Building Games With Story.

As I've written about before once or twice, I'm working on a board game called Septimus. I've now actually done all of the printing, and have all the parts - though I could probably use some more dice. I can get dice easily enough, though. That's not too hard.

I just spent way too long looking up 100 packs of d6s. *sighs* Actually can't seem to find an easy way to get them in bulk, at least not in different colours. I'll keep hunting around, though.

Anyway. That's not what I wanted to talk about. What I wanted to talk about was the difficulty of building games with the story at the centre, which is what I'm trying to do with Septimus. And also, solving multiple problems with one solution.

What I mean is this. A lot of games have some sort of story to them. But most of the time, it's somewhat tenuously linked to how it works mechanically. Choices are always made in favour of making the game work, rather than making the story work. Because the game is more important!

And it is, in a sense. But with this game, I wanted to develop it in such a way that all of the mechanics, as much as possible, made sense from the perspective of story. They should also have a purpose mechanically, of course. But they should make sense within the world that I'm building.

I'll give you the example that I've just been struggling with. So this whole game happens within a giant underground maze/dungeon type thing. With lots of rooms that you go through, and each room has an encounter that you have to face, to both get closer to the middle of the maze, but also to get skill boosts and items. Now, this is all set within the Middle Ages - at about the time when black powder was happening, because that's what one septimus (clan/faction) is focussed around (they were pretty much going to be the wall removers, but then I've taken out walls from the game, because they weren't working; so they're now much more along the actual flavour of Red in MTG). There's no magic. And so the idea was, that when an encounter is revealed, it stays there for the rest of the game. Which makes sense, story-wise. Rooms don't really shift around and move too much, particularly not without magic, or some serious modern-day tech, and especially not underground.

And I created these Encounter Markers to help that - to show which space on the board an Encounter was tied to. They're rather fidgety to sort through, but they're helpful.

The thing is, though, the way that the game plays out, even if you have less players, you're revealing most of the encounters on the board. There are seventy spaces. So probably around sixty cards, let's say, each 8.89cm x 8.89cm. That adds up really quickly, and your playing area grows and grows. If you're playing on a table, that doesn't really work too well. If you're playing on the floor, it doesn't matter so much, but it's still awkward. But I can't really make the cards any smaller - I need that room for all the rules text, the numbers, title, and it's nice to have some flavour text and art as well. (I don't have art at the moment - just a space for it.)

But I realised that this was a problem, and going to be more of a problem the more players you had. It's supposed to work with up to seven players, being optimal at probably four or five. So yeah, there wasn't going to be enough room.

As such, I introduced a new mechanic. The shuffle.

"At any time during a turn — except when an Encounter is being drawn or faced — any player may declare a Shuffle. When this is done, all visible Encounters are shuffled back into their respective decks, and the Encounter Markers put back, except for ones that Heroes are standing on. All other spaces now revert to being Unknown, and are drawn again as normal. If you draw an Encounter that you have already defeated, follow the rules further down. A Shuffle may occur a maximum of once per round; also, the same player may not declare a Shuffle twice in a row."

Unknown spaces, fairly obviously, are spaces where you don't know what's there. If you draw an Encounter that you've defeated, you get a free movement to another space, or can just end your turn if you so choose. A round is when all players have had one turn. I decided to leave in the Encounters that players are on at the time - because that makes sense from a story perspective. All these rooms are shifting and changing around you, but your room doesn't change. It might move to a new location, or something - but that would be complicated to do. I also could have done it that rather than being shuffled back into the deck, they were just shuffled into themselves, and then immediately drawn again until they are redistributed around the board. But that both takes up too much time, and completely misses the point of what I'm trying to achieve with this mechanic.

The idea is that with this, you will have less cards out at any one time. If the encounters that are out at the moment seem too difficult for you, you could declare a shuffle, hoping to get some easier ones. If you think that someone else is just having a super-easy run of it, you could declare a shuffle, hoping to make it trickier for them. But it's going to affect everyone, of course.

Now, there are a couple of things that don't really make sense here, story-wise. I've already mentioned that in that time, rooms really aren't going to be able to move. But hey - the Ennius are master builders, love mechanical things, and I've already got lots of other rooms that I can't explain from a Middle Ages standpoint - particularly not in just a 10m by 10m space or so! So I'm sliding over that a little, so that it will work better as you play.

It also doesn't make sense that one Hero would be able to know what's happening with another one. They can't really have tracking devices or anything, monitoring cameras. A map with little coloured dots showing the other Heroes. Now, again, I might be able to come up with a way for each player to mark their route in secret, perhaps only revealing it when they go to a Junction Space, or something similar. But that's really, really annoying to make work for multiple people at the same time. One person, that's okay. Multiple people? Yeah, no. So I accept that as something that I really can't do anything about.

I mentioned at the beginning that I would be solving two problems with one solution. What were the two? Well, the first, as I mentioned, was the game taking up too much space. The second is that, on opponent's turns, players don't have much to do. I mean, you can watch, and hopefully it's an interesting enough game that that's enough. And some of the players do have Abilities that they can use on an opponent's turn; and there are some Items that work that way too; but not all do. So this gives players another opportunity to be able to do something on an opponent's turn.

Hope you've enjoyed that little look at mechanics, story, and board game design!