Ducks,Discs,Dice,and Decks Design Diary

I’ve decided that one of the few things I will commit to as a game designer is writing out the  development story for every major game I release.  Apparently “major releases” includes this silly 6 hour project.  

I’ll be writing assuming you’ve played Ducks, Discs,Dice and Decks as context.  Even if you read this without context, be warned that I’ll be spoiling the joke.  Everyone knows that comedy is much funnier when you explain it to someone.

Game Origin:

While browsing the thinky-puzzle-games discord, I saw that someone had made a game-jam for “mechanical jokes”.   It sounded like an interesting challenge to go out of my way to make one, especially without any starting context.  

I don’t currently have the mental health to commit to things, so I simply filed away the mechanical joke jam as something interesting that would be cool to do, not something that I am going to do.  This distinction is quite important, counter intuitively I think it made me more likely to end up actually submitting a game. 

I used to love tight time limit game jams, it felt like the pressure was such a great way to get myself to focus.  Some of my favorite weekends of my life were ones where I did 48/72 hour game jams.  I think the past 2 years of struggling with depression and school have broken something in me. I’ve tried to do 4 short-timeframe game jams this year and given up on all of them. I think I’ve lost the part of myself that thrives under external pressure.

So my new game dev vibe is to purely make things on my terms. The mechanical joke jam was a good fit for this.   3 weeks is plenty of time and I’d only participate if I thought of a solid idea. No problem if I didn’t, since I was just treating it as an interesting thing to think about.

I allocated a portion of my random background thoughts to trying to think of potential mechanical jokes.  I didn’t use a significant amount of my mental bandwidth in this on/off brainstorming

I thought of a few cute ideas that didn’t stick.  A deck builder where none of the cards you add to your deck actually help you accomplish your goal;  a card game where there’s also other random cards that don’t belong in the game shuffled in the deck; a cutthroat game about betraying other players, only to learn that the real treasure is the friends we made along the way; a card based action selection game where the deck is rigged to ensure each player only ever draws 1 type of card throughout the game; “Oops all points”- a game where the only action you can do is score points in some way,  you can’t affect the game-state. 

Almost all of these were boardgame ideas.  As a designer I’m open to both boardgame and videogames as a medium, and simply choose whichever one seems right for any project.  Here I decided to bias my thinking towards boardgames, to alleviate a frustration I currently have working on a video game.

The frustration is the way boardgame and videogame design communities are so separate from each other. To me each medium is one half of the whole, so it’s jarring to see communities where the other half is not included. I mean it makes sense, they’re entirely different cultures.  I could go on and on about the (general) differences between board and videogame designers.   Boardgame design groups having explicit rules against bringing videogames to playtests makes *perfect sense*.  Well I still find it annoying… I’ve gone from finally having multiple communities to playtest my games with back to square one just because I happen to be working on a video game at the moment. 

So, I felt inclined to pursue a boardgame project, mostly because I wanted something I could bring to my local design group. 

Anyway, this game was born on September 26^th [2023]. My thoughts for that day  were strongly directed towards game design, since it was a meeting day for the Kansas City Game Designers.   I was thinking about the above mentioned “oops all points idea”, and thought it would be even funnier if players were trying to minimize their score.  

Soon I took it one step further, what if players didn’t know that they were all trying to minimize their score.  I originally conceptualized this as a negotiation game.  Each player would be trying to find a way to offload their valuables to other players, until eventually everyone realized that no one actually wanted anything. 

At this point, I was laughing wildly at the idea, but there was a game’s worth of specifics to work out.  I decided to preemptively sign up for the day’s playtest requests, even though the game didn’t exist yet.  What better motivation to materialize something than a playtest session in 4 hours. 

About 2.5 months ago, I had a deranged idea to experiment with a game that combined Sushi Go Party! and Point Salad.  I mean literally combine… I wanted to test a game where both of those game’s decks were shuffled together.    The 1^st round was using this combined deck to play a game that used market selection like point salad, the 2^nd round was using the combined deck to play a drafting game like sushi go, and the 3^rd round was something cursed of my own design.   The intent was to see how players would evaluate Point Salad scoring and sushi go scoring competing for the same opportunity cost. 

