When I last left that design, about ten years ago, I had created three major versions of the game. I didn't actually end up documenting them all here, because I was pretty discouraged with how things were going. The last post I put up here was after I put together a full prototype of the first major version, with a full set of content. This was a bad idea, probably - I put a lot of effort into all of that, and it turned out the game didn't really work.

There were parts that worked great, though. In particular, the combination of class + skill resulting in a character was neat, the way that you had a pool of dice that were your health was cool, the way they could either absorb damage or be spent for special abilities was a very nice resource tradeoff. The combat system, based (very) loosely on Cribbage was working pretty well for the first fights. So what was the problem? Scaling.

The way that basically any dungeon crawling game works is that everything gets bigger. The characters get more powerful, the monsters get more dangerous, the loot gets shinier. KMATTS is no different. I don't want to buck the conventions of the expected fiction. I want to make a game that gives players some real resouirce management challenges, sort of the same kind of feeling as a classic roguelike, but in a very familiar package. Anyway, in KMATTS, you pile up loot and become more powerul, resulting in rolling more dice and fighting monsters with more dice. But that's where the problems came in.

The way combat worked, roughly, is you roll a pile of dice, the other side rolls a pile of defense dice, the defense dice cancel matching attack dice, then you score the roll. Echoing Cribbage, you score damage for pairs, for runs of three, and for two dice that sum to 7. But, as your dice pool gets larger, you get more and more combinations, and kind of any die becomes useful in some way. Defense dice also frequently match, so they don't really have much impact. It just became a chore, and the number of dice kind of blurred out the importance of any one die. The central limit theorem hauled everything into the same groove in the last couple fights, and it just made you wonder what was the point.

Well, I tried some alternate systems, two more major revisions, and neither of them worked either. So onto the shelf it went, massive pile of content and all, and I just stopped thinking about it. Until recently. I had a bit of inspiration for the original, Cribbage-y combat system (which was the most fun of the three major revisions). Specifically, what if runs were all that mattered, but length of the run in particular? Your runs would be more fragile, so defense would be more significant, and you could differentiate characters by how many runs they scored. You would need some luck to get a full run of 6s, but it would be a big result. It would still feel like dice combos were critical, but you wouldn't get that slot machine thing of scoring thirty different small combos and the tedium of counting it all up.

It seemed promising enough to try out. And so I did. There are rules available. There's a Screentop prototype. I'm back, baby!

By the way: do not play this. It's going to be bad. This thing is going to need a lot of revision. But, dammit, it's nice to be working on it again.

First, the new platform. I had been using playingcards.io, which I really do love. It's so easy to get things working with automations, it's a fantastic platform for getting a card game going quickly. I certainly had no trouble getting an expansion for a game of mine working on there quickly. However, I did run into a problem with PCIO for playtesting this game, which is that there doesn't appear to be a way to model the Reserve in it. It only has the notion of one hand per player, and there's no object you can place on the table that hides things from other players, because stuff on the table isn't owned. So, alas, it just wasn't going to work.

Time to find an alternative. You couldn't pay me to use Tabletop Simulator for anything, so that's out. I've used Tabletopia before, and the best thing I can say about it is that it's not TTS. However, I think anything with physics in it is just braindead for this kind of thing, resulting in a miserable playing experience. I had heard nice things about Screentop, so I decided to give it a try. Short version: it's pretty neat, and certainly can model the ownership stuff that I need. The documentation is pretty sparse, but I found my way through it. I'm not sure how to make it pretty yet or anything, but I think it's functional.

That sorted, it was time to actually get some updates for the four-player game in. I always knew it was going to be a partnership game, which is certainly appropriate given how many times during battles when there were multiple forces maneuvering on each side. What I wanted to capture was a little bit of action with your partner besides just trying to win tricks with them. There are a lot of little things from battles that I could evoke, but one thing I wanted to capture was some asymmetry between the side having Initiative and the side without. It would give some more texture to the game, further differentiating each Battle from one another.

The way I went about that was to permit the side with Initiative to perform a "pre-battle deployment", exchanging a couple of cards with each other. It allows them to adjust their hands, potentially giving them an advantage over their opponents to compensate for being behind. I did want the side without Initiative to also have something special, so they can "march to the guns", optionally sending cards to the first player on their side that plays an Artillery card. By deferring their card transfer until later in the hand, and making it one-way, it differentiates the two sides, which hopefully provides additional interest.

Finally, I added the notion of combined arms, which boosts both cards that a side played if they are from different suits. That's just a nod towards history, a vague gesture really, but it does provide for some surprises in play as well. When you combine that with the new bonus tokens, players should have more options during card play to tilt things in their direction.

Overall, though, the game should largely flow the same, and so the testing here will largely be around seeing if the three special rules work well or if they're just extra fiddliness without an additional befit. Draft rules are available, and there's a virtual test set for it on Screentop. If anybody tries it out, please let me know!

The first is the Rout threshold has been lowered to 7. I hadn't seen any Rout wins for a little while in my own testing, but hadn't really noticed that problem until a tester noted that the threshold seemed too high to them. I'd like a Rout win to be a real threat, but not the most common way for games to end. If one in six games ended in a Rout win, I'd be happy with that ratio. That would be something frequent enough that you have to account for, but not necessarily dominant. I've adjusted this threshold repeatedly during development, so it's not a big surprise that it's still being tweaked. The truth is that the other changes in the game are going to change how easy or hard it is to score Rout points, so this threshold will need continual attention. I should probably just have a development item once the game settles down to double-check the Rout wins to make sure they're in the right proportion (somewhere between 15%-20% of games or so). But for now, seven. Why not?

The second change is around the mix of battles. With two Massive battles in the battle card mix, there's only a ~36.4% chance that you'll see even one Massive battle in the layout. Since the Massive battles are the most different of the battle types, it's kind of a shame that only about a third of games will see even one. What I did was take two of the 10 Standard battles and move them to 11 Massive battles. The "massive" line was always an arbitrary one, so this doesn't even really upset the "historical" analysis that I did, it just moves down the line a little bit of what counted as one of the big ones. In the end, I'll sacrifice historical fidelity for better gaming for this game, the theming is mostly a way for me to think about the systems, so I'm not too worried about this. Now, 60.7% of games should see at least one Massive battle. Better!

Finally, a problem that I've encountered several times throughout the testing was brought up by a tester, and it's time to tackle it. You can sometimes get some real garbage in your Reserve. Mostly, I didn't worry too much about it in the past, as you could still use those garbage cards when they're in the trump suit and maybe dump another suit. Not totally useless, but still kind of a bummer to see 1s and 2s in your reserve. I thought about several possible options:

• I could set it up so you draw extra cards for your Reserve and then discard down to the target size. This requires a bit more faffing around during setup, which isn't great, and the choice here feels like it'll be pretty obvious. Like, maybe there's a borderline call where you need to think about whether to keep an Artillery 3 or an Infantry 5 or something like that. Still, not a terribly challenging decision. And when I used to just have a single deck that established the Battle Sites, and you had to deal cards and discard ones out of range, that was kind of annoying. So I don't really want to bring that kind of thing back.
• A variation here would be a Magic-style mulligan. This is a tried-and-true mechanism, forces players to think about the utility of the stuff they got, and has more of a decision than the previous one. But with a relatively short Reserve, I might need to increase its size before this becomes a viable option. And it doesn't really solve the faffing about problem (although there's more thinking involved here).
• Provide an alternative use for Reserve cards. There are a few options here, such as something like the Scout ability, or forcing a discard, or something else. A problem with this is that it kind of dilutes how special the Scouts are, so that's not a great direction. Getting to cancel a card play by an opponent is kind of neat, but I was sort of hoping to potentially reserve that for an alternative Commander play.
• Perhaps adding another resource. You could discard Reserve cards to gain this resource. And, maybe there's something else I could do with this new resource. Generally speaking, there's a balance in adding new resources in a game, in that it gives you some more design levers and parameters, but there's additional overhead and complexity for players. Add too much of this kind of thing, and players find it difficult to remember and reason about things. And this is, at heart, a card game so I don't want to lard it up with too much extra stuff.

