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Summoning Circle Scramble: A Postmortem

When I first heard about the Button Shy 18 Card Challenge, my first reaction was to go through the five stages of grief:

So here I am a month and a bit later, one of those masochists who crammed a worker placement game into just 18 cards. If you're interested in playing it, you can find the print and play files and the rule book here.

My Design Philosophy

There's a famous quote from Sid Meier:

"A game is a series of interesting choices."

This is something I think about a lot: it helps me understand why I like the games that I like, why I dislike others, and how I can apply that to the games I design. I like Raiders of the North Sea because I find the decisions around which crew-members to hire and what actions to take each turn interesting. I like Quacks of Quedlinburg because the decision to draw just one more ingredient from my bag when I know my potion is about to explode is exciting! And one of the many reasons I have a love-hate relationship with Dinosaur Island is because it always seems that the best strategy is to just get carnivores - that's one example of a choice which I don't find interesting, which hinders my enjoyment of the game.

The other pillar of my design philosophy is elegance: I enjoy games that create a lot of interesting decisions by using a few simple, cohesive mechanics more than games that do so by incorporating a ton of different mechanics. I think it comes from my background as a software engineer - I always want to understand a system as fully as possible, so when I can't intuitively create a mental model of how a game works, I feel like I'm making uninformed decisions and it leads to a poor experience. Because of this, I try to build a game up carefully, starting with the core mechanics and only adding new ones that complement the existing gameplay. There's another quote I like, this time from Antoine de Saint-Exupery, which I think sums it up nicely:

"Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."

Worker Placement Games

To design a worker placement game within the restriction of 18 cards, we first need to understand what worker placement games are. The challenge announcement gave a few example definitions, but let's go back to that Sid Meier quote: what are the interesting choices we make in worker placement games? Typically a number of different action spaces are open - these give you some benefit when you place your workers on them. The key decision you make is where to place your workers. In good worker placement games, this isn't a simple choice - there are many different strategies you could take, so you need to carefully weigh up the potential outcomes from taking each action. One typical formula for worker placement games is to provide the following actions:

This is the basic starting point of most worker placement games, but to make it interesting you generally need a bit more of a twist on things.

Limiting the amount of workers able to use each action space is one trick a lot of games use - this brings in the concept of "blocking" - now you need to consider what moves your opponent might make, as they might prevent you from carrying out your strategy - you might even choose specifically to take an action yourself just to block your opponent. I really like the way Architects of the West Kingdoms has a kind of soft blocking system - as you place more of your workers on a space its effects are more powerful when you use it, but at the same time you run the risk of them all being captured by your opponent.

Engine-building mechanics are also fairly common in worker placement games. Providing ways for players to make certain actions stronger is a good way of letting players express themselves through their choice of strategy and ensures different players value certain actions more than others.

Worker Placement in 18 Cards

So why is the 18 card restriction so limiting when designing a worker placement game? I think the reason is that there are a lot of things you need to represent in just 18 cards. When designing software, a useful exercise is to describe a problem and look at all the nouns that pop up when you're talking about it: these are the concepts you'll need to represent in your system. I find this exercise useful for boardgame design too, so let's apply it to the previous section:

Nouns:

In a typical boardgame these things are pretty simple to represent: workers are represented by meeples, action spaces are represented on the board, you can use tokens for resources, and there can be a track on the board to keep track of players' victory points. With no board, tokens or meeples however, things get more complicated. You need to make maximum use of the 18 cards you have available. You can use a few tricks to draw out as much potential from the cards as you can - things like using both sides of the card rather than using a common card back for all cards or using multiple cards together to increase the amount of things they can represent.

Out of the concepts we need to represent with cards, I think resources and victory points are the hardest to get right. The reason for this is that workers and action spaces can naturally be represented by a single card each. In contrast, for resources and victory points you need to be able to represent a range of values - this is something cards aren't naturally good at. There are ways of representing scalar values (see the image below), but it's hard to get something that feels elegant. If a concept seems like it could be better represented in other ways, the game ends up feeling more like it's been forced to fit into 18 cards rather than designed as an 18 card game. This is something I really wanted to avoid.

