Cat Land Designer Diary #2
Cat Land is a working title for a medium-weight euro-style tabletop boardgame about the birth of ancient Egypt and the domestication of cats.
You can read the first entry in this Diary here!
It is time to start making playtest components for Cat Land. At this early stage of design we know that future iteration will result in a lot of changes to the mechanics. And it’s likely that major game systems will be added and/or changed as well. Which means that spending an excessive amount of time on graphic design at this stage is likely to result in a substantial amount of “wasted” work.
If I were making these playtest components a few years ago I’d probably have used little more than stiff cardboard with some hand-drawn graphics and pieces of paper chopped up in my paper cutter and inserted into card sleeves. And this is still a pretty common way to prototype; in my role screening product pitches at AEG I see a lot of games that don’t have much more visual impact. We have purchased games that were pitched as little more than handwritten cards and roughly drawn boards.
However, the market is changing. The ability to do more visually appealing prototypes has evolved rapidly. We are increasingly seeing pitches made with components that are quite good, from “simple and clean” to “almost ready to print”. And I’ll be honest that a well produced (even if “simple and clean”) presentation package does make it easier to visualize how a game might look when it’s been produced and that can be a factor in how interested a publisher is in your design.
I want to stop here and provide some insight for new designers. It is incredibly unlikely that your graphic design or art will be used when your game is produced for sale. Almost without exception the work that you can do visually just isn’t good enough for today’s market. And that’s ok. No serious publisher is going to evaluate your game on the basis of your graphic design and art. We hire pros to do that work and they’re worth every penny we pay them. Unless in your regular job you are a professional graphic designer or artist, whatever you create for the purpose of playtest and pitching isn’t going to be in the box when it goes on sale. So don’t kill yourself making your visuals; just do enough to convey a general sense of what you’re trying to accomplish and to give reviewers and playtesters a sense of where the game might go when the pro designers take over.
A big part of the reason for the evolution in the quality of playtest and prototype components is the Gamecrafter company. Gamecrafter makes it possible to generate prototype components that look professionally produced for a reasonably small amount of money.
In this Design Diary we’re going to look at producing the main game board.
The Main Board
The main game board is the centerpiece of the game. On the table it needs to do a number of things: It should identify itself, it should be attractive, and it should provide some visual assistance for setting up and playing the game.
The main board is going to undergo some of the most complex iteration as the game evolves because it’s going to house most of the critical game systems. As we develop and test we’ll discover that some of our assumptions were wrong, some components will need more or less space than envisioned, and adding and subtracting things will alter the layout.
As a result at this stage we don’t want to invest the time making a highly designed board with a lot of features. My objective instead is to produce a board that has the minimum gameplay elements I’m reasonably sure the final game will feature, and a lot of space where we can experiment with layout and functionality as we prototype and playtest.
We’re going to use Gamecrafter’s “six-fold game board” as our main board for this iteration of the prototype. This is a 27 inch by 18 inch board. It’s the biggest board Gamecrafter offers. Since we don’t know for sure how the layout of the components will work on the board, having more space than needed will be harmless and it’s more than possible that we’ll use all this space and maybe even have problems with overflow.
The first step is to download the template from the Gamecrafter site for this board. I prefer to work in Photoshop but the company provides templates compatible with a number of potential creative tool options.
Once downloaded and open in Photoshop, we save off a copy to a working directory where we’ll keep the files for this iteration of the game. Looking forward to the fact that future iterations will likely make changes in components, we’ll build a directory hierarchy that lets us group each iteration’s files together so that anyone with access to that repository can quickly identify and print the most recent version of the prototype.
Design Choices
For aesthetic reasons, I’d like to have a black border around the board. Using the notations provided on the template, I’ll make a layer with a suitable border.
For the graphic which will serve as the main backdrop of the game board I want to consider using something that looks like the actual geography of the ancient city of Memphis.
