:strip_icc()/pic5718402.jpg)
Enchanted Plumes box cover
After finishing my run and making it past the initial barricade my brain likes to throw up when presented with a seemingly novel idea — that idea is preposterous, go no further, turn back now, continue at your own peril — I began to earnestly entertain it and think through how a game with a peacock courtship theme might play. It would need characters, peacocks, and a peahen; there'd be feathers, plumage, attraction, perhaps room for ambition and hubris. Most of all, the idea my brain became enamored with was that at the end of the game, players would have peacocks flaunting their plumage arranged before them on the table.
I adore games in which players construct something through the course of play. No matter what the reward for the construction is, there is an intrinsic reward to play itself when a game facilitates this sort of creation and a player can sit back and admire their work, win or lose. There's a ludological inverse to this design paradigm, too: games in which through the course of play the players destroy or deconstruct something, Jenga being a prime example.
:strip_icc()/pic5783534.jpg)
Beautifully arranged finished peacock
In the best iterations of this design paradigm, game components themselves take on a toy-like form. While playing the game, the components function as game pieces. When not playing the game, they function as a toy — something that's pleasurable to manipulate solely for the sake of manipulation. During the game, some of that pleasure of manipulation, or play, carries through. When a game component can function both as a component and a toy, or at least something toy-like, a game of this sort is headed in the right direction.
:strip_icc()/pic6198075.jpg)
The table after a completed two-player game
Visual Design
A design tool I value greatly is visual game design. How a game occupies the spaces where we play them is vital to our experience of them. Put differently, the shape of a game shapes our experience playing it. In visual game design, the designer imagines how the game will occupy space at different points in the game, then designs the components and rules needed to guide their players to that destination. It's a powerful tool.
In the case of Enchanted Plumes, I imagined the player's table full of beautiful, vibrant, and sprawling peacocks, made of fanned-out cards, filling the space. It was wondrous and awesome — I wanted it to be real. Following my visual design destination, I knew that the core component of Enchanted Plumes was cards: differently-colored cards depicting feathers that coalesced to form peacocks.
Next, I needed rules for arranging peacocks and how cards would be added to them in a systematic manner to create that shape. Quickly I got to the concept that plumes would be arranged row by row, starting with the largest row and tapering down, one card at a time until only one remained. This structure accomplished a lot for the design. Most importantly, it laid the foundation of risk and reward that's central to the game: Larger peacocks are more attractive, have more effort invested into them, and are therefore worth more points — but they are also more difficult to construct because they contain significantly more cards.
This row-by-descending-row mechanism accomplished something else important for the design when I layered the color trait of the cards on top of it. To accomplish this, I integrated a rule that the feather cards in each row must share a color with a card in the row that precedes it (except for the first row, which may have any colors). Thus, as each new row tapers down, it will have one fewer color than the row preceding it. This rule forces consequential decisions each time a row is passed.
:strip_icc()/pic6198078.jpg)
Prototype cards. Functional!
In Enchanted Plumes, cards range in value from 0-9. Values are important because every card in a peacock is worth points equal to the value of the card — except for cards in your initial row, which are worth negative points. This decision reinforced the risk/reward system that the row mechanism brought to the design and created harmony between the arrangement and the scoring. Sometimes, this system also meant that players surveilling their hand would have an obvious next move, a clear path to follow. These turns of obvious decisions are a boon for the game. They give players a small break and can help players experience a sense of flow as their plan is executing itself smoothly before them. That's an excellent sensation, and I think it's important for designers to consider the pacing and frequency of choices and decisions in their games. If a game is made entirely of agonizing decisions, it will exhaust its players. Designers have to be careful to pace their games such that there's room for all sorts of decisions.
:strip_icc()/pic6198144.jpg)
A showcase of the card art; the eye of each feather color has a unique design to make the ten-color game more colorblind friendly
Feather Tempo, One-Two Step
At last, I understood the rules for peacock arrangement — but what about the rules for card playing? How often would players be able to tinker with their peacock(s) in a given turn, and to what degree? In any card game in which you collect differently-valued cards, there's a tension between using the cards you have versus spending resources (time or otherwise) to acquire and use better cards instead. This is a design rule that can be broken, but even poker, which allows players fairly little agency over their cards (depending on the variant), is made interesting by introducing tension between card quality (your hand) and time (how long your chips will last, with chips being something you trade for more opportunities to see additional cards and increase your card quality). There's something very human about that core tension — working to improve what you have, while also making do with what you have — and it makes for engaging games, so I wanted to explore it in Enchanted Plumes.
The peahen is randomly inserted into the bottom seven cards; when drawn, she initiates the end of the game
It's from that tension between card quality and card quantity that I integrated the rule for how a player approaches playing their cards: Each turn, you one or two cards from your hand. This gives you agency over how and when you would play cards, allowing you to trade time for additional cards (or different cards) at the expense of tempo. Tempo in card games represents an opportunity cost. In Enchanted Plumes, each time a player decides to play only one card during a turn, they give up half a turn of tempo. Playing more cards does not mean that a player will win, as card quality is equally important to quantity, but it thrusts a core tension into the turn structure.
