❖ Version History ❖
July 23rd, 2023
Today we are going to begin discussing the third and final major mechanical upgrade for Royal Threadcount that we started talking about two episodes ago in the Librarium Games Design Journal. So far we’ve covered the initial concept of transparent cards, then the magic of our color based D4, and today we are going to dive into this crazy idea of a collaborative tic-tac-toe board.
The objective of today’s discussion is to cover how we came to this idea, and where we think it is going to go in the future design of this game. Now, until this point in the history of Royal Threadcount, we have technically only played with the mechanic once. Since we are changing a bunch of the other mechanics surrounding the scoring / cost of different resources, there will need to be many new variables considered in how this mechanic will work. But of course, before we go into the changes, let’s talk about what we even mean when we say “Collaborative Tic-Tac-Toe”:
How Does the Collaborative Tic-Tac-Toe Board Work?
As you can see in the featured image above, we have our very typical 3×3 grid. This is the board we are going to reference for this whole post. This grid will sit in the center of the table while playing the game, and each turn players are going to interact with it using x2 10-sided dice.
Now, originally, when Ben handed over the prototype, the way that this was going to work was very simple:
First Player’s Turn:
1. Roll the two dice (Let’s say we get a 1 & 6 for this example)
2. Add x1 “Silk” cube (a tiny white block) onto the tray at the positions rolled (1 & 6)
3. Do your “Shopping Phase” if you have resources to spend, then end turn by passing dice.
Second Player’s Turn:
4. Next player rolls the two dice (Let’s say they get 2 & 6)
5. By rolling “2” they add a silk cube to the two… but by rolling “6” they take the silk cube that the previous player placed onto the board!
As turns go on, there are always going to be pieces added onto the board for future players to acquire.. but the payout is fairly small if we simply only use these rules. After our first play test of the game, I had almost immediately suggested to Ben that the board will move too slowly for paying out resources. This is when we collaboratively realized that it would be so much more interesting for the potential “bonus pay” if a player could land a “tic-tac-toe”. Let’s picture our example from previously, but change the outcome of the second player’s turn:
Second Player’s Turn:
4. Next player rolls the two dice (Let’s say they get 2 & 3)
5. By rolling the “2 & 3” this player now forms a 1-2-3 line on the tic-tac-toe board & take those three resources! (leaving the silk cube on position “6” where it was for the next player).
But… What about “10?”
As you may have been thinking all this while “a tic-tac-toe board only has nine positions… what happens if you roll the “10” on the 10-sided dice??” ~ Easy. This is exactly like rolling the “white” on our TriChrome dice, or rather, its a “free-play / wild-card” number. When 10 is rolled, a player may add the “silk” to any of the 9-positions that they want! (A huge & exciting advantage in this system)!
This simple change to the mechanic is specifically how we got to actually referring to it as the “Collaborative Tic-Tac-Toe Board”.
By having all four players interacting with this mechanic in between turns, the game is generating a genuinely random payout for players each turn that keeps itself in check by not allowing it to get too valuable before dumping out resources to a player…….
…..But does it work?
This is hard to tell.
Where we currently stand in the process of designing this game, we have no means of play testing this idea without having a more stable / playable prototype of the game to interact with (this is a frustrating reality). This means that the need to generate a new prototype of the game has escalated to ‘necessity’, as in, we literally cannot make more forward progress with the design without having the tools we need to do the science.
But, before we take the huge leap of designing a digital set of the cards to be printed, I am really concerned that this tic-tac-toe board won’t actually work for us the way we need to… So I came up with an intermediate solution of prototype play-testing this tic-tac-toe board ~ using excel! But this is a bit of a larger topic than what I want to bring into this conversation today, so we will come back to this concept in the next adventure of the Librarium Games Design Journal! Be sure to tune back in soon to hear how this turns out, and as always, thank you for reading!
