HerdZ - Chess with Zombies

farsicon

Hey everyone

I have been so inspired lately by all the awesome board games that were released here, that I couldn't resist attempting this as well.

I was a bit hesitant to share the game without having some decent artwork first, but based on some very good advice I decided to test the game on its design first (draft PDF attached) before sharing any of the crappy concept art. The game is basically a turn based strategy game with a large amount of humans and zombies battling it out for survival.

There is still a few challenges with the design that I am not completely certain of - for example that the game may be too complicated, or that I'm not sure if the character setup and health/ammo counters will work that well. I have no experience in this - if anyone knows of a better solution to keep track of stats in up to 50 characters please feel free to share it!

I would love any feedback and criticism - don't even dare to be gentle :)

Thanks!

Tuism

I gave the rules a read/skim:

- Immediately I was struck with "I have no idea what you're talking about". What's a tile look like? What's a square? Some visuals, even rough ones, would help. I had to scroll down to the bottom to see a couple of squares, and even then I didn't really have any context of what that means.

- Second immediate thought: 16 x 10 squares? This contributed towards the "I have no idea what you're talking about" feeling - it seemed very simply like there's an impossible number of spaces to work with, for a board game. Go can do that because the entire game literally has 2 types of pieces and one rule. This zombie apocalypse setting means 160 x 160 sounds insane just to setup, nevermind play. Reading further I see the 50 zombie pieces and whatever number of pieces and pieces and pieces and it all just turns me right off. Games, especially boardgames, are about abstraction. There are very seldom games that completely simulate every aspect of everything. Most zombie games, despite trying to depict hordes, have up to 10 pieces. Dead of Winter has a bunch but they're really dumb, "AI" controlled chits more than pieces. The sheer perception of massive logistics and components makes me uninterested.

- Have you tried to play your own game? Playtesting is vital to see how a game feels. First playtests should be with yourself, just to feel it out. Simulating player turns against yourself will quickly show you the very basic problems, and right off the bat I feel that the setup of your game will take a LONG time, much longer than should be for most boardgames. You said you want to "test the game first" - well, you should have "tested it" yourself first to get a feel for it! First test by yourself is part of game design, not testing, I think!

- Reading further, each "character" has life totals AND ammo counts. That's a lot of logistics! You said:

if anyone knows of a better solution to keep track of stats in up to 50 characters please feel free to share it!

The real question you need to ask is not "can I track 50 characters ammo and heath" - it's "is tracking 50 characters ammo and health" fun or create interesting decisions?

- And then each character has their own bunch of stats... I'd say leave the actual details out of the rules, but make cards that has each character's characteristics on them, and in the rules explain what each shared characteristic means. Move stat: the number of spaces a character may move. Shoot stat: number of damage the character does, etc.

- You've described a bunch of stuff but without any components, it's all lost. I can't visualise what you're trying to say and describe. The components doesn't have to have art on them. A card is simply a rectangle with a couple of sentences and numbers inside - it's about design, not art. It's about clarity, not art. I guess this goes hand in hand with the first point.

- It looks to me like you've made the *very classic* mistake of first time boardgame designers. You've gone and thrown in the entire kitchen sink trying to simulate something. I've seen it over and over again, from many people designing games locally, at Icon, at local boardgame meets, etc. When I see people say "I'm designing a game!" the prototype they show is inevitably this giant heap of stuff. Now compare that to ANY boardgame you've played (and definitely play a ton of games, it's much better to play boardgames than to study boardgames), and you'll notice that there are actually very, very few games that are actually kitchen sinks. And those that are, are either made by super huge names in the industry with TONS of experience, or super niche, usually military simulations, which very few people actually enjoy (I'm not one of them). Massive games are SUPERIORLY difficult to design well and balance well. It's the same as video games, really. Making Starcraft as your first game will NOT work out well.

- Some thoughts on if you really want to pursue this design:
a) Minimise. If a game is fun at 160 x 160, it can be fun at 16 x 16. Scale everything down and create that design. In fact, go small enough so that YOU can be bothered to build and play it YOURSELF. If YOU can't be arsed to build and play it yourself, noone will.
b) Zombies. Why zombies are such a popular trope in games is because they are mindless and it's easy for games to use their mindlessness thematically as enemies to mow down easily. If enemies are supposed to be ninjas and they moved on the map like mindless zombies (because it's easier to write/manage rules for mindlessness than cunning), it would be thematically wrong. So you have a player who plays zombies... Are zombies supposed to be smart and tactically move about, etc?
c) Simplify simplify simplify. Asking players to randomly place bits down on the board will obviously make it biased - I'll put things closer to me. Some war games let players take turns in placing things within a certain area, with certain rules (must be 2 squares away from the nearest XX and must be Y squares away from the edge or soemthing). Let choices be few but important rather than many. Randomness needs to be defined by the game rules/system rather than "hey player, make this random".
d) Look at existing games that has the theme you're looking at to draw some inspiration or see how they handle things:
- Dead of Winter
- Last Night on Earth
- Zombicide
- Zombie 15
And a whole pile more, really. I only like Dead of Winter in the above mentioned titles.

Okay I hope this helps. TL;DR:
- Simplify!
- Simplify some more!
- Try it out yourself!
- Start small!
(yes all I'm saying is simplify)

farsicon

@tuism, thanks for the feedback dude! After posting I realised that I should have added some basic structural drawings at least *facepalm*

I'd like to take some time to process and respond appropriately, but for now just thanks :)

quintond

@fariscon: What I found helped with my rules was the 20 page limit imposed by The Game Crafter on a Rule Book. basically your minimum size if 4 pages ... so I worked with those constraints.

