Rapid Prototyping Week 3: Iterating on SPY

Week 3's theme was Economic Decisions, we had 6 different economic theories and we had to incorporate 2 into this weeks game. My two choices were: Zero Sum and Prisoners Dilemma.

Zero Sum Game:

A zero-sum game is a situation where, if one party loses, the other party wins, and the net change in wealth is zero.

Prisoners Dilemma:

With my choices I ended up designing a Spy thriller boardgame based on lying and deceit.

I've always had an idea to make a cold war themed boardgame based on an old design document also named SPY.

SPY, is a multiplayer card game centred around the prisoners dilemma and zero sum game. Involving deception, factions and uncertainty.

My first playtest was a Think-out-loud Group Test in which I watched over taking notes. There was a google form that some of the play-testers filled out at the end. The initial thoughts at the end were fairly positive, I was very surprised that a lot of the issues with the initial prototype were mainly balancing. I did dig deeper with the feedback though and the big takeaways were:

-Only 1 Player ever lied, meaning the roles were possibly not useful enough.

-A player unknowingly won the game for the Blue faction whilst being a green member. Meaning that the policy enactment may need some tweaking

-Players were getting stuck with role cards as there was no way to change a role without someone calling your bluff.

-The game ended too quickly

-Players got confused between the difference of Spending and Enacting policies

-Double Agent was deemed too overpowered even though it was more of a defensive card.

-There was no way of blocking an enactment so the last 2 turns didn't matter as Jon was always going to place a Blue card down.

I really wanted to rapidly iterate these ideas, so 2 days later, I came back with some changes,

-All factions now need 5 of their own colour to win, this was done for 2 reasons: One, it lengthens the game a bit; two, Green now more even to Red and Blue so there's less confusion.

-Role cards now require enacting policies not just discarding them to use, this means more players will be placing down policies and as there is no spending policies only enacting, it makes it more streamlined.

-Some Roles are buffed and re-arranged, the big change being to the politico and double agent, the Politico now doing the role of blocking the assassin, as well as blocking an enactment. The Double Agent can now be used to change your roles, but can still block the politico. The politico is now more powerful then the agent ever was, but players haven't complained about it because other cards were made more useful.

-Made turn action cards so players can see what every role can do so they are encouraged to lie more.

The second playtest was less think-out-loud, but it was another group playtest session, the biggest takeaways:

-Players are now lying a lot more, it's really fun to see the deception tactics players are using.

-The game now plays for much longer meaning some players strategize.

-No one uses the politico to reveal faction cards, it's something I do want to look into more.

All in all, the second playtest went much better, and I made a few more changes after this, the big thing I wanted to change was the faction balancing, as I still felt it was too much of a free-for-all, and so I changed the green faction for a third time.

-The Green faction was now only one member and the game could be played without a player playing Green. This means there's more social deduction as one member could possibly be green meaning using those policies(which are twice as likely) is riskier.

-Another small change, players can now use their turn to steal a policy from another player if they have no policies in their hand and there are none left from the draw pile, this will hopefully stop players from hoarding policies.

This was my first prototype of the module in which I used experience pillars, I found them incredibly helpful in focusing my attention to the core gameplay experience. The initial pillars were: 3 - Asymmetrical teams; 2 Teams working against each other; Different Roles; Lying and Zero Sum. I was really happy that by the end of the iteration my path didn't divert from these pillars. The thing I found most surprising was eventually managing to find a fun and interesting way to include 3 teams. Without the pillars, I probably would have sun-setted a third team and carried on with just red and blue, but keeping to the pillar made me come up with an interesting game design element to the game which now makes it stand out.

I felt that the rapid iteration on this was made so much easier by the use of rough paper prototyping. I had only ever done a paper prototype like this once before, but not to this extent. It makes me really want to go back to that old paper prototype and give it another look. For the first couple of days I was really worried about every possible outcome in the game, but it wasn't until the first initial playtest using this paper prototype that I realised the only way to find possible solutions is to figure out how people react to certain gameplay elements.

I have always looked at playtesting in an archaic way, I used to use playtests just to measure the quality of a game I was designing. But these small focused group tests really helped me find a new way to use playtesting to properly iterate on my designs.