ever encountered is Sentinels of the Multiverse, by Greater Than Games. They’ve released 7 expansions, more than 40 heroes, over 35 villains, 25+ environments, and a whole pile of promo cards. Christopher Badell has told me in the past that they could keep writing new decks forever; they’re only stopping because it’s a story-driven game, and all good stories have an end.

Sentinels of the Multiverse has simple rules but a lot of design space.

Dracula’s Feast has three actions: query (ask another player “Are you Dracula?” and get a yes/no answer in response), dance (ask another player to dance - they’ll either accept or reject), and accuse (announce who everyone at the party is).

When it went out to reviewers, it had a fourth action - you could accuse one player. If you were correct, they were out of the game (not just revealed; permanently eliminated). If you were wrong, you were eliminated instead.

With the power of hindsight, I can see that this action is clearly superfluous. The difference between accuse and query used to cause a lot of confusion, as well as the difference between accuse and Grand Reveal, which was the old name for the “accuse everyone” action.

Despite this, it was a central part of the game for 2 years and 11 months. Our developer Tom Lang had suggested cutting it a few times, but I was convinced that we couldn’t - we needed it for the design space.

Of the 9 characters in the base game, 2 relied on that action for their cool abilities, as did several promo cards and about half of the expansion characters. I was certain that by eliminating it, we wouldn’t be able to have enough unique characters to keep the game fun and varied.

I mentioned this last week, but one of the big secrets of game design is that you have to kill your darlings and strip everything that isn’t necessary. More and more, my measure of a game’s elegance is “how many rule exceptions does it contain?” (Followed shortly by, “how many questions do the players need to ask while playing”)

Under this old rule, dancing with someone meant that you could accuse them on your next turn with 100% certainty to knock them out of the game. As such, a new rule had to be introduced - “once you’ve danced with someone, you can’t accuse them.”

(This is why Van Helsing also won by dancing with Dracula - another rule that we’ve recently eliminated.)

When the reviews came in, one repeated concern was that it was hard to remember who you’d danced with, especially after multiple games. Remember our discussion last week about trackable information? The game relied on players remembering who they’d danced with - not only for the accuse action, but also because a few characters relied on it.

And so before we launched, I decided to add dance tokens to the game. They would look nice, they’d be an extra component that we could build stretch goals around, and they’d not only solve the “tracking information” problem, they’d open up even MORE design space!

Here’s a handy tip: adding more stuff to a game is rarely a good solution. On rare occasions it can be, but the vast majority of the time the best solution is to take stuff away.

At this point, Zombie evolved again:

We couldn't decide whether to go with two or three dance tokens for a while - three dance tokens meant that in a 4-player game, he had to dance with every other character, which basically meant he didn’t have an ability. Only requiring two, however, meant that in an 8-player game he was almost guaranteed to win.

For a while, there was a brief discussion about making two versions: a 2-dance win for smaller games, a 3-dance win for larger games. 

This was an extremely inelegant solution, but I didn’t know what else to do.

A week before the Kickstarter launched, Tom Lang returned with a suggestion. He’d worked out a way that we could not only remove the extra “accuse” action, but also get rid of player elimination from the game, which had been one of the original design goals so many years ago. 

It didn’t solve my design space issues, but it made the game SO much better that I couldn’t ignore it. 

Developers, everyone. They’re worth their weight in gold.

We spent a few weeks going through all the cards, seeing if we could make this new idea work...to my surprise, the more limited the design space, the more interesting the characters we were coming up with.

This is going to be another obvious lesson, but it was something I had to relearn: restrictions rarely limit your creativity - they force you to come up with MORE ingenious solutions, 

After we’d found interesting ways of fixing all the characters who relied on the old accusation, I was hooked. I thought the game was done, but it was obvious that there was still room to improve.

“How can we make this game more elegant?” I asked, and quickly came to a realization: 

The dance tokens weren’t necessary.

Now that dances didn’t need to be tracked as a core part of the game, the tokens were only sticking around to give us more design space. And if there was one thing I’d learned from the past few weeks, it was that a limited design space wasn’t as constrictive as I’d feared.

Kill your babies. Cut anything the game doesn’t need. Justify every rule.

The dance tokens were removed, and so we again needed to rework Zombie.

We wanted to keep Zombie as a dancer (for both thematic and mechanical reasons) - we briefly considered “dance with both neighbors to win”, but it wasn’t trackable, and so out it went.

Only having to accuse your neighbors, however, worked great. It kept the “grand reveal” feel that makes the end of each game so exciting, and it was immediately trackable. The new set also contained a few other unique accusations (Van Helsing, Cerberus) and it didn’t run into balance issues after we ran it a few times.

