Page: History.Page9 - Last Modified : Sun, 23 Oct 11 - 1069 Visits

This page talks about various other mechanics that would not fit in a page by itself.

The repetition problem

When the game was starting to get solid, the designers I played with said that the game was becoming repetitive: You invade, score points, lose you kingdom and invade again. It was also one of the reason why people did not like Britania and Vinci since after a while, you do the same things over and over again and it becomes boring.

So I decided to find a way to make the game change and evolve through time so that the game does not feel to repeat itself. My first idea was to make sure that the buildings stayed into play permanently, they don't get destroyed during invasion. This way, some parts of the map would get more developed than others making them more interesting to invade since they are worth more.

The second idea was to add technology cards which would give special abilities. But with the idea of public knowledge, now the rules of the game are changing as the game evolves, which mean that the game is not exactly the same as it was in the beginning. So players might need to adjust strategy as the game evolves.

Knowledge cards

At the beginning of the design, in order to make the game easier to balance, I did not want to use special abilities in my game. It's when I got stuck with the repetition problem that I decided to design special abilities. I also realized later, by reading a design rule model, that everything must not be perfectly balanced. Having mechanics that are slightly imbalanced actually makes it more interesting.

The problem with the knowledge card design was that there is so few things that can get influenced in the game. There is so few combination of special abilities that can be designed if I still wanted the game to be playable, avoid abusive combination and avoid duplicate abilities. First I did not want to have scoring technologies, but I eventually had to give up since I ran up with few options of special abilities. My friend suggested having more abilities, but I don't think that is actually possible without making similar or duplicate abilities.

Gods

The gods is a concept I introduced near then end of the game design. The idea behind the gods is that I wanted to give a logical reason why various kingdoms give victory points to the player who owns it. What is the relation between each civilization played by the same player? So I determined that each kingdom worship the same god, that is why each of them gives glory points to the same god (player).

Now the design of the gods was a bit problematic. The gods setup the intimidation level of each player because at the beginning of the game, I had a situation where everybody was tied for the intimidation level so players could not actually take advantage of it. So now by making sure every god has a unique intimidation value, there is always an imbalance at the beginning of the game. Of course, a tie could occur through the game, but it does not occur very often.

It's the special abilities that has been a problem. Since I already had knowledge cards with special abilities, I did not want the gods to be the same thing. I wanted them to be different. I tried of using other stuff than abilities like maybe a set of stats, but there are so few things in the game that could be influenced by a stat that I could not actually use this. So I decided to use special abilities that changed immediately the status of the board rather than changing or breaking the rules of the game. So players does not need to remember each of others abilities, they only look at their technology and the public knowledge area.

Replay value

I always like games with replay value and I knew that Britania had very little. So my first idea was to use a modular map, give various game length, and give each player a different set of kingdoms. Later in the design, the replay value increased even more with the concept of trophies which were randomly selected. That made every game unique and could make the game lean in a different direction. The resources on the map also changed the focus of the game since some resources could get scarcer than others. Finally, the gods added the last element of replay value with unique special abilities. So the combination of all these elements makes every game almost unique.

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