Game Design II

This blog is now for the Game Design II class that I have for the semester, and any blog posts from here on will relate to that course's material. For this post, I will be discussing the board game activity we did in lecture 1.

Rules of the game
The name of the game I played was Ligretto. This is a very fast paced card game where things get much more hectic with more players playing the game. The minimum number of players is 4, and the max is 12. Each round takes approximately 10 minutes.

Each player picks a stack of 40 cards with a unique back-suit design to call their own. Each deck contains 4 sets of coloured cards, with each set containing cards numbered 1-10. 10 random cards are put face down into a deck, and 3 more are put face up next to the deck. The rest of the cards become the player's hand.

To begin playing the game, a player must shout 'Ligretto start' once all players are ready. Players must build stacks of cards of the same colour ranging from 1-10 in sequential order. Whenever a player encounters a '1' card, they may place it on the playing area. The players may discard 3 cards at a time into a stack form their hand at any time, and can only play the topmost card. If they run out of cards in their hand, the stack is shuffled and put back into the hand. Players may also play cards from the 3 'slots' they have available to them beside their deck. If a card is played this way, the player must draw a card from their deck and replace the played card. The winning condition of the game is when a player gets rid of both their deck, and the remaining cards in their 3 'slots'. When this happens, the player shouts 'Ligretto stop'.

The score is counted up by however many cards that player has put into the piles, and each card is worth 1 point. However, any remaining cards in their deck are worth -2 points.

Things I liked

This is the only card game that I've seen that has no turns. I think this is a really nifty feature of this game where everyone plays at once. This means that people aren't waiting for most of their time as others get to play their turns out before they actually get to do anything. With everyone playing at once, all are engaged and no one is bored. This also opens up a new opportunity for skill-testing. Games with clearly defined turns make it easy to pay attention to other player's moves, and think of how to react to them. With this game however, it is an entire skill-based mechanic to watch what other players are doing with their cards. For people who are good at this mechanic, they may be able to chain together combos as soon as a desired card is played by a certain player that hey were observing. This is a very fast way to deplete your deck, and often nets you lots of points.

The rules of the game are very easy to learn, and are simple enough to be quickly picked up by anyone. This opens up the accessibility of the game to a very large amount of people, so that anyone from a circle of family/friends can easily enjoy this game without struggling to find people to play with. Not only that, but the excitement and enjoyments arrives much faster once everybody is caught up and knows the rules.

This brings me to the next thing I liked, which is the ability to accommodate a very large amount of players. I rarely see card/board games accommodate more than 6 to 8 players, which forces people to split if they are in a large group. Having the ability to support 12 people creates a single experience that can be shared between a larger group of friends, which increases the enjoyment for all. Given the accessibility the game possesses, supporting 12 players capitalizes on that and makes sure there is enough room for newer players to join in and try out a few rounds.

The pacing of the game is very quick, with short rounds offering a small energetic burst of fun. I think this is really awesome because it lessens the time investment needed from players, and becomes much easier to play the game more often. With other, longer games, people often have to plan around the fact that the game might take anywhere from 30 minutes to 2 hours to finish. Having short rounds gives people more of a chance to play this game with a larger group when not everybody can afford to drop a significant amount of time from their schedule.

Ligretto also stands out from most other card games by exercising a different skill set from players. More often than not, card/board games exercise strategic thinking, and reward thought out and well planned moves. It is a nice change of pace to have something faster that rewards good reflexes and hand-eye coordination.

Things I didn't like
The score gap between winner and losers of a round is too large. The person who shouts 'Ligretto stop' usually wins by a large amount of points, compared to all other players because they have no penalties. There were some instances where people were in a near-tie, but even then, all other players went negative. Having a -2 penalty is too harsh in my opinion, as this essentially kills any intense competition and near ties unless both players happened to dominate and be at the top of their game. If you were not leading the round, it felt like there was nothing you could really do to gain an advantage or to stop other players from depleting their decks very quickly. In all of our rounds, the person who shouted 'Ligretto stop' is the one that won, even though the rules hint at the fact that depleting your deck first may not necessarily cause a victory.

I didn't like the fact that there were no stack limits. Even between 5 people, the amount of stacks that could crop up would really slow down the pace of the game, since there was so many opportunities for people to place their cards. The over saturation of opportunities also caused players to not even notice some stacks were in play, while other players took this to their advantage to quickly get rid of their cards without anyone noticing and having a chance to react or stop them. If there was a stack limit based on the number of players, then this would bring more focus to the game.

Ligretto is very messy. Card piles often don't get cleaned up by players who finished a stack, and stacks themselves end up in a large pile which takes up quite a lot of room. Not to mention that players usually have 20+ cards in their hand, so cards tend to fly around everywhere and make a mess.

The rules of the game don't have much depth. Simplicity is a double edged sword, where in this case its easy to pick up, but also easy to put down, and forget about it completely. I could see this being fun for a couple of games, but the lack of any extra rules, special conditions or anything of that sort quickly dwindles the excitement due to repetition. Couple this with the large score gap between winners and losers, and you have a recipe for frustration. Although this is supposed to be a fast-paced game, it does not hurt to give players some sort of rule or condition to keep in the back of their minds as they play.

Cards are easy to damage. Although this is more of a nitpick than anything, it brings up the question of how durable is this game? I know for a fact that in the heat of the moment, I bent some cards  (sorry prof. Nacke!) as I was trying to lift them off the table. Given the speed of play, these cards are going to go through a lot of abuse. Having them either made out of a more rigid and durable material could help prevent card damage.

One thing I would change
I would change the penalty system that is applied for players who still have cards in their deck. Out of all the things I didn't like, this was the one that bothered me the most. In the 5 games I played, 3 of them I ended up have a score of lower than -20, while the other 2 I had a score of at least 18+. This very large (almost 40 pts!) gap prevented any sort of real competition between the 5 of us.

Instead of having a 'deck' and a 'hand' I would change it so that you only have to care about the 1 pile of 40 cards that you are given at the beginning of the game. In other words, you start out with just 1 deck on the table and nothing else. At this point, players can only play cards from one source, the discard pile. However players could still utilize the 3 slots to place any cards there that they think are going to be useful soon . Players only have 3 slots however, and if their slots are all full, they can remove a card from a slot and place it face down next to their original deck, forming a secondary 'penalty deck'. If a slot gets free, players can either draw from their penalty deck and place that card into the empty slot, or put a card there from their discard pile. When the game ends, any cards in a player's slot and penalty deck are worth -2 points.

Obviously, the winning condition needs to change. The winning condition would instead rely on the amount of stacks that have been finished and the number of players that are in the game. So let's say in a 5 person game, 8 stacks need to be completed to finish the game (5*2 - 2). Some stat collection needs to be done to make this change. For example: how many stacks do players finish on average in the original game? The formula would then need be tweaked to make sure the game is long enough for people to enjoy themselves.

The idea behind this change is that players are responsible for their own penalties, rather than just be given -26 right off the bat (3 slots + 10 cards in the deck), and having to crawl out of it. This way, there is a sacrifice to be made. Initially, players only have 1 place to play their cards from, and playing only from this pile is very limiting, as you don't have a lot of options. While putting cards in their slots opens up options, it also potentially brings about penalties if you're not careful. This trains players to both look for opportunities to chain together points, and looking past their own cards to strategize. Good players will know when is the right time to put cards into their slots, and management of slots is essential to victory.