I thought I’d stick with the original German for this particular announcement!

News of Divinare’s place on the recommended list for the Spiel des Jahres reached me early yesterday morning — via the wonders of Twitter. As Tony Boydell put it:

Woot! Congrats to @55cards for the SdJ recommendation for Divinare! Woot! Woot! Woot!

— Anthony Boydell (@tonyboydell) May 21, 2013

Not sure I can add much to that sentiment, other than to heartily congratulate all of the nominees — and the other recomendees, of course, assuming that’s a word.

Earlier this week I got the prototype for new territorial city-building game Angkor Thom to the table for the third time. On the first and second outings, we’d played the game for maybe as long as 45 minutes, but had then all agreed, politely, to abort.

Those first playtest revealed several key shortcoming, and was rightly ended prematurely. The second, which made some big changes, would simply have taken far too long to reach its conclusion: there was far too much for the players to do before they game could reward them. If we’d had the patience to finish either of them, it would have been a very hard slog.

Third time lucky, you might say: I’d made some more big changes to the game: streamlining the player actions and speeding up the choice. I still didn’t have much comprehension for how the game would feel if we ever got to the end, and I fully expected at the start of the playtest that we probably wouldn’t find out.

Although we all fumbled around at the beginning, forgetting and remembering rules and not quite being able to see where the game was headed, the pieces started to fit. And it was simply good fortune that when the time came for us to agree either to stop mid-game — to abort, discuss, and then move on to other prototypes — that we had actually made it to a point that felt like a mid-game, a second act. This meant we had begun to see further ahead, and that we all wanted to discover what the third act would deliver. We girded our gamer loins, and played on.

And we made it! And far from losing steam towards the end, the game picked up, pulling us towards a conclusion in which we were all very invested.

What’s interesting to reflect upon is this: that if we’d stopped in the middle, which is so often the fate for young prototypes, my conclusions about what was worked and what didn’t would have been very different.

All games impose restrictions on their players, and although I may not be the most doctrinaire of designers — favouring freedoms over limitations — the early game seemed to be telling me to be even more free than I had been.

Player freedoms are attractive, but they will amplify choice, and more choice means more time. And Angkor Thom is still too long. It seems obvious that you won’t be able to tell how long a game takes unless you get to the end, but I think it bares repeating.

And there’s also value in observing that, unless you push through with a playtest, and begin to interrogate the further reaches of your game, you won’t know how early decisions can impact the game later on. This, dear reader, is what people call strategy.

All my design instincts tend towards the tactical, so I was more surprised than anyone to discover that, in the third act, my early choices were coming back to bite me. Every turn and every action is deliberately discrete, and yet the sum of these simple, singular actions turned out to be something greater. The game had, much to my delight, some genuinely emergent characteristics.

So the playtest represented several big successes, the biggest of which was simply that it actually managed to stop at the right time.

If there’s one thing I’ve learnt about game design it’s that nothing’s ever wasted. The only problem is that it’s sometimes hard to tell the wheat from the chaff.

Recently I have been playtesting two new prototypes, and I think it’s interesting to reflect on my experiences nursing them through their respective infancies. Something common to both is that they are the product of old ideas, which have either been brought back from the grave or reconstituted from the scattered limbs of several other games.

Aegea

This one is a true resurrection. A long time ago, I created a prototype called Archipelago. It seemed to have a lot going for it. It looked the part. It had a little boat.

I entered it into the 2009–2010 Hippodice contest where it caught the attention of a couple of well-known German publishers on the contest jury. At the time I was very excited. I believed I’d created a game that felt like the real deal.

I was very grateful to Hippodice and to the interested parties in Germany, but I can clearly see now how the game flattered to deceive. Yes, it looked the part, but there was far too much work still to do. It was very attractive, but it was just very attractive chaff.

Roll on three years and things look very different. I dug up the game after its long slumber in November, and re-imagined the game completely. I jettisoned almost everything, and have wrestled the game through repeated and sometimes faltering playtests over the past four months into its current form.

And it’s very close. It’s nearly there. I had an excellent playtest at the weekend in the rarified company of Alan Paull and David Brain and it was interesting and gratifying to see how these two hardcore strategists tackled the game’s tactical core. I like it; they liked it. But I’m not sure I’ve quite excised all the chaff just yet, so there is still a bit of work.

And there’s still a little boat, too. Everyone loves the little boat.

