My summer has been undeniably altered by my dayjob. Nights, weekends, during my “vacations”, I have been at the mercy of an industry that has always been tougher in the summer but has just exploded this year. It truly has been something. Something hard and terrible. But I need the money. Yay capitalism!
Anyway, at my day job, most people have three screens, their laptop and two monitors. I keep my laptop closed and get by with just two, which makes my coworkers look at me with the respect and fear usually reserved for a particularly smelly shaman. When asked how I can possibly get by with only twice the screen space my parents had for their actual engineering jobs, I explain that I often take my laptop home to work overtime (Yay! Capital! Ism!) and as I have no monitors at home, I have to do the job with one screen, so two feels like a luxury. This is greeted by a short jerky nod, not of understanding but of acceptance, and the swift departure of my questioner as they cross themselves surreptitiously.
What’s my secret? How on God’s melting green Earth do I manage to make three screens worth of information accessible on just one? It’s all in how I array my windows. It’ll surprise my longtime readers 0% at all to learn that I have a million tabs per window. and many, many windows open at once. But here’s the thing: I position my programs to incompletely overlap one another, with my primary window in the center and the others arranged around like petals around the head of a flower, so that there are always edges visible for me to click on to bring that window to the fore. It’s a little thing, but it gives me the kind of aesthetic efficiency microjoy that game design does.
That’s the first chewy chunk of today’s design post. Tangentially related (the best kind of related): It’s still weird to me that we call square cards “tiles”. One of the big things that threw me when I stumbled into learning about modern analog gaming was the terminology. I didn’t know what a trick-taking game was, necessarily, despite having played a variety of them for many years; I certainly didn’t know what a ladder/climbing card game was (and how they were similar to, or different from, shedding games) despite how closely related those mechanics are to trick-taking. And having never played Carcassone, I had absolutely no concept of what “tile-laying” was. When I think of tiles, I think, you know, floor tiles. Ceramic tiles. Or at its most basic, something thick, chunky, tactile. If I’d been asked to identify “tiles” in a lineup of board game components, I might have hesitantly selected Scrabble letters or perhaps mahjong or dominoes. So the idea of placing square cards (admittedly actually cardboard and thicker than cards) in a grid did not at once feel intuitively related to what I pictured as tile-laying. In retrospect, the jump is a little more obvious; although the components were closer to what I thought of as cards, Carcassone and its descendants still adhered to the same mechanical activity as Scrabble/Dominoes/Pyramid/etc; namely, placing regular polygons on a grid (on a board or defined by the pieces already played) relying on spatial reasoning to optimize placement, orientation, and scoring. It makes a backward kind of sense, once you can see the whole picture, and the genealogy of the term. But still, language is such a barrier to this hobby (look up @ithayla on Twitter, he’s got some great threads about this).
Anyway, once I wrapped my head around what tile laying means in the context of MAG, along comes Kodama (or, as the DriveThruCards PrintOnDemand copy in my backpack calls it, Kigi). I’ve written before about how Kigi/Kodama was a revelation to me (spoiler alert, I’m going to continue to frequently reference Daniel Solis’ and Todd Sanders’ influence on my work because they were the first MAG designers I followed and they’re also both brilliant) but I can’t overstate how much it changed my thinking about what a board state could be. Free of a board, free of a grid, free even of the constraints of the second dimension while still creating a 2d end result.
Anyway you combine those general concepts and stew them around in my brain for a few weeks while I’m too busy to write a blog post until now and uhhhh this is what you get:
Freeform Tile-Placement Tableau
In TABLET, each player pulls shards of runic magic from a Rift to create their own Tablet, an artifact that grants immense arcane power. But the shards are fickle, dangerous things, and must be carefully placed in order to stay stable. Each shard is a card with placement and scoring symbols: the card may be entirely black (must be in the interior of the Tablet) or have an edge separating black from white (used to define the edges of the Tablet). Shards are taken from the Rift into a player’s hand, and then played in front of a player to create a Tablet. Scarab symbols are dangerous; if more than three are showing at the game’s end, the Tablet ruptures. Scorpion symbols are less deadly but still harmful; the player loses points depending on how many are showing at game’s end. Shards with Sun symbols may only be played on top of shards with Moon symbols, and vice versa. Shards with Reed symbols must be placed in a way that they cover a number of reed symbols that add up to the number on the shard played. There are also symbols that affect the flow of play: Placing a shard with a Lightning symbol allow a shard to be removed from the Tablet; placing a shar with a Wind symbol allows you to discard a shard from another player’s hand. Once the supply of shards from the Rift is emptied, all Tablets must be completed based on the cards in player’s hands. The first player to complete their Tablet gains a bonus, and at game’s end, all players score based on visible symbols.
So that’s what’s been gestating and kicking around in my head for the past month or so. It started as loose thoughts about a growing tableau of overlapping, and then solidified into a concept about creating a rectangular shape based off of cards showing the edge of something. Kind of an inverse Kodama in that way. Lots more room to expand vis a vis symbols for scoring, placement restrictions, and in-game effects. Might fuck around and either make a spreadsheet of such symbols and/or make a quick proto to try and test the concept, see if it has legs.
Anyway. Going to go work on trying to get together that 4page mech rpg I wrote about a few entries back, and touch up the treatment for my next play. Will post this the next Monday that I get a chance to. Thanks for reading!
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