Supervillain #2: Dr. Hominoid

Let's meet the great doctor...

From the beginning, the consistent favorite among Infamous playtesters has been Dr. Hominoid.  And why not?!  The trope of genius-gorilla-scientist has long been fun for comic book fans (e.g., Gorilla Grodd, Monsieur Mallah), and I admit to a certain predilection for hyper-intelligent non-human primates.

Dr. Hominoid resides on the island of Madagascar, and as such, the closest continent locations to his secret base are Africa and Australia.  Thematically, he's a militant environmentalist who believes that eradicating Homo sapiens is the best way to save the planet.  His lackey is the lovable Mr. Jones, a quick-witted but lazy research assistant who'd rather be playing video games than conquering the world.

Dr. Hominoid's strength is "Evil Genius," which gives him two benefits.  First, he starts the game with an extra Scheme card.  Second, every time he visits The Underground special location, he can draw 2 Scheme cards (instead of 1).  Scheme cards are very helpful in Infamous.  Each one comes with two possible benefits:  a) you can play the card for its "help you" effect, which gives you a benefit or bonus at some point during your turn, or b) you can play a Scheme for its "hurt them" effect, which negatively impacts other players (basically, a "take that" card).  If you enjoy scheming and possibly messing around with your opponents, then Dr. Hominoid is for you.

Dr. Hominoid's weakness is "Incompetent Assistant" - which, you may guess, has to do with the capricious Mr. Jones.  When weaknesses are in effect, you must use the "incompetent" version of the Mr. Jones lackey card, which significantly reduces his value when assigned to contracts.  Most likely, you'll be keeping Mr. Jones around in your base, where you can keep an eye on him...

And what can I say about Rob's art that doesn't speak for itself?  I love his tie, and the pens in his pocket.  He's also clearly good at multi-tasking.

Supervillain #1: The Arctic Queen

We're probably a little over a month away from the launch of the Infamous Kickstarter.  I also have a bit more time in my schedule to write/blog about Infamous, since the academic year is closing and I'll be submitting grades this week.  Of course, summer research begins at the end of the month, but I'm going to ignore that for now...

Let's start meeting the central characters of Infamous:  the Supervillains!  Each player will choose one of five different supervillains to play.  The supervillains are differentiated by their flavor and artwork, their secret base location, their Strength, and their Weakness.

The Arctic Queen was one of the first supervillains I came up with, and my daughter Inara helped me flesh out the idea.  The Arctic Queen's secret base location is in Glacier Bay, Alaska - which means that contracts in North America and Asia are closest.

Thematically, she's got the whole sorceress-who-wants-to-freeze-the-planet thing going on.  Inspired by The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, as well as the The Snow Queen (Danish folklore).  She's introspective and isolationist.  Rob's artwork is just brilliant, I think; he's made the Arctic Queen sensuous and otherwordly and intimidating, all at once.

The Arctic Queen's lackeys (to be shown at a later date) are supernaturally intelligent, sibling saber-tooth tigers:  Sabra & Sable.  If you choose to play with the Arctic Queen's strength ("Exceptional Smilodons") Sabra and Sable become more powerful than any other lackey in the game.  The Arctic Queen's weakness is "Suspicion & Discord," which punishes you if your contract teams are composed of different henchmen types. 

Who's the Queen best suited for?  Your daughter, of course!  Or anyone who's jonesing for some serious climate change.

Humor in Infamous

Humor in board games is a tricky business. First, the experience of humor is a highly subjective one; more so, I think, than preference for particular board games. As such, some people might find the humor within a game to be a real boon to the experience, while others might find it to be a complete turn-off. Designers walk a delicate rope when they decide to inject humor into a design. I look at something like Galaxy Trucker (and its subtly clever & humorous rulebook) as an example of successful use of humor in a board game.  I see the recent KS campaign of HATE as a poor use of dark humor that is potentially turning away potential backers.

Perhaps most importantly, the theme and mechanics have to match the level and type of humor involved. A heavy, thinky Euro is probably not going to be a great place to inject slapstick humor (but it might very well be an appropriate venue for a more subtle, "sophisticated" humor?). Similarly, a casual family game that presents itself too seriously - imagine a grimdark adventure game for kids! - is a poor fit.

