❖ Version History ❖

July 28th, 2023
In today’s post, we are continuing off of our discussion previously on the Collaborative Tic-Tac-Toe board that we have concocted for Royal Threadcount. To this point in time, we have figured out roughly how we imagine this tool to work for the game… but that is always the shortest and easiest part of the design journey.

Now comes the arduous math-centric conversation revolving around establishing the “proof” that the mechanic actually functions in the way that we want it to with the other mechanics in this game’s ecosystem. But how do we do that without having a playable prototype of the game board to interact with?? This is in fact a problem that we have very very rarely had in the past with our game designs, because 99.9% of the time, if I need a component, I just go craft one up quickly. But the variable of needing translucent cards makes iterating for Threadcount very challenging when you don’t actually have them in hand (which at this point we do not).

Well, the best solution that I have come to (as you can see in the crazy looking featured image above), is to try and simulate the usage of this tic-tac-toe board using a handy-dandy excel file. Let’s talk about how I went about this, and what sorts of things I learned along the way!

So, just to set up “how” this crazy looking chart is going to work for us, let’s just look at this little slice first. This game is only ever going to be 10-turns long, so each “play-test” is going to have 10-rows in the excel sheet that look like this one.

Each player shows what happened on their turn underneath their title… so for player #1, we have the empty tic-tac-toe board to start the game off, but on their turn they rolled an “8 & 3”, hence positions 3 & 8 have a “•” added to them to mark where “silk” is currently sitting before the next turn begins. In player #1’s chart, we can see what numbers they rolled, how many “silk” cubes they earned this turn (in this case, 0). We are also going to track what color dye they have rolled on the special d4, and what cards they decide to “purchase” during their turn during the shopping phase that comes after rolling the dice.

In this charting system, as we can see on Player #2’s turn, any time a 10-sided dice roll yields a “hit” on the tic-tac-toe board, that will be represented by a green “x”, and it is also noted in their ‘silk earnings’ on the chart below.

By the time we get to Player #4’s turn, there is already a board state that yields the much-anticipated & exciting first hit of a true: tic-tac-toe payout, which sets our 4th player off to the most profitable outcome in this turn of the game.

Now, this is a perfect setup for all the conditions that we are looking to test for. Immediately we are off to a test where a player is starting off with an advantage (not typically good for game design), but let’s see what happens as it plays out into the 8th, 9th, & 10th turns of the game:

As you can see in a quick first glance, the tic-tac-toe mechanic is working fairly well in the sense that on almost every turn a player is getting paid (shown here in x12 gameplay actions). As you may have also noticed, I needed to add some details to what we were tracking before we got to the end of this design! (I had not accounted for what players were carrying for ‘points’ through the gameplay.

But. You may have also noticed that our player #4, who had the advantage out the gate in the start of this game definitely won the game with just as powerful an advantage as they set out with. Of course, this may not be the case every time, so I ran a few more play tests on this front, but very quickly learned our 1st very important lesson from this mechanic’s function in the gameplay:

••• Rule Modifier Needed •••
Player #1 is Currently Starting the Game at a Disadvantage Every Time!

In this first play test, player #4’s advantage was pretty clear: by being the last player to take an action, they have the greatest likelihood of “silk” being on the board before they get the opportunity to roll the dice, where player #1 is literally incapable of earning “silk” on their first turn.

We have to account for this problem. The game will never work with a mechanical weakness this obvious… but how do we accommodate for this? Well, the easy answer is this: Give player #1 an opportunity to earn silk on their first turn. How do we give them this opportunity? Add another simple but great missing mechanic: Roll to Go First!

••• Rule Correction :: Roll to Go First Mechanic •••
Rule: Each player rolls a 10-sided dice to see who goes first, each number rolled adds silk to the tray before the 1st player takes their turn! (doubles are added to the same tile, but no tic-tac-toe can be present at the start of the first turn, so if this result happens, it slides to the next lowest or highest position on the board).

This is a pretty great idea for moving forward, let’s see how it plays out using our simulator:

Some very interesting things happened in this play test. As you can see in our results, player #4 won the game again… but this time it was no where near the landslide that it was the first time through. Every other player was within a few points of the top score… but the scores overall were definitely low.

In this run of the game, I had the players trying to buy the most valuable things that they could afford along the way… but not a single player finished this round of the game with all four pieces of their Kimono finished, which is a huge problem. This problem however, may be coming from a very different place in the game’s mechanics (it is not necessarily because of the tic-tac-toe board, it is likely of the cost of goods in the game’s other resources).

So, of course, let’s do some more science!
Let’s see what happens in the outcomes of the game if a player focuses on “Shopping Cheap” rather than going for ritzy points, all the while keeping our modification for the “roll to go first” mechanic that we have introduced:

Analyzing the results of this next play test is… surprising.

The goal of the third test shown here was completely focused on “Shopping Cheap”… and this of course shows through in how low each player’s score actually worked out to be… But look at player #1’s stats! They destroyed the competition in this round, and the balance feels very bad.

But what else could be going wrong here?
Well, simply, it almost certainly has to be one of these two different issues:

••• Mechanic Modifier Needed •••
Problem Variable #1: The Cost of Goods Might be Too High.

Problem Variable #2: The Amount of Currency in the Game Might be Too Low

From where I am currently standing looking at this wealth of data, my guess is that the problem is likely Variable #2, and I have an easy fix for testing this: add a third 10-sided dice to the mix of each player’s turn. I did this, ran several tests & got to the point where I was decently satisfied with the results… but from this moment forward, I am going to remain skeptical of Variable #1 as well. I am not completely convinced at this moment that it is a big enough problem to change, especially because i do not want to change the values of things in the economy if I don’t have to… but I assure you, we will be back to this conversation some day into the future of this project.

That being said, this post has gotten very very long, so I think I am going to end things here for the time being. Hopefully you got as much out of this journey as I did in terms of learning about stress-testing your games using theoretical mechanics tests! And stay tuned for more exciting updates on Threadcount as we continue our journey here in the Librarium Games Design Journal, and as always, thank you for reading!