One of the chief things we discussed with Dominion was how drastically your playstyle and tactics changed based on the set of Kingdom cards for that particular instance of the game, which affected how you valued different cards and behaved with regard to other players (for example, in a game with no Attack cards, it would be rare to buy a Moat. However, in a game with the Saboteur, Moats are common. In a game with the Witch, Moats would be useful, but you might not want to buy one until someone actually started buying Witches, etc.).

Daniel and I are currently working on a game, and we’ve discussed applying some of the lessons we’ve learned from Dominion in making it more interesting–this one in particular. The game is a puzzle-platformer where the player has different forms they can turn into to access different powers. The thing is, you don’t always have access to every form; you collect them as you progress through the level, and you use them up as you use the powers they give you. In the game we are making, the level design makes you value different forms differently; one form might give you a great double-jumping power, but another might give you a better long-jumping power. Also, the game only lets you access most recent form you have collected, so if you have collected forms A, B, and C (in that order), you only have immediate access to C; to get access to B, you have to get rid of C. So the issue sometimes arises of whether or not you want to attempt to use C to solve a problem, or to discard it to use B instead, which may be better but result in you losing overall power. In parts of the game where you encounter enemies you must fight, do you go for form C, which is on top and defensive, form B, which is under C and does more damage, or do you toss them both for form A, which is on bottom but may let you avoid the encounter altogether? While it is not exactly the same concept (random environment variables introducing replayability), it does allow encourage players to go through the puzzles again and try to find different ways to solve them, as choosing the ‘easy’ choice one time would make a different part of the level noticeably more difficult or vice-versa. In this way, the value of different forms is variable, but variable depending on player choice rather than on the environment. We’ve even discussed player choice being able to affect environment variables; using one power in one place may open an area previously blocked but it may also cut off their ability to obtain a certain form for future use. I guess that aspect is the reverse of this particular quirk of Dominion — instead of the environment affecting player choice, player choice affects the environment.

There are a few exceptions – I have yet to find an instance where buying a curse is good…buying estates is almost always useless (though not ALWAYS, per the point here).

The value of cards is also variable. There are definite weaker cards, like Chancellor, that have increased or decreased value depending on the cards in play. Smithy is an excellent example (+3 cards) of a card that increases in value immensely when there are +2 Action cards (e.g. Village or Festival) and Throne Room in play.

This is something I would love to see in strategy games like Civ / StarCraft / Advanced War / etc. They do a little bit of that by virtue of you being able to pick out your starting race / character / powers / etc., but the permutations are very limited. If you’re playing Protoss vs. Zerg, you know what to do. There’s little question once you’ve sussed the matchup. Have the amount of possible permutations listed above is just staggering to think about. In Civ, you could potentially have a larger set of Wonders that are randomly assigned to the tech tree each time you play, making how you choose to traverse the tree different within each play session, e.g. This notion of randomly selecting from a larger pool of buffs every time you play seems like a core aspect of Dominion that could translate very well to multiple games (FPSs would be another avenue worth exploring).

Otherwise, Tannhauser seems interesting

And I am working on a XBOX360 conversion. Some news in the French boards.

Congratulations for your website.

Bogost comments on the greater ease of sports to games adaptation than film to games adaptation, since the former adaptation can be based on a set of rules rather than the latter being based on narrative. This could also imply that a sports game adaptation would be easier to design and develop since there is already a sound set of rules and mechanics for play. This is truer for digital games than non-digital games. Since non-digital games do not have the luxury of a 3D graphic display capable of presenting realistic characters running around on a realistic baseball diamond, non-digital game designers must think of extremely innovative ways of bringing the basic rules of baseball to a board game. Zimmer’s game cleverly used metal hooks to represent fielders, which would “catch” the ball if it has been hit toward them, signifying an out. If the ball passes through the fielders, a single, double, triple, home run, or foul ball would be awarded to the batter depending on the location and size of gap which the ball passed through. The game I would play as a kid had a crude LCD scoreboard but the mechanics of the game were very similar to Zimmer’s ingenious design.

This is a great example of the difficulties that designers of non-digital games have to endure when creating a new game. Even if the rules and/or narrative by which the non-digital game is to be based, another full set of clever mechanics must be designed in order to bring the board game to life. My hat’s off to all non-digital game designers who lack the visual luxuries that digital game designers have.

Another interesting thing that Bogost pointed out was the endorsement of games by athletes. What I first saw the Zimmer game, I immediately thought of the Tiger Woods game franchise and his face being plastered on every aspect of the games. It is interesting, but not surprising, that we have always used the same methods in order to increase the respect of our products. Charles Louis Zimmer….paving the way for Tiger Woods, Tony Hawk, John Madden, Dave Mira, Ken Griffey Jr……

I think the real change, where contrapting could be used, would be in higher-end item crafting after all the main ingredients have already been used. Every MMO relies on resources: wood, stone, cloth, etc., to work as ingredients items but they do not allow users to connect created items together in an elaborate fashion. The main hump that game developers would face when trying to adding contrapting to a game would be how do they get past just having every item add +5 attack that is connected to a weapon. For instance, you can make scopes in WoW and attach them to guns. Those scopes just add a tiny percentage to overall guns strength.
What would be interesting is if you combined that scope with some contraption that allows a Hunter class to use is far-seeing power (don’t remember the actual name but allows you to move the camera a fair distance away from your character, it’s for spying) and be able to shoot their gun at targets they find at a much longer distance. Sorta like that gun that could shoot through walls in GoldenEye (actually I think that was called the farseer, or the farsight). Obviously the game would have to be balanced differently too so that’s another huddle to get over.

I did like your idea for using it as a avatar customizer too. It would be interesting to see how players would react to having to find upgrades and other cards instead of having all the powers just available to them. I often worry if games are turning into “impression manager” games (to use Carrie’s word), because game designers are just giving everything to the player, they just have to work for it (which means it’s not for explorer type players).

And for the battling I could defiantly see a game like Dofus taking this battle mechanic. In Dofus you enter a separate battle field where you do turn based attacks anyways, so just changing that to do IC battles would be easy.