No Quarter - Design

TGC’s Mint Tin Challenge has certainly been a fun ride, albeit a bumpy one.

This is, of course, the second post in my Design Journal Series for No Quarter, this one on its design(if you want to know where it all started, check out NQ’s Ideation post).

In the last post, we had a prototype consisting of a mint tin, twelve coins, and two d10s(for life trackers).  This version was not very exiting, but here’s how it worked:  Each player had one ‘move’ coin(hit or block), one direction coins\(left or right), and 5 power coins(1, 2, 3, 4, and 5, with blank backs).  

Every round, players would secretly make a move(place one coin of each type in a pile), then simultaneously reveal the pile.  A Hit would deal damage equal to the number on the power coin, and a Block would counteract a Hit, provided that they were in the same hand.  If two hits were in the same hand, only the one with the highest power hit.

At first, that incarnation was actually pretty fun, but by round 3, we realized that it was great folly to play anything but a Power 5 Hit;  Lower power was useless, and that level of Hit countered everything but an equal hit.  Therefore, assuming players followed this strategy, players always tied(either both players simultaneously hit, or neither of them did), which did not make for interesting gameplay.

Round Two

I solved this issue with a rules change and five more coins per player.  The new coins were all Power coins: Two 1’s, a 2, a 3, and a 4.  That left two of everything but 1’s(which had three) and 5’s(which had only one).  The accompanying rules change was simple: discard power coins after you use them.

This fixed a lot of issues.  You only had one 5, so you couldn’t use 5’s every turn, and Blocks became a valid(and crucial) part of strategy— it didn’t matter which number you used for a Block, so they became good dumps for 1’s and 2’s while actually doing something.

At this point, I actually found it to be pretty fun, but it didn’t feel like boxing;  It was just too slow, too well planed.  I tried making three moves per round instead of one, which was a thousand times better;  It was much faster, it took a lot more strategy, and felt generally more box-y.

If three moves per round is great, surely five would be even better, right?  Actually, wrong.  With five moves to make, it became hard to remember what moves you had made, and it was like work trying to strategize.  Five moves was a short-lived failure.

So why was five so much worse than three, and three so much better than one?  I think it corresponds to the active memory capacity of a human(that’s right, it’s going to be one of those posts). 

What’s this ‘active memory’?  In essence, it’s a how many pieces of data your brain can handle at a time, like the RAM of a computer.  According to psychologist George Armitage Miller, the capacity for active memory is seven, plus or minus two.  Too low and the brain becomes bored, too high and it can’t handle the information— some stuff overflows into regular memory, and that takes retrieval. 

So how does this affect the issue at hand?  Well, each move is made of three parts(Hit/Block, Left/Right, and Power), so one move requires three bits of active memory— too few, so the brain gets bored.  Conversely, five moves takes fifteen pieces of a nine-slice pie, which is way too much.  Right in the middle, though, is three moves with a total of nine bits of information— exactly seven plus two, the upper edge of active memory.

So with the perfect moves-to-round ratio figured out, I turned to fine-tuning the game.  One issue was that, while left or right mattered quite a bit, there was no real way of predicting which one your opponent would use.  That, combined with a desire to implement special powers for the players, resulted in the Champion cards.  Each Champion has an ability and a dominant hand(you get -1 power to hits made with your non-dominant hand).  The first Champions were Abraham Lincoln and Queen Elisabeth, whose abilities were “Emancipate” and “Have Tea,” the former reclaiming a used Power coin and the latter blocking with both hands.  I found these to be a lot of fun, and so created George Washington(Revolt: Deal damage to your opponent equal to the power of their move) and ‘The Buffalo’(CHAAAAARGE!:  Double the power of this attack), the Buffalo becoming a playtester favorite.

After this, the changes were minor: a tweak here, a rewording there.  I kept playing it through most of the design period(discounting the interim of me entering into Buttonshy Games’ ICG contest in September, and the last two days where I redesigned Flick Wars to be a mint tin game, and— Ooh, shiny!  Um, where was I?), and I finally realized just how much production work was supposed to go into making nice graphics and a fancy shop page, then worked until midnight the last possible day just to get NQ entered.  Excuse the looks of the shop page for now, but I can’t edit it until the semifinals.

Before we go, I have a favor to ask;  The hour of trial is finally here— The Mint Tin Challenge is in the community voting stage right now!— and I’d really appreciate it if you guys would check out No Quarter’s shop page if you have the time.  No need to vote for me, just a quick look will make me happy!  (And while we’re on the subject, also take a look at Flick Warfare, a tin-sized mathless wargame!)

And that’s about all from this big mouth today.  So what do you guys think?  Did you find this at all helpful?  Did you like the format for design journals I’ve been following so far?  Do you have your own MTC entry that you want to shamelessly plug in the comments?  Feel free to share your thought/self-links below, and as always, keep on geekin’ on!