Designing a MegaGame: 4 - Resource Management
I’ve been working on the laborers and the craftsmen part of the game - the part where resources are created and can be spent on stuff. The worker placement part of Den of Wolves (the core game) works really nicely in a megagame as long as there is a point to it. For GAW, the output of the resource management will be additional soldiers, ships and goods to sell for victory points.
That means that I have to develop an resource management, engine creation, and worker placement game. Fortunately, this is one of my strong areas as I’ve played many games that feature these three things over the past several decades, both in video game form and in board game form.
The trick is to find a balance between having enough stuff to do and not over complicating the game so it can be played in a MegaGame setting, where things are a little frantic and the rules need to be fairly light. The outputs need to have multiple stakeholders all vying for time and attention, thereby making the decisions in the laborer/craftsmen game difficult.
Version 1
I began with a simple list of resources, things that are typically found in civilization building games - food, wood, stone, metal, and the buildings that produced them. My goal was to not over complicate the number of resources and the number of steps that resources had to through before they can be used. If you’ve ever played a Settlers video game, you’ll know you can mine all kinds of metals and create individual tools which are used in specific buildings. I didn’t want to go too far down that track but it still had to be interesting to make a game out of it.
Version 2
Version 2 was turning the buildings and upgrades into sticky notes and putting them on a big poster board. This helps see what an eventual player mat might look like and gives you room to experiment with some numbers - how many things they produce, how many levels of buildings to create and how much the upgrades cost. The picture below is my v2:
And the picture below this is of my v2 upgrades:
You’ll see I’ve put the abilities of the buildings in pen but the outputs in pencil so I can change them on the fly.
Once I played it through, I then transposed this information to electronic files so I could print them out for when I had my friends over to playtest.
Version 3
Version 3 is more-or-less a copy of what I had for v2 but electronic. Here’s a picture so you can see what it looked like:
I didn’t grab a picture of it, but I have upgrades for all the spaces also so that when we did the playtest, we could upgrade after every turn (using the build action).
Also, you’ll notice the yellow paper above where I kept tabs on the quantity of resources I had after every turn. I asked all my friends to do the same so that I can see them all side by side and see what each “stage” of the game looks like. e.g. how many soldiers in the first third of the game, how long does it take for people to create artisanal goods, etc.
Outside of balancing, I think we learned a lot from the playtest, especially talking through the ramifications of what happens if you can’t feed all your people!
Overall, I think I’m fairly happy with where I ended up. I’m going to write up all the rules and start to do some graphic design on the player mats and buildings/upgrades.
I’ve been putting a lot of thought into the military game recently so I think that’ll be my next blog post. Stay tuned!