Since the last time that I actually had a new game that got as far as the table, I've thought about probably a dozen different ideas. These have expressed themselves as anything ranging from rules sets I've actually written down, to several paragraph sketches, to scribbles in a notebook, to just a sentence fragment in a Google Doc. Every one of them, however, never managed to actually get my attention far enough to turn into a thing I wanted to actually try out. Mostly, that was because I couldn't see the interesting game part in it. I spend a lot of time turning game ideas over in my head, thinking about how they might play. What decisions are players making? What tradeoffs are they going through? What is going to surprise them as they play? I'm not especially interested or inspired to make games that are centered around the early experiences players have, nor games rooted in their stories. I want to make games that can withstand many plays, that's where my mind moves, so if I can't see in my mind's eye where the interesting tension comes from, I don't want to proceed.

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.