I'm going to go with option four for now. You can now discard cards from your reserve to get +2 tokens, and you can spend a +2 token to bump the rank of a card by two during resolution. You have to make the decision to discard Reserve cards at the start of the game, so it's a little decision players need to make early, which adds some tension to setup. You have a little extra in the resolution of tricks, which is nice. And I can use that currency for a bonus, which is that the player that is behind gets one after each Battle, just to give them a little boost. It seems like it should be a lightweight addition, but give players a little bit more control of things and potentially disturb the card play at a crucial moment.

So those are the changes. I've updated the PCIO file for use with playingcards.io and the draft rules, which also include some tweaks to the wording. The four-player version is still kind of baking in my brain, but I think there will be some fun stuff coming in it.

But! I don't just have the rules. I put together a PCIO file to play the game on the fantastic playingcards.io, which will allow you to play the game against someone. It's possible there are still bugs in the file, but I'll sort that out as we go. I have to stress that it's a pretty early version of the game, so I'm not sure I would actually encourage anybody to try it. But if you're really curious, there it is. You can download that file, upload it into a new room on the site, and give it a try.

My next task with this project is to really focus on the 4p version of the game. The rules linked above have a rudimentary 4p version, with a shared Reserve for the two players, but I want to do more. I'd love Scouts and Commanders to do more in a partnership game, I'd love to have the ability to send cards back and forth between players, and I'd just like to add some more partnership dynamics to the game. The 4p game is the one I really wanted to make, so it's time to really knuckle down and make it awesome. But for now, the 2p is, I suppose, available. Kind of scary to take this step!

I went through all of Napoleon's battles and read a little about each of them, seeking to first capture a notion of the size of each of those battles, and then at least a little bit about what might make the battle out of the ordinary. Every battle, of course, had unique circumstances associated with it, be it the location, the strategic situation, the terrain, the forces involved, or whatever else. But I was really trying to see if there were large factors that might allow me to sort battles into some buckets. I took some quick notes on what I thought was the most exceptional thing for each battle, and wrote that down for each along with the size of the battle in a spreadsheet.

I then went back and read through all of those notes and there were a couple of categories that seemed pretty obvious. One is that the truly massive battles were kind of their own beast. Of course, the line between the really big ones and the regular battles was somewhat arbitrary, but obviously Leipzig, Dresden, and Wagram were in. I counted Borodino among the group by virtue of being such a bloodbath. Aspern-Essling seemed like a more normal battle to me, so the question was what to do with Bautzen and Waterloo, the two battles inbetween Borodino and Aspern-Essling in size. Waterloo is certainly famous, but it doesn't strike me as exceptional in how it played out, nor did Bautzen, so that's my line. Four massive battles that had their own rules.

With that line determined, the next obvious category was sieges. There were a fair number throughout Napoleon's career, with some called sieges and some that revolved around fortifications that might not have been called sieges. In all, I roughly categorized 15 of the 77 battles in my list as either sieges or siege-ish. Basically, battles where artillery was center stage, infantry did some grunt work, and cavalry was really not very important.

The remaining battles, 58 of them, needed to be broken down a little bit more. Having at least one more category of significant seemed like it would be important. Reading through my notes, what stood out was that there were a number of battles where cavalry took center stage. These ranged from pursuits, to meeting engagements, to some of the battles in Egypt where the Mamluk side was mostly cavalry, to rearguard action, to some battles where things were decided by large cavalry charges. There's a little less tying all these battles together compared to the sieges, but grouping them together pulled 19 of the 77 battles together. That left the remaining 39 battles, basically half, as sort of the "standard" battles.

With my categories more or less figured out, at least for now, I needed to express them in game terms. The commonality among the categories is that each of them had differences in the importance of cavalry, ranging from the most important arm (in the pursuit/mobile battles) to the least important (the sieges), with the standard battles in-between. That translates nicely to just changing the ordering of trump suits. Standard would be my standard artillery/cavalry/infantry ordering, mobile battles would be cavalry/artillery/infantry, and sieges would be artillery/infantry/cavalry. There's kind of a neat little thing there, where artillery always beats infantry, which just kind of feels right.

As a digression, there's some real "design for effect" going on here in wargame terms. That is, in Eylau (for example), did we know ahead of time that it would feature one of the great cavalry charges of history? The initial conditions of the battle weren't necessarily ones where we would have expected that to happen. The causes of why cavalry played such a big role in that battle aren't probed at all in this design. The game captures the effect, that Eylau was dominated by cavalry, without really explaining any of the factors that resulted in that. It's an approach to designing historical games that I would normally shy away from, but this is only barely a historical game. I think it's totally fine for something this abstract, but I thought it was worth mentioning.

So, finally, what to do with the massive battles? My instinct is that they were such big affairs that each arm had its role to play, and so maybe those battles should be played at no-trump. Why not? The other nice thing is that the counts of each category, turned into percentages, come out to roughly 5% massive, 20% sieges, 25% mobile/pursuit, and 50% standard. That can easily turn into a deck of a multiple of 20 cards. I'm going to go with 40, because I want to preserve the possibility of two massive battles in the layout. And so: 2 massive, 8 sieges, 10 mobile/pursuit, and 20 standard.

The last thing was looking at the sizes of battles. If I assume 8 different sizes of battle and bucket the battles into those sizes, the buckets are pretty asymmetric. The first 8th and second 8th of sizes comprise more than half of my list (20 and 23 battles), so a straight mapping probably wasn't going to work out that well. But it does suggest skewing the sizes down some. In particular, the sieges tended to be small, with the sieges falling mostly into the two smallest buckets, three in the third-smallest, and only one in the fourth-smallest. No sieges were above the median. The pursuit/mobile battles were larger, with Eylau and La Rothière in the second largest bucket. That suggests some asymmetry in the battle types with regard to sizes. The sieges will mostly be the smallest battle types, the pursuit/mobile battles a little bigger, and the remaining battles will skew larger. And, of course, the massive ones will be, uh, massive.

And after that long digression, I arrive at the next iteration of the design. The main deck will be the same as last time: infantry cards (2-10 x 3), cavalry cards (2-10 x 2), artillery cards (2-10), four commanders, and four scouts (2 x 2, 3 x 2), for a total of 62 cards. The battle site deck will be 2 massive cards (2 x 12, played at no-trump), 8 siege cards (2 x 2, 3 x 2, 4 x 2, 5, 6), 10 pursuit/mobile cards (2, 3, 4, 5 x 2, 6 x 2, 7, 8, 9), and 20 standard cards (2, 3, 4, 5 x 2, 6 x 2, 7 x 3, 8 x 3, 9 x 3, 10 x 4). Commanders count as the lowest card of the highest suit for the battle type, scouts can either add to the rank of a card (and then draw) or be discarded to draw cards equal to their rank (choosing one and discarding the rest). Finally, the number of battles is 8, you win if you score 9 Rout points, and the number of cards in the reserve is 6. If all that is confusing, well, I'm mostly recording it here for my own memory. But if this works, I'm going to put out a full set of rules for the two-player version and maybe it will make sense.