Tracking two resources using two cards

The final thing to consider is how many of each concept we'll need to represent. You can kind of think of the 18 card restriction as a budget: if you spend too many cards representing workers, you have less for action spaces or resources and vice versa. Once we start listing it out it's pretty clear that we're going to have to compromise somewhere. This is where we need to approach the problem from the other side: which concepts can we combine together? Which concepts can we cut out completely? You can also pull some tricks here: if you only calculate victory points at the end of the game or round, you can eliminate the need for a tracker (as long as all the info is still in front of you). You can do a similar thing with resources - if you have to use them at the end of each round, you don't need to keep track of them separately. I think the best approach is to combine both ideas: limit what you need to represent in the game as much as possible, and then use clever tricks to maximise the use of your limited cards without going overboard - it's easy to fall into the trap of having the cards represent too many different things and just making things confusing for the player.

The Core Idea

So what to compromise on? One thing I personally love about worker placement games is having a bunch of workers: knowing that the placement of each of them needs to fit into a bigger strategy and having to adapt that strategy in response to your opponents' moves is the key experience I want to recreate. Having too few workers will make it feel more like action drafting rather than worker placement, so I want at least four workers for each player. That's already a sizeable chunk: eight cards out of the budget (at minimum). Similarly, there need to be enough action spaces for the worker placement decisions to be interesting, so we can't compromise there. That leaves us with the concepts of resources and victory points, neither of which I'm overly attached to. Thinking about victory conditions other than victory points is what led me to the core idea behind Summoning Circle Scramble:

"A worker placement game where the workers are the victory points."

By combining the victory points and worker concepts into one, we've significantly reduced the number of concepts we need to represent! Even better, having the victory condition tied into to the concept of workers helps emphasise their importance.

The next step was to lock down what exactly the victory condition would be. In this case, there are two obvious ways to go about it: the goal should be either to scale up (gain workers over time) or scale down (lose workers over time). Intuitively, the former makes more sense - engine building mechanics are often integrated into worker placement games as it leads to a nice arc over the course of the game where you get to feel more powerful at the end as a result of your strategy early on. However, this leads to a problem with action economy: in general, having more workers and taking more actions is just better than taking fewer actions. What this means is that when you're ahead, you have more workers, and it is easier to snowball your lead. It's important to always feel like you have a chance of winning in a game until the very end, so it would be difficult and require a lot of clever systems in order for this not to be a problem in the game. Complex systems not only mean more cognitive load for the player and more play-testing and balancing for the poor designer, they also mean more concepts to represent on our limited cards. Instead, I chose to go with the other approach: have the goal be to lose workers over time. This seems less intuitive, but it means that the game should have natural catch-up mechanics - the closer you are to winning, the less powerful you are. Additionally, it gives us a clear victory condition: win the game by having zero workers left. This is the new core idea:

"A worker placement game where the goal is to get rid of all your workers."

That sounds nice and interesting - I should really have used that as the game's tag-line!

The Inner Loop

We have the main goal of the game defined, now we need the "inner loop" - the moment to moment gameplay. There a few things here that we need to be careful about. The first is that you need to be able to easily keep track of how many workers you have at any given time. These are your victory condition, so it should be easier to remember, but using a round based system ensures that you always have it explicitly on the table. The alternative would be to "restock" your hand with X workers every so often - I think this would be a cool mechanic, but it would likely be much harder to remember how many workers you get each time without some kind of tracker. With a round based system, each player places all their workers, the round resolves, and players take back their workers for the next round. This is much simpler given the 18 card restriction. To take this one step further, I made another decision: each round resolves with a clear winner, and that winner removes one of their workers as a reward. This removes the need for worker tracking between rounds (freeing up room in our card budget), and keeps the inner gameplay loop simple. It does remove one aspect of strategy from the game: the choice of when to get rid of your workers. It's an interesting risk vs reward decision - make yourself weaker now to get closer to victory or gain an advantage with more workers before snatching victory at the end? I think that's a really cool mechanic I'd like to explore in the future, but it would introduce a ton of complexity that I didn't think would fit well in the context of the 18 card challenge.

