Looking back at the future of tabletop games
BLACKFLOWER, Messina 1347, GDC 2017, Cyberpunk Red: Combat Zone
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TL;DR Summary
🤖 BLACKFLOWER
🐀 Messina 1347 estate boards
⌛ Looking back at the future of games
🎲 Recently played: Cyberpunk Red: CZ
🤖 BLACKFLOWER
I recently picked up a used book of William Blake poems. After reading A Poison Tree, I was inspired to make a CY_BORG heist that involved revenge. Specifically the kind of revenge that takes years of planning.
Or as William Blake would say:
And it grew both day and night. Till it bore an apple bright. And my foe beheld it shine, And he knew that it was mine. And into my garden stole, When the night had veild the pole; In the morning glad I see; My foe outstretched beneath the tree.
Thus was born the unresolved past of Jerry and Xu in BLACKFLOWER.
It’s a heist to steal a defective exosuit with a rogue AI that puts your crew in the middle of a revenge plot. There’s a new security corp, new gang led by Xu, new shops, and a two-level apartment building map.
BLACKFLOWER has connections to the other Exeunt Press heists in the Holo Bundle, especially Prophet of Eternity and A Hundred Thousand Burned Hackers.
The whole thing is written, and I sent it to the printer to get a couple test copies made. It’s about 40 pages plus the cover, full color print inside and out.
Assuming the tests come back looking good, I hope to open pre-orders via the Exeunt Press Shop the week of March 11, 2024. If you pre-order, you’ll get both the print and PDF versions.
I’m really excited about this! Can’t wait to show you the final product!
More updates in the next newsletter!
🐀 Messina 1347 estate boards
I really enjoy mechanisms that allow for tokens to cycle around the board. I’ve written before about how Sakura Arms uses this in its cycle of aura, shadow, and flare.
Having recently played Messina 1347 (Aparicio & Suchý, 2021), I could see just a touch of that cycling element in how the estate boards work. Three overseer tokens can take circular paths around the board, starting and ending at the center. Each one has a node where the player can pick to go right or left, with significant consequences for later in the game.
It’s a really interesting mechanism, and one I hope to incorporate (in some fashion) into some future games.
READ: Rats, Plague, and Quarantine Cabins at Skeleton Code Machine
Skeleton Code Machine is a weekly publication that explores tabletop game mechanisms in board games and roleplaying games. It’s been called a “Seemingly endless source of gaming ponderings” and a “Goldmine.” Check it out at www.skeletoncodemachine.com.
⌛ Looking back at the future of games
Last year I watched The State and Future of Board Games panel from GDC 2023. It was a fascinating look at what the panelists saw as the current trends and predictions for the future. You can check out my notes on that.
I thought it would be fun to watch a similar The State & Future of Board Game Design from GDC 2017, now almost seven years ago. What did they see as the trends at the time? Did their predictions come true?
The panelists were Rob Daviau, Eric Lang, and Geoff Engelstein, who happen to be three of my favorite designers and thinkers in modern board gaming.
I took some notes as I watched, and here are a few of the highlights from what game design looked like in 2017:
Rapid market expansion:
Seeing 10-20% YOY growth, making it easier to find an audience for your game. The number of publishers and games is outpacing the growth of the market, so it is hard to get your game noticed. Mentioned that there were 3,000 new games added to BGG last year.
I pulled two different datasets from Kaggle (1, 2) to check, and both showed the number of games published in 2016 to be closer to 1,300. The point still stands, however, as the rate at which games were being added to BGG was rapidly increasing from about 2014-2019. The number of new games published each year seems to have slowed after 2019.
Licensed IP games:
Because of the rapid expansion of the market and games, it is harder to get noticed. That makes licensed IPs a much safer bet, similar to how movies use Marvel and other franchises. Make things that people already know.
I think this has definitely happened, and continues to become more prevalent. You can see it both in licensed board games and TTRPGs on Kickstarter.
