❖ Version History ❖

7th January, 2021
In our last entry to the Design Journal, we had been discussing the chaotic effects of the dragon mechanic during our day of play testing. But the dragons of that day were only one half of the focus in our discussions. We had also very seriously discussed aspects of scoring the game.

This scoring conversation struck up a brainstorm that went on for about two weeks. There were two significant things that had taken place:

1. A new concept for calculating a ‘Final Score’ for the players

2. An enormous project to track down all of the previously existing scores that we had tabulated from upwards of six months prior, across several iterations of the rules, all kept track of through conversations in text message format or random post-it notes.

Let’s take a quick moment to talk about how the new calculation would work, why it mattered so much, and the impact this conversation would have on the entire future of the Librarium Games Website!

Scoring a Game of Phoenix Farm, Original Layout:

At first, Phoenix Farm was only scored based on two measurements of success:
(The # of Phoenixes that you’ve raised) + (The # of Gold Pieces you’ve bought)

This was a fairly successful method for measuring the score of the game, because more often than not you would end up seeing one player get only a point or two ahead of another player for the victory, and it was always a toss-up of whether that player was greedy for the gold, or long-term strategic with the farming.

The problem with this method of scoring the game however, is that we had some games that ended up in an exact tie… and we did not like that.

Scoring a Game of Phoenix Farm, New Layout:

We decided to add in a third measurement for the score, the balancer:
(# of Phoenixes) + (# of Gold Pieces) + (Gold Buying Power)

There is a frustration that can happen if you were saving up feathers, but someone struck it rich before you and bought out the rest of the gold to end the game. In these situations, you end up getting stuck with money that feels like it wasn’t worth anything.

To help fix this problem, we added “How Much Gold Could you Buy on your Last Turn” into the final score. It is calculated by taking the player’s remaining feathers, checking how much gold they could buy on the final turn.

This additional parameter to the score keeping added a third factor for players to consider when the game is being played. Not only did you have to be strategic in your farming decisions, wise in your gold buying, but also clever in your competitive money management when the game was nearing its end. It made the game feel more balanced and fair… but did it really work?

The hardest task in making this decision was that we had no idea how it would change the end of the game statistics. But luckily, Ben and I had been keeping track of these numbers anyway as a factor of seeing how the statistics were working in the play tests of the game that lead up to this day in the first place.

We had a backlog of at least seven to ten major days of play testing, where we really took diligent notes and made sure to track everything that we could in the gameplay, for exactly this kind of future research. The only downside is that we had been tracking these things through texts and notes to each other, and didn’t have a database for this information. So, I whipped up a quick grid in excel, and we started sifting through text messages!

Within an hour or two we had found a good batch of the scores from several important games that we’ve already discussed in previous design journal entries. I began plugging these into excel with an equation that I made to tabulate the scores based on the new parameters. The results of this moment are the featured image of this post!

After analyzing all of the data, Ben and I are really happy. This changes up the results of the game a lot, and it makes it so that achieving an exact tie is extremely unlikely! The only downside to this method is that it is slightly confusing to explain at first, and there is no easy way for one of us to plug the results into a calculator to send it to each other.

I explain to Ben that I will be thinking of the best way we can assign these tabulations into an easy calculator, but that I might need to come back to this process once I have finished setting up the email system for our (at the time) very new, up and coming website. Little did I know how significant this would end up being later on in the life of Phoenix Farm, The Great Chase, and many other future titles of Librarium Games.

Stay tuned for the next incredible evolution of this process in the Librarium Games Design Journal!