Coming up next, testing this thing out, updating the formal rules to reflect all these changes, and then starting on the four-player partnership version. I actually think that that version might be the most interesting version of the game, I'm excited to start on it.

I played three games with the new setup, and the changes kind of worked. Kind of. There was some more dynamism with the switches from attacker to defender, and there was more thinking about "do I really want this to switch right now, I can't really follow-up on the attack?" And it's nice to have that decision, but it felt kind of bad as well. You shouldn't decide to stay on defense just because if you went on attack you'd lose even more. That decision worked very much against the fiction of the game. It should be a good thing to go on the offensive, and often the decision here was that it would be bad to do so.

I tried tweaking the rules around how you win skirmishes, letting the attacker play any card when the attacker role switched, but that just felt really artificial in the other direction. It just felt wrong. I finally realized something that I had been overlooking in my enthusiasm for trying a combat resolution systemt that wasn't trick-taking: Durak-style gameplay relies on larger hands, and the narrow hands that I was using for the battles was essentially incompatible. The interesting decisions in skirmishes should come from large hands and allow you to kind of predict where things would go, and those decisions just couldn't happen in a low hand count situation. It was a fundamental mismatch, and it was time I recognized that.

So, I punted. I switched back to trick-taking, with the modification that there was a strict hierarchy of suits: infantry was lower than cavalry which was lower than artillery. Scouts would basically work the same way (can discard to draw cards equal to their rank and keep one, or modify the rank of a played card and draw a card), commanders would be the lowest card of the next suit up. This wasn't exactly the same game as the last time I'd done trick-taking. The deck was different, and the trump rules were intended to better match the setting of the game. And you know what? It was excellent. It was fun again!

The lesson here, fundamentally, is that sometimes game design goes down a blind alley. I had an idea a while back, it led me to some exploration, I made a bunch of tweaks and larger changes, and the new system just didn't work. It was a mismatch for my design goals. But, some of the changes I made were a positive thing, I learned stuff about commanders, scouts, and the composition of the deck, and I could switch back to trick-taking in a better spot.

The focus, though, now turns to the Battle sites. If I'm not going to change trump based on the choice of Battle site (which I no longer want to do), there still needed to be something interesting about the different Battle sites, something that might push you to choosing one vs. another. It's time to go to history. My next design task is to go through every one of Napoleon's battle and do some quick analysis on them to see what made them interesting. How big were they? Were there factors in them that made them exceptions to the usual way that 18th/19th century battles went? When I complete that analysis, I can use that to shape the Battle card deck, and then maybe we'll really be somewhere.

I assembled my new deck and played out a couple of games with the rules, without tinkering, to see how things would go with the new rules. And I'd judge it to be a mixed bag. Some notable things are that the attacker bias seems to be gone. Of the Battles that I played through, roughly half were won by the attacker, which felt pretty good. I was sticking with the Battle chooser being on attack to start, as it felt like a more natural structure for things, but I could set it up so that player chooses attack or defense at some point. Different hands might be better suited to one or the other, and giving the player the choice might be another way to privilege the player that is behind. But that's a piece of complexity I could add later if I think it's necessary.

The second notable thing is that Routs were back. One of my games actually ended with a Rout victory, with one player winning Routs in a 7 and 4 sized Battles to score the win. The previous version basically was impossible to tally a Rout in, and it was nice to have that come back into play.

There were some small things as well. There these extra little bits of drama whenever you drew a card from a Scout that were kind of fun. Fishing through the Reserve to decide what to pull into your hand felt like a significant decision again. The range of Battle sizes seemed pretty reasonable. Overall, things were in decent shape, and the game was interesting again. I was starting to get a little fatigue in my purely solo testing, which will eventually happen. I was going to start losing my ability to judge fun just on my own soon.

There are also some issues to address in this version. The first is that Commanders are a bit of a problem. Their ability to always be played on defense is super powerful, but they're pretty iffy on attack. Sure, you can extend the skirmish, but they mostly didn't help you if you were in trouble and only amounted to improving your opponent's reward for winning the skirmish. In addition, scouts were totally worthless on defense. On attack, they felt good, but on defense, they were absolutely worthless. Both of the special cards would need some work.

But the other major issue with the game is that it felt a little bit static. Most Battles would consist of a big skirmish at the start, pushing back and forth, and whoever won that skirmish would almost certainly win the Battle. There was decent drama in that skirmish, but the rest of it seemed a little bit like an anti-climax. There needed to be a little bit more to things, a bit more of push-and-pull throughout, and a few more tactical choices to the resolution.

So those are the problems to fix: get the commanders and scouts into a place where they're useful in both positions, and get a bit more tactical interest in the game. Scouts seemed to have a clear potential fix, permitting a player to discard a scout on their turn to draw a replacement. It was a weaker version of their ability to help on attack, but it meant they weren't necessarily dead cards. A potential improvement is that you could make them draw-two-keep-one when discarded, which would give them a different utility for the two modes.

Commanders were a little trickier to fix, and perhaps thinking about the static nature of things first would make a fix obvious. One potential change would be to swap the attacker/defender roles during a skirmish. As it stands, when a player trumps to a more powerful suit, the skirmish can't drop back down unless a commander is played. But a possibility would be instead to make the players swap roles when the suit changes. That would actually change how commanders work as well, and you could always shift roles on play of a commander. The ability to seize the initiative in a battle might result in enough dynamic play that it could change how things work. It wasn't clear if I needed to retain the inability to drop back down suits, I'd have to test it both ways.

That, then, is the changes for the new version: attacker/defender roles swap when the suit changes or a commander is played, and scouts can be discarded to draw-two-keep-one during your turn. I'll test this new version and then re-evaluate where things are. Potential things to update in future versions are the composition of the deck, the power of commanders (I'm pretty happy with scouts), the size range of battles, and the attributes of the battle cards. And, of course, there are various numeric parameters to fiddle with when things settle down more. It still feels like the game is making progress, although not as quickly as the early versions.

Essentially, at the core of it, the previous versions of the game were very elaborate setups to get you to a hand of trick-taking. The rest of the surrounding armature of the game was to set up different scoring situations, have some jockeying with how you strengthen your hand, and some other positioning, but at its core, this was a trick-taking game with a couple of twists in the cardplay (the commanders and scouts). But it doesn't have to be that way. The Battle/Rout/Reserve components would function fine (probably!) with some other type of head-to-head card resolution system. I read through a bunch of card games to draw on some inspiration, and while some ideas seemed like they might have some promise (what about Guts, which is basically three card poker?), the most promising was a Russian game called Durak ("Fool").

You can read the rules to it there, but roughly speaking, Durak is played in "bouts", where the attacker plays a card, the defender plays a superior card (higher rank or trump), and the attacker can continue the attack by playing any card matching the rank of any of the played cards. It goes back and forth until one player concedes. In Durak, you then pick up those cards, and the game is lost by the last player with cards in hand. Because this is related to trick-taking, but is modeled around bouts, I thought it might be a good fit for the martial thing I was trying to put together. So I adapted Durak and created a new resolution system.