This is what the area looks like today:
It is likely that the modern day site of Mit-Rahineh may be the original location of Memphis. The course of the Nile itself has changed in the 5,000 years since the city was founded. The Nile is now much further west, but for obvious reasons it is almost certain that the city would have included extensive harbor facilities, and may in fact have had to continually re-engineer its Nile access as the riverbed itself shifted over time.
The Pyramid of Djoser and Saqqarah are sites of ancient Egyptian temples and burial grounds, some dating back to the predynastic (3,000 BCE) period. This region is full of tombs, temples, quarries, and the ruins of the camps and support structures dated across most of ancient Egyptian history.
What I would like to depict on the main board are three major areas, from west to east: The western desert, the city, and the Nile. The eastern desert won’t have a role in the game.
We’ll use the fact that the six-fold board is a rectangle to provide a sense of spatial alignment, with the long side of the board corresponding to a roughly north-south axis.
We don’t want any really visible details at this stage of design; abstract swathes of color are more better than photorealistic images. I’ll start with a snapshot from Google Earth of the general region of Memphis as it looks today.
Some quick freehand selections in Photoshop allows us to carve up this map as needed. Making each region a specific single color makes it easy to select irregular shapes in Photoshop with the Magic Wand tool for later editing. I’ve made the Nile much wider to eliminate the shore of the eastern desert.
This map roughly depicts an area 7km across and 10km tall. At this scale the size of Memphis itself in 3,000 BCE would be about the size of a couple of postage stamps. That’s ok: this game isn’t an engineering simulation of city construction. We’ll be abstracting the entire city when we get into the mechanics of how its represented in the game and we won’t be trying to make it “fit” into its actual real-world location.
The First Game Mechanics
There are four “tracks” that need to be on this board:
- Bastet’s Favor
- Victory Points
- Apotheosis of Pharaoh
- Civilization Level
Bastet’s Favor
In Egyptian hieroglyphics Bastet’s name is rendered in three (or four) glyphs. For Cat Land, I want to make one iconic image that is visually identified with the goddess. A part of her “real” name is the hieroglyph of a seated woman:
We can convert this glyph to a path, then alter the path to make something that looks a lot more “catlike”:
This icon will be used on components that relate to the overall theme of the game — that the goddess Bastet is working via her agents to alter the trajectory of world history. Later it will be used on the Trait deck and possibly the bag that the Favor cubes are drawn from.
This track will be placed in the upper left corner of the board and will descend vertically down the left edge.
I already know that the Bastet’s Favor track should have 9 spaces. The game is being designed around a framework of 9 turns (aka “Lives”) and the Favor track is used to show which is the current round.
Victory Points
Based on my general sense of how the game will work I estimate that we’ll need about 80 spaces for Victory Points. 80 points means that about 9 points can be scored on average each round by a player who is approaching the theoretical maximum score. It’s OK if we discover in playtest that scores are more that 80; we can just include a rule to track when a player starts over on the track. As other game systems change it’s likely that average scores and theoretical maximum scores will wildly fluctuate so there’s no value in obsessing over exactly how many points to have on the scoring track at this stage of development.
A good rule of thumb is that you should allow enough space for the number of the score to be partially visible underneath whatever token you’ll be using to track each player. For the purpose of this prototype I’ve made the scoring spaces about a half-inch in size.
It’s helpful to highlight increments on scoring tracks. The increments allow players to quickly calculate their new scores as offsets from their old scores, and the visual aid can also improve on the fly calculations for relative scoring positions.
I’ve made every 5th point on the scoring track a highlighted space.
Apotheosis Progress
This tracker will really require a lot of development work to fine tune. Since it represents the “come from behind and steal a victory” mechanic it needs to be carefully balanced so that achieving it is hard — otherwise smart players will try to use it as their standard strategy and will ignore the rest of the game design. We want it to be possible, but more difficult than running the normal game engine so that experienced players will only pursue it if they find themselves hedged out of alternate routes to victory.