When it came to Infamous, I tried to let the humor come naturally. After I made a critical decision (between v1 and v2) to enhance the narrative element of the game, writing became a more central design component. There was going to be a LOT of flavor text in this game, and the purpose of it was to bring the characters to life and give the players a sense of living inside of a comic book. Each henchman and villain needed a description, so that it was easier for the players to develop feelings of attachment for their team. And perhaps most importantly, the contracts needed significant flavor text for Success and Fail states so that your actions in the game contributed to an overall narrative. Consider how important the flavor text is in games like Eldritch Horror. If you just conduct the skill rolls without immersing yourself in the story of what's happening, you miss out on so much of what the game is offering.

So the question became:  would the contracts be humorous, or would they take themselves fairly seriously?  My natural inclination led me towards humorous. These were supervillains, after all - and they were engaging in periodically horrific acts within the game (kidnapping, domestic terrorism, subjugation of the entire planet, etc.). If these acts were taken too seriously, the game could fall flat or potentially be offensive. I ended up leaning more towards Despicable Me vs. Dark Knight.

Instead, contracts provided an opportunity for these villains and henchmen to fail spectacularly - in often hilarious ways. This had the added benefit of taking the edge off of contract failure. You almost want to see what happens if you fail a contract; the story is amusing, and the effects are often persistent (e.g., Injuries, Powers).  Now you have a story to remember about that time your henchman was bit by genetically-modified sewer rats, or overdosed on super-fertility hormones.

With the decision to embrace humor in the game, the presentation had to follow appropriately. The theme matched, the relatively light mechanics matched, and now the art needed to match. This is probably the biggest reason why I really wanted to get Rob Guillory on board to do the art for Infamous. His artistic style is very dark-humor; stylized and clever and immediately funny.

Infamous is a game centered around the central tenant of FUN. The mechanics provide lots of opportunities to make fun, small decisions that influence the game-state and your likelihood of victory. The story that you and your opponents will create together is all about fun. Perhaps you'll laugh out loud, chuckle softly, or just groan at some of the humor in the game. Regardless, it's there to remind you - to remind all of us! - that games are meant to be fun, and sometimes nothing is more satisfying than sitting around the table with a group of friends sharing a laugh.

2-player Infamous? Enter the D.O.P.E. squad!

Infamous has several interlocking mechanics, but perhaps the most central is the opening draft for Secret Base Room cards.  At the start of each round, players draft up to 3 new rooms to build into their base.  These rooms are central to your strategy.  Each one will provide a certain number of "attraction points" for different henchmen types (Beasts, Criminals, Scientists, and Mystics), and many rooms also possess unique activated abilities.

Drafting is a great mechanic for so many reasons.  I love how it speeds up play through simultaneous activity.  Every player is reviewing and choosing at the same time - not sitting around and watching someone else deliberate.  I also love how the cards you're choosing from are in your hand, and thus, easily readable.  Games which force players to choose from a communal line-up of cards lead to frustrating usability issues; for example, players not being able to read small card text from across the table.  Finally, drafting is a form of light player interaction.  The decisions you make influence the ones subsequent players can make.

However,  early on in playtesting, it became clear that drafting for room cards - and the subsequent attraction of henchmen to your base - didn't quite work with 2 players.  There wasn't enough interaction during the draft itself, and there was too little competition for the available henchmen.  Players could easily accrue a large retinue of henchmen each round and fulfill a bevy of contracts without feeling substantial pressure.

As such, I started to develop a dummy player (or automata) for 2-player games who could spice things up a bit.  Rather than make the dummy another, potentially faceless, supervillain, I thought it might be interesting to thematically dress up the dummy as a squad of superheroes.  These heroes interfere with the players by stealing away (arresting) henchmen during the Henchmen Phase, and patrolling the world during the Contract Phase.  

Perhaps most importantly, the automata rules were simple to instantiate and involved only a single deck of Hero cards.  As such, 2-player Infamous is:  1) only slightly different from the regular 3-5 player game, and 2) thematically fun - as you find yourself getting easily annoyed by the D.O.P.E. squad.

This post also gives me the chance to show off another piece of Rob's fantastic artwork, and also the superlative graphic design work by Kody Chamberlain.  This one piece of art (for the heroes) took some time, as I wanted to work through a set of specific characters with Rob:  one "defender" for each continent.  We wanted the cultural ties to be somewhat obvious without being offensive.  Personally, my favorite is Baby Penguin - defender of Antarctica!