The basic idea is that each bout would represent a skirmish. The attacker (the player who selected the Battle site) would play any card, and it proceed as in Durak. However, I would have a heirarchy of cards (infanty < cavalry < artillery) allowing stronger suits to trump weaker ones, and once you move up the heirarchy, you couldn't move back down in the same skirmish. Commanders could always be played, but would reset the heirarchy, so any card could be played in response to them (respecting the restrictions about having to play a duplicate rank on attack). Once someone won the skirmish, they would take all the cards from the skirmish, and at the end of the Battle, you would count captured cards and whoever took more cards scored the difference. A Rout would be if you took cards and your opponent took none. Scouts? Well, I would figure those out later. The last thing I did was bump up the Battle sizes by two across the board, so instead of 2-8, they were 4-10, because you needed some larger hands to make a skirmish even work. I also made it so that the suits were irrelevant for Battles, at least for now. I would revisit this later if the structure worked, I wasn't worried about making the Battle sites interesting if the core of the game worked.

I started out by just dealing myself some hands and running them against each other. It seemed like it might work ok - I had to do some thinking to play the hands out, which was all I was really looking hoping to see. So, I set up a full game, dealt myself hands, and there were some details that clearly needed to be worked out. What ends the Battle? Because a player might not be able to respond to a card, you can end up with unequal hands, and the ending condition for a Battle wasn't always obvious. As a special case, what happens when both players run out of cards at the same time and there is an active skirmish? Whatever rules I applied here would make a big difference in how the game worked, especially in the smaller Battles which only featured a few cards. I tried a few variations of things here, and nothing quite felt totally right, with some real complexity in how to compute things ending. Either it was too hard to win cards and you might get a Rout with only a couple cards, or it was too easy to manipulate the Battle ending resulting in some artificial-feeling gameplay, or other strange situations that kept popping up.

Another problem cropped up after I played a few games. I wanted to try and keep things stable because I wanted to really get a feel for the new resolution system. I didn't have the same ability to do a snap evaluation of this as I do straight trick-taking, so I didn't want to judge the new rules too quickly. But as I played, it became clear to me that the defender had a huge advantage in the structure of the game. Generally, the way things were playing out was that the attacker would push as much as they could in the first skirmish, but the defender would usually win out because of the challenge of matching ranks as the skirmish wore on. That first pile of cards was often enough to win the small and medium battles on its own, with the rest of the Battle determining if it's a close win or a big win. The alternative, of the attacker conceding after one card each just to go on defense, felt even worse. Flipping things so that the Battle selector is the first defender seemed like it would help with the point imbalance, but I fundamentally couldn't let the defender have such a huge advantage, as it would distort game play.

So that's where I was: the structure seemed interesting, the boundary conditions of Battles were fuzzy and high-impact, and there was a big defender bias. All together, there was promise, but some substantial fixes were needed. I decided to think about a small problem for a bit, and maybe the big problems would have some suggestions come up. Sometimes that sort of narrowing can help. I decided to think about scouts.

The scouts were respresented in the current deck by two 2s and 3s of Spades. I kicked around several ideas but decided to focus on one of the things giving the defender advantage: it was hard to match ranks. What if the scouts helped with that? You could play a scout with another card, and adjust the rank by up to the scout's value. It would allow the attack to continue the skirmish while being basically useless to the defender. There weren't that many scouts in the deck, but it would be a positive adjustment to the balance and add some more tactical options. Seemed promising.

However, it would exacerbate the Battle ending problem, because it would cause a player to spend an extra card in more circumstances. I had to fix that. What if you also draw a card when you play a scout? It's now hand-size neutral, it potentially gives some more help to an attacker (with some luck!), and it wouldn't make the Battle problem worse. It even was kind of thematic - the scout found a way to pull in some reinforcements by getting them to the battle? It is also an improvement over having to look at your Reserve in the game, which could slow things down. Again, it seemed promising.

But that idea suggested another fix. If I'm comfortable adding cards during the Battle, what about losing cards? What if you had to discard a card whenever you passed on a play as a defender? Call it additional losses from a breakthrough, whatever, we can justify it in the game's fiction. But it would stop hands from getting imbalanced (an attacker that cannot attack doesn't need to discard a card as the number of card plays are equal at that point). It further clarifies the end of Battles: a Battle is over when both players are out of cards. If the defender played on the skirmish, nobody wins, otherwise the attacker wins it (after the discard). Suddenly, the boundary conditions would go away and there would be clarity. Nice!

The final thing that I thought about was revisiting the deck. The asymmetry in ranks which was intended to work well with the no-trump Battles in the previous iteration was, on reflection, causing problems with this version. Especially once things ratched up to artillery, the exotic ranks were extremely hard to match for the attacker, leading to some of the defender bias. It also had some strange side effects. 8s were some of the best cards for the attacker, because there were six of them in the deck, with 5-7 next best (five copies), while Ks and As were extraordinarily valuable on defense but almost useless on attack. What was intended to provide some fun texture was causing me pain. I could get rid of that pretty easily.

Overall, then, I have another major version to try. I'd keep hands at parity throughout Battles, I'd re-arrange the deck so that cards were all 2-10 for all suits, and I'd try out the new scout rules. I'm optimistic that the new rules might work out well, and perhaps would finally get me to an asymmetric deck with Napoleonic flavor, some more combat-related semantics for resolution, and a fresh feel for card play compared to pure trick-taking. That's what I'll report on next time. And if that works, I'll fine-tune the deck, maybe try and get some more Napoleonic flavor into it, and then take a hard look at making the Battles distinct.

My first thought was that there should be three major suits, representing infantry, cavalry, and artillery. Those are the major components of armies of the time period, so it seemed like a reasonable thing to represent. I figured a few things would also be nice to capture: infantry is generally the weakest but most numerous card type, cavalry is next up the ladder with fewer but more powerful cards, and finally artillery should have the strongest cards but should be the least frequent. I got out some decks of cards and started stripping them and Frankensteining something together. I pulled out 2-10 of Clubs from three decks for the infantry (figuring that no face cards made sense for the weakest suit), 5-Q of Diamonds from two decks for cavalry, and 8-A of Hearts from one deck for artillery. I followed the Bridge heirarchy of suits here because it's internalized for me, so it's easy to remember the types of each suit. An observant reader might notice that the range of cards narrowed with each type, and my thinking there was that I wanted the range to be larger for infantry to capture all the crappy infantry units that might be present, but also sometimes asymmetry in itself can be interesting, so why not?

That left me with 27 infantry cards (2-10 x 3), 16 cavalry (5-Q x 2), and 7 infantry (8-A), for a total of 50 cards. I wanted the deck to be a litle larger than a standard 52-card pack, and I wanted there to be some cards representing commanders and scouts. So I pulled out the six jokers from the three decks that I was using, and then the 2 2s and 2 3s of Spades for the scouts. That was 60 cards, which was a nice round number, which seemed like a fine place to stop. The deck seemed promising: asymmetric suits, a little bit of special flavor, every card representing something from 18th/19th century warfare. As a starting point, it seemed totally reasonable.

