❖ Version History ❖

October 23rd, 2022
By now in our journey we have finally acquired a printed version of the card stock for our Phoenix Farm Prototype. This is a critically important step in the process of our workflow.

When there are only hand-drawn iterations of the games, we very rarely take them to the play testing stage with anyone outside of our close friend groups. With a printed iteration of the prototype though, we can accomplish a lot more. This is true for a variety of reasons: we have more concise/concrete rules, we have easier to read designs, size & color of cards are consistent, and overall there are simply less variables for the science that must now be done.

So, of course, this is now the time to start reaching out to more people. We are specifically looking for friends who have a rough understanding of our games, but have not yet given Phoenix Farm a play test yet. The goal is to witness a raw experience within the game and see how it plays for a stranger.

Ironically, as one could only expect, the first session that we hold goes horribly wrong. As if the fates were specifically tasked with reminding us that there are variables that have still not been accounted for thus far in the design. Here is the tale of what happened:

We have a fairly clever set up for the cast of tonight’s game. Ben, Aimee, and I are at this table. We are the creators of the game, and we are the ones who have played it the most. Neil has heard of us playing the game and has a rough idea of what it is like, but he has never actually sat down to the table and played a round with us. Then we have a guest star: Josh, who, has in fact never played any of our games before.

With this group, we are ready to both teach and play the game at the same time. Our hope is to have either Neil or Josh end up winning this game (going relatively easy on the strategy side of things, letting them explore the options without as much risk). As you can see from the results up above, this is clearly not what had happened… but how on earth did things back fire this badly for our objective?

Well. It turns out that there are a couple of hiccups in how the game can play, and this leaves players with two possible outcomes that are extremely frustrating to deal with. For today’s post in the design journal, we are going to explore the problems. It’s the beginning of a long-winded journey, and it’s important to know that it all started here:

Problem #1 :: Potentially Infinite Failure

“They say that when it rains it pours…”

Poor Neil.
In this game he revealed to us that it is possible to have just about the worst luck in the entire universe, and showcased very clearly how bad that can feel.

When playing Phoenix Farm, a player has two objectives: managing money and rolling dice to work their farm. When rolling the dice, you are simply looking for a 50-50 outcome on the odds. Half of the time you are successful in your action, half of the time you fail. Within those halves, there is a 30% chance of critical success or failure.

In this game, somehow it came to be that Neil rolled on the failing side of the 50-50 chance more than 75% of the time. I seem to have lost the exact quote, but I recall him exclaiming something to the tune of:

“I had at least 10 turns in a row where nothing happened. I just sat there”.

This is not what we want one of our players feeling. To be honest, if this had happened to a child, I can only imagine the table-flipping level of angry. ~Unacceptable.

In every single game that we have developed, we have strived endlessly to make certain that there is never the situation of a truly “useless turn”, or an instance of “nothing could have happened better”. You may fail, but at least progress would have been an option that wasn’t taken. In Phoenix Farm, this was clearly not accounted for well enough.

What’s worse, is that there isn’t an easy solution to this problem immediately available. There is no way to alter the way the rules are currently set up to make it better. We would either need to add more content into the game, or entirely change the circumstances of how the dice rules work (which is completely not desirable due to their otherwise fairly balanced nature).

Problem #2 :: Financial Poverty Lock

“Could you spare a penny for your thoughts…?”

Poor Josh.
In this game he revealed to us that it is possible to actually run out of money in such a way that could destroy your chances of winning.

When playing Phoenix Farm, a player begins the game with enough currency to start making a profit. At first it is a very thin margin: every feather earned must be used to develop your farm. But eventually your profit is much greater than the investment. When your phoenix returns to ash though, this process starts over. If you have not saved yourself at least two feathers by this point in time, you can theoretically run out of the money needed to buy tools between the ash-egg-chick phase of the bird.

In this game, Josh skipped the turn needed to rest his elder phoenix and return them to ash. After doing this, he purchased a wealth of gold and a new broom (but did not buy a kiln as well). Incidentally, when he succeeded in sweeping for a new egg, he discovered that he had no money left to buy the kiln. This left us with the lack luster review of:

“I needed to wait for several turns hoping that someone would roll a ‘1’ and give me the one feather that I needed to escape eternal poverty“.

Once again, this is not a desirable outcome for our players.

To an extent, this is a problem that we had faced in the past. It was in fact the reason why we made it so that “Any time a player rolls a ‘1’ on the dice, every other player gets a free feather”. This rule was put into place to prevent infinite poverty.

But, in every test of the game that we had run prior to now, Ben and I had already learned the error of our ways. We knew that a tiny bit of funds must always be saved at this point in the game… but this is a feature that a new player would almost always miss. Even worse, clearly there are times where our clever solution to this problem isn’t clever enough. If no player rolls a one for a few turns, there are several turns where a player in poverty will be trapped indefinitely. ~Unacceptable.

Once again, we were back to the drawing board on this rule, and once again, we were faced with the tough problem of “There is no way to fix this with the way the rules are currently set up without adding something new to the game or dramatically changing a rule that otherwise works just fine”.

While I do always love a good play test, today was a bit tough. Everyone walked away from the table with a bad experience (other than Aimee of course), but it left a sour taste in the mouths of us all. No matter how hard you try, a day like this is difficult to fight through. It defeats the morale, and it comes with the obvious problem of needing to do a lot more work to help fix the otherwise simple problems.

At the end of this evening Ben and I only have a little bit of time to actually talk and brainstorm. We know that there are problems much bigger than we could solve in the moment… but we know also what must be done. We more or less decide to step away from the situation for the time being, to table it for another day with a more clear view.

Be sure to tune back in to the next couple of Design Journal entries, where we will delve deep on our ideas (both good and bad) for solving these problems, and the crazy solutions that we came up with in the end!