So, yes. We’ve been playing Lego Minotaurus this week. Minotaurus is part of a range of games, which includes Ramses Pyramid, Lunar Command and Creationary, as well as a few smaller, lower cost games. Creationary seems a bit different from the rest, in that it’s basically Pictionary-with-LEGO. and I think that this game, along with the other games that LEGO has released this year, is potentially very significant for the perception of board games amongst the wider public.

Award-winning Eurogame designer Reiner Knizia has been involved to some extent with the design of the games. Even though it’s not clear how much he’s actually contributed to the games’ design, or whether it’s more of a PR thing, it’s an interesting development that LEGO clearly think it’s beneficial to have a name designer on board.

These aren’t the first games that Lego has published. A few years ago, my youngest and I played game after game after game of LEGO Racers, in which you built a racetrack out of interlocking cardboard pieces, then raced your LEGO cars around the track. Movement was determined by a spinner, and you could pick up various power-ups as you progressed around the track.

Good fun, but it didn’t really need to be LEGO. What’s different, and very interesting, about this new batch of games is that they are much closer to the brand values of LEGO, in particular its appeal to creativity and interchange.

Briefly, here’s how Minotaurus works. It’s a game for two to four players, and each has to navigate three pieces from one corner of the board to the centre. The board is a LEGO base with a simple labyrinth, constructed out of more LEGO pieces. The design of the initial labyrinth is set out in the rules (but more about that in a moment).

There’s a piece called the Minotaurus, which starts in the middle, and can be moved around by the players. If the Minotaurus catches a player’s piece, that piece has to return to the corner where it started.

The dice - also made of LEGO - has the numbers three to six on it, plus a grey face and a black face. Throw a number, and you get to move one of your pieces. Throw a grey face, and instead of moving you get to reconfigure a wall, either to block an opponent or to clear your own route to the centre. Throw black and you get to move the Minotaurus piece eight spaces, hopefully to catch or at least block an opponent.

So it’s really straightforward, and kids should have no difficulty picking it up. What’s interesting from a gamer’s perspective is that the rules actively encourage mucking about with the game. There are suggested tweaks, including changing the labyrinth layout, making the Minotaurus faster, or allowing players to jump walls if they throw a certain number, but implicitly the rules say: MAKE UP ANY RULES YOU LIKE. GO NUTS!

And this is what should make the LEGO games interesting to the specialist game community. It’s not that the game mechanics are particularly innovative, it’s that the game actively encourages variants and modifications, and because it’s LEGO, there’s no shortage of extra bits and pieces that can be filched from the toybox to make new pieces for the game.

From there, it’s only a short leap for kids to start using LEGO to make up their own games. What a wonderful opportunity for children - and their parents - to realise that they don’t need to be confined to the published rules. This approach to gaming is, of course, already recognised in the hardcore gamers’ world, but when a toy company with the reach of LEGO gets behind it, things could really get interesting.

“Point Zero Games” and “Army Of Zero”… what’s the big idea?

When we first started putting real thought into creating the characters, we decided that we ought to have a way of generating character stats that made all the gameplay balance. We didn’t know at the start how many characters we would have, and indeed we thought (before wiser heads prevailed) that we might have many more than the 84 we ended up with.

So we looked at ways of creating the characters in a way that would tie in with the puzzles and still leave a playable game. Was there a way to automatically do that? If there was, it would make creating (literally) an army of characters possible - we’re talking hundreds of characters, each with a name, stats and their own (computer-generated) image.

I recalled an article I’d read about the classic computer space-trading game Elite, whose authors Braben and Bell had used pseudo-random numbers (actually the Fibonacci sequence) to build their galaxies, and we played with similar ideas for a while. It would have been a good way to go if we’d pushed ahead with the enormous army that we originally planned, Eventually, though, saner heads prevailed and we started to settle on a smaller group of characters. When we figured out that we could get a manageable number of unique characters by having four character stats and each character’s stats adding up to zero, we knew we had something that we could make work.

I’ve written about the balance that this gave the game in a separate post, so I won’t go over it again here.  But we had the germ of the “zero” idea.

