My Own Worst Fan: A Critical look at Frontier Scoundrels

Frontier Scoundrels has been in development since July and I think I've hit another key milestone, though it's not necessarily a good one. I've held a few complete start-to-finish playtests of the game, and while I think the game is finally mechanically sound, it's too complicated, ill-focused, and lacks the fun element it needs to have. I'm not sure I can fix the game in its current state.

The past 5 months haven't been wasted though; I know a great deal more about what works and what doesn't. More importantly, I know which of my core mechanics need to change, though that means I need to discard some of my original design focuses.

This will be a long post, so here's a quick table of contents to show you what to expect. Another thing to note is that I aim for this post to be useful as a design exercise for folks and it hopefully won't require prior knowledge of Frontier Scoundrels.

Table of Contents

• The Current Frontier Scoundrels: Summary of the game flow with a link to the complete rules
• Why It's Broken: A breakdown of what's wrong with the current game
• Mulligan: Details on where I'm taking the game next, including a mind-map.
• Thinking Time: Questions for which I need to find answers

The Status of the Expedition

My current lead design project, Frontier Scoundrels, has traversed some difficult terrain lately. I finally played the game from start to finish, which was excellent, but also showed me just how far I needed to go.

The feedback from the test was as follows:

• Explorers didn't have enough interesting choices. They were basically pawns while the Expedition Leader and War Party battled it out. They had little incentives for either outcome, as well.
• Event cards (now Action cards) played almost no role in the game. They were too hard to obtain and didn't matter much.
• Resolving Hardships was too easy.
• The Land mechanic was interesting on paper, but nobody really liked it as executed. During the test, each Explorer selected 1 Land card (from a hand of 3) and gave it to the Expedition Leader face-down. 

I tried to solve these problems in a few ways.

• I made it so that Explorers played a Land card in clockwise order. Instead of the Expedition Leader choosing the order, the Explorer picked it. This actually simplified the game, sped it up, and made the Explorers' choices more interesting.
• I modified the Land to benefit the Explorers more and the Expedition Leader less. This made it so that Explorer's could play cards that leaned in their favor.
• I made it so Explorers earned points as well as the Expedition Leader (though fewer), but also would gain more dice to use throughout the game. 
• I gave players more Action cards at the start of the game and added several ways to get them (primarily tied them into Land to once again make the Explorer's choice more interesting). 
• I made Hardships more difficult by increasing/decreasing the numbers and putting more restrictions on how the dice could be used. I also cleaned up the mechanics here to be more consistent. Just a better change overall. 

Fixing the Trainwreck

Game design is a treacherous path of bad ideas, good ideas paired with bad ideas, and too many good ideas that form into a multi-headed bad idea that just won't go away. Games are one train wreck after another that just keep dog-piling into their predecessor, and just when you feel your playtesters are going to stab you for putting them on yet another no-fun high speed death trap of metaphorical proportions, someone has fun.

That is a magical moment, but for me and Frontier Scoundrels, we just encountered a massive fuel tank laden locomotive colliding with an 18 wheeler crap fest. We are so not there.

Frontier Scoundrels: Second Playtest Results

I got tired of waiting for friends to have a chance to playtest Frontier Scoundrels (people are busy!), so I played a four player game against...myself. It seems silly, but it was an incredibly useful act and I made some good changes because of it.

Here are a few things I learned about the game...

I really enjoy the Explorer bonuses (i.e. which dice you roll) combined with the Command cards. Command cards are assignments dealt by the current Expedition Leader. Players with Command cards roll dice to try to win a Hardship. However, each Command card conveys different bonuses and abilities. For the Expedition Leader, assigning them is a great choice that is fun but not too heavy. You have to quickly scan to see what the challenge is, who is participating, how many points everybody has, which dice they can bring, how the bonuses will change this, and then think about who can do the most damage with the bonus contained on a card.

The challenge is that you must give out Command cards, but which ones and to whom? You must involve the others! The other great part is that sometimes you get Command cards that are basically duds, which restricts your choices even further.

I was really pleased with this mechanic.

It was difficult to test the Frontier Scoundrel cards by myself. Each player has a set of them and different cards can be played at different times. Some are offensive, others defensive, and some can be used in both ways. What I did learn, however, is that three of the nine cards I had were worthless and never seemed useful. I cut these three and swapped them out for two new cards: one allows a player to wager against the current hardship (which is especially great if you aren't participating in the current turn) and the other allows a player to counter another Frontier Scoundrel card.

The cards I did use were useful and entertaining.