While the D.O.P.E. squad is limited to the role of automata in Infamous for now, I have big plans for a future expansion which makes their presence much more... intrusive.

Infamous: the artist & cover illustration

The past two months have witnessed a furious pace of development on Infamous.  My publisher, Eagle-Gryphon Games (EGG), is ready to start revealing some of the artwork that's been created for the project, and so I figured I would make that the theme of this post.

I'm thrilled to announce that our artist for the entire project has been Rob Guillory, the Eisner-award wining comic book artist, primarily known for his work on Chew. I was introduced to Rob's art many years ago, when one of my research students was reading an issue of Chew in the lab.  This particular student and I shared a passion for comics and were often exchanging recommendations for series and graphic novels we thought the other might appreciate.  Chew sounded totally crazy and looked amazing.  Rob's art is unique - comedic and dark, detailed yet often absurdist.  Here's an example of what I mean:

Chew cover

In late July of this year, I started working with Charlie Bink who was assigned to be lead developer and art director on Infamous. Let me say right off that bat that Charlie has been amazing to work with. A true professional and always on top of his game. Charlie asked me for a list of potential artists that I could see doing the 100+ potential illustrations for Infamous. At this point, our goal was to hire one artist to do it all - but realistically, we didn't actually think that would be possible with the time schedule we had in mind (January/February KS launch).

I gave Charlie my dream-list. At the very top was Rob Guillory. For some reason, I just thought his style and humor would be a perfect match for Infamous. I wanted the art to clearly reflect the comic book vibe of the game, the dark (semi-mature) humor, the bizarre cast of characters. As luck would have it, when Charlie contacted Rob, he had the time and interest in the project. He agreed it sounded like a great match for his talent. Needless to say, I was flabbergasted.

Rob's done every single piece of art for the game, which has included:

• 1 Box Cover (see below)
• 5 Supervillains
• 36 Henchmen
• 5 Lackeys
• 8 Mercencaries
• 10 Powers
• 75 Secret Base Rooms (!)
• and 1 Hero Squad

Infamous front box cover illustration

What a great piece! The cover features one of our five Supervillains, Dr. Hominoid, surrounded by shadowy henchmen within the central control room of his secret base. A holographic globe floats between his hands. In the various computer monitors around the room, we're actually previewing some of the additional art within the game. I love the image and really think it expresses what Infamous is all about:  taking pleasure in being bad.

I can't wait to reveal more of Rob's fantastic work over the coming weeks and months. I'll be doing some here, some on BGG - and EGG will showing off pieces on Twitter and other social media sites.

Contracts at their Core

Another long hiatus from the blog! The past year has been a relatively slow one for game design and development. Infamous has sat in EGG's development queue for a while, but everything is picking up very quickly right now. As such, I though it might be a good time to start posting design entries again.

I think Infamous has some really fantastic design elements - in particular, how the base building directly feeds into henchman recruitment. It's thematic, intuitive, and strategic. Putting together a team of henchman and sending them out on a contract half-way around the world is evocative and satisfying.  I also really like how straightforward and tense contract resolution is - although it's possible some players won't like the centrality of dice-rolling within the design.

[WARNING:  CRAPPY PROTOTYPE COMPONENTS SHOWN]

Contract Resolution

Let's take this contract as an example: Take Revenge Upon Your Nemesis.  This is a "Hard" difficulty contract, which requires a team size of 2 henchmen. You'll need to roll 5 successes to succeed. If your henchmen possess Brawn as a trait, you'll be more likely to succeed (that's what the flexing muscle icon means).  That's because each of your henchmen contributes a certain number of custom dice, based on what traits they possess.  A henchmen with 3 Brawn will contribute 3 Brawn dice.  A henchmen with 4 Stealth will contribute 4 Stealth dice, and so on.  The dice types differ in some ways; for example, Magic dice provide more extreme outcomes (spectacular power!  spectacular failure!), while Stealth dice are relatively consistent.

Furthermore, if you're rolling Brawn dice and the Brawn symbol comes up (1/6 chance), that will be worth 2 successes on a contract like the one shown. In contrast, Stealth, Intellect, and Magic icons will be worthless for this particular contract.

So there's some strategy is enhancing your odds here. And this leads to juicy choices when determining the composition of your team. For example, one of your team members could be: 1)  a Scientist with 5 Intellect - but no Brawn, 2) a Beast with 3 Brawn, 3) your Lackey, who has 1 Brawn but also lets you re-roll all your dice once. Who will you choose?