Sparkle

Other than some low-grade sniggering from my game designer chums about my choice of name, this one has gone from start to finish (well, nearly) in just a few weeks, and with very little resistance. Or at least, that’s how it seems. But I think the reason it’s become so solid so fast is because its ingredients have all been stewing in my head for a good long while.

Sparkle is a tile game; and if you want to know what kind of tile game, Pete Burley’s classic Take It Easy! springs immediately to mind as a suitable exemplar. It’s got hexes, colours and connections, and each player builds their own layout of tiles. It’s very different in execution, but is very much (and quite deliberately) aimed in the same direction.

It is the specifics of all those elements — the nature of the hexes, colours, connections and layout — that have all been harvested from distinctly different game ideas and somehow crystallised into a coherent whole. Somewhat miraculously, the pieces fit; and where they failed in isolation they have flourished in combination.

Which means that the journey really isn’t nearly as short as it appears.

I do have high hopes for Sparkle. It plays 2–6; it’s colourful and engaging; it’s permissive — by which I mean that it never tells the player “Don’t do that!” — and has a very short ruleset. In short, it already does everything I want it to do.

And it’s pleasingly light on chaff, I’d say.

Science is an inherent contradiction — systematic wonder — applied to the natural world. In its mundane form, the methodical instinct prevails and the result, an orderly procession of papers, advances the perimeter of knowledge, step by laborious step. Great scientific minds partake of that daily discipline and can also suspend it, yielding to the sheer love of allowing the mental engine to spin free. And then Einstein imagines himself riding a light beam, Kekule formulates the structure of benzene in a dream, and Fleming’s eye travels past the annoying mold on his glassware to the clear ring surrounding it — a lucid halo in a dish otherwise opaque with bacteria — and penicillin is born. Who knows how many scientific revolutions have been missed because their potential inaugurators disregarded the whimsical, the incidental, the inconvenient inside the laboratory?

Lewis, Amini & Lannon
A General Theory of Love

Science produces ignorance, and ignorance fuels science. We have a quality scale for ignorance. We judge the value of science by the ignorance it defines. Ignorance can be big or small, tractable or challenging. Ignorance can be thought about in detail. Success in science, either doing it or understanding it, depends on developing comfort with the ignorance, something akin to Keats’ negative capability.

Stuart Firestein
Ignorance: How It Drives Science

[S]everal things dovetailed in my mind, & at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously — I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.

John Keats
Letters of John Keats to his Family and Friends

All these quotes come straight from Brain Pickings (one, two, three), Maria Popova’s endlessly fascinating parade of wise observations and quotes, which she carefully curates and places into context from an impressively large and varied collection of sources. Read one post, follow the links, and you’re off down the rabbit hole, something new and unexpected at every turn.

Maria’s mission is to find the unregarded — in art, science, philosophy, design, technology, history, technology — and to reveal it, with the express intention of finding new connections. Bravo!

Creativity, after all, is a combinatorial force.

Maria Popova

Illustration: I want to live in the overlap, by desertstars on Tumblr (discontinued).

In which I report on last weekend’s session, during which six game designers played games old and new, although not necessarily all at the same time.

Kill Doctor Lucky — James Ernest (Cheapass Games, 1996)

It is always a problem finding games that play up to 6, if not beyond, and first to the table was my now positively antique copy of the original Cheapass edition of this title. It’s a curious and amusing twist on the familiar Cluedo country-house murder trope: The players are all would-be killers, desperately trying to catch the eponymous Doctor Lucky alone in one of the rooms of the sprawling family manse long enough to kill him. Each attempt — for example, I actually managed to dispatch him rather quickly in the first game by the judicious use of a ‘tight hat’ — can be foiled by the other players, but the trick is try to get the other players to empty their hands of ‘failure’ cards before you do, so increasing the chance that your next murder attempt will succeed.

It’s cute, and played with the right degree of complicity, funny, but it’s not without its flaws. The turn order is annoyingly jumpy, and can mean that some players can sit for a long time waiting for a chance to do anything at all. The card draw is very choppy, so can land you with a uselessly powerful hand, and the game is, usually — unless you have a tight hat, it seems! — brought to an end through collective and lengthy attrition, and firmly outstayed it welcome second time around.

Again, it is a cute idea, and there are plenty of games out there which get by on less even than that. But perhaps it is simply showing its age. Games and gamers have moved on since 1996. I think I have.