So the name of the game flowed from that.  In retrospect, “Order Of Zero” and “League Of Zero” might have been more appropriate, because of the fact that those names both imply the need to put the cards into a sequence.  (I’m not revealing any secrets here: I’ve mentioned this before.)  But “Army Of Zero” has echoes of the existing phrase “Army Of One“, so that works too.

The company name came later, but we wanted to have some kind of theme going through the company name and riffing off the word “zero” seemed a more abstract - and hence less restrictive - choice for future projects than “army”.  “Point Zero” worked out well for the treasure hunts too, because we could use the word “point” as in “compass point”: the graphic we used for the treasure hunts is a compass rose with “Z” for zero replacing “N” for north.

Today, my eyes are sore from staring at the cards, checking and checking and checking again.  In some ways, this is the part of the playtesting process that’s most important; or at least, if not most important, then it’s the place where mistakes are least easily forgiven.  A typo in the rules would be irritating, but wouldn’t upset the apple-cart too much.  Ah, but the puzzles, there’s a place where you really don’t want anything to go wrong.

I’m thinking of the puzzles as a game between me and the player, and as with all games, it’s no fun if one participant in the game finds its too hard.  Although I won’t be there to see it, there is a sense in which I, as the designer, get a kick out of the player having a “eureka!” moment.

I’ve been testing the puzzles in various ways.  I can do very quick first-pass checks of a lot of the puzzles on the computer: another benefit of using the computer to render the cards in the first place.  By my method of counting there are ten puzzles, or eleven if you count figuring out what the overall objective is (but don’t put too much store by this, because some of the puzzles are related and you might reckon it differently), and the computer checks all but two.  But that said, this testing assumes that there are no errors between generating the card images and getting them printed off.  So even after the computer checks, it’s necessary to get a physical copy and go through the puzzles “in real life”.

The computer checks can be gone through in about 15 minutes, but doing it all physically takes longer - maybe an hour and a half.  So I do the computer checks quite often, at least with each new rendering of the cards, and I do the physical checks only at strategic milestones in the development process.

Um, I don’t know what else I can tell you without giving too much away.  You’ll need a bit of space, I think.  Our kitchen table wasn’t quite big enough to cope with some of the puzzles.  Also, I’ve been running through the puzzles in a particular order, but only because I was being systematic about it; you might find yourself figuring out in a different order, and that’s fine.

FUN!! is a difficult thing to pin down.  We spent a lot of time round the kitchen table, playing various versions of the Army Of Zero with our kids but also with anyone else of the appropriate age group who wandered through our front door.  This was very useful in terms of seeing whether it was FUN!!, even though it was hard to quantify.

These playtesting sessions also helped us increase the FUN!!  As much as we liked the original game mechanics, we went into the process wanting to jettison as many rules as we could, because rules aren’t FUN!! A lot of the games we like - just to pick some examples, Cluedo, Risk, and one of our new favourites, Sprouts - don’t have much in the way of actual rules. Or look at the iPod. Why is the iPod such a design classic? Partly because it has all your favourite music on it, and what’s not to like about that, and partly because its UI, at its best, is barely even there.

We (casually) asked our playtesters for some feedback, and here are some of the things our play-testers said they liked about the game.

• “Even when you’re being beaten, you still feel like you’ve got a chance.” We still talk about Fracture’s Stand, when that particular character was the last one standing for one player, while the other player still had five characters left. Fracture took them all out one after the other; after that, all our players knew that the game wasn’t over until it was over.
• “It’s good the way that you can defend for two rounds and then attack. It feels realistic”. We like this comment a lot. We like that the player thinks that the rules create the illusion of something realistic although they are really quite simple.
• “The fights are over very quickly.  It makes it exciting.”.  In the original rules, a character had to be wounded twice before he was out of the game.  We changed that rule to make it that one good strike was all that was needed.  We did this to speed up the combat, mainly to cut down on the time needed to play the game.  But we also found out that it made the game more fun, because players know that each character is at risk all the time; each character can be out of the game in an instant.