This brings us all the way up to the last couple of weeks, when people have been playtesting the game all over the world and sending us some amazing data. One of the main things we’ve learned is that Zombie’s ability doesn’t scale well: in a 4-player game, he only has to accuse one fewer guest than everyone else. In an 8-player game, however, he’s dealing with a quarter of the challenge that everyone else is dealing with.

His focus on his neighbors should clue people into who he is, but even with everyone else getting that piece of information, we found that he was winning far more larger games than we’d expected...especially when lucky enough to get neighbors who were forced to accept dances.

And so just a few weeks ago, we made one big change to the game’s rules, and one final change to Zombie himself:

This version of Zombie can’t luck out by getting must-dance characters on either side of him. And the change to the rules is another one we’ve been debating for quite a while: once revealed, characters lose their powers.

This means that Zombie can’t just take a stab at his neighbors, and then try again when play returns to him. If he messes up his initial accusation, he has to win like everyone else - by identifying everyone at the party.

So far, feedback for this version has been extremely positive. It’s one more rule for the Zombie player to remember, but he’s not a complex character - especially because he only really cares about the players to his left and right.

The resultant character is one who has strong answers to all the big questions (he’s not the most thematic character, but the art helps on that front - it shows Zombie between two characters, which is a nice thematic link for someone who only cares about his neighbors.)

This is also the most balanced Zombie for all player counts - in a 4-player game, you’re accusing one fewer player. In an 8-player game (where everyone’s playing smart), you care about a fraction of what the rest of the table cares about...but you can’t initiate dances, and are only likely to get dance requests from players who don’t get you any closer to winning.

Like I said, Zombie is definitely the character who's changed the most. The end result is something I'm extremely happy with - he's interesting, different to every other character, and playing a slightly different game to the rest of the table.

That’s all for this week! If there’s any particular aspect of the Dracula’s Feast process you’d like me to talk more about (design, production, running the Kickstarter) let me know in the comments, and I’ll pick one of them to talk about next week!

Thanks so much for your support,-Peter C. HaywardPossibly getting a little too into these designer diaries.

P.S. In each of these updates, I like to share a link to a currently-running Kickstarter that I think my backers may enjoy. If you’re reading this, you like gorgeous horror-themed deduction games where each monster has a unique ability...well, have I got a game for you? Keymaster Games has just launched Campy Creatures, and it is stunning. It’s only $20 within the US, and did I mention how stunning it is? It’s gorgeous!

Check it out! 

A closer look at the Zombie, and a flash sale for the ACLU!
about 7 years ago – Wed, Feb 01, 2017 at 11:31:58 PM

Hey!

Everyone seemed to like the ‘designer diary’ update from last week, and so (time permitting) I’m to continue those for as long as people are interested. As I said, I spend a lot of my waking hours thinking about this stuff, and it’s nice to have somewhere to share all the thoughts.

Before I get into that: we’re doing a flash sale! For the next week, there’s an “ACLU special” on the Backerkit pre-order page - for $19, new orders can get Dracula’s Feast, Cthulhu and Friends AND the Promo Pack, and $5 from each sale will be donated to the American Civil Liberties Union.

Tell your friends!

Also, a few people expressed concern about the “F” in the Dracula’s Feast logo I posted last week - right now Tania is hard at work on our next game, The Lady and the Tiger (we want to get it out to reviewers well in advance of the Kickstarter launch) but as soon as she’s done with that, she’s going to have a look at the logo! 

Here’s some more art from The Lady and the Tiger - coming to Kickstarter in March. Exciting!

 

This week, I'm going to share some information on the 'Zombie' card. It’s hard to say which character in Dracula’s Feast has gone through the most changes, but my guess would definitely be Zombie.

The original original Zombie was simple and interesting/weird. His power was "Accept all dances. After dancing with you, players must accept all dances."

I look at this now, a few years of game design behind me, and I’m super impressed I ever thought this was a good idea. Let’s look at some of the questions I posted last week;

• Are they fun to play as/against? 
• Are they balanced? 
• Do they work with all player counts/any combination of characters/future expansions? 
• Is it thematic? 
• Are they easy to understand?

I’m also going to add a sixth question: Is it trackable? From the top:

Are they fun to play as/against? 

This is a tricky one! During a development session earlier this week, Tom Lang and I actually sat down and tried to work out specifically what makes a character fun in this game. This is what we came up with:

Having a cool win condition is fun, because it means you get to play a slightly different game to everyone else. It’s also fun for everyone else, because the way you’re playing will give them hints about your identity. 