I just needed some rules for what the commanders and scouts would do. Commanders seemed simple enough: I could make them always trump, but always the lowest trump. That would make them always reasonably useful, but not overwhelming. Good enough for now. The scouts were a little trickier. My first thought was to allow you to swap the Battle card, which would change the trump, representing choosing the site of the battle better. Seemed scouty? But I avoided that for two reasons. One, it was too much like the 3s from Fox in the Forest, and I didn't want to repeat too many ideas. Two, what happens to the size of the Battle? My next thought was to make scouts always lose a trick, but you could swap a card from your hard with the Reserve. That would be useful both to beef up your current hand but also if you had something good that wasn't useful this hand, you could save it for later.

The final element I wanted to change was how Battle sites were generated. The asymmetry in the deck would result in wonky Battle sites (what would a King Battle site even mean?), and I wanted Battle sites to be roughly equally common across the three suits. So I created a separate deck for Battle site cards using a different color back of cards. 2-8 of each of my suits provided 21 cards, and then I had an idea. I took 2-10 of the other suit for Battle sites, figuring those could represent a sort of no-trump. My idea was that for these Battles, the trick is won strictly by the highest ranking card, but you still have to follow suit. It would make the higher ranks of Cavalry and Artillery relevant, and would change things up from standard play. That gave me a 30 card Terrain deck, and I could test things out from there.

The game has now evolved enough that I wanted to provide an updated summary of the two-player rules for folks to follow along with the design discussions. As before, you can't really play with this summary, as it elides important details, but provides a framework to understand the decisions I'm describing.

Napoleon, Blown Apart is played with two decks, a 60 card Troop deck and 30 card Terrain deck. Deal 8 Terrain cards face up as Battle sites. Deal each player 6 Troop cards for their Reserve. For each Battle, deal each player 2 cards, and then the player with Initiative picks one Battle site. The number on the site is how many tricks will be played in the Battle, and the suit is the trump suit. For Battle sites of the extra suit, play is at no-trump. In all tricks, for a tied top card, the first card played wins. Deal each player cards to fill their hand up to the correct number of tricks, then each player in turn may discard cards from their hand to take an equal number from their Reserve, freely chosen. Tricks are played with normal trick-taking rules, where you must follow the lead suit, and the highest trump (if any) wins otherwise the highest card of the lead suit. For no-trump, you still must follow the lead, but the trick is won by the highest ranking card regardless of suit. Commanders are always trump, even in no-trump Battles, but are considered the lowest trump. A Spy always loses, but permits the player to exchange a card from hand with a card from their Reserve. If a player wins all the tricks in a Battle, they take the Terrain card to record their Rout. If any player ever has seven points in Terrain cards from Routs, they instantly win. Players otherwise score one point for each trick they take more than their opponent, with a bonus point for each Commander taken. If no player wins on Routs by the end of eight Battles, high score wins, but if the point leader loses a Rout in the final Battle, deal a new Terrain card and play another Battle until someone wins.

All right, that's dense, but should be good enough to give an idea of how the game is currently played. And enough talking, how did it go? I got things shuffled up and played the game against myself, and it didn't feel great. The suits felt strange, the commanders seemed too strong, there was a mismatch between the frequency of cards in the Troop deck and the frequency of things in the Terrain deck that felt off, and everything just seemed really awkward. I hadn't really changed that many rules, I'd mostly changed the composition of the deck, and it just threw everything off. But it was my first game, and I'd played the game quite a bit with a standard deck, so perhaps this was just a clash between the current game and my memories of the way things used to work. This actually happens fairly enough to me during game development, where I get some dissonance between versions.

I stopped that day and tried the next day, to let the new version marinate in my brain a little bit. And still, it felt bad. Another day, another couple games, and nothing was changing. Overall, I played the game with the new deck five times, and at the end, I still liked it less than the version I had been playing with a standard deck. The new deck was a failure, and it wasn't just mis-tuned. If it was in the right direction, but the suit counts were a little off or whatever, I'd still have had fun. But this just was a step back, so something needed a lot of adjusting.

That was actually an encouraging sign! It meant, among other things, that the game was originally fun enough that I could meaningfully detect a step backwards. For a game I had been exclusively playing solo against myself, that means that the previous version was actually pretty darn good. More than anything else about this step, this was an incredibly reassuring thing to realize. I'm still on the right track with the game, broadly, even if this deck is a mis-step. Dead ends happen!

The next thing that I realized is that part of the problem here was a mismatch between the diagetic meaning of the suits and the results in play. In particular, in an infantry battle, you would have infantry able to trump both cavalry and artillery, which feels very wrong. And given that infantry cards are the most common cards, you end up in this situation pretty often. But more broadly, the properties of the different suits are irrelevant 2/3s of the time (roughly) as they only come into play in the no-trump battles. And even there, they might not work properly. My intuition of how 18th century troops should work, born from reading a bunch of books about the Seven Years War and the Napoleonic wars, was utterly useless in thinking about the game. While I wasn't designing a simulation here, it shouldn't work against my intuition.

Beyond the problems of the game's trappings working against the mechanisms, the game was just a more predictable thing. While there was room for clever play in the previous version, the current one felt more rote. I think that's mostly a consequence of roughly half the deck being infantry, but it ended up feeling pretty same-y in practice.

It was time to figure something else out. There were, roughly speaking, two paths forward. The first was that I could change the way that Battle definitions worked. While I liked the sizing of the battles, the way that trump was defined could be changed around. Perhaps trump suits were always fixed, and there was something else about the Battles that changed conditions. I wanted there to still be a decision of consequence alongside the size of the battle, something that the first two dealt cards would condition, but there were potentially other options there that I could modify. Perhaps something relating to weather, terrain, or other factors. I could look through Napoleonic battles to pull out some of the factors and reflect them to the cards.

The second path was potentially more interesting. I love, obviously, trick-taking games. I've designed more than one, I met my wife playing Bridge, I've been playing trick-taking games longer than any other type of game. It's a warm hug for me, an incredibly comfortable genre. But does it need to be the center here? Roughly speaking, this game was a representation of a campaign, with the Battles being, uh, battles, and the individual tricks representing clashes within that batle. But the overall structure of campaign and battles could be preserved while replacing how those clashes are represented in the game. The more interesting path forward here was to swap out the basic trick-taking of the game for something else that would make use of number/suit cards.

I wanted to take that path. Partially because I don't want to be just known as a trick-taking guy, but also to stretch myself a little bit and get out of my comfort zone. So that's what I was going to explore. The first step here was to get out my trusty copy of David Parlett's Penguin Book of Card Games and read about a bunch of card games for inspiration. It worked for Fox, I assumed it would work here.

Next time, we'll explore what I came up with and see how I can push this game towards history. At least a little bit.

For the last set of tests, the big change was going from treating the Reserve as a small deck to an auxiliary hand. After the Battle site has been chosen, setting the size of the Battle and the trump suit, you could go through your Reserve and replace cards in your hand with cards from the Reserve. The very first thing that happened is that I forgot the new rule right away. This is a hazard of game development - you start becoming so familiar with your own rules that you forget how they work, or you blend versions together, or recall old rules. It's a real mess. Anyway, after a restart, I had a go with the visible Reserves and immediately liked the effect. You had a lot more control over how particular hands would go, you could make a decision on when to deploy your good cards in the Reserve, you could decide to make a big push or lay back in a particular battle.

There were a few secondary effects that popped up. First, the ergonomics of it were a little awkward. On one occasion, I got my hand mixed up with my Reserve and ended up getting stuff horribly crossed up. I'm slightly worried about that, but not worried enough to do anything about it. I think it will probably prevent me from making the Reserve very big, but that's probably fine. And it's unclear how much of a problem this will be in practice, since I'm running multiple positions and it's easy to get crossed up and that won't be true of players of the final game. One thing that might help is keeping captured tricks face-up, giving one fewer thing to get confused with. It's something to think about in the future, but not something I'm going to tackle right now.