This 3^rd round turned out to be the most interesting one.  I split players into 1v1 pairings, where they collected cards by playing several iterations of “I-Split-You-Choose”, constantly alternating roles.  This did a great job of emphasizing the intended sushi vs salad dichotomy and also was pretty good at creating interesting decisions.   I filed this away as interesting potential that I wanted to explore in a dedicated design someday.

Design Process

So back to September 26^th.  30 minutes into actually designing the game, I scrapped the negotiation focus.      I didn’t like the idea of the game concluding once players reach a deadlock, it just seemed like there were too many ways this could fall flat.   I also didn’t want to make a game that needed a group.  Right now, I’m trying to gently encourage myself to make more 1-2 player games-   both because those are by far my favorite player counts for games and because testing games that require a group is a pain.

The moment I decided to make a 2-player game, I had to figure out mechanical focus for the game that wasn’t negotiation.  I don’t think it’s impossible to make a 2-player negotiation game, in fact doing that someday is one of my goals as a designer, but here pursuing that interesting design challenge would have been a distraction. 

This seemed like a great opportunity to get back to that great potential of I-split-you-choose mechanics with various things that are very different from each other.  

First, I populated the list of objects that would appear in the game.

I currently have a bag of red circles that I carry with me. I see it as a design challenge to make a game that uses them exclusively as a component.   While entertaining this silly challenge, I’ve realized that I like the potential of a game where players trade stacks of varying size to each other.  Why not recycle that here and see if it’s interesting?

A few months ago, I bought a pack of rubber ducks.  It is also currently my life mission to include them in as many prototypes as possible, so obviously those were in too. 

Next it seemed obvious to add in dice.   I have several sets of 10 D6 in various colors  (and also a copy of sagrada which contains 90 Dice- 18 in each of  5 colors).  I think this often encourages me to make prototypes where the value and color of dice are both relevant.   This frequently leaves future me with trying to figure out a way to make my design color-blind accessible.  

My brain noticed a pattern that I was picking things that started with D.  Of course, this prompted me to spend a lot of effort trying to continue this pattern.  

I used this site for inspiration- probably the silliest “research” I’ve done for a game

https://www.inspirethemom.com/100-objects-that-start-with-d/

I briefly considered adding dominos or dimes, but I did not own any so those were rejected immediately.  Finally, I thought of diamonds, and allowed myself to compromise by adding playing cards.  This isn’t really a good fit for the pattern, since you know playing cards have 3 more suits that are not diamonds. I could have just used the diamond suit, but that seemed unnecessary.

Originally, each object had different scoring styles.    

Dice scored for 1VP  for each die in values where you had at least 2 surviving  dice. {So 4 1s, 0 2s, 1 3, and 2 4s would score 6 VP}.  There were 3 different pools/colors of dice, which were each a separate domain for the purposes of the “dominance”  rule where players discard all of their thing  if they have a lower amount than the other player.

Cards scored 1 VP for each card in your largest run of cards (from the surviving cards after players compare their counts of each suit)

Discs scored based off stack size, but each distinct size was also a separate dominance domain. 

I couldn’t think of a good way to score for ducks, and I was starting to run low on time.  So I just decided that they wouldn’t score anything, but they’d still be “in the way” as something players had to divide.   Then I realized it would be an excellent joke to build up the ducks as potentially decisive for scoring identities and then along with the main punchline of the game there’s the side one that the ducks do nothing. 

The nature of the scoring identities was settled quite early.   This was the first thing I solidified, because I started designing this game while I was still at my college campus.   I don’t have a printer at home, so I made it a priority to figure these out while I still had access to a printer.     I cut the paper I printed in random sizes- that’s part of what makes the joke work well in person with my prototype.   The identities look like they have different rules on them because the face down slips of paper are vastly different sizes. 

{While finishing up this game I noticed that all the identity rule pdfs  have the same file size, but I just couldn’t be bothered to artificially give them different file sizes.}  

Playtests

This game was play-tested with 2 different sets of people.  