The basic idea of the mechanic is that at certain points in the game, special resources will become available that can be acquired by a player and placed onto this tracker to indicate that Egyptian’s understanding of the cosmos has advanced, bringing them closer to the point where they can achieve the apotheosis of a Pharaoh.
Before playtesting I think that this will need to require between three and five resources. Since it will be reasonably easy to adjust this number in the testing process, we’ll build a tracker with 6 spaces and assume that we can adjust with stickers or just by changing the rules as we fine tune.
The two most iconic aspects of the ancient Egyptian religion are the Great Pyramids and Tutankhamen’s funeral mask. I’m reasonably sure that monument building will be a part of the game mechanic (as the Pyramids in Egypt began to be constructed quite early on in the history of Egyptian society), so to avoid confusion we’ll use a stylized version of King Tut’s mask.
Civilization Level
The last tracker the game needs is the Civilization Level system. The general idea is that progress towards unlocking more advanced parts of Memphis is gated by the overall civilization level of Egyptian society. Players won’t be able to selectively isolate their worker placement just into the areas of the game that benefit their engine but will also have to work on advancing the overall game state even though that will benefit their opponents.
There are at least two ways to attack this problem.
The first would be to use a simple numeric tracker and then write rules which describe how the gating function works.
The second would be to try and design in the gates at this point which would make the board more graphically interesting and might serve as a prompt to get the players engaged with advancing the tracker.
The problem is that none of the underlying game system has been designed yet so its virtually impossible to guess at the correct spacing or sequence of the gates. And if playtesting indicates that a gate should come earlier or later or should be materially different, then the board ends up getting covered with a lot of stickers and handwritten modifications.
In the interest of maximizing simplicity I’m going to go with the first option. It’s more bland, but less likely to end up with some kind of seriously bad ongoing maintenance issue.
We’ll use the Pschent as our icon for this track. The Pschent represents the merger of the upper and lower kingdoms of ancient Egypt just before the first dynasty and the founding of Memphis. The Pschent is two crowns in one; the red portion being the crown of the Upper Kingdom, and the white portion being the crown of the Lower.
Since these mechanics have yet to be designed, we want to imagine a range of possible uses for this track. Given that there will be 9 turns (“Lives”) in the game and advancing the Civilization level isn’t a direct path to victory, we can assume that we don’t need to have too many spaces on this track. The more finely grained we make this tracker, the more options there will be for players to manipulate the underlying game system. So we want a balance between length and complexity.
Purely arbitrarily I’ve picked a track length of 10 spaces. Like the Apotheosis Track, that may be too few or too many but we’ll discover a good range of values in playtesting.
This tracker will run from right to left, from the upper right corner to avoid a collision with the Bastet tracker in the upper left corner.
Game Logo
Since “Cat Land” is a working title I’m not going to spend much time working on a logo and will just use some simple text to identify the game on the board.
If I expected to be showing this game to publishers seeking a contract for development I might add a URL or an email address to the logo area just in case someone needed it for ease of contacting me, but I don’t expect to be doing that so I’m not going to clutter up the design with that info.
Final Adjustments
The last thing to do to prepare this file to be printed is to make some adjustments to the spacing to incorporate the information on the provided die line about where the board will fold and be cut.
The fold line will run vertically through the board which means we want to make some accommodation for the Civilization tracker at the top and the lower part of the Scoring tracker at the bottom. The fold will disrupt the graphics and create an uneven surface that will not be solid footing for tokens and cubes. We’d like to keep playing pieces off of the fold line.
The cut lines are less concerning because the board’s graphics won’t be meaningfully impacted by the cuts. When laid flat the cut lines should not be very noticeable, even if they bisect a graphic.
Next Steps
The next Designer Diary in this series is going to be about creating the Trait Deck and the Player Boards, which are the other two components that I’ll be producing with Gamecrafter.
