So you might have noticed via a Twitter announcement earlier in the week, or via the link on this site’s home page, that we posted some alternative rule variants for Army Of Zero this week.  You can read them here.

These are rule variants for the basic game.  We’re still (yes, still!) working on a co-operative Army Of Zero game, using the existing cards but pitting players against a common foe, but it’s been hard to get the thing working as well as we wanted, so I’m afraid you’ll have to wait a bit longer for that.  But have a look at the new, optional rules for the existing game, and see if you like them.

You can pick and choose which ones you want to incorporate into your games, but I confess that my favourite is the one we’ve called the “Champion” variant.  In this version, you don’t have to pre-order your characters and play through them in that order - you can choose any character from your hand to go into battle. We’ve found that if you play the game this way, it’s much more natural to develop favourite characters, and as a player you become rather more involved in your characters’ struggles.  You feel it more when they lose, but you also enjoy it more when they are victorious.  We like this variant so much that we used it almost exclusively at Game ‘09 in Manchester last weekend.

At Game ‘09, we also used the “Skirmish” variant, where each player receives five cards instead of the more usual ten.  We opted for this to make the games shorter, so we could get through more rounds with the show visitors who wanted a game, and it worked pretty well.  We didn’t use the “Carnage” variant, which replaces the game’s six-sided dice with eight-sided ones, because the standard game only comes with the six-sided dice.  We just wanted to present the game using whatever was in the box.

Here’s something I found particularly informative. We had a game of Sensible Soccer, which I spent far too much time on in the nineteen-nineties, and guess what? It was still great! The graphics were primitive in the extreme, but it was fast and easy to get the hang of and consequently brilliant fun. And it played nothing like football, but it didn’t matter because you got that it looked like football, so you knew the object of the game, and then you got that it was fun, and so who needs the “realism” of FIFA10?

I’m reminded of a documentary I saw once about seventies TV sci-fi, in which the “special” effects were discussed. The point was made that the fact that the spaceships were painted egg-boxes on bits of wire wasn’t a concern, because the viewer was quite happy to accept that the egg-boxes were a representation of a spaceship. Of course they were! You couldn’t film an actual spaceship, so what were the special effects guys supposed to do? The egg-boxes were used to inform us that the spaceship was on the move - and on with the story.

And so it is with Sensible Soccer. And it was a timely reminder, as we continue to work on the Army Of Zero rule expansions, that realism comes a distant second to playability and fun. Being able to pick up the game and just play it and have fun with it is paramount, and simulating “realistic” combat doesn’t matter. At all.

We haven’t blogged for a couple of weeks, but we’ve been plenty busy writing up and testing the variant rules for Army Of Zero (and clearing out the stockroom, but that’s not as interesting). Actually, rather than talking about variants to the rules it’s maybe more accurate to say that we’re coming up with new games that you can play with the Army Of Zero deck.

As well as offering a different way to play, the additional rules will let you play with more than two players.

There are two main approaches that we’re working on. It looks like one new game will be purely cooperative, and will involve all the players working together to defeat a common enemy.  We like co-operative games when they play well, like Pandemic.  And here’s an example of an invented cooperative card game called Seamus.

The other approach will be more of a team game, with the players divided into (probably) two teams, and those teams competing against each other.  This version will use many more of the 84 character cards than the standard game - perhaps even all of them, if we can hone the rules to make it keep moving quickly - to give more of an “Army” vibe.  Zombies!!! is a game that does a great job of keeping things moving while there are lots of pieces in play, so it can be done.

It seems likely that we’ll be making more use of the clans in the new games, too. You’ll get extra benefits such as enhanced stats if you hold more than one member of a particular clan in your hand at once, so there’ll be a new “collecting” element to the game. This will make some cards more valuable than others, because not all clans have the same number of characters in them. There’s only one member of the Horse clan, for example, but there are three Hyenas.

None of this, of course, affects the basic game, which will stay just the same, but for those of you who have asked - and we’ve had inquiries particularly about playing Army Of Zero with three or four participants, and about adding a bit of complexity - it will add some new perspectives.

So, at the moment we’re drawing up the rules, but we are looking for play-testers! If you’d like to help us out, and have an influence over the new games, then please email playtest@pointzerogames.com.

Also - maybe it’s a bit early for this - we’re going to need new names for the games. We’re thinking along the lines of Army Of Zero: Blah Blah Blah or Army Of Zero: Whatever. Probably we need to play the games a few more times and do a better job at setting the theme, but if you’ve got ideas, or even ideas that we could use for codenames right now, let us know, again via playtest@pointzerogames.com.

