❖ Version History ❖

January 1st – February 1st, 2023
In our last adventure through the Phoenix Farm Design Journal, we spent a wealth of time talking about some of the critical issues that we have been facing within the mechanics of the game. There were two main concerns to the flow that we talked about in depth: Financial Lock, and Unbalanced Odds.

For today’s journal entry, we are going to talk about the more than month-long conversation that came from the Unbalanced Odds problem. It was the first issue that we thought we had a solution for at first glance, and there were some important ideas that got tossed around.

For this point though, there were some heated debates on the topic as well! So let’s take the time to analyze what happened and see where this lead us in the design!

First: A Moment of Inspiration!

With our catastrophic play test in very recent memory for me, I have been thinking endlessly about what I can do to help the game without doing much to alter it. My best way to accomplish this typically comes to play testing. It is almost always where I can witness the answer to important questions and make alterations to rules in real time.

All of this came to January 1st 2023.
I had invited my sister over for an evening of hanging out & playing various games. She had specifically requested Phoenix Farm, and so Nicole, Aya, and I sat down for a three player game. While we were setting things up, I told the two of them about my issues with the rules that we had in place leading up to this game, and asked if they had any interesting ideas behind what we might do differently to make things more fun. This lead to a pretty amazing brainstorm. We came up with about a half dozen ideas, but here are the highlights to our conversations:

1. Bonus Dice Mechanic #1 :: “For every turn that a player fails to make progress, they get one extra chance to roll the dice (i.e. a failure on turn one = x2 dice on turn two, a failure on turn two = x3 dice on turn three, so on and so fourth).

2. Bonus Dice Mechanic #2 :: “During any turn, you can spend an extra feather for an extra dice to roll during that turn, up to two dice”. (i.e. -1 Feather to roll two dice, or -2 Feathers to roll three dice).

3. Farming Upgrades :: “At the start of the game, the first coop slot and the first tool shed are free, but unlocking a second one of either of them would cost an additional feather. To unlock the third slot, they cost x3 feathers each”.

4. Randomized Numbers on the Tool Cards :: “Each tool could have a variation on the numbers needed to succeed. So, rather than having a Broom always be: 2 & 3 = Fail, 4 & 5 = Success, it could be the case that these numbers are randomized, meaning that multiple brooms in the shed = a better chance at success”.

To be honest, this nearly two hour discussion behind the rules left us very thirsty to play the game. We wanted to attempt using all of these options in the new gameplay, but not all of these options were possible to be used at the time. For example, the randomized tool numbers is a pretty easy fix, but it requires that we get a second set of the tool cards printed to see how these effects play out.

Outside of this though, almost every other new rule is very possible. So, with lots of ambition, we set the game up, put little lock tiles on our coops, and started duking it out in a totally new way. The game ran really really smoothly, and caused all manor of new strategic thought through the puzzles.

Overall, we had a really positive experience with the game, and we hadn’t even tried out everything that we were thinking about along the way. I was especially excited by this, and I could not wait to fiddle around with the numbers on the tool cards. I booted up my iPad that night and into the next day and ferociously started whipping out new designs to try out. Here is what we worked out for the random tool numbers:

As you can see in the image examples above, these iterations of the Broom Tool feature different numbers for a basic sense of success. With this, sometimes a 2,3,4, or 5 might be the dice roll needed in order to find success in your farming.

With two brooms in your shed, you would be able to alter the odds of your roll from: 32% to 48% to 64% chance of success on a regular dice roll depending on the diversity of the numbers you collect (32% for 2 unique numbers, 48% for 3 unique numbers, and 64% for all four unique numbers on the dice odds). So, ideally, keep eyes peeled for a broom with 2,3 and a broom with 4,5 in the dice requirements!

This process had to be done to each tool in the game, so over the course of the next day I made these alterations to all six tools and ended up with a fresh new batch of designs, which I quickly ordered and had express shipped to my house for testing.

After all of this happened (probably about a week later), I called Ben up finally and started telling him all about the wild new ideas that we had been trying out at the house. Though I was extremely excited, I was surprised to find myself explaining all of this to Ben and discovering that he was quite upset. He did not like the idea of almost any of our changes, and felt very reluctant to budge on that thought.

Now, we had spent this day talking to each other about the ideas over the phone, so he was not seeing these ideas play out on the table like we were…. but none-the-less, he was really unhappy. As a result, I made a plan to come out and visit him. I also called up another one of our friends from long ago who has been a part of our game making process for years now.

With new designs in hand, I drove out to Pelham Massachusetts and sat down to an afternoon of arguing and play testing and arguing all over again. This might officially be the most that Ben and I have ever butted heads over something… but it was critical to the improvement of this game, and thought it was a bit of a hard day, even better ideas started flourishing from this experience. Not only did we find ourselves a lot closer in agreement on some of these really good ideas by the end of this day, but we also concocted an idea that might help us solve our other mechanical problem discussed at the top of this journal post: Financial Lock.

Be sure to tune in to our next Design Journal to see more about what happened in this brainstorm, and to indulge in the results of our day-long argument.