(This, in turn, means other people can bluff a little and pretend to be you to confuse the table. Fun for all!)

Having special information is fun, because it means you have more information when reading the table. The bluffing I mentioned above? You’re in a far better position to see through it. This doesn't provide more fun to the rest of the table, but it doesn't detract from their fun at all.

Making people play around you is fun, although should be used sparingly. It's fun for you, watching people dance around you (sometimes literally) and avoid triggering your ability. 

It can also be quite fun for the other players, having minor limits on how they can play - although as I said, if you include too many characters like this, it stops being fun and starts feeling overly-restrictive.

The best example of this is Bride of Dracula - if anyone queries her, asking if she’s anyone except Dracula/Bride of Dracula, she immediately reveals her role, reveals the querying player, AND gets to make an out-of-turn accusation.

That can be enough to win the game, and so it's wise to tread lightly.

The Zombie ability I mention above has a few of these points going for it - people have to play around him (if they ask him to dance, they’re stuck accepting dances for the rest of the game), and he has special information: he knows why people are accepting dances.

A big factor in “is he fun”, however, is balance:

Are they balanced?

Balancing characters from Dracula’s Feast follows a simple rule: everyone has an advantage. The trick is trying to make those advantages equal.

This, as you can imagine, is really really hard.

Dracula has a simple power - after he fails his first accusation, he can accuse again immediately. This means that he can work out all but one or two guests at the table, and then guess on those two, reversing them if he's wrong. His disadvantage is that Van Helsing is out to get him, and so if he plays his hand too early, he gives her the game.

As much as possible, we try to balance other characters around Dracula. If we didn’t, he’d just win the vast majority of games, and the best strategy for the game would be “hope you’re dealt Dracula!”

The "make other people accept dances" version of Zombie has is completely unbalanced. He has no advantage - he knows why some people are dancing, but only after he’s danced with them and knows exactly who they are.

In fact, he’s at a disadvantage - after he knows who a character is, he makes it easier for other people to get that same information.

On top of that, “Accept all dances” is our standard go-to when we want to weaken a character slightly. It gives them a little less agency, and gives everyone else at the table a bit more information when they accept a dance.

So, "are they balanced?" No. No, they are not.

Do they work with all player counts/any combination of characters/future expansions?

In a small game (4-5 players), Zombie’s power is essentially just “accept all dances”. The odds of someone dancing with you and then being asked to dance by someone else is pretty low - it would give the dancing player information about almost all the players in the game, and so people would have to be playing pretty strangely for that role to be considered balanced.

Is it thematic?

Yes! At least, I think so. He turns people into zombies. Fun!

Are they easy to understand?

Again, another yes! The few times I played this version of the Zombie, I never saw anyone have any trouble.

But this brings us to the new, big question:

Is it trackable?

This wasn’t in last week’s update because my development process has changed. Nowadays, if the answer isn’t “Yes”, the idea doesn’t even make it to the rest of the questions.

Two years ago in New York, I played a prototype of my friend’s game, Cultists of Cthulhu. It’s quite fun - you place tiles to build the university, then play on the map you’ve just put together. One player is a traitor, everyone else is working together to stop the rise of the elder gods.

Some tiles allow you to try to search for special items - books in the library, tools in the toolshed, etc. Each character is only allowed to attempt a search once per tile.

The issue that I found was that there was no way of marking if a player had searched a particular room. You might search, find nothing, wander around for a while bit, and then later want to search again.

Without any way of tracking this information on the board, you might end up in a situation where you genuinely can’t remember whether you already searched that room - or, just as commonly, whether you searched the room this game or last game…

There’s a lot of information to keep in your head in Dracula’s Feast, and so after dancing with the Zombie, it's very easy for players to forget that they’re meant to accept all dances.

In an open information game, that might not be such a problem - someone could just say “Hey, you can’t do that,” but a hidden role game is immediately broken when someone has to jump in and say “Actually, sorry, you shouldn’t have rejected that dance request just now. How do I know this? Uhhhhh...”

As much as possible, we try to restrict limitations on the character cards. It's very easy for players (especially new players) to forget them. 

Untrackable information that isn’t listed on the cards? That’s a hard pass!

The second iteration of Zombie was an attempt to solve the balance issue - I didn’t know enough about the perils of untrackable information yet, and so we didn’t fix it.

In fact, we made it worse.

(Over the years, I've commissioned a few different artists to put together a set of Dracula's Feast cards. This one was an artist/graphic designer from reddit, whose name I have lost.)

