❖ Version History ❖

November, 2024
What happened?! ~ Again!
Yes…. It has been yet another nearly 10-months since any major updates on this game! (aren’t you glad we constantly have something cooking in the background?)

This time around, the delays are because of everything that happened during our launch sequence with Phoenix Farm (Chapter 32-42 in the Phoenix Farm Design Journal). This took up just about every minute of our time, and it unfortunately put Royal Threadcount on the back burner to simmer for a while. This, however, was an anticipated outcome, and this is exactly why we are always prototype developing at least 1-3 games behind the scenes while we crank out the publication process of the games you currently get to play with!

The good news is that by now, we are arguably 100% officially finishing up with the Phoenix Farm production process, which is leaving a huge wake of space for Royal Threadcount to fill! So let’s get back on the saddle, and start taking this game a lot more seriously!

As a small tangent / hilarious backstory to today’s post:
I host a huge charcuterie event at my home every fall to celebrate Halloween. At this year’s gathering, Ben insisted on getting our prototype of Royal Threadcount on the table for some of our friends who we rarely get to see, so they could get us some feedback on what we had thus far.

Of course, I am always supportive of Ben trying to get projects like this done, but I was also hosting nearly 30 guests at my house for the day, so I could not be very present for the test. Lo & behold, one of the funnier things that happened during this play test is that Ben had forgotten several of the rules of the game (let’s be real, it’s been literally a year since the last time we played & there’s no rule book that has been made yet). As a result of this situation though, many comical (and easily avoidable) issues arose in the game that lead to a… not so desirable score at the end (like one player winning with 40+ points & other players with less than 10-points).

This play test left our friends…. not terribly impressed with our progress, just impressed with the idea more than anything. This play test left Ben & I however with a much different reaction: major inspiration. We were now set on locating where the holes in the game are hiding & getting them repaired. The result of this is that we are setting out to fix a wealth of small mechanical changes which we will be discussing over the course of the next several chapters of the Lirbarium Games Design Journal, which brings us back to the topic of the day! :: Scoring This Game Sucks!

So… why does scoring the game suck so bad?
Well, the big problem at face value right now is that there is… so much math. Way too much math.

At the end of a round, a player is tallying up: points for clothing, points for patterns, multipliers for combos, and bonus points for colors. It is… at least one to two steps too many, and writing it all down takes literally 5-10 minutes for one person to do, which has been me, because no one wants to do the math.

So… how do we fix this?
The most notable options available to us for this agenda are as follows:

1. Reduce the Formula
If we can simplify how many numbers a player has to calculate, it will make the game significantly faster to score, but how do we accomplish this? My target is to gut the system of how we score the patterns. The idea for scoring the patterns was initially discussed in our previous post with this complicated variable of: some points per pattern, bonus points for multiples of the same pattern. Additionally, there are six variations on how the patterns are scored, which is a lot of variables to consider when looking at everyone’s results. This idea is great, but we have to take the math out of the hands of the player. This leads us to our next best solution idea:

2. Provide the Answers!
Here’s a comical fix: Take the math out of the equation entirely & provide players with just the answers. For some stupid reason, I didn’t think that this would be possible at first (because I guess I felt the cards would be too crowded with data?)… but this is ridiculous! If you look at other games that do this, they accomplish an incredible amount of complex math with a very simple chart provided on the cards themselves (the best example I can think of here is Raccoon Tycoon, which gives out points & multipliers of points on their rail-road cards all in one beautiful set of x4 numbers). Giving players these numbers cuts out 50% of the math they had to do… but it comes with a bit of a tricky problem for us to solve:

3. Redesign the Cards!
If we want to make the end of the game more simple, we need to make the components of the game ready to meet us at this challenge. Right now, our card designs are not doing enough of the math for us, and they easily could, we just need to format them correctly. However… before we can do that, we need to not only decide on new numbers for the math, but we have to find a way to fit all of this information on the card layouts that we have established!

So let’s get back to that brainstorming board!

Of course, in order to make the math easier for everyone else, I myself must do… x1,000 calculations to make sure the math is actually going to work when translated to this new system!

In the pictures above, we have a lot happening.
All the way to the left we have some brainstorming on the diversity & cost of silk patterns. The goal here is to start the path of simplifying how many numbers we are working with in the pool of options at the end game.

The middle I left picture are all about redistributing the final numbers of the game… trying to see how each combination compares to one another, with the hope of finding a good balance, where, even a player who only affords the cheapest patterns in the game has a decent shot at competing in the end game… but not enough for them to defeat someone who budgeted better in the strategy.

These charts got my mindset much closer to what we would need to show on the new layout of our card stack:

Okay, so, new number system starting to brainstorm well, new card layout coming together… but we need to really consider the actual breakdown of the numbers here too. I can’t just doodle up some numbers and feel accomplished. I need excel.

As you can see in the top image of this post, there was already a system in mind for how this game worked, but as you might also notice, it is not very balanced. Let’s take another look at that image:

So, here we have x6 variations on the score options (because of our six different patterns, and how they are valued). This is all fine and good in theory, because the game was set up to make it nearly impossible to actually afford the full set of “Karakusa” patterns, or rather, achieve the “56-point” score. But… if someone could accomplish that, then someone who had the full set of the “Asanoha” pattern wouldn’t even have a stake in the game at 16-points. In fact, anyone who had x2 or more of the same pattern effectively put the Asanoha combo at 0% chance of winning the game.

This clearly shows that the numbers have not been calculated well. Let’s try some other variations and see how the numbers pan out!

As you can see from each evolution to this chart, we are getting closer & closer to a pattern that brings us what we want: good diversity in scores, with final scores keeping players closer together at the end of the game, rather than vast disparity.

In this third model of the game, a player with the four Asanoha patterns that we exemplified before now has a chance of beating any player who has achieved only x2 or less as a combo for their outfit. They even have a small chance of beating a player who has x3 of the second lowest costing pattern combo (i.e. Ichimatsu or Uruko).

However, we want the scores to be even closer. The jump from last to first here is spanning about a 21-point gap still, which is not bad at all by comparison to our initial issue of 40-points… but I still think it could be better, so let’s keep iterating this score system a bit and see what we can get:

As we get to our final chart here for today, we have really set up a much nicer diversity of scoring options. The logic that has been built into this final chart is fairly simple & follows a few specific goals:

•Each pattern’s Max Combo beats the 3-combo of the next value up, with decaying margin.

•The max disparity from lowest 4-part combo to highest is only 16-points!

•Nothing beats the max combo, but everything comes very close.

• All patterns are close enough for us to implement a special opportunity for these players to achieve “max-combo” victory via a different path: “the Empresses favorite pattern” – A system that grants higher values to lower patterns, allowing almost any pattern to overcome the value of the max combo.

Now everything is looking a lot better… but my brain hurts just thinking about all this math again, so I think we are going to call it quits for today my friends! I hope that you found some useful information in this post today! (definitely a good one for game number balancing). And be sure to stay tuned for our next episode of the Librarium Games Design Journal, where we will continue to delve into this process of refining the game design for our next prototype! As always, thank for reading!