Escape — Kristian Amundsen Østby (Queen Games, 2012)

I tried this first at Essen last year, when its name was on everyone’s lips. And this one really is a clever piece of design; the cleverest part of all being it can only ever take 10 minutes. We played with and without the curses and treasures expansion, and were not, as a group, that sure about what it added, other than complexity; possibly necessary complexity, once you’ve explored the regular game enough, but complexity nonetheless.

My question would be, as much fun as it is, is there something inherent in its form that will limit its ability to claim the holy grail of game design: replayability. I think I would tire of it quickly, and I think I know why: Games are, for me, about the journey, and my issue with Escape’s journey is not that it is merely short, but rather that it is, in a different sense, fleeting. The moments of the game come and go so quickly that they cannot be properly appreciated. It’s like skim-reading great literature or skipping to the last page of the mystery novel. It’s just the punchline, and not the joke.

Heimlich & Co. — Wolfgang Kramer (Ravensburger, 1984)

This was another game from my personal collection, this one collected for next-to-nothing from a charity shop, back in the day when you could actually find decent stuff like classic Ravensburger games in charity shops. I had always wanted to give it a try, but never got the chance; and it was useful that I brought it since the chunky wooden pieces were excellent avatars for our games of Kill Doctor Lucky!

For me, this narrowly edged out the next game as the best of the afternoon. And you really can’t knock it. I mean, it won the Spiel des Jahres! In 1986!

To be honest I sensed a certain chill amongst my gaming colleagues when I laid it out in front of them. It’s such a simple, simplistic even, proposition: secret identities and ‘roll and move’. That’s it? Yes! That’s it. And what it demonstrates is how much game there can be in such a small set of precepts (which is another thing that can definitely be said about the next game, too!). And where Kill Doctor Lucky was cute, this is actually smart.

I am — God knows! — a ‘less is more’ man, but I know that less is more difficult than it looks — and Heimlich & Co. makes it look oh so easy.

The Resistance — Don Eskridge (Indie Boards and Cards, 2009)

I was a Resistance newbie, and I am certainly a convert. It takes the well-known Werewolf setup of unknown assailants and group deception, and boils it down to the purest, strongest, but most drinkable of liquors. It provides just enough structure to make the game run, and then stands back and let’s the players get on with it. And by ‘get on with it’ I mean lie and argue and bluster and accuse and generally get in each other’s faces. Saint Francis of Assisi famously sought to bring harmony where there was discord: The Resistance does precisely the opposite. And with the absolute minimum of fuss.

So my advice is: Go play this game! But I have a proviso: Don’t play it with other game designers. As a breed, I can’t help feeling we’re all just a little too skilled in the art of bare-faced lying to ever be trusted.

Coup — Rikki Tahta (La Mame Games, 2012)

Last up was this tiny little morsel which, like Escape, won a lot of mindshare at last year’s Essen, although this one did it with appreciably fewer resources at its disposal. I very much liked the concept — after all, microgames are close to my heart — but not all microgames are born equal. Brevity may be the soul of wit, but it’s not always a guarantee. For the brand new player, parsing the actions and interactions of the money and the different cards is harder than it should be, and I have to believe there is a better way to represent them than the over-sized spreadsheet-like player aid.

The game does begin to run more smoothly once players are up to speed (which is of course an unremarkable observation about almost every game), but once they have, I sensed a sort of procedural nature to our play. To be fair, and this is true of all the games we played, the way a particular group chooses to play could definitely make all the difference, but I don’t think Coup is nearly as generous and as open as The Resistance is, in this sense: that the game feels as though it requires significantly more complicity on the part of the group to be played with the texture and interest that appear to be the designer’s intent.

Which, perhaps, is a rather too self-consciously analytical way of saying something simpler: That, all things considered, I think I’d rather play something else.

Or maybe it was just all the other game designers I had foolishly chosen to play with. Yes, that was it: They ruined it for me!

Over at Gallimaufry, friend and fellow game designer Matt Dunstan has written up a report of the very first playtest of our new collaboration, a mercurial beast of a game that we have called Trinity. As Matt points out, there’s no such thing as a ‘bad’ playtest, and although the version of the game we presented (and our unwitting playtesters endured) is a far cry from where it needs to be, by no means was the playtest a failure.

At the same event — the monthly Playtest Meetup in London — I also got in another play of my own prototype Aegea, with, of course, another set of changes. The design is far more mature than Trinity, but no less in need of playtesting. I was very pleased with how the game ran, and the new texture created by the key change I was principally looking to try out. Mission accomplished?