I really enjoyed the two different dice mechanics the game currently employs. I fiddled with the tuning on some of the cards, but I thought the current weight and probability of the dice felt pretty good. Two of the Eight Hardships tried were failed. Another two were almost failed, but a good roll and some well-placed Frontier Scoundrel cards fixed things. Perfect! Well, I may actually want 3 of 8 to be failed, but we can see how that goes. Dice will be dice...

The current mock up for Hardship cards...

I'm currently worried the punishments for failure won't affect the game enough. I added a -1 Point penalty for Expedition Leaders when Hardships are failed to make them sting just a little bit more. I did this for another reason as well, however. I noticed that later in the game players didn't have enough options by which to gain the lead. I think this -1 point loss will give players another way to hurt the leader in hopes of taking the lead themselves.

I tweaked a lot of the numbers pertaining to most Hardships, re-wrote a few of the punishments, and tweaked some of the tuning on Frontier Scoundrel cards. The score was fairly tight, which I enjoyed. I really like the current bonus mechanic and how it's an advanced strategy to try to figure out who will get the bonus to stop them from getting it.

A bit surprisingly, I found out that not one, but two other designers are working on exploration games. One is even working on a Lewis and Clark themed game (dammit) titled Corps of Discovery, which was the first name for Frontier Scoundrels. And there I was thinking Lewis and Clark was a fairly safe bet for a unique theme...

And so, our Adventurers Set out on the Grand Expedition...

After about a month and a half of brainstorming, rule writing, content creation (and cutting), tuning, scrounging for sweet antique dice and pawns, swapping out components to lower the cost of the eventual game, writing flavor text, designing card layouts, cutting the cards, I finally have a playable prototype of my latest game.

I originally called it The Adventures of CLEB, CLEB being an acronym for the name of the characters (Clark, Lewis, Ethel, and Buford). I then briefly settled on Corps of Discovery, which was the name of the organization to which the explorers belonged. Finally, I decided upon Frontier Scoundrels, which is the name of one of my card types and a name that I feel has a bit of a punch and a ring to it.

Plus, I think Scoundrels are funny and the Frontier is such a good noun.

I'm immensely pleased with the progress so far, but now the real work begins. I've done a great deal of early tuning, balancing, and mechanic re-design. In fact, far more so than any previous game. This is my fourth board game and I'm really starting to get a knack for spotting bad ideas before I go through the effort of testing them. Sometimes, bad is just bad and you can spot imbalance from a mile away.

I'm pleased with how I've simplified the game, while at the same time creating a richer experience. A core mechanic is that the player who is the Expedition Leader (title passes each turn) can order other players to do certain things. Initially, this was very limited (3 choices), always the same, and the design had an incredibly overwhelming play phases that just weren't intuitive or elegant. After stewing over it for a week (and taking in some feedback from a colleague), I created a new small deck of cards called Command cards. There are about 6 different cards, each with a unique role that can be assigned to a player by the Expedition Leader. However, the Expedition Leader can only use a limited portion of the cards.

This does a few things:

• I've removed one confusing choice and given the player an easier, but also broader one
• I've dramatically cleaned up the turns and  phases of the game
• I've added more content that's more interesting
• Each turn will now be different, but still within a familiar range of possibilities

I'm also pretty excited by quality of the current rules; I've edited them at least 50 times. They are 10 pages total (or 5 pages front/back), but the game can be learned in the first 5 pages. The last 5 go deeper into content and provide examples for some of the mechanics. The other reason the rules went from 6 to 10 pages is that almost every concept has a visual component or diagram to help explain it. After reading Pandemic and Forbidden Island's rules, I knew that was the way it had to be for Frontier Scoundrels. 

I'll play a few games with myself this week to pound out the early bugs and flow issues. Then I'll bring my friends over. If all goes well, I'm hoping to send prototypes to colleagues in a few months. This will coincide perfectly with the website for Hyperbole Games going live and the Christmas holiday season. 

Let's be about it, shall we?

"Ocian in view! O! the joy!"

-Captain William Clark, upon reaching the Pacific Ocean

Let's go Exploring: My new game at a high level

This is a long post about my new board game's mechanics. I may sell the rights to this post to Lifetime for a made for TV movie.

I've been finished with Farmageddon for a while now. I'm basically just doing my best to market the game and get it into the hands of bloggers and enthusiasts. There are two game design competitions approaching, one of which is hosted by The Game Crafter, but I've been too excited about my new non-competition game to really give these contest designs their due diligence.

My non-competition game is based on the Adventures of Lewis and Clark, two explorers sent by Thomas Jefferson to explore the western frontier, assert sovereignty over the native Americans, find vital scientific discoveries and trade routes, and generally accomplish much. I love history, so it's a natural fit for my personal interests.