Mutant Pizza

I know, I know, my last entry was all history lesson, no game design. Look, sometimes you’ve got to write about the past in order to get to the present, okay? Let’s discuss where Color Space is and the problems I’ve had to combat over the past week and change to get the game where it is now.

Dust that thing off and play with it

When I pulled Color Space off the shelf, the game had two issues preventing it from being fun:

• There was little tension in the game play, this was a major issue
• Players were pulled out of the game periodically to make sure they were playing it right, as the game had a lot of nuance and edge cases.

Let’s talk about tension

Tension is the most crucial element to a game. Without tension, there’s no reason to play a game; there’s no fun. When a game lacks tension, it’s not a challenge to players but more importantly: a game without tension isn’t interesting. A game without tension also sort of lacks identity. There’s nothing unique that says to the funzone of your brain “try to figure me out so you can win.”

In trick taking games, tension comes from analyzing your hand against your opponents’ hands, knowing how many cards exist overall, and estimating whether you have what it takes to force your opponents to play their good cards at inopportune times for them. In area control games, tension comes from the struggle to take space your opponent is fighting for. One simple way I’ve grown to understand tension is this: It’s about the limited resources players fight over, but it’s also about the tools and information players are given to cleverly win those resources over their opponents.

Tension doesn’t have to be a wholly unique thing. Area control games often provide representations of tangible resources, including territories on the board, as what players fight over. In Risk, as we all know, leaves territory as the only resource for players to fight over. When you have land, you get more troops. And with more troops, it’s easier for you to take more land. These types of games have evolved quite a bit since Risk, but these core ideas stay true to it — they’re called area control games for a reason.

In Color Space, players are fighting over colors! Precious, precious colors! Beautiful colors! Recently, both players fought over red, blue, or yellow cubes so they could make pairs of different colors and score points at the end. Players would move a tile to generate these cubes, then move their ship to claim them. The board was big enough and resources plentiful enough that players didn’t need to interact. Sure, the mechanisms were there, players could swoop in and steal cubes their opponent needed to deny them points. But at the end of the day, they didn’t need to. After watching designers playtest this and bring up this feedback, I knew I needed to pivot.

Mixing mishaps

I threw things at the wall to see what stuck. What if both players had to go for the same cubes? Fighting over resources would surely provide tension. Nope, players could simply go for alternate colors and switch, roughly giving them the same score. What if players had to go for the same color? Nope, the board was large enough for them to generate their own cubes and they rarely fought over tiles to move. Okay, then what if the play area were reduced? Nope, limiting player moves turned the game into an arbitrary mess of binary decision making.

I spent a week of concentrated tinkering, doing nothing else, to figure this game out. Then it dawned on me, why am I making this game about “scoring points” versus something more objective. Then it Dawned on Me II: The Redawning: Electric Boogaloo, why am I making this game about two people going for primary colors to make secondary colors. I’ve got a far more interesting thematic way of delineating player objectives: Primary and Secondary colors. I also am literally designing a two player asynchronous game of cat and mouse set in space about a ship and a space creature. Why not rob Peter to pay Paul, use a lot of those ideas in this game.

Enter the asynchronous world, my child

One player moves primary color tiles and generates cubes. They want to generate cubes of a color so they can put out black cubes that block their opponent. Their opponent controls three ships, their goal is to push cubes into one another to establish bases on the board before the primary color player can get them stuck.

After a few playtests and tweaks, I had something interesting and, dare I say it, fun.

There are a lot of rules and powers I’m glossing over here as they’re not set in stone yet, but that’s the game.

Since I took the photo above, I’ve expanded the play area a bit. This game works better with a slightly larger field of play. Ships push cubes around, the tile mover generates cubes and can knock everything back. It’s a fantastic experience.

What’s next?

I want to put this game in front of other people and get their opinions. I think the game plays well but I want to make sure that’s not all in my head. I think there’s tension but again, is it right? Am I on the right track, at least? I’ve got to answer those questions with some proper playtesting.

I’ll tell you how it goes. Until next time, space cases!