Committing to the single-winner round based system brings up the second concern: having more workers is generally better, but you still need to be able to win a round with fewer workers. It should be harder, but not impossible, otherwise the game is disengaging. Similarly, whatever mechanic is used for determining who wins each round needs to scale well to situations where players have the maximum number of workers, but also to those where they only have one. The typical worker placement paradigm of resource gathering/transforming doesn't really work here - it would be pretty hard to make the choice of what action to take interesting both when using one or four workers. Instead I chose to try to come up with a unique mechanic better suited to this game. In this case, the mechanic needed to be something where both players could influence the outcome of a system, without letting the player with more workers have full control. This is what led me to come up with the Weird Graph Traversing Thingy™.

The Weird Graph Traversing Thingy™

The idea behind the main mini-game you play each round is pretty simple: there's a bunch of nodes, with connections between them in different colours. You direct some marker thing along those connections by placing your workers on different action spaces, and you want it to end up on your side.

The Weird Graph Traversing Thingy™

For this mini-game to work, we need to resolve the workers at the end, after they've all been placed, rather immediately than when they're placed. This ensures that the decision of where to place your workers is still interesting - the order you place them in isn't necessarily the order they'll resolve in. This gives you a bit more to think about than "Well, I guess I'll just move the marker back to my side."

Fitting the Game into 18 Cards

With the mini-game figured out, we have all the concepts we need to represent:

To make sure the game stays fresh between rounds (and in later games), we need to have a lot of possible actions and graphs. We can use a few of the tricks we explored earlier to make sure this fits into 18 cards. The first is using the worker card as a common card back for the action space cards - this lets them be shuffled together so we get a different set of action spaces each round. For this to work, we make the worker cards rotationally symmetric, so they can represent either player. The second trick is to have each graph be made up of two cards joined together - this gives us more possible graphs with fewer cards.

The final Summoning Circle Scramble components

Each round we'll need a maximum of 10 worker cards (five for each player) and three action spaces (randomly chosen each round). This means we need 13 action space/worker cards, leaving us five left over for our graphs. Using the trick described above, five graph cards gives us 5 x 4 = 20 possible permutations for the graph. For the 13 action spaces, we can use the 12 possible permutations of choosing two colours (eg: red, then green) from four candidates (red, green, blue and yellow). This leaves us one special action card leftover for variety! So each action card will be made up of two colours, and using it means moving the marker along the connections of the first colour, then moving it again along the connection of the second colour. For the special card, we can make it a combination of every colour!

The First Play-Tests

With the core of the game in place, I decided to do some play-testing with friends! The initial feedback was... mixed. It was clear that there was a good idea in there, but there were a few key problems with the game in it's current state:

  1. There wasn't really an intuitive strategy for first-time players
  2. When playing with a low number of workers, it was too easy to figure out every possible solution via brute-force and choose a strategy guaranteed to win
  3. This was especially the case when playing from behind: your opponent could let you place your worker and then have complete control over the rest of the round
  4. Because of the above issues, it always came down to a one vs one situation. This should be the climactic finale of the game, but again, it was too easy to reason about, so it felt anti-climactic, unfair, and purely luck-based as to who would win
  5. The "Use Every Colour" card was over-powered since you could get back to your side from anywhere if you used it as your last move

The first issue was easy enough to solve: changing the order resolution from a stack (the last worker played is resolved first) to a queue (the first worker played is resolved first) made it so that you knew how the first worker you played would resolve. Previously you had no idea where the marker would be when it came time to resolve your worker, so you couldn't really strategise. The queue system was much more intuitive - now you could reason about the situation in terms of "I can do this, and then you can do that" as you were placing the workers.

