Blog - Weekly Game 3: Pennies and Dimes
Sunday, January 25, 2009Introduction: In this game, two players lay down playing cards as tiles, and attempt to land thrown coins onto the cards for points.
Players: 2
Materials:
-A standard deck of playing cards
-5 pennies
-5 dimes
-another coin for flipping to solve disputes
Setup:
Shuffle the deck and lay the top card from the deck face-down in the middle of the playing surface or table.
Each player should then draw 7 cards.
Set aside the rest of the deck as a draw deck to draw new cards from, and leave space to discard unwanted cards.
Players must then discard any two cards of their choice from their hand, so they start with a hand of 5 cards.
Players should decide who will be the Red Player and who will be the Black Player.
The red player gets the 5 pennies, and the black player gets 5 dimes.
As there is a slight disadvantage to the player who goes first, a coin-flip should be done to determine which player gets to go last.
How to Play:
This game has two phases: Tile Laying and The Coin Toss.
Tile Laying:
In this phase, players take turns placing the cards from their hand down as tiles, in order to create targets for themselves to aim for, or for their opponents to accidentally hit.
Cards must be placed edge-to-edge from a card already on the table, which can include the face-down card in the middle. Cards cannot be placed diagonally, as in corner-to-corner.
Players may also pay for the right to discard one of their cards in their hand and draw a new card. Doing so costs one of their 5 coins. This can be done as many times as the player wants, although the player needs at least one coin for the second phase.
Players may also choose to trade cards with one another at any time during this phase.
When both players have laid down 5 cards, the game moves to the second phase.
The Coin-Toss:
Players now take turns trying to toss their coins onto cards for points.
Each player tosses only one coin each turn.
The red player earns points for any red card (Hearts or Diamonds) a coin lands on, and the black player earns points for any black card (Spades and Clubs) that coins land on.
This point-earning is true regardless of which player threw the coin, making it possible to accidentally score points for your opponent.
A card earns points equal to the number of the card.
So a coin landing on the 7 of diamonds earns the red player 7 points, regardless of which player's coin landed there.
For face cards, just continue numbering, so a Jack would be worth 11 points, a Queen worh 12 points, and a King worth 13 points.
Aces are high, at 14 points.
If a coin lands in between two or more cards, players should try to determine which card the coin is "on" the most.
Example: if 1/3rd of a coin rests on the king of spades and the other 2/3rds are over the 3 of hearts, then the red player would earn 3 points.
If there is dispute over where exactly a coin has landed, or if a particular throw was unfair in some way, flip a coin to determine which player gets to make the final call.
Points are scored only after all coins are thrown.
As such, if a coin is knocked into a new position by a later coin, its final resting place is what is scored.
After all coins are thrown, the face-down card is revealed and all cards are that coins landed on (including the face-down card) are scored.
Winning the Game:
Once all coins have been thrown, the player with the most points wins.
----------
Designing the game:
I only realized late on Saturday night that I hadn't created a new game for this weekend yet, so many of the design decisions resulted from this near-panic.
I needed a game that sounded quick to design and playtest.
You'll note a play session of this game is fairly brief and that's intentional.
Partially so because I didn't have much time to make or playtest the game, so a short game allows for far more playtesting. Secondly, I'm interested in games with short play times, as players can play even if they only have a few minutes to spare, and if they have more, they can always play again.
I had earlier considered a game where the 'board' was created by a random scattering of cards and players would attempt to bounce a rubber ball in ways to try and land on high-point cards, perhaps with some sort of multiplier for each subsequent card the ball hits. I even bought rubber balls for this, but never ended up even trying that idea (future weekly game, maybe?) instead deciding (due to a lack of suitable testing space in my cluttered living room) to go with a scattering of coins instead.
So with that rather simple base mechanic, I decided to try to think of ways to make a game a bit more deep.
I decided first there should be some sort of strategic card placement, rather than a random scattering, providing some sort of strategy. Players can chose to try to keep their cards separate as larger target areas, or infect rival player's target areas with their own cards hoping to be accidentally hit.
Initially I was envisioning the coins would all be thrown all at once as a giant scattering, but in practice throwing individual coins one at a time was far more effective. Players could build strategies and planning based on their previous throws (or throws of their opponent!) and it builds tension as they increasingly run out of future chances.
Taking turns for the throws aides in balancing and this building tension, and especially with the possibility of bumping coins out of position, adds an element of strategy as well.
I realized from my observation of the carnival games at the Renaissance fair (mentioned in an early entry) that games that involve throwing objects at a target have a wonderful quality of luring players into believing that they always have a chance. Throwing is so basic and fundamental, we imagine it in our heads to be easier than it actually is, so even after continue failing to hit a target we still think "Next time, if I just aim a little bit higher, I just know I could hit it."
The coin-toss phase of this game proved to ring very true in this aspect - it is much harder to get a coin to land on a specific card than I had anticipated.
This lets the strategy of placing cards so that your opponent will accidentally land their coins on your cards very viable. Still, with a bit of practice, I got better and better at getting the coins to land approximately where I wanted, but it was still random enough with the ways the coins would bounce or slide to add some randomness for surprises.
Because I had already decided that cards should be strategically placed to create a strategic round of play before the more dexterity/skill-based (and admittedly very random) play of tossing the coins, I decided to play with an affordance of playing cards I had not yet employed, realizing that cards could be used as tiles in a strategic tile-laying game format.
For this I took some inspiration from Carcassone. I liked how Carcassone starts players with a root tile from which to build their world off of, and felt that kind of grounding is helpful to players. However, unlike the root tile of Carcassone, there was no reason players needed to actually see what the card was, and decided it was an interesting chance to add a bit of hidden information, using the root card as a sort of wildcard. I think it adds a little bit more interest to the game having the middle of the 'board' as a wildcard, and liked the aesthetic quality of the core of the game world being an different, icon card unlike the rest.
As it was apparent this game is one where the latter player gets the advantage (of reacting to the first player's moves) I determined there may be a need for determining player order. Having also created games before where tossing an object at a target was a key mechanic, I knew that disputes can arise as to whether the tossing player was too unfairly close to the target, or somehow performed an illegal throw, etc. Through playtesting it also became apparent that coins rarely landed squarely onto any one card. So I realized I needed mechanics for dispute resolution. An obvious answer manifested: a.) Players were expected to already have coins as part of the required materials for the game b.) There are exactly two players anyway and c.) not only does the game use coins, but the core mechanic involves tossing coins.
Having players perform a coin-toss (flipping a coin) was a logical answer as it fits perfectly with the already established core and theme, it's a binary randomizer perfect for a game with exactly two opposing forces, and reused one of the game's existing materials for a new purpose, playing off the affordances of a coin as a binary surface.
Several mechanics of the tile-laying phase were added because I was often winding up starting with terrible hands and felt the game needed more opportunity for players to upgrade their hand with something they could actually use.
Since the game already gave the players a stockpile of the coin resource used for the latter phase, I decided it would be an interesting risk-reward situation to have players spend the coins (a logical affordance of coins!) to attempt to purchase an upgrade. Players could risk one less coin to throw to attempt to find a better card to aim for.
As the red players was often winding up with a starting hand of all black cards and vice-versa, and given that hitting target cards was often more difficult than one anticipates anyway, I decided allowing players to trade cards with one another could be used as an alternative card-replacing choice. It fosters social interaction that benefits games like this, and leaves the players more likely to end up with cards that benefit each player, where it would have otherwise left both of them frustrated.
Labels: weekly game
posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 1:06 PM
0 Comments: