Failing fast is often talked about in business but can be readily demonstrated as being highly important in tabletop board game design.
Getting ideas out of your head and onto paper is probably the first piece of advice I would give to anyone new to game design. What may seem like a fantastic idea in your head, whether it be simply an idea or a fully worked-out game, can turn out to be clunky, boring and simply not work when you get put it on paper. Prototyping fast and ultimately failing fast is therefore critical to successful game design.
I’m currently working on my next game: a card game that is loosely based on an obscure traditional competitive card game. This isn’t the first time I’ve started trying to design around this concept. It’s a game that my nan introduced me to when I was a kid and I have very fond childhood memories of playing it with her. Upon finding out it was actually a rather obscure game yet one I absolutely loved I wanted to bring it to more people. It was actually my very first attempt at a game design way back in 2015, before Assembly. I was sure it was going to work but simply put, it was awful – you were better off just playing the original than my slightly modified version using a deck of 52 playing cards.
Fast forward 5 years and I’m trying again, but this time I’m starting from the point that I want it to be fully cooperative. This requires significant changes to the game and moves away from just needing a deck of 52 cards. I thought I had it. I thought it was sorted but the more I played it, the more dissatisfied I became. I realised it just wasn’t right. Had I not prototyped it up and played it I would never have known this and instead gone on designing a game in my head that didn’t work.
I decided that I needed some external input so I sat down with my hubby, Stu and we brainstormed. My gut was telling me the problem was the win conditions. That they weren’t interesting enough but I was reluctant to ditch them as they were key to how the game played out, even if they did feel quite mechanical.
After around half an hour of brainstorming, between us we managed to come up with what we thought was an excellent solution – we’d add a feeling of someone catching up to you using the existing cards which require some extra decision making. There would be ways to both positively and negatively influence this using the existing components. We’d also split out tracking to make it easier to handle during game play. We thought we were sorted but then I tried it and immediately I could see it didn’t work, there was just too much admin which was too easy to forget. It was too fiddly, so I removed it; it seemed like the perfect solution but if even I couldn’t remember to implement the rules, how was the average gamer going to remember?
A week or two passed and back to the drawing board we went again. Another brain storming session, this time longer, well over an hour just chatting through ideas. My gut was telling me the win conditions were the problem. That they weren’t exciting enough. But I needed them there to make sure the game wasn’t too easy and to encourage players to exhibit certain behaviours so they didn’t ‘break’ the game. But perhaps there was another solution?
I resisted for a while and then it hit me. The idea Stu had for a ‘chase feeling’ could work but I needed to ditch all my current win conditions. We could influence how players interact with the cards through a different mechanism. Rather than specify what was required, we could instead reward behaviour that we wanted and penalise behaviour that we didn’t. This would incentivise players to play how the game was designed but would allow them to break the rules I had originally laid out without breaking the gameplay. The beauty of this is that it gives players more control over their actions as well as obvious consequences. It moved the power from game designer to player. It made playing it more fun.
That’s not to say the game is complete. I still need to do a ton more testing and refining plus I still feel there’s a layer or two missing to make it the sort of game I’d want to publish, but I think we are moving in the right direction and we now have a much better game than we did a few weeks ago. But I’d say I’m at a stage that I’m happy to show it to others which is progress! Now I just need to start organising some playtesting!
However, had I not tried these new ideas immediately this could be a different story entirely. I would have gone on thinking the problem was solved when instead all we had done was make the gameplay worse. This is why failing fast is so important in game design. It’s not just about the ideas, it’s about how players interact with the components. How much they have to remember, the impact of luck and how this feels during game play. How fiddly it is. Without experiencing this for yourself, how do you know if it works or not?
But there’s something more important than getting your idea to the table and seeing if it works, it’s about recognising that it doesn’t work or it’s not quite right. Being willing to chuck away hours of playtesting to do something different & better. You have to be willing to change what you’re doing, which is probably the hardest thing of all.
Have you had an idea that you thought was excellent in your head but turned out not be as good as you expected?
What did you do?
How long did it take you to get it to paper?
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