You can divide games players into three types:

1. Those who play by the official rules.
2. Those who think they are playing by the official rules, but who have got something (usually slightly) wrong.
3. Those who play by their own modified versions of the official rules.

Actually, there’s also a Type 4 who don’t play by any agreed or consistent set of rules, but since these are known as “dirty rotten cheaters”, we won’t discuss them any further.

The game that I can think of where the three main types are most prevalent is actually one of the most successful board games ever - Monopoly.  I haven’t done the research, but I’m willing to guess that more people fall into types 2 and 3 with Monopoly than with any other popular game.

I’m not a fan of Monopoly (though we have two copies in the house, in addition to copies of Junior Monopoly and Anti-Monopoly), and I think a lot of people share those feelings, but it’s a great example of rule variants.  Some of the unofficial rule variants that exist are so well-known that they have become de facto rules that need agreeing, and the pre-game checklist  becomes:

• Choose a banker
• Pick your tokens
• Roll to see who starts
• Are we paying fines to the Free Parking square?

The preponderance of rule variants doesn’t reflect well on Monopoly.  Players usually introduce the variants to either make the game more interesting (like the Free Parking rule mentioned above), or to correct some real or perceived flaw in the gameplay.  For example, the start of Monopoly, according to the standard rules, is notoriously unfair in favour of the person who starts and to the detriment of those who set off last.  In a six-player game, the poor sixth player finds themselves following in the dust of the other players, landing on property that’s already been snapped up and not only having to cough up rent from the get-go but not having the opportunity to buy property themselves.

One of the variants most often introduced to tackle this is the rule that you can’t buy anything on the first time around the board.  I was never convinced by this rule, because at best all you’re doing is shifting the problem from the start of the game to the point where someone completes the first lap.  In fact I suspect it makes it worse, because by the end of that first lap everyone’s more spread out.  In fact it’s not inconceivable that the pace-setters could lap the tail-enders through pure chance, leaving the tail-enders with even slimmer pickings once they finally complete their first lap.

An alternative is to randomly stagger the start, so instead of everyone starting on Go, some players start from Go, some start from Just Visiting, some start from Free Parking and some start from Go To Jail.  I haven’t tried this myself, but it sounds like it makes sense (though if you don’t want some players to feel hard-done-by, it helps if they appreciate that Mayfair and Park Lane aren’t the best set of properties).

And so on and so forth.  Click this link for more suggested rule variants for Monopoly.

Another interesting phenomenon, particularly noticeable amongst the better known games - and again, Monopoly is a prime example - is the way that everyone thinks they know the rules, but actually they don’t exactly.  For example, I just found out - and I’m sure I’ve never played Monopoly this way - that if a player lands on an unowned property and decides not to buy it, then the property is auctioned to the highest bidder.  Wow, really?  Have a look at this PDF from Hasbro’s own site if you don’t believe me.

The reason for having this post in the first place is that we’ve been thinking about “official” rule variants for Army Of Zero.

There are a couple of rule variants that we’re playtesting at the moment and are broadly happy with, and a further couple that need a bit more work before we’re really happy with them.  The latter two are about playing Army Of Zero with more than two players: we’ll get back to you on those.

The other two are very straightforward, and we know of a few players already using them.  Firstly, you don’t need ten cards each at the start of the game.  If you want to play a quicker game, why not try five cards each?  Or if you want a longer game, try playing with 15 cards each.

Secondly, here’s a variant that can be used if you don’t like players having different sizes of Squad (after some warriors have been defeated).  Basically, when a combat is over, the losing player discards their warrior, and the winning player, instead of putting the winning card onto a separate pile ready for the next phase, just puts it to the bottom of their Squad Pile.  Play simply continues until one player has no cards left.  This variant was explained to me as a way to cut down on the space you need to play the game (you can basically play it on you knees, although some sort of container to throw the dice into is recommended!) but it also eliminates the way that some warriors don’t “get a turn” when the two squad sizes are different, because each card still comes up in rotation.

We’ll be “officially” making available a set of rules variants shortly.  In the meantime, feel free to contact us, either via email or in the comments below, if you have any favourite variants of your own.

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.

One of the questions I get asked most frequently when I mention that I’ve designed a game is: “Have you tested it?”.  Actually, it’s probably the second most popular question, the most popular being: “You what?”  But the testing question is a good one, and I want to spend today’s post, and probably a couple of subsequent posts too, talking about it.