The next version attempted to fix the balance issues. But this is when we started running into issues with another one of the questions:

Do they work with all player counts/any combination of characters/future expansions?

In a larger game, Zombie consistently had a good chance of winning. In smaller games, however, he (again) had zero advantage. By the time you’ve danced with three players, you literally have all the information in the game, and everyone knows exactly who you are. He may as well have had the ability “Accept all dances”, which isn’t fun at all.

We played around with a few variations of this - dance with two players, dance three times. This version stuck around for a few months, until Tom Lang (who at that point was just “friend with opinions”, not “official developer”) pointed out how much extra effort the last sentence was, for very little reward.

If I could offer one tip to all designers out there, it would be this: justify your rules. Every rule is something extra the players need to remember. Think of each rule as negative 10 fun, then ask yourself: does this rule really add MORE than ten fun?

In 95% of cases, it doesn’t. A big part of my work as a developer (one of my day jobs when I'm not Jellybean Gameing) is stripping out rules that aren’t necessary. That’s not even to say that they’re bad - just rules that, when removed, people won’t notice are missing.

Kill your darlings. You might like a rule, you might think it’s nifty, it might even be thematic and fun. But if your game doesn’t need it, it needs to go. People who are playing your game for the first time won’t miss it, and they’ll have a cleaner and more elegant experience, and - in most cases - more fun.

And so Zombie was changed to “Accept all dances. Win by dancing three times.” In fact, that’s the version that went out to reviewers - if you like seeing how a game evolves, compare the Dice Have It Review to the current print-and-play, and then when the game arrives, compare it again to the final version.

At this point, we found the problem that a lot of you have already noticed - this still isn’t trackable. Zombie can just announce “Hey everyone, that was my third dance!” and it’s entirely reliant on everyone’s memory to prove or disprove them.

This was a problem with a handful of roles/rules, but the entry has already gone WAY longer than I intended so I'm going to wrap it up there. I’ll be back next week with the second half of the story: Dance Tokens!

Until then, thanks for reading, and thanks so much for your support.

Cheers,
-Peter C. Hayward 
Not a zombie.
(For reals.)

P.S. Each week I link to a currently-running Kickstarter I think you might be interested in - this week is one I ESPECIALLY think you might enjoy, because it’s being run by me! My ex-fianceé and I host a podcast, Being Honest With My Ex - she lives in Melbourne, I live in Toronto, and we get together once a week to discuss our relationship, love, break-ups, and life generally.

We’re trying to raise enough money to get me to Melbourne for a live recording - we launched two days ago, and are already most of the way towards our goal!

If you haven’t heard my podcast, I recommend checking it out (the Kickstarter contains links to some good jumping-in points) and if you have, you’ll know how cool it is. 

Warning: The podcast and the kickstarter both contain swears, and a lot of adult discussion.

 

New logo, updated white samples, and a peek at the playtesting process!
over 7 years ago – Tue, Jan 24, 2017 at 08:20:30 PM

Hey!

The whole Jellybean Games team has been hard at work on Dracula’s Feast lately - our graphic designer Darrell Louder has been designing graphics, our developer Tom Lang and I have been playtesting, and I just got new white samples from China!

I was concerned about the thickness of the cards, so they’ve sourced some thicker cardstock. Look I don’t want to be too graphic, but these cards are going to be juicy. They feel so good and oh man I’m so dang excited.

The rulebook has also been upgraded, to fit all the juicy rules in!

Basically what I’m trying to say is that Dracula’s Feast is going to be full of juice. I sure hope you like juice in your social deduction games!

We also hired a specialized logo artist (logoist? Logologist? Probably logologist.) to put together a new logo for the base game, and our artist Tania Walker created a similar one for the expansion. Behold:

We have had volunteers from all over the world help us with playtesting, and so I thought I’d give you a bit of behind-the-scenes info on the process. I’ve learned so much about game design even since this time last year, and Tom and I are working overtime to make this game as elegant (and juicy) as possible.