The second thing that emerged is that there were opportunities to bluff. If the player who picked the Battle doesn't draw from their Reserve, they might have an exceptionally strong hand. They might convince their opponent to over-commit, and burn some of their Reserve unnecessarily. Bluffing as an emergent property of the Reserve is delightful, and I'm very happy that it's popped up.

The final observation is that you might end up with useless cards in your Reserve and never really get to use them. It's not a huge problem, but it can be a bit disheartening to have a 2 in your Reserve (or a couple 2s!), realize that that suit isn't available as trump for the rest of the game, and know that that card is almost certainly worthless. I'm considering giving each player a point for each leftover Reserve card if the game ends on points instead of Routs, which might fix things. I haven't decided if it's necessary or not yet, but it would provide a bit more incentive to manage your Reserve carefully.

Overall, the open Reserves are very neat, add to the decision space, and provide for some fun opportunities to confuse your opponent. Even if your opponent is yourself. Yes, I did successfully bluff myself.

The other two changes were both successful as well. Having the player behind on points pick the next Battle seemed to work pretty well, in that being able to match the choice to what your first two cards are is a small advantage. There's a little bit of a drawback in that you sometimes don't want to play the first lead card, but I might change it so that the person who selects the Battle gets to choose who leads the first trick. It's a little bit of extra complexity, I think, and I'm still trying to decide if it's worth it.

Finally, the "you can't win on a Rout" hasn't come up. But I'm happy with it anyway, as a bit of a Hail Mary thing in the game. On a theoretical basis, it's pleasing. Overall, the game is progressing nicely, and at this point, I think it's time to tackle adding some additional flavor, get some more Napoleonic stuff in there. In particular, I want to evolve the deck from a classic French deck to one with suits for infantry, cavalry, and artillery, and have commanders and scouts mixed in. Creating a custom deck gives tremendous opportunity to really shape how the players interact, and it opens up the next big stage of development. The custom deck for Fox in the Forest is super important to how the game works. I've got my 12-pack of Bicycles ready, and I've got a first draft of the deck, and it's time to give that a whirl. For next time.

Napoleon was largely inspired by a mechanism, which is kind of an odd starting point for it, at least for how I think about games. But that has helped it accelerate quickly and forced me to think about the direction sooner than usual. As I chip away at it, a few targets have emerged that I'd like to adhere to. Those targets will define both how I approach development and maybe the sorts of players it might appeal to and what the final product is like.

First, I want it to be a card game. I don't want this game to evolve into having a board for tracking state, and I don't want the fight to end up on a map. Partly, this is to avoid comparison to Richard Sivél's masterful Friedrich and Maria, which take trick-taking into a war context in this rough time period and do it fantastically. But even beyond not wanting to make a pale imitation of games I admire greatly, a map would very much be at risk of becoming the focus of play in any kind of wargame. Even one as heavily abstracted as I'm working on here. It's natural - the position of forces within space is of course a critical part of simulating any conflict, and a map would exert an inevitable gravity on the game to become the center of things. And I don't want that. I want the focus of this game to be the hands of cards that get played during the game.

The second goal that I have is that I want there to be some resonance with the subject matter. Not so much that I want this to be a serious simulation of Napoleonic warfare or anything, goodness knows there are plenty of games that have tackled that to varying degree of success. I don't expect that anyone will really learn anything about how battles worked by playing this game. Instead, what I'd like to get is a sort of broad sense of how things worked baked into the design. Roughly, if you know something about how Napoleonic warfare worked, the special rules and interactions in this game should make sense to you and not make you recoil. "Oh, sure, that makes sense," should be what you think as you read these rules.

The third thing I'm keeping in mind is that I really want the player count to work for two or four players, and I really, really want the 4 player game to be a partnership one. I've written before about my love of Bridge, but I've wanted to make a partnership game for forever, and dammit, I'm going to do it here. This is just a design parameter for me, not something that can drift, but if it comes down to a set of rules that works for 2 and doesn't work for 4, I'm not done yet. Note that I've skipped 3 players here. If I need to, I'll sacrifice the 3p game to make the other counts work, but I suspect strongly that I'll be able to get that version to work just fine.

My fourth thing to keep track of is that I want there to be both strategic decisions of significance as well as tactical decisions. In the context of this game, the strategic layer is how you're allocating your resources across hands and the tactical layer is how you're playing the cards in each hand. If you think about card games that take place across multiple hands, mostly there aren't resource allocation decisions you have to make. Your approach to any particular hand might be different based on the current scores in the game, such as bidding differently in Bridge or Spades, but that still is just changing your approach to a particular hand, rather than being a strategy you execute across many hands. In this game, I want there to be decisions you make in a hand that could have impact across many hands. That framework is relatively unusual in card games, particularly card games that hew towards traditional mechanisms, and I think it could be something pretty unique.

So those are my rough parameters, for now, the things I want to keep an eye on as I iterate through the game. Notably, I don't necessarily want this to be a trick-taking game. It can be, and it certainly is right now as of this writing. But that's just a thing that I started with, and there's no guarantee that it'll still be there at the end of development. If I come up with some other core mechanism that will work better, I'll cheerfully use it.

I'll try and check in to this list periodically and evaluate how I'm doing against things, to make sure that I'm keeping myself honest. As for how I'm doing now, there's no map or any kind of positional information (good!), there's very little fidelity to 18th/19th century European warfare (bad!), the player count is frankly unknown right now because I've been exclusively testing 2p (incomplete!), and there's a real sense of strategic decisions now (good!). Not bad! My main task, then, is to improve the impressionistic depiction of warfare that I'm going for, and then to make this thing work for two partnerships (and, I suppose, three players).

The tests with the changes went well. The ergonomic change, of discarding a card after drawing a Reserve card, worked great. The additional layer of shaping your hand by discarding was a fun little decision that was occasionally consequential, and it was nice to not have to count the tricks as carefully. The Battle is over when you run out of cards, simple. There was one small modification, which was that initially I was discarding the cards face up into a discard pile. That had two problems. One, I didn't like exposing the discarded card to the opponent, it gave more information that I wanted to to the second player, who could shape their hand in response. I didn't want quite that much sensitivity to player order. Second, discarding face up led to potential confusion between the discard pile and the current Battle card. I changed to discarding face down, and that worked better.

The changes to scoring were pretty solid. The Rout points system is working to provide a realistic alternative victory condition, one that I've had happen in a couple of games. It's certainly a big improvement on just three Routs winning. The change to make each round score equal to trick difference is fine. I'm still not totally sure it's the right thing to do, but it's working for the time being, so I'll leave it in place for the time being. It's not really a problem to address right now.

The other change, of dealing the first two cards before selecting a Battle, is working great. It's not a ton of information, but now selecting the Battle site involves a few variables, and it's not a trivial decision which one to pick. Each player's Rout points, the state of each player's Reserve, the two cards you can see, and the remaining sites on the board are all inputs into the strategic decision, and that feels like a good direction.