Similarly, the last issue was another simple fix - rather than having it be use every colour I changed it to choose any one colour. This was still powerful in its own right, as it let you defer some more decision making to the resolution stage, but it wasn't strictly better in every situation like it used to be, since it doesn't let you travel as far.

The other issues were a bit harder to figure out - the problem essentially came down to the fact that the decision space was too small when you didn't have many workers. I considered a lot of different ideas for how to solve this - one of the simpler ones was to simply end the game before it reached that state (make the victory condition two or three workers instead of zero). I didn't like how this felt - I liked the way that ending on zero workers was intuitive, and this solution was simply avoiding the core problem in favour of addressing the symptoms. Another idea was to introduce special connections or nodes on the graph cards that affected the game when you landed on them - things like removing workers from the queues or swapping out one half of the graph. I liked the idea behind this - it made the resolution more fun and the game feel like less of a chore! However, it still didn't address some of the edge cases: when you were down to a one vs one finale, you couldn't guarantee you'd be able to hit a special node/connection in any useful way. In fact, even if you did, it wouldn't really feel rewarding since the game would feel like it came down to RNG anyway, and it didn't address the issue of your opponent controlling everything once you've played your workers if they have significantly more. It also ran the risk of ruining the visual clarity of the already busy graph cards.

I found myself thinking about it a lot - it seemed like an impossible puzzle to solve! If you could determine all the possible solutions, the game was too deterministic and felt unfair. If I introduced any form of RNG, the game would feel unfair. What I actually needed was to increase the decision space so that you couldn't calculate every possibility - even with only a few workers in play. The player with fewer workers also needed a way of deferring their decision to play their worker until the right moment!

The spells mechanic is the solution that I came up with. Now, for each worker you've lost, you gain one spell you can use instead. Spells have the effects I was considering above (removing workers etc) but it's a decision the players have control over. Since hands are open knowledge, spells are something that can be played around, so it doesn't feel unfair - it's just one more thing you have to consider when planning your strategy. It addresses the core issues with the game in a really great way: you can defer your worker placement by playing spells (introducing another interesting decision). Even in the finale you still have way too much to think about to actually be able to calculate out every possible way the game could play out. Best of all, it feels fun to use them! It even addresses a problem I wasn't really thinking about at the time: blocking is one of the key worker placement mechanics, and in this game only it really applied when players had a lot of workers. By letting spells be used on the same action spaces as the workers, blocking remains a key factor to consider throughout the entire game. One versus one finales went from being the most boring part of the game to being the most tense and interesting - now that you only have one worker each, when do you play them, and how can you use your spells to gain the best advantage possible?

I think this experience shows how important it is to play-test with the bare bones of a game first. The less going on, the easier it is to identify where the real problems are and where they can be addressed - even before the play-test, I had a bunch of ideas for different mechanics I could add to spice things up, but if they were in the game from the outset, I think it just would have made it harder to address the core issues of the game. I think the spells mechanic led to the best possible version of the game, and I don't think I would have been able to come up with it without first coming to a better understanding of the game's core issues.

Final Thoughts

Is it a Good Worker Placement Game?

I think it captures the feeling of the key interesting decisions you make during worker placement games pretty well - although it kind of plays a bit more like chess than anything else. It's always hard to fully describe certain genres, and I think worker placement in particular is one that's very difficult to properly define. The format I used where every round has a single winner seems to be the main factor which makes this feel less "worker-placementy" - although maybe that's a sign that there's room for more experimentation within the genre.

Is it a Good 18 Card Game?

I think the game fits the 18 card restriction really well! The game gets maximum use out of all 18 cards without over-reaching and trying to fit too much on each card.

I hope this blog has given you some interesting insight into my thought process while designing Summoning Circle Scramble. Overall, I'm really happy with the game that I managed to put together. I think it's fun, interesting and it does something that I haven't seen done before. I had a ton of fun putting this together, and I learned a lot at the same time. Finally, I'd like to thank Jason and the Button Shy team for running this competition, as well as the great community on Discord for all the support!