This looks interesting: a site for self-publishing games.  At Game Crafter, you can create an account and then upload your artwork for cards, boards and rule booklets, then add dice, play money, tokens, and so on and so forth.  In fact there’s a ridiculous number of bits and bobs available.  Then they’ll put everything into a box and post it to you, plus they’ll offer it for sale on their site, on your behalf.

I did some quick calculations, and it wouldn’t be worth me using it for Army Of Zero, partly because the unit cost would be too high, and partly because the packaging is a bit basic, but your situation and requirements might well be different.  But you can order as few copies as you like, so it looks like a great option for producing quality prototypes and proofs-of-concept, even if shipping from the US might introduce a bit of a time delay.

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.

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.

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!!