So, what are the new problems I'm seeing? One is that the Reserve is too random. You'll get a hand that's bad for the current Battle, and draw on your Reserve to help out. It feels really bad to draw, say, an off-suit 9, a card which might have been really helpful if it matched the trump suit but is otherwise probably a waste. Your Reserve is very short, and wasting even one of your precious draws feels bad. In some ways, this mirrors the problem that I previously had with Battle selection. The randomness of Reserve draws was swamping the strategic decision of when to draw. It felt like you weren't really adjusting the course of the game as much as you should be, and given that managing the Reserve deck is one of the critical things tying the Battles together, players needed to have some control over the Reserve.

This is a decision that I ended up sleeping on. One thing that I strongly considered was making the Reserve deck a fixed set of cards. I already had it seeded with two Kings, after all. Incidentally, that decision to add Kings to the Reserve was made before I first played it, for a couple reasons. First, Kings score a point when taken and I wanted them out of play at the beginning of the game so later Battles on average would be more valuable. Second, at some point, I'm going to want those cards to have some special effect, as they'll represent commanders on the battlefield, so I started by seeding them to players to make sure the special cards were evenly distributed. Finally, as the second highest cards, it adds some cheap drama when you pull one of your precious Ks from the Reserve and it gets beat by an Ace. I am absolutely not above trying to create some artifical dramatic moments.

Anyway, a fixed deck of Reserve cards potentially could be interesting if those cards were all special in some way. If they were all decent to strong cards, and all had their tactical uses, then you wouldn't have the problem of a dead draw causing you pain during the game. Ultimately, I decided to not move forward with this for now. I think it's an idea I might revisit when I create a custom deck for the game, but for now, it would make setup more painful and make the Reserve more predictable, which isn't exactly the direction I wanted to go.

However, I got somewhat stuck on that solution to the problem. This occasionally happens with game design, that you see a problem clearly, and a solution that doesn't quite fit the bill, but it can be hard to shake yourself out of that solution to move to a better one. You get trapped in that local optima and it can be difficult to move to another part of the design space to find a better approach. In this case, I used an old standby: thinking about the problem as I fell asleep. That method has its risks, of either coming up with something and forgetting it or thinking you have it only to have the light of day demonstrate you're a bozo, but in this case it allowed me to see a potential new path.

I had been treating the Reserve as a deck of cards. A deck of cards, of course, has an implied set of rules. A deck is face down so you can't see what's in it. A deck is ordered. A deck is accessed one card at a time, from the top. It's a useful construct for many games, and these implicit properties and rules help people quickly understand how to interact with common design elements. But, those implied rules are ones that are worth examining. Was the Reserve using the right design construct?

There's a parallel to a problem in software engineering, of choosing the right data structure for a system. Thinking about how the data will be organized, how the data will be used, how often data will be retrieved, added, or removed will inform what the is the right data structure for a use case. Similarly, it's worth considering whether you're using the right game element in your design, given what you want it to accomplish and the role it plays in the design relative to the other elements.

In this case, what occurred to me is that maybe treating the Reserve as a deck was the problem. The Reserve was small, and the decision to draw a card from it was very high impact, one of the most important ones the player would make during the game. Given the centrality of the Reserve to the decision space for players, it seemed to make sense to provide them with more control over it than they currently had. The thing I needed wasn't a deck, it was a hand. If the Reserve was a hand of cards, the player could choose a card that they knew would be helpful in the current Battle. They wouldn't ever waste anything, and they could deploy their resources meaningfully. As the game was already fairly random, this piece of control would help adjust the balance towards skill. I would include it in my next set of tests.

Another problem I wanted to tackle was a mirror of a problem that I had in Fox in the Forest, at least the early versions. The player on-lead in early versions of Fox had too much control over the pace of the game. The biggest decision you make in that game is the choice of lead, as the response card was more constrained, and it was too easy for a player to keep a stranglehold on the lead and therefore the big decisions. The introduction of the special powers on the 1s and the 3s was my solution to breaking that cycle and giving the following player the ability to change the tide of the game.

In Napoleon, Blown Apart, the decision of what Battle to choose rested with the winner of the previous Battle. Since that player now had access to some information about what Battle to choose and could tilt things towards their own hand, it provided a bit of the same stranglehold problem. Once you won a Battle, you were more likely to win the next and keep the ball rolling. In Napoleon, it's easier to fix than it was in Fox. I could have the player with the fewest points select the next Battle. This would provide the trailing player with a minor advantage to assist in catching up, and didn't really have a downside, so it was an easy change. It's also easy to kind of squint and see how it matches with the theming, as the player that is behind is presumably on defense, and the defender choosing the ground for a Battle isn't an unreasonable reflection of historical patterns.

The final thing to consider was a largely hypothetical problem thus far. I wanted the Rout point mechanism to provide hope for a player even if they're down on points, with the idea that they might still be able to Rout their way to victory. However, with the current scoring, there's a possibility that a player might be drawing dead going into the last Battles of the game. If there are insufficient tricks left in the Battles on the board for a player to win by Rout, and they are behind enough on points, their position might be hopeless or effectively so. Unfortunately, the computation to figure out if your position is hopeless isn't trivial, so I couldn't put in a rule saying someone is eliminated under certain conditions. I think it's a bad property of a game to have a player be in a hopeless spot but not have the game end, so I wanted a fix, ideally one that might permit a comeback.

I settled on the idea that you can't win if you were just Routed. That's a simple fix, easy for players to understand, and it leaves the possibility for a comeback win at all times. No matter how far you are behind, if you can string together Routs to get to 7 Rout points, you'll win. If the final Battle of the game is a Rout against the leading player, deal a new Battle site and keep going.

These fixes togther increase the amount of player control in the game. It's a card game, I don't want it to be a perfect chess match. But I do want players to feel like their skill matters, and I want them to feel good if they make a strong play and it leads to victory. By increasing the decisions around the Reserve and giving the trailing player some advantages, it should lead to a higher skill ceiling and closer contests. And overall, the game was still showing promise, which is very exciting.

At the start of the game, each player is dealt a Reserve, which consists of two Kings for each player plus four more random cards. Eight cards are then dealt as Battle sites, with each card being from 2-8. The game then starts, with the lead player choosing one of the Battle sites. The number becomes the number of tricks in the Battle, and the suit is the trump suit. Each player can then draw as many cards as they want from their Reserve, one at a time, and then the Battle is played out as a standard trick-taking game, with following suit required. If a player takes every trick in the battle, it's a Rout, and the player scores points equal to the size of the Battle. Otherwise, whoever took the most tricks scores a single point. Play until one player wins three Routs or until all Battle sites are done, in which case high score wins.

Now, one of the obvious things that needed to change from this first version is that the scoring didn't quite work. While the reward for a Rout was certainly appropriate, and worked thematically with the overall Napoleonic battle idea, in practice they were difficult to achieve. Three Routs, in particular, was not an especially relevant winning condition. I'm very much a fan of multiple winning conditions, as it can provide a way to enable multiple strategies and potentially provide for surprise endings to the game. But in my first playtests, getting three Routs would almost certainly put a player far enough ahead that they would very likely win on points anyway. The idea was to potentially enable a sudden death win, so that even a player who was behind on points still had a path to victory, but this configuration of scoring wasn't really going to enable that.

So, I changed the scoring to be the difference in tricks taken. So in a 6 trick Battle, a 4-2 split would be worth 2 points, which resulted in a greater difference in scores and some more nuance. I also switched it so that you scored Rout points, and if you got to 7 Rout points, you would win. This was possible in a single Battle, and winning a Rout in a 7 or 8 trick Battle would be akin to shooting the moon in Hearts. But it would provide for hope for a player that's behind, as 7 Rout points was a more achievable target. Between them, these changes gave a more dynamic scoring system, it made each trick matter more, and it provided for more potential drama for come-from-behind victories.