If I hadn't had a constraint like that I would have ended up writing a 60 page rule book that no one would have read.

The next thing is something that @mikethetike brought to my attention ... keep the game setup and game turn sections as simplified as possible ... most players will learn the game and will then use those two main areas as refreshers when they come back to your game.

Using these guidelines, I then re-did my rules and as I mentioned a new part of rules or a new aspect, that became my next section ... for example my first aspect I mention in the manual are the main structures you need to build ... so after my Overview, Game Setup, and Game Turn sections ... the next section I added was Colony Structures.

I continued to do this throughout the manual and the manual ended up having a logical flow to it. I also added images to help explain the new aspect at each stage.

Now I am no rules expert ... but I think it worked out in the end and I think your rules can maybe benefit from these guidelines ... even if you go over the 20 page limit ... try to keep under it ... you will be amazed at how quickly you learn to say something in a clearer and more concise way. 8-}

Good luck ... keen to see where you go with this.

Tuism

While having a constraint is nice, I'd say 20 pages is a LOT of pages, enough for me to not want to read the rules of a game. (For comparison, @farsicon only has 13 pages). And what's in a page? Is it ye standard A4 word document? Most games I've played come with smaller-than-A4 rules booklets, usually under 8 pages.

I had an experienced game designer look over Dubai's rules, and his feedback was that I could cut out at least 25%. And that the first page was not necessary. My rules are 2 pages A4.

So I would say yes, try to keep your rules footprint low, but limiting it to 20 pages is probably not a good limit. Try to understand major headings are important for skimming (as in literally make them 30 points and bold), and that's what most people will use the rulebook for - skimming for sections.

farsicon

@quintond: thanks man! It's not really a manual yet, it is just a draft game design that I wrote up while doing the prototype:


*roughly placed - just visualise a 4x4 grid of these tiles with the different building types and counter beads on top of the pieces for the basic idea - the Radio Events and Loot cards came after the original prototype

Will definitely simplify further when it comes to creating a proper manual - Ideally I would like to be able to provide a crib sheet as well as a few pages exploring the detail an the motivations behind the rules.

I'm currently working on the concept "art" for all the tiles and cards, etc. and will also refine the design a bit further to simulate a more "manual" kind of feel.

@Tuism, I think it may make more sense to respond to your feedback when posting an update - The original doc was probably a pain to read and understand without context (my bad), and I may have addressed at least some of your concerns already.

quintond

@Tuism: Sorry, I should mention that it is 20 pages at A5 size ... not A4. 8-}

@fariscon: I understand it is more of a draft design document but you would probably want to get feedback on the rules sooner rather than later and treating it as the official rules for the game might help in the long run.

Again ... I am no expert ... it has just been what I experienced with my project. Good luck.

farsicon

@quintond, yeah you're probably right. I tend to over engineer my prototypes, so it's a balancing act when to start sharing, but the feedback is awesome and helps to learn some kind of feel for it :)

Tuism

I see that you've built it yourself, or at least part of it... I can't tell. That wasn't apparent in your rules document, because there was nothing to see. Well now that I know that you could be bothered to build it yourself, the question is who else would be bothered to build it... And the scale that you have it at means it's unattractive for people to print and play, and that's ultimately a problem for you, and not for them. I've mentioned this somewhere before - it's not surprising that the most popularly participated and played PNPs on BGG comes from 9 and 18 card contests - the component limitations lower the barrier to entry and let people get in on the action really quickly. Those contests tend to yield the most improvements, and thus the most successful outcomes. (There's been a few publishes from them, usually turning into low funding goal, cheap kickstarters, which is great because they're also easy to manage and produce (relative, of course, to massive projects)

So again, if it's fun at 160 X 160 it should be fun at 16x16. Scale everything down, it'll be doing yourself a favour :)

farsicon

@tuism: appreciate the comments.

This game will probably not be well suited to print and play, though. I specifically want to lean a bit towards the scale of managing 20 or more characters per side (hence the name) as it is a type of game that I personally would like to play - although it is 40x40 and not 160x160 as you have noted. To be more specific, the scale is in the ballpark of 4x4 chess boards and with less than double the chess pieces in a single game (50 instead of 64) - so it's not that large.

It may very well be possible that this game doesn't lend itself very well to a physical board game (and I don't really see that as prohibitive), unless I can solve the problem around the characters and their counters in an elegant way - I realise that this could also be costly to produce in any case and may just end up having to prototype in unity and take it from there instead.

Let me refine it a bit further. For now, the strategic gameplay opportunities intrigues me most and I want to explore that :)

dammit

Thanks for sharing this prototype - keeping an eye on this conversation for what I can learn too :)

[On a side note, should we have a separate tag for boardgame related stuff on the forums since there seems to be a number of people interested in this now? It also means that the word "boardgame" will appear on the side and so people who come to this forum will know it's an option to talk about].

I actually have a question as to when it's worthwhile sharing a boardgame prototype. Obviously, I make my prototypes and test them with actual people. But when is it ready to put online to try and get others to print and play? When the first run through of art/design is done?

quintond

@dammit: Might be better to actually take your question to a separate thread ... will help prevent this thread getting taken over. 8-}

farsicon

@dammit, I also have that question - it may just be my experience but it always seems to be either too early or too late :)

farsicon

So I have taken all your comments to heart, and have stripped the game down to its barest essentials, while still maintaining the core experience. The document now resembles a manual as well :P

I am still in the process of working out the loot/perk cards, and will start posting some concept arts as soon as that is ready.

Would love some feedback :)