Legacy and episodic games:
Legacy games were a big thing in 2017. Risk: Legacy came out in 2011 and both Pandemic Legacy: Season 1 and Time Stories had come out in 2015. The panel seemed to think this would continue to grow.
Interesting discussion of the life cycle of games, and how a lot of the fun is in the initial discovery stages of learning a new game. After 4-5 plays that starts to plateau, and leads to moving to a new game. Legacy or episodic game might fill the need for continual discovery, but at the risk of become single-play or “disposable” games.
Geoff had a good point that there are movies he loved, but will only watch once. That doesn’t make them less good of a film. We might say the same about some board games.
Surprisingly no mention of Gloomhaven, or perhaps I missed it. The Kickstarter campaign finished in 2015 with 4,904 backers raising $386,104. The game was published in 2017, so perhaps it hadn’t actually come out yet.
Kickstarter and crowdfunding:
There was talk of a “mega-success” like Kingdom Death Monster ($12.4M) and Scythe ($1.8M) on Kickstarter, but expected larger publishers like CMON and Stonemaier to start moving away from the crowfunding model. Only really small players would remain on Kickstarter.
It would seem the opposite has happened, except for Stonemaier. Kickstarter and/or Gamefound are routinely used by what I’d consider major publishers like CMON, Awaken Realms, Free League and others.
It’s not unheard of for Kickstarter campaigns to raise millions of dollars. Though KDM does remain in second place. The top six are now Frosthaven ($12.97M), KDM ($12.4M), Avatar RPG ($9.5M), Marvel Zombies ($9.0M), The Wyrmwood Gaming Table ($8.8M), and Exploding Kittens ($8.8M).
Niche and expensive games:
There will be games for everyone coming out. If manufacturing costs drop, it will be easier and cheaper to release games that don’t depend on scale to get the cost down.
I think this definitely happened, but has perhaps retracted when global shipping prices rocketed up.
Smaller, faster games:
Geoff predicted that, although big games will have a market, there will be a push for smaller, faster games. There was mention of Cheapass Games.
I think this has happened, but it just took a little while longer! I don’t have data to support it, but it seems like the growth of trick-taking games, roll and writes, and small box games has really taken off. Sure, you can still get giant boxes of plastic on Kickstarter, but small games are hot.
Playtesting online:
There was talk of Tabletopia and doing playtesting remotely. Eric wondered if we could use VR for playtesting and collect better data in 3-4 years.
I think the pandemic and the amazing growth of Tabletop Simulator really changed this forever. It’s now routine to do online playtesting using a number of platforms. The VR part seems to always remain 3-4 years away.
Color accessibility:
It was interesting to hear the discussion of designing with accessible colors. It sounded like this was only a recent change in the development process, but was becoming standard. Eric said that they had a miss with the Blood Rage components, but now test to ensure they work for the main types of color blindness.
I think board games have come a very long way. It is now routine for publishers to use better colors, different shapes, and other methods to distinguish pieces. I’d love to do a Skeleton Code Machine article on this in the future.
Please note that the above comments are just based on my notes. I didn’t write down direct quotes and have made some generalizations on what was said. So I highly recommend watching the entire video for all the details!
WATCH: The State & Future of Board Game Design
🎲 Recently played: Cyberpunk Red: CZ
Had a chance to play Cyberpunk Red: Combat Zone (Cadice, et al., 2023) recently, having been part of the beta testing early in the campaign. I’m thrilled to say the final product is every bit as good as the beta, and probably better!
It was Lawmen (me) vs. the Danger Gals (my friend). They had to hack two of the four terminals at the center of the map. I had to defend the terminals and flatline half their gang. While both of us had comically bad strategies, I ended up losing eventually.
Such a fun game, and can’t wait to play again!
PLAY: Cyberpunk Red: Combat Zone
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- E.P. 💀
I immediately thought of Sea Salt and Paper's colour accessibility design. Would also love to read your coverage on accessibilty.
I'd love to read your thoughts and advice on accessibility!