Then, gather up all your dice, roll 'em, and count your successes.  Wait!  Did you activate your Ectoplasmic Nexus with your Supervillain back at base?  If so, you can add another die of any type to your roll (add a Brawn die!).  Wait!  Did you bring your Lackey?  You get a free re-roll.  Wait!  Do you have a Scheme card in your back pocket (not literally) that gives you another re-roll?  There are so many ways to mitigate luck in this game, which I think is always important in dice-driven systems.

Greater games than mine have been based on repeated "skill checks." Arkham Horror/Eldritch Horror come to mind immediately, but the list goes on and on. Shoot, we might-as-well put D&D on that list. My concern isn't necessarily the role that luck is playing here - although that's part of it - but rather if rolling dice will feel enough like sending your team on a dangerous mission. It's an issue of abstraction.

For example, I imagine a (different) game in which you take your team, plop them onto a separate board that represents the specific location they're infiltrating, and you now take tactical control of a squad of villains. Movement, weapons, line-of-sight, rolling dice to hack electronic locks, stun guns, skill checks of different varieties, you name it. That's going to feel like going on a mission - but in Infamous, that would 1) turn the game into a tactical minis game, which is definitely not what I want it to be, and 2) make the game last 10x as long. One advantage of abstracting down the team's efforts to a dice-roll is that it makes the game move quickly and smoothly - especially since the other players are waiting while you resolve your contract.

Contract Difficulty

Right now, I think contracts are a bit too easy and I've got some additional tweaking to do. In my last solo (4-supervillain) runthrough, I probably achieved success on 90% of my contracts. That's too high. If players consistently succeed, the tension of the dice-rolls later in the game will dissolve. But maybe I'm achieving a high success rate because I'm good at the game and know how/when to press my luck. After all, if you play Infamous well, you know how to 1) recruit the right henchmen for the job, 2) build the right rooms to support your team, and 3) spend your resources (time, money, henchmen) wisely to achieve maximum value each round. 

The other factor playing a role here is the Supervillain strength/weakness. I've built in a specific strength and weakness for each Supervillain. For example, Dr. Hominoid gets to draw 2 Scheme cards instead of just 1 when he visits the Underground. These Scheme cards basically let you mess with other players more.

You can play Infamous where 1) everyone is playing vanilla supervillains and you ignore their strengths/weaknesses, 2) everyone is using their supervillain strengths (easier game), 3) everyone is using their weakneeses (hard more), or 4) everyone is using both. You can even mix and match, allowing you to handicap some players.

The vast majority of playtesting has been with people using strengths but not weaknesses. As such, my statistics are primarily based on easy mode. So perhaps a 90% success rate isn't surprising, or bad. But this is something I need to think about and play around with a lot more.

At a more fundamental, philosophy-of-fun level, I wonder if there's an optimal success rate that appeals to people. Games where you fail over half of your skill checks, I think, are considered tough and possibly frustrating. I'm thinking 66% success is possibly the right target. Just gut instinct. If you go on 5-6 contracts per game and fail 2 of them on average, that feels about right. And that's assuming "average" play - not blind idiocy (which should lead to a nearly 0% success rate), or high-level play (which should increase your rate substantially).

Lots to think about.

Infamous: a new game design

After a fairly long hiatus from this design blog, I'm happy to announce that I've signed a contract with Eagle Gryphon Games (EGG) to publish my second board game design.  As such, I'm going to start posting on here more regularly, to talk through some of the design choices and roadblocks I encounter through this next year's development process.  But let's start this off right!  Let me give you a quick summary.

Infamous (working title) is a strategy board game for 2-5 players that plays in around 2 hours.  It's a medium-light design - perhaps a "3" or a "4" on a 1-10 scale - and while it sports some sleek, Eurogame mechanics, I'd say it falls firmly and confidently within the Ameritrash family.

In Infamous, you take on the role of a comic-book supervillain.  You goals are to build a secret base, recruit henchmen, and then use those henchmen to complete nefarious contracts around the world. Successfully doing so will earn you money and infamy points.  The player with the most infamy at the end of three turns wins the game.

Current prototype

There are four phases in each turn.