Hardly. I think I can legitimately claim that the core game idea has always been appealing — there’s a little boat; you move it around; it’s cute — and further that for the past few iterations it has been something more: a ‘good’ game. Good, yes, but not finished. Good, but neither wholly connected nor wholly resolved. Good, in exactly the same way that so many games are, but not more than that; not — whisper it! — great.

You might think — if you were prone to absurd rhetorical flourishes — that some games must be born great, and some must have greatness thrust upon them. But I’d be dubious of any designer claiming to be one who can regularly achieve the former, rather than one with hands regularly bloodied by the folly of the latter. I make no such claim, and if I did you’d be right to scoff. And if you did, then I’d scoff right back.

If achieving greatness was just a case of waiting long enough for the arrival of a happy accident, if it were that… simple — well, we’d all be doing it, wouldn’t we? Greatness is not only an act of will, but one of force.

Get your hands dirty, then we can talk.

Photo: Clay Ave Pottery Studio.

Every magic trick consists of three parts, or acts.

The first part is called The Pledge. The magician shows you something ordinary: a deck of cards, a bird, or a man. He shows you this object. Perhaps he asks you to inspect it, to see that it is indeed real, unaltered, normal. But of course, it probably isn’t.

The second act is called The Turn. The magician takes the ordinary something and makes it do something extraordinary.

Now you’re looking for the secret, but you won’t find it. Because, of course, you’re not really looking. You don’t really want to know. You want to be fooled.

But you wouldn’t clap yet. Because making something disappear isn’t enough. You have to bring it back. That’s why every magic trick has a third act; the hardest part. The part we call The Prestige.

Opening monologue from The Prestige. Screenplay by Jonathan & Christopher Nolan, based on the novel by Christopher Priest.

The Prestige should, if you ask me, be required viewing for any game designer.

Why? First, because it’s a brilliantly crafted piece of cinema. Second, because it credits its audience with an uncommon amount of intelligence. And third, and most importantly, because it is itself a game, and one that has a great deal to say about game design. It’s something of a riddle, too, of course, but I believe it’s an honest one. It tells you the rules and then it plays by them. The film may be a mystery, but it’s no trick.

It is a story of three men, three magicians: Angier, Borden and Cutter. Each man understands stage illusion differently, and while each comes eventually to understand the others’ methods and secrets, our protagonists are, in the end, consumed by their mutual obsessions. It spoils nothing to tell you this; the tale, as they say, is all in the telling.

Angier knows what the audience knows, that “The world is simple, miserable, solid all the way through.” He wants to fool them “just for a second”, to “make them wonder.” His trick is to create these moments. Angier is the showman.

Borden, his rival, has a secret. But he knows that “The secret impresses no one. The trick you use it for is everything.” His trick is his own life, and to fool the audience he must nurture that myth above all else. Borden is the storyteller.

Cutter is the ingénieur, working behind the scenes to design illusions and build the apparatus. He understands that the audience “want to be fooled” even while they know that the illusion must, somehow, be real. He understands the illusion and enables it. His trick is to create the machine. Cutter is the engineer.

I think the film resonates with me because it is both entertainment and exemplar: a show about showmanship, a story about how stories are told, and a machine crafted to tell us something about how machines are made.

And, writ large, are the three types of game designer: Showman. Storyteller. Engineer. Which are you?

Or, to put it another way, what do you make: moments, myths or machines?

It has long been an axiom of mine that the little things are infinitely the most important.

Arthur Conan Doyle

The wheels are in motion for the launch of my new project Good Little Games: which I am describing as a showcase of free print-and-play microgames. You can point your browser at goodlittlegames.co.uk (although there’s not much to look at just yet) or follow @goodlittlegames, which will be the primary (and, I promise, not too shouty) news feed for the site once it’s on stream.

What’s a microgame? As with all neologisms, that probably depends on who you ask. I’ve chosen to adopt Alan Paull’s definition of a microgame as a card-based game in which the only bespoke, printed components are 18 or fewer cards. Why 18? Why not! For starters, you can fit 18 Poker-sized cards on two sheets of paper, making delivering the games as print-and-play games straightforward, and keeping the amount of printing needed before the actual playing bit can kick in to a minimum. (The card images will all be sized so that they can be either pasted-up or sleeved with regular Poker-sized or M:tG cards.)

One of the core attractions of the microgame for players is, I think, portability. You can fit an 18-card deck into the smallest of spaces, and conceivably have your favourites with you at all times, ready and waiting to be brought out almost anywhere, to deliver a quick blast of fun during the briefest of downtimes.

