Designer Diary: Crooks

"As far back as I can remember, I've always wanted to be a gangster."

I started designing games in mid-2010, though I've been playing them since I was a child - first games like Scotland Yard and The aMAZEing Labyrinth, then on to Dungeons & Dragons and Warhammer, then Magic: The Gathering and finally now back to the other side of the hedge with games like Scotland Yard and The aMAZEing Labyrinth.

"Your enemies always get strong on what you leave behind."

The first idea for Crooks was a type of drafting: Start with a number of face-down piles of cards. On your turn, select a pile, look at all cards in that pile, then choose one. I had no idea what you'd do with that card yet, but I liked that players would have to remember which cards remained in the piles they'd seen. I liked too that if the chosen cards were revealed immediately players could try to work out from their opponents' picks what might remain in each pile and choose their next pile accordingly.

Looking for cards in piles seemed to fit a game about exploration, so at first I decided to try an archaeological theme. The piles of cards would represent sites and the cards themselves artifacts. It made sense then there would be museums where players would sell the artifacts they had excavated. It is interesting how sometimes mechanisms suggest a theme, which in turn suggests further mechanisms. Later, the theme was changed to the more exciting one of crooks and robbery, so sites became hangouts, artifacts became crooks, and museums became the targets of their schemes.

"The richest man is the one with the most powerful friends."

For the targets I decided to try a simple mechanism I found in category dice games: The targets would range in value from two to nine points. On your turn, you would explore a hangout, choose a crook, and send him to a target. Each player could send only one crook to each target and each target would pay its points to the player who sent the most valuable crook to it. The game would be won by the player who earned the most points overall. Since players could submit only one crook to each target I'd hoped they would have a tough time deciding where to put each one as they picked their way among the hangouts.

I made a quick prototype with Adobe Illustrator, printed out the cards, and put them in sleeves with the chaff from a million Magic drafts.

It just took a few minutes to realize that this wasn't in the least bit exciting. That's the thing about making prototypes early: You learn quickly how bad your early ideas can be. Rather than agonize over where to place their crooks, players had plenty of time to just explore and fill up the low-value targets until they found a powerful crook to send to a high-value one.

"These few dollars you lose here today are going to buy you stories to tell your children and great-grandchildren."

The next change tried to fix that. The face-down piles of crooks beneath the hangouts would be of varying sizes; poor hangouts would start with just two cards and rich ones with seven. Players would start with $18. To explore a hangout would cost a number of dollars equal to the number of cards currently beneath it, and when you ran out of money you could pick no more crooks.

This turned out to be a much more exciting approach as players could pay a lot to explore a big pile of cards or less to explore a smaller one. The number I'd chosen at random – $18 – also meant that players usually ran out of cash before they had sent a crook to each target. It turned out that this was a much more interesting way of ending the game. Now players had to think carefully about how to spend their money and which battles they chose. Lucky guess!

"I don't know nothing. I don't see nothing. I don't hear nothing."

Despite being mainly pleased, I felt the game was still a bit flat. I had hoped – during the optimistic, pre-prototype stage – that it would be more interactive and exciting. I wanted players to be able to trick each other, to bluff, and to be surprised.

To this end I added score modifiers to some crooks. These were positive or negative numbers beneath the crook's rank that affected how much the target the crook was sent to paid out. For example, a 4 (-5) crook would subtract 5 from its target's payout, whether or not it was the winning crook at that target. Now players could sabotage targets they felt they could not compete to win. You had to think even harder about which crooks to pick as sabotaging a target you're losing can be as lucrative as winning a target of your own. Decisions about which targets to send crooks to were also trickier now, as the richer targets often attracted more sabotage.

The second change was allowing players to place a crook face down when sending it to a target at the cost of one additional dollar. A dollar is quite a lot in this game, so players couldn't afford to do this more than once or twice, but combined with the score modifiers, it added everything I had felt the previous version lacked.

"Made it, Ma! Top of the world!"

I had submitted a design to White Goblin Games a couple of months earlier and they were testing the prototype. During our correspondence, White Goblin CEO Jonny de Vries mentioned that they were looking in particular for card games. I sent them the prototype of Crooks and was over the moon when they decided so quickly to publish it. I've learned this past year that submitting games is a slow process. I was very lucky in this case to be in the right place at the right time.

"Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in."

Jonny wrote to me with an idea he'd had. He felt that often you wished you could move a crook you'd already played, so why not make a special crook that allowed this? It was a great idea and it led to the addition of a number of such special abilities.

We came up with five other specialists. Now, as well as the Switch crook that lets you move a previously played crook, there are Accomplices that may be added to a target where you have already sent a crook, Killers that let you discard an opponent's crook (or one of your own – hey, it's a tough business), Thieves that give you $2 with which to explore hangouts, a Spy that lets you look at either a face-down crook or a hangout's cards, and the Kingpin, the highest-ranked crook in the game who can be picked only if he is the last card at his hangout.

When assigning these special abilities I tried to ensure that, when combined with the crooks' ranks and score modifiers, they presented players with tricky choices. For example, the rank three Thief with a + 3 modifier; yes, he'll give you $2 with which to explore more hangouts but his low rank means his positive modifier will likely benefit an opponent. Or the rank 3 Accomplice with a -1 modifier; he'll help you win a target but in doing so devalue it.

Throughout this period Jonny was sending to me the game's art as Dennis Lohausen completed it. This was a real pleasure, and I awaited each update eagerly and I think Dennis did a brilliant job. By a coincidence, one of the crooks looks a bit like me - a puny rank one with a -5 score modifier!

"That's how I got the south side for you, and that's how I'm going to get the north side for you."

The addition of the specialist crooks got me thinking about the game again and reminded me that there is always room for improvement. That said, not every change is an improvement, and most of the ideas I came up with in the following weeks turned out to be awful. One idea worked well, though, adding depth and making choices harder without making the game any more complicated to understand. I added three gangs to the game: the Northside, the Westside, and the Outfit. (The east and south of the city must be nice places to live.) About half the crooks belong to one of these gangs, and at the end of the game the player who has the most crooks of any particular gang earns that gang's bonus points. It's a simple majority control mechanism that lets players shift strategies if they feel the need, and the existence of face-down crooks lends it some uncertainty.

"Mother of mercy, is this the end of Rico?"

I'm very happy at how the game has turned out; thanks to Jonny's suggestions and Dennis's interpretation of the theme, the finished product is far better than what I first submitted. It's been a great experience.

I'd like to thank the many kind souls who playtested Crooks and the other games I'm working on. Thanks especially to my parents Peadar and Margaret, Aidan Raffles, Noel Peare, Fiachra Kelly, Brian Mulcahy, Clare Crowley, Eamon Griffin, Keith Power, Cormac Smythe, Conall Forde, Ronan Daly, Barry Mehan, Hosun Oh, Stephen Ruttledge and everyone at Deerpark. And especially especially to my girlfriend Irina who first prompted me to design a game.

Neil Crowley