Base Building Phase

Prototype only (art stolen from internet)

The base building phase is primarily composed of a draft.  Each player is dealt 4 Secret Base Room cards.  They secretly decide to either build or sell one card.  The players reveal their decisions simultaneously, pass their remaining cards clockwise, and repeat two more times.  Thus, it is possible to add 3 new rooms to your base during each Base Building Phase.  These rooms are important for two reasons.  First, each room gives you "attraction points" for various types of henchmen.  For example, if you build a Money Laundering Facility, you will immediately earn 6 Criminal attraction points.  Criminals will now want to come live in your base!  You can also build rooms to attract Beasts, Scientists, and Mystics.  The second reason why rooms are important is that many of them have special powers that can be activated during the Contract Phase.  These powers might spell the difference between a successful mission and a failed one.


Henchmen Phase

Sample Henchmen card (prototype)

During the Henchmen Phase, each player will (hopefully) recruit henchmen to their side, depending upon how attractive their base is. Beasts, Criminals, Scientists, and Mystics will be drawn to the player who scores highest in attraction for that henchmen type. There are some additional subtleties to this, but the feel of it is that the Henchmen Phase flows directly out of the Base Building Phase and just takes a couple minutes to resolve. You'll immediately get feedback on whether your base is successfully competing with everyone else's for the henchmen's attention. The more henchmen you recruit, the better. Having a diverse crew will give you a lot more flexibility during the Contract Phase.


Contract Phase

This is the meat of the game. There's a big map of the world in front of you. Six (or seven, depending on player count) continent locations, each with a different Contract card. These contracts represent missions to which you can assign your henchmen. During this phase, players will take turns choosing contracts, forming teams of henchmen, and then rolling dice to see whether they succeed or fail. If you succeed, you'll earn cash and infamy. If you fail, your henchmen might get injured or captured. Then again, sometimes your henchmen will fail but end up receiving a cool, new Superpower (e.g., caught in a radioactive explosion)! In future entries, I'll spell out more of the rules for the Contract Phase. There's some fun strategy on display here, in addition to fistfuls of custom dice.

World Map board (prototype)

Sample Contract card (prototype)

Clean-Up Phase

It's not very exciting, but it's necessary.  You've got to pay your henchmen (including your Lackey), refresh any of them that are exhausted, and re-seed the world map with contracts.  Quick and easy. After three turns, the game ends!


The Story So Far

I've been working on Infamous for the past 6 months or so.  I would say it was around early December (2015) when I hit on a set of ideas that would eventually evolve into this game. My initial point of inspiration was actually from the mechanics end of things. For a while now, I've been pondering how I could adapt the "attract a hero" mechanic featured in the small card game, Boss Monster, into a bigger game. And make it a bit more interesting, to be honest, by having the people attracted be positive (members of your team, not enemies) and persistent. In some weird unconscious back-alley, this idea got mashed with the 2004 PC game, Evil Genius. I've always liked "dungeon"-building sims (Dungeon Keeper, etc.), and once I hit upon the idea of using room cards to attract different types of henchmen, the rest of the game started to fall into place. The hardest part was the Contract Phase - but I'll save that story for another post.

I got a solid ruleset and prototype in place around March or so. Initial playtesting was extremely positive. Kept working on it and polishing the proto until I felt it was ready to show to a couple publishers. I wanted it to be ready before Origins, since I thought that would be my best opportunity to pitch it to a number of different companies. But I first sent an email to Eagle (who published my last design, Clockwork Wars), and they asked me to send a copy of the prototype to the Gathering of Friends. They checked it out there, loved it right away, and offered me a contract. I happily accepted, and we'll be starting development within the next couple months. I expect a long road ahead, but after having gone through years and years of waiting and development work for Clockwork Wars, I have a much better understanding of the process this time around. I'm looking forward to the work and have really high hopes for this game.

Needless to say, I really love this game. It is so fun, and surprising, and constantly throws small but interesting decisions at you. The narrative you and your opponents create will set you laughing. The tone is playful, but the gameplay is consistently tense and engaging. In very broad terms, imagine a mash-up between:  Boss Monster, Among the Stars, & Eldritch Horror. It's a very different design from Clockwork Wars, but I think that's a good thing! I think it will appeal to many types of gamers, especially those who like (slightly heavier) beer & pretzels-type experiences, an emphasis on theme and narrative, and the conceit of playing a villain.