Dracula’s Feast has 9 character cards - Dracula, Alucard, Beelzebub, Boogie Monster, Doctor Jekyll, Trickster, Van Helsing, Werewolf, Zombie. Compared to games with 200+ cards, that might seem like it would be easy to playtest, but there are a bunch of juicy questions we need to ask ourselves before we can consider a character ‘finished’:

• Are they fun to play as? This is obviously the most important question - the primary goal with Dracula’s Feast was to counter the problem I kept running into with other social deduction games - being dealt the ‘dud’ role. We try to make each character interesting, unique, and juicy, so that no matter who you end up with, you're sure to have a good time.
• Are they fun to play against? This is the next most important question - it’s easy to make a rad character with crazy juicy powers, but if everyone else at the table is having a bad time, that character obviously has no place in the game. 
• Are they balanced? In some ways, this is a subset of the above two questions: a character with a smaller chance of winning is no fun to play, and a character who can’t be beaten isn’t fun to play against. 
• Do they work with any combination of characters? One of our reviewers misread a rule, and didn’t realize that Dracula was included in every game. As a result, they had a less-than-juicy experience - without Dracula in the game, Van Helsing and Alucard are completely broken.
  
  Another great example is Doctor Jekyll - she has the ability to take the Mystery Guest card at the start of any of her turns, and so any character who messes with the Mystery Guest isn’t going to work with her in play.
  
  Dracula's Feast is a heavily modular game, and so we put a lot of work into trying to make sure that you can have a good time whether you're picking specific combinations or shuffling the characters and choosing them at random.
• Do they work with all player counts? This has been the one that’s tripped us up the most lately; it’s far easier to get a group of 4 or 5 together to playtest (as well as games going significantly faster) and so as we’re able to get larger groups together with more consistency, we’re finding characters who seemed fine are actually overpowered or underpowered in larger groups. 
• Do they work with all styles of play? This is an area where getting feedback from diverse player groups has been amazing - some groups dance every chance they get, some will avoid it at all costs. Some groups accuse early and accuse often, while others will hold off until they have all the information they need to win. Making sure that a character works with all groups is a juicy challenge. 
• Do they work with the expansions and future sets? This is where it really starts getting juicy! Cthulhu and Friends and the promo pack are complete, but I also have the framework of the next two sets - Monster’s Ball and Night of the Mummy in mind, as well as several documents full of juicy ideas for sets after that.
  
  Often when Tom and I are throwing around ideas for tweaks, we’ll come up with characters who can force dances. This might be a solution in Dracula’s Feast (although generally it’s pretty unfun to “force” characters to do anything) but the Monster’s Ball set is based around two characters who need to dance with each other to win, and lose if they dance with anyone else.
  
  Obviously it’s not the end of the world if a character from set 1 can’t be used in set 2, but my ideal version of the series will allow you to take characters from any set and mix them with any other set. 
• Is it thematic? Van Helsing is trying to find Dracula, Doctor Jekyll transforms into a monster, Boogie Monster triggers off dancing...it’s important that the characters are thematic, not only to ensure as immersive an experience as possible, but to make all the different abilities easier to remember.
  
  Tania did a great job tailoring the art to the abilities (check out Alucard, for example - people take one look at that card and immediately understand why he wins by being mistaken for Dracula) and so we're doing all we can to make sure the entire game is just as thematic. 
• Are they easy to understand? This is a game of hidden roles and secret identities, and so players who are given a juicy character they don’t understand are going to have a rough time - after all, you can’t just ask the other players for clarification. This isn’t a problem after a few games, but after a few bad games it’s unlikely that people are going to want to play again…
  
  This is less a problem with the VIPs - the characters who are face-up from the very start of the game - but for everyone else, we’re constantly trying to make them simpler, more intuitive, and as thematic as possible.

As you can see, even though there’s only nine characters in the base set, there’s a lot of work that goes into each one! We’re signing off on more characters by the day, and I’m confident that we’ll have the game to the printer by the deadline.

We’ve gotten a few comments from people wanting to make sure that we’re focusing on quality, and not rushing anything - I can assure you, this game is my baby and I won’t be printing it until I’m 100% happy with what we’ve put together!

If people are interested in these “designer diary” kind of updates, let me know! Board game design is something I think about constantly, and I could talk about it for literally hours. I don’t really have much opportunity to do so, so if you want to hear it, I’m happy to share!

That’s all for this week - I’ll be back next week with another juicy update!

Thank you so much for your support,
-Peter C. Hayward
Juicy.

P.S. In each of these updates, I like to let my backers know about a currently-running Kickstarter that they might be interested in! This week, it's a cool and weird project from Jonathan Gilmour - the designer of Dead of Winter, an enthusiastic backer of Dracula's Feast, and one of the classiest acts in board games today. He's participating in Kickstarter's "make/100" initiative, and hand-making 100 copies of an exclusive new game. Once he's made the 100 copies, there's going to be no other way to get the game, so get in fast! I don't know what the game is going to be yet, but knowing Jon, I can assure you it's going to be good. Check it out!