Designer Diary: The Rise of the Lords of Scotland

As occurs all too often in tabletop game design, a game reaches publication about a year after it is tested and two years from when it was conceived. Even with extensive documentation, a designer is forced to dig deep to recollect the thoughts, feelings and ideas that were once so salient, immediate and grueling. Just as the game is about to become a fresh new experience for the rest of the world, the designer finds himself asked to refresh his old memories.

Fortunately, the release of a game is usually an opportune occasion to play the game again, to see the fruits of all your labor and to discuss with ordinary people things that you didn't get a chance to talk about earlier. So just as easily as the feelings were forgotten, the experience of the game quickly comes back and the opportunity to express all those earlier joys and frustrations again can be seized.

Inspiration

Lords of Scotland was conceived in an Irish pub in Santa Monica. At least, thematically and materially, I realized I wanted to make a card game about commanding troops in the Scottish Highlands while enjoying a meal at Finn McCool's with some IDGA members. At the time it was just a nice thought in my head and I didn't have a clue how the game would actually play, so it entered that nebulous region where I'm sure hundreds of thousands of great games exist and it stayed there for a while. I didn't have the chance to make real on the theme until over a year later while surfing Pagat.com.

Pagat is a repository for card game designs. I'm not sure who runs the site, or why, but Pagat is an attempt to compile the rules for most public domain playing card games and their variants. Using a pseudonym, one of the authors of Havoc: The Hundred Years War posted a version of the game which uses ordinary playing cards. The two extraneous suits in Havoc were removed, the odd six-card poker hands were reduced to ordinary poker hands, and the fixed battlefields in the game were replaced by random cards drawn from the deck. It was from this variant that Lords of Scotland was born.

After comparing the playing card version with the published game, a lot of the mechanisms in Havoc seemed unnecessary. The playing card version was more elegant than its published version and would take much less time to play. However, it was clear that there was still room for additional elegance and balance, so I went about working on a version of the playing card game which could fit my desire for a pub game about Scottish lords.

Engineering

At first, I got rid of the cards that seemed to not balance with the main mechanism of the game. Games like Condottiere and Havoc have a number of special case cards which don't have a normal play value and produce an effect that cannot be compared with the other cards. Usually this makes a card either something you always want to have (a trump card) or something you never want to have. The existence of these cards tends to change the game from contextually advantageous actions to situations where (un)luck of the draw impacts your strategy. Instead, I borrowed an idea from Three-Dragon Ante and added a special action to every single card.

Next, I added a feature of true poker to the game, by giving players the ability to "withdraw" their troops from the battles they were losing. At first, this seemed like an adequate balance to the advantage of winning, but the game stalled right around the rules regarding withdrawal as it became increasingly clear that you would tend to see the exact same hands over and over again. So the game languished for a while...

Breakthrough

The biggest breakthrough in the design of LoS was the transition from a poker-based mechanism of set collecting and strategic withdrawal to a clan-matching mechanism with irreversible commitment and greater card draw. The game was turned into a much more metabolic auction, a prize was added to the pot for each player at the end of each battle, and players were given the opportunity to hide their play at the expense of not activating a power.

It was at this point in time that I realized that I had a publishable game in my hands. The design still would need a few minor tweaks before it would become what you see today, but with hidden play, play or draw, and at least a few points for each player at the end of each skirmish, it proved in multiple playtests to be light and quick, yet surprisingly strategic. I played a number of two- and three-player games, then sent it to Zev Shlasinger of Z-Man Games, who had published my card game Court of the Medici in 2009.

Testing

While the design was being evaluated by Zev's team, I continued to test the game and made a few minor changes to the design to alleviate the one problem that everyone seemed to encounter: time tracking. "Is this round two or three?" "Did I start this skirmish or did you?"

In LoS, it really matters who gets to go last in a skirmish and it can change each round depending upon who won the last round, so it was not always clear by the fourth or fifth round exactly how many plays were left. So we changed the recruit pile into a five round clock and an additional dynamic – the pressure of disappearing resources – was born. Even though you could always draw something on your turn, the opportunity to grab a card was now linked not only to your opponents desires but the refresh rate of skirmishes.

Perhaps the biggest surprise of Lords of Scotland, and the last tweak to the game design, came about when Zev played the game. He called me up while I was having a discussion about game designs with my resident game counselor Luca Holme and he wanted to know what happened in a couple of the situations that his testing group had just experienced. After attempting to clarify how each power worked, it became clear to both of us that he and his team did not play the game that I sent them. At least, not by the rules I gave them.

In my version of the game, a card could not activate its power unless it was the lowest card in play of all cards. In his version, it had to be the lowest card of only its bloodline, so he was generating tons of questions about how a high-value persistent power targets a lower value card. There were questions about whether you could copy other cards and whether copies replaced other cards. Basically, he had invented the first home rule for the game and discovered that there were a lot more questions than the rules I gave him could answer.

Variation

After we talked it over and discussed our mutual testing experiences, we resolved the questions regarding persistent effects without too much issue. But we also determined that the game needed to play one way for two or three players and another way for four or five. For almost the same reason that you need to be able to limit activation in small player games, you need to be able to permit a lot in big player games. So that players can feel like they have an consistently diminishing range of choices from their first turn to their last turn of each skirmish, players in small games need to be able to spike all powers with any low card and in large games, only be spiked by cards in the bloodline.

I'm not sure we would have discovered this issue if it weren't for a misinterpretation of the rules by the publisher, of all people. But ironically the game became better off because, apparently, I'm such a poor rules writer.

After we agreed on the publication of the game and how Evertide Games would contribute the art as well as the design, the game entered production and a whole new set of developments came about – but that is a story for another time. I'm just happy to now see the final vision of the card game realized. With its release in late March 2011, the color, theme and elegance of Lords of Scotland is now in my hands as I originally envisioned it, and all those who supported me throughout the process can see the benefit of their support.

Richard James