For the designer — at least for this designer — their attraction is also in the intellectual challenge of creating something small, but perfectly formed; the distillation of something larger to discover its essential nature. There’s nowhere to hide; no room for lazy thinking or rough edges; no room for anything other than that which is vital. Indeed, you might think there’s barely enough room for a game at all — and there’s the rub! Just how much game can you fit into such small a box?

Microgames also very much feel like an idea whose time has come. The success and sheer presence of the smallest of gems — Love Letter and Coup: I’m looking in your direction — at last year’s Essen was undeniable. And it’s hardly gone unnoticed by the great and the good of the design community. Abundant designer Daniel Solis has been documenting the recent development of his microgame Suspense on his blog, the game-design tweeters are all a-chatter, and over at TMG, Michael Mindes is busy plotting (and blogging about) something which is not-so-entirely-dissimilar (although definitely more organised!).

The microgame has arrived. And little wonder, you might say.

Over at Futility Closet, Greg Ross recently wrote about a problem posited by philosopher David Lewis.

A singer sings this song:

I’m a stockman to my trade, and they call me Ugly Dave.
I’m old and gray and only got one eye.
In a yard I’m good, of course, but just put me on a horse,
And I’ll go where lots of young-uns daren’t try.

He goes on to brag of his skill in riding, whipping, branding, shearing: “In fact, I’m duke of every blasted thing.”

There are two fictions here: The singer is pretending to be Ugly Dave, and Ugly Dave is telling boastful lies. But why doesn’t this collapse? How are we able to tell that the fictional Ugly Dave is lying (which is essential to the song’s meaning), rather than telling the truth?

“We must distinguish pretending to pretend from really pretending,” writes David Lewis in Philosophical Papers. “Intuitively it seems that we can make this distinction, but how is it to be analyzed?”

I cannot answer the philosopher’s question, but the phrase ‘pretending to pretend’ has stuck with me.

When we play games what are we doing? Are we pretending? Or are we pretending to pretend? These feel like very different endeavours, yet both are predicated on the same falsehood: that the game world is real.

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone stand
in the desert…”

So begins Shelley’s famous sonnet Ozymandias. Like almost all fiction it is written in the first and third person: a story told from the author’s perspective about somebody else.

And we know that every part of it is a lie. No reader imagines that the poet actually met a traveller (although he may have done), nor that the ruins described by that traveller are real (although they might be). We ‘know’ this because we are armed with an understanding of the nature of storytelling, and so assume without concern that the events are fictional, even though none of us have any direct way of establishing if the author’s words are genuinely false.

Games are different. They may begin by declaring “You are a traveller from an antique land.” This is a fiction of an entirely different order. It is not just the inventive retelling of some unexperienced history or some unvisited world, it is a lie told in the second person about the reader themself.

If I play that game, I know that I am no such thing, and yet if I am truly to play it then I must be willing to become, at the game’s invitation, that very traveller, and explore those antique lands for myself. To do this I must deliberately, genuinely, honestly pretend; if I can only muster the will to pretend to pretend then I — and surely the game itself — have failed.

Photo: Cobb’s totem from the film Inception.

Our weekly playtesting and game designers’ get-together in Cambridge had a good start to the year on Tuesday with the genuinely grand total of 8 designers in attendance. This week including such design luminaries as TerrorBull Games’ Andrew Sheerin, newcomer and designer of Convoluted Adam Brooks, and a coterie of other sparky, creative and generally fun-to-be-with tabletop game designers. If you’re one of those, and in the Cambridge area (or don’t mind the journey on a wintry Tuesday night) do get in touch.

Any designer will tell you that putting a new prototype on the table in front of new players is often a daunting proposition. An audience of game designers only makes this worse, because they will typically start questioning your design choices before you’ve started playing (or even finished getting all the components out of little plastic bags). This is entirely to be expected, absolutely necessary and just as it should be, but that doesn’t make it any easier to take.

Playtesting needs to be a brutal, challenging, revolutionary, transformative event; if it’s not you’re probably not doing it properly. Or, at the very least, you’re not making the most of the opportunity.

The fantastic thing about sharing this experience with other designers is that no-one minds if you change the rules halfway through, start a game without really knowing how it’s going to end, unilaterally jettison some key part of the game without warning, or simply stop when everything falls apart.

After all, if your game is exactly the same thing at the end of a playtest as it was at the beginning, what’s the point?

Illustration: Third of May 1808, by Francisco de Goya.