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Mechanic Monday: Scoring Cats!

Ding ding ding, time for a fresh new helping of MECH AN IC MO N DAY! All aboard “fin heads”, if there’s any ROOM left ABOARD this very full BANDWAGON!
Got a chance to playtest R2I Games’ latest project a couple weeks back, and it was a particularly good design.
The term “elegance” continues to be a fuzzy, mercurial one that defies meaningful definition, but this game checked off all its points for me in spades.  There’s nothing wasted in that game - it is a series of interconnected, limited systems, with resources, battle cards, and contracts flowing naturally through a player’s engine and back and forth between opponents.  Everything is intuitive and the theme meshes beautifully with the mechanics.  There’s a sense of scarcity that haunts at the edge of everything and spurs the players ever onward in a smart, tactical, tight race to the finish.  Jeff and Andrew are good guys and at this point, great designers, adept at iterating, trimming away the less-optimal parts of a gameplay experience, and making a holistic design.  Kudos to them.  Being me of course, I didn’t let them get on with the playtest without giving me a rundown of the design inspiration and development process.  I was particularly tickled when Jeff explained that the contract cards (one of which you sign for three years, two of which you have for two years, and three of which are only on one-year deals) were inspired by his being in a long-time fantasy football keeper league.  This perked up my ears, of course, as I think that along with M:TG, Fantasy Sports have the most potential to mine for game designs that create popular crossover appeal.  Hence why I’ve been working on Fantasy Fantasy GM GM.  And today I want to talk about one of the mechanics in it: Categories!

Scoring Categories
In FFGMGM, after drafting their heroes, they must set that season’s party: Simultaneously, the players pick a hero from their pool to add to their party; then, one of the categories is revealed, along with its point value for that season.  Players then add another hero, and reveal another category.  This continues until four categories have been revealed - each player now has a party of four, and four of the five categories now award points.

So that’s the rough gist of it, but there are lots of ways this can still be tweaked; my goal here is to capture the way fantasy players game their lineups in a non-points league to try and put insufficient eggs strategically into fewer baskets in order to win specific categories.  And there’s lots of ways this can still go; maybe one of the categories is revealed BEFORE hero selection, so that players can try and chase gradually revealed information.  Maybe the fifth category, currently worth nothing, is what determines drafting order? Maybe the players have the option to vote for which categories will be valuable, prior to hero selection.  And I’d like there to be some Hero abilities that let you sneak a peek at the face-down categories so that you can use Magic to gain a prediction advantage.  Lots of fun theme-meets-mechanics experience synergy here.  Just got to figure out which are the most attractive options.
Anyway, there are still a lot of fun mechanics in FFGMGM that I’ll probably dive into in the coming weeks - just as soon as I get this pesky BURN prototype built to get it out of my head… Anyway, til next week!

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