From the first playtest,  I learned that I needed to vastly simplify the scoring.    I had such a strong instinct to make each scoring mechanism more complicated- but I’m glad I was convinced that I needed to go in the opposite direction.  Now everything (except ducks of course), simply scores 1 VP each.  The differences are all in the player’s heads as they imagine how the other identity works.  I don’t know how I didn’t think of this initially, this contributes so much to the overall joke and makes the game work much better as a one-off experience.  {The more rules you put in a game that can only be played once the harder your life is generally}

From the 2^nd playtest, I learned that forcing players to roll dice before they add them to the turn’s object pool is stupid.   This created so much unnecessary confusion, since you also roll a dice to determine which objects to add and how much.   The original solution was to use a visually distinct dice for the pool generation, but the even better solution is to just roll all the dice in-play at the beginning of the game.  Now there’s more for players to blindly speculate on, since you can directly choose what die values to take. 

I concluded that different colored dice didn’t add anything to the design, especially since I already had a similar gimmick with different suits of cards.  I was happy to get rid of the color-blindness inaccessibility and at the same time ensure the playing card deck is actually relevant.  {On the 2^nd game  they barely got any cards from it}. So instead of using the last 3 slots for different kinds of dice,  it felt way better to use each slot for a third of the playing card deck.  The best part about this change is that it fit the “D” pattern I was going in for the title.  Since now there were multiple decks of cards I could use the word “decks” (where it wouldn’t have fit if it was the singular form because all the other objects are plural, that would sound terrible. The title “Ducks,Discs,Dice and Deck” doesn’t flow at all)

Also, it’s worth saying that the greatest value of these playtests was getting confidence that this game’s joke actually works. That was incredibly satisfying.  I was pretty sure it was going to totally fall flat and I was just amusing myself with this design.

Rules

After the confirmation from these playtests, the rest of the work was writing up rules.  This is actually the first board game I’ve made where the rules weren’t written down before my playtests.   I thought that writing rules first was part of my style as a designer… apparently not. 

 Writing rules at this endpoint in the design process is painful. I want to crunch to get them done so I can have the satisfaction of releasing something but then I have trouble focusing on getting it done.  Yet even as I struggle to keep focus, I won’t let myself do something else… because I’m so close to being free from the project.  This is a pretty cursed mental state to do something so crucial in.  

I think my rules documents often turn out better than they deserve too.  It’s just like how I used to write school essays 3 hours before they were due and be shocked at a teacher telling me it was good.    Well, this game was a 2-day project (1 for designing/playtesting, 1 for writing out the rules), so I’m fine with the effort I put into the rules here. It could be better, but I’m confident it’s adequate.

The hardest part of writing the rules was ensuring that every sentence was strictly true and helpful, but I didn’t give away the joke.   I think I overemphasized that players shouldn’t read the identities before the game begins, so I wonder if this makes it obvious where the joke will be. 

Reading through the rules again, I’ve noticed that I’m very inconsistent with my use of 2^nd and 3^rd person.  (Sometimes I say the active player should do something, other times I say you should do something).  Accidentally slipping into 2^nd person is the bane of my existence as a writer, I bet I’ve done it all over the place in this design diary. 

I spent way too much time thinking of good names for the identities {that was one session of my operating systems class where I was very distracted}. The intent was for each one to be evocative enough to lead the other player along some strange route of speculation while having the possibility space of many interpretations.   I never actually tested the game with these identity names, so I hope they serve their purpose well.  

Reflections on the game

I think I’ve hit upon a great wealth of potential here for a more developed game.  I like the joke, but I could definitely use these core mechanics to make a more traditional strategically interesting game- where there is reliability and actually distinct  identities. This is pretty ironic given that this game was me trying to use some of the interesting potential from that time I tested a fusion of Sushi Go Party! and Point salad… I’ve ended up with a net gain of potential I want to explore.

One of my friends asked me what games I’ve played with I-Split-You-Choose mechanics, and I struggled to think of games… I couldn’t think of a single published game I’ve played that fit here.    It’s hard to perfectly pinpoint where my fascination with I-Split-You-Choose came from, but I’ll definitely try to expand the genre with some of my future designs.

This is the least amount of time I’ve spent on any of my games.   I hope I can do this kind of thing more.  I’d much rather be a designer who has experimented with a lot of interesting ideas than one who has perfected a few. This game was an experiment both in a personal sense and mechanically, I’m proud with the outcome in both perspectives.

Making a play-once game is incredibly fun.  I’d definitely recommend more designers to try it out. It’s an exciting challenge with interesting constraints and opens up some fascinating possibility space.