Here’s what I wanted to test:

• Is there enough FUN!! in the game?
• Do the game mechanics work?
• Do the puzzles work?

Today I’m thinking about the game mechanics, and whether the game mechanics do the best job they can of meeting Army Of Zero’s design criteria?

We spent a lot of time round the kitchen table, playing various versions of the game with our kids but also with any of their friends and cousins who wandered through our front door.

These playtesting sessions also helped is to streamline the gameplay a lot - a good thing, because we wanted the game to play as quickly as possible.

For example, early versions of the game had a “wound” system.  If your character got hit, you’d put a little counter on his card to indicate he was wounded, but he wouldn’t die until/unless he got hit again.  I guess the idea was that if you got hit, you had a second chance.

What actually happened in practice was that the player tended to start playing defensively, and consequently the second wound took a while to come.  Eventually we realised that if we got rid of the wound system then (a) the game played more than twice as quickly, and (b) we didn’t need to supply the counters.

That idea about having a second chance was bogus anyway: your character could avoid being hit in the first place by being faster than the other character, being better in combat, or by having good armour.

We also quickly realised that we didn’t need as many character stats as we started off with.  We began with 5: SPEED, ATTACK, DEFEND, WEAPON and ARMOUR.  ATTACK and DEFEND were supposed to indicate how skillful the character was at, well, attacking and defending, but things improved a lot when we replaced the two of them with a single stat called COMBAT.

That change, incidentally, also had a big impact on the puzzles - I’d go so far as to say it made them work - but I can’t say much more about that without giving stuff away!

The only real issue that we had with the balance of the early versions of the game was that we discovered that it was really, really hard for a character with WEAPON -2 to beat a character with ARMOUR 2.  In the original rules, the attacker had to beat the defender’s score, so the only way for the attacker to win was to throw a six (total score 6-2 = 4) and hope that the defender threw a 1 (total score 1+2 = 3).  The odds of this happening are 1 in 36, and to even earn that 1 in 36 chance you have to beat the other character for speed or combat first.

We tried replacing the six-sided dice with eight-sided and ten-sided, and even tried using different dice for different tests, but we decided it was getting too complicated.  In the end we just tweaked the rule to say “if it’s a draw, the attacker wins”: sort of like the offside rule in football, we liked rewarding attacking play.

Now the attacker wins with rolls of 6/1, 6/2 or 5/3, giving odds of 1 in 12, which feels about right for the worst weapon in the game against the best armour.

I’m pleased that we found these problems, because that was the entire purpose of the playtesting.  If we’d done the playtesting and decided that the first design was optimal, I think it more likely that there would have been a flaw in the testing process.

I was going to entitle this post “Playtesting #1″, but then I changed it to “Testing #1″, having realised that not all our testing was done through play. Because Army Of Zero is relatively simple, we could actually computerise the gameplay, so that we could simulate many, many thousands of rounds of combat and make sure that there weren’t any nasty hidden circumstances where the rules came unstuck.  We could also check the balance of the game and make sure that particular characters weren’t dominating.

Here’s one example of a chart that we produced.  This particular chart was used to check whether characters with high SPEED had any innate advantage:

If there had been obvious clusterings (horizontally), it would have meant that some characters were winning too easily.  Fortunately, it looks pretty much randomly spread out.  We had similar results when we looked at the other characteristics.

So anyway, long post today, phew. In the next couple of posts, I’m going to talk about testing the puzzles, and testing the FUN!!

After fiddling about with a few ideas, I’m coming to a few conclusions about what I want Army Of Zero to be.  There’ll be more about the puzzle element in another post, but for now I think it’s important to set out my grand vision of how Army Of Zero should play.

I’m writing this from the perspective of a parent as well as a game designer.  I’m not going to argue with the success of Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh!, those people clearly know what they’re doing.  However, I want to make a game that a parent can pick up really quickly and then play with their kids in 10 to 15 minutes.  And although I want some decision-making by the players, at the same time I want to avoid older kids having a big advantage over younger kids (personal trauma, don’t ask).

So here’s my gameplay manifesto.

Army Of Zero will be:

Quick To Learn

Quick To Play

Playable Between Age Groups

Every change in the gameplay design must improve at least one of these aims.

During the development process, I’m going to come back to this post at regular intervals to make sure I’m still following the manifesto.