The second problem area with the game is that the Battle selection felt too random. The suit contributed nothing to the decision space, because you had no information about what might be a good choice for you or a bad choice. The size of the battle might be relevant, especially if you already had a Rout, and the size of the remaining reserve for each player might factor in to the decision. But overall, the selection of the next Battle felt very rote. This was intended to be a strategic decision for players, where they could evaluate the current state of the game and make what they think is the best decision for the next fight. That element was just not there, and it was to be a key part of what makes the game interesting.

In order to fix that, the different suits had to be relevant to the decision. In order for that to be true, the player needed to have some piece of private data that pushes them in one direction or another. The easiest way to do that was to provide some kind of preview of their hand. Because the Battles ranged from 2-8 tricks, I could give each player their first two cards in order to fuel the Battle selection. They'd have a limited amount of information to push them in one direction or another. In some ways, this reminded me of a three-handed version of Bridge that I used to play in high school, where six cards of the dummy is exposed before bidding, allowing you to hopefully make an informed enough bid. There were always enough surprises in the remaining seven cards to generate lots of drama, and we ended up calling it "Falling Off Bridge" as a consequence. From that experience, I knew that partial hands would be a fun addition to the game.

Finally, there was an awkward piece of ergonomics in the game. Ergonomics very much do not show up until you try something on the table, which is a valuable side effect of actually getting a game to the prototype stage quickly. The specific thing I was noticing is that when you draw Reserve cards in your hand, you no longer had cards equal to the Battle size. That resulted in a change in how quickly you'd run out of cards in suits, which is a mixed bag for the game, but it could also result in playing the wrong number of tricks if both players drew on their Reserve. On one occasion, I played an extra trick in a Battle, and on another occasion, played an extra card from one hand before catching it. Given that I was paying a ton of attention to how things were going because I was testing, I thought it likely that players would get this wrong sometimes in practice. A fix here is to have players discard a card (face down) when they draw from the Reserve, which also has the nice side effect of letting them better shape their suit distribution, which meant even low ranking Reserve cards might still be useful.

With these fixes in place, I could try out some more tests and find the next layer of things to change. Mechanically, the way that I capture these things is just taking quick notes of problems as I play, without trying to fix them on the spot. It's more valuable to just keep going, taking raw notes of observations as I go, and then consider what I am going to change holistically. That way, fixes can work together. If something is really obviously wrong, sure, it might be worth fixing on the fly. But usually it's better to just complete a game and then consider the changes later.

My goal at this point with the game is to get to a core structure with a standard deck of cards that I'm happy with, one that presents challenging, interesting, and fun decisions to players as they play. I'll focus on the two-player version, as the easiest to test, and then confirm that the rules carry over to the three- and four-player versions just fine. Once I have that core game working well, I'll add some more thematic flavor to the mix. In particular, I want to customize the deck to be more Napoleonic, with suits corresponding to different types of troops, with some notion of commanders and scouting, and potentially some ability to choose your ground for fighting (and potentially modifying the Battle sites). Adding thematic touches is an easier thing if the basics are already in place, because judging the impact of those additions is easier if you know the game is already fun. "That made this less fun" is easy to percieve, and is a reasonable way to judge the chrome you bolt onto a game.

Coming up next time, the results of these tests and the further changes I make, as I continue working on the title.

And so it's gone, for years: promising ideas or themes or approaches, with some notes written down, and I just haven't been able to see something neat come out of any of them. I was genuinely starting to think that perhaps my well was dry. Had I invented all the games I had in me?

And then something changed. As I mentioned in the last post, I left my job, and the sudden freedom started getting things moving. During a family vacation, I was looking for a new card game to teach to my daughter and nephew. I wanted to play a trick-taking game with them, but it needed to be something simple. Hearts or Spades were certainly possibilities, I've played a ton of both, or perhaps something in the Oh Hell family. Euchre wasn't an option with only three of us. I started thinking about Whist and its variations, as kind of the elemental trick-taking game, and remembered playing Knock-Out Whist a long time ago and thought it might work. I looked up the rules to Knock-Out Whist on Pagat, taught it to them, and off we went. They loved it, immediately wanted to play again (and again and again), and we played it quite a bit during our visit.

A couple days later, while driving, a thought just popped into my head: the structure of Knock-Out Whist, where all that really matters is taking a single trick, is one worthy of exploring. What if that basic idea was applied to a larger structure, a more sophisticated game? Just as reminding myself of Piquet and Écarté helped spark Fox in the Forest, playing Knock-Out Whist had fired my brain.

When I got back from vacation, I pulled up Docs, and in one sitting wrote a set of rules that would be playable with a regular deck of cards. The basic idea is that you had a set of battle sites, each of which specified a number of tricks and a trump suit. You fought through each of these in turn, scoring a small number of points if you take more tricks, and scoring a lot more if you take all of them. Basically, providing an incentive to try and take all the tricks. I also provided the players with a small number of "reserve" cards, which they could add to their hand in order to augment their hand during a battle, if their initial hand looked like a woofer. By having a resource that extended between hands, it put the players in position to try and balance risk and reward.

My usual initial testing process involves trying to play a game with myself. I'll play every position of the game, doing my best to evaluate what I should do in each position honestly. What I'm generally trying to figure out is if the game play is obvious, which is a very common trap for a game, especially early versions of it. The tradeoffs that you picture and write in the rules may turn out to be very simple to resolve once they're on the table. So, by just setting up the game and viewing the state through the lens of each player, I'm able to usually judge if there's anything beyond trivial decisions facing the player. In short, I'm usually able to judge if a game is boring by trying it solo. I might not be able to tell if a game is actually good, because that really only becomes clear as other players get involved and you see if the game is capable of surprises and novel situations.

It wasn't long before that first test provided results. There was genuinely something here. I played it through all the way to the end, a rarity for a solo test, and even enjoyed myself. That's a surprise for a first draft, and something I hadn't really felt since Fox in the Forest. There were some obvious changes that needed to be made, but the core idea seemed sound, and there's real possibility here. I needed a name, though. Since I was theming it around battles for now, picturing Napoleonic stuff in my head, it should have a name reflecting that. So, for now, the new game will be called Napoleon, Blown Apart. Join me as I design this and hopefully get the game out into the world, and I'll try and document my decisions here.

In the month or so since I left that job, I have actually written the rules to a game and even put it on to the table for multiple tests. This is the furthest I've managed with a new game in years and years. And with that success, that optimism of a game that is actually fun to play, I wanted to resurrect this space to permit me to journal some of my design thoughts. Writing about design can help clarify my thinking, and placing this information on my personal website gives me control of it. Should I put this into a Substack? Yeah, almost certainly. But whatever. The process of writing it all down is more important to me than if anybody actually reads it, so even an audience of zero still allows me to accomplish my goal.

I did need to spend some time upgrading Ghost, and I'm sure there are still rough edges here and there, but I'll sort those out. Apologies if you try and read this and cannot. And thank you, by the way.

Anyway, uh, we're back! And just to make sure that things are different this time around, I'm actually writing the next post immediately after this one. It'll be about the game I'm calling Napoleon, Blown Apart.