A similar and important rule is that players may start as many peacocks as they'd like — recall that cards in the first row are worth negative points so there is risk to doing so — and may play cards to any of their peacocks. Juggling multiple peacocks at once creates a more dynamic and rewarding puzzle for players interested in tackling such a problem. It creates unique tactical moments in which you can use smaller peacocks to create opportunities for acquiring the cards you need to complete larger ones, and so on...
Draft...or to Filter(!)
I certainly made some egregious blunders in the process of designing Enchanted Plumes, the first of which came when trying to design a mechanism through which players would have agency over their starting hand. Early in the design process was a feather draft, and it was awful.
Starting with the right cards in Enchanted Plumes can be quite powerful and likewise weak of cards can be quite detrimental, so I wanted to be sure the design assisted players in this regard, evening the playing field in the process. Here's how that cumbersome feather draft worked: Players dealt a grid of cards, nine per player, to the table face down. Taking turns, they'd flip two cards face up and pick one of the face-up cards from the table to add to their hand. The draft continued until each player had six cards, then the remaining cards were returned to the deck. The draft was slow, and the choices it asked players to make generally weren't really decisions because often one card was strictly better than others on the table.
Too many choices that aren't decisions can make a game trite and boring, leading players to think, "This game plays itself." Another downside of the draft was that it could take as long as ten minutes to play out. A quick card game should not take ten minutes to actually begin!
It took some time for me to see the light, but finally I decided to cut the system and make something quicker that was a functional facsimile of the decisions that could happen simultaneously. In the published version, each player is dealt nine cards, from which they pick six to comprise their starting hand. With this hand filtering you have agency, it is quick, and the decisions are more interesting because you have more possibilities to consider all at once. Now, instead of a slog, the game starts with a flurry of engaging choices.
Harmonious Design
Here's the second blunder: You know the feeling of searching for your phone, thinking that it's lost, only to realize that you're holding it? That's the sensation I experienced when I'd finalized the scoring system in Enchanted Plumes. The negative base system (cards in the first row count as negative points) worked well, but I knew the game needed to reward players with bonus points for completing peacocks. Without bonus points for completing a peacock, there would be little incentive not to just go tall and pile cards into one massive bird.
My first take was a mess. I'd created reference cards with point values for completing a peacock tied to the size of it. For example, a three-card peacock would earn a few points, a six-card peacock a few more, and so on as the total number of cards in the peacock grew. These distributions were arbitrary and based on my gut instincts. Functionally, they were clunky and a real stumbling block in terms of the play experience.
I often hear people describe games or mechanisms that they enjoy as "elegant". This term is applied to games very liberally and ranges in use from "this system was clever, I hadn't thought of it before" to "this system helps me get into a flow state" to what is better described as harmoniousness in a game, i.e., when multiple rules work synergistically towards the same aesthetic goal. While not always the case, with Enchanted Plumes, the correct design decisions were consistently the ones that increased harmony.
:strip_icc()/pic6198083.jpg)
Players decide how large of peacocks to aim for — here are some cute little peacocks!
I'm sort of embarrassed to admit how long it took me to get to the scoring system that ended up in the game, but it's worth mentioning because the system that's in the published game is the most harmonious I've ever designed and the most obvious in retrospect. After one frustrating playtest, I just sat there looking at the table, tracing with my hands trying to think through how the bonus point system should work when it hit me that at their most base level, players were arranging triangles out of feather cards.
Triangular scoring is a very common mechanism in eurogames. The Castles of Burgundy, for example, uses a triangular scoring system (1, 3, 6, 10, 15, etc...) for the scoring of completed regions based on their size and Sushi Go!'s dumplings are scored using triangular numbers. I was working on a game where players are asked to physically construct triangles out of feather cards on the table before them. Each card in a completed peacock could be counted as a bonus point. The game's form quite literally facilitates triangular scoring. Utilizing the physical shape was a harmonious design decision. There was a direct parallel between the scoring system and the physical peacock arrangement rules that rewarded players for completing their peacocks, encouraging ambition without making it a dominant strategy. It worked perfectly. The marginal benefits of triangular scoring meant that players were reasonably rewarded for taking risks and constructing large peacocks, but with savvy assembling they could also make a wide strategy, a flock of smaller completed peacocks, work. Sometimes the most obvious solutions are the ones right in front of your face.
:strip_icc()/pic6198080.jpg)
Visualization of harmonious scoring
The trifecta of design decisions that follow are the direct result of taking the input of others and their perspective on the game. Enchanted Plumes is a richer game for it.
Mechanisms for card exchanging and drawing are always important in card-collecting games like Enchanted Plumes. Figuring out how to allow players to source new cards without making it too difficult or too easy is key, and the suggestion of fellow designs at the local design group helped me get to the system that ended up in the published version. At the end of a player's turn, they either draw two cards, swap two cards from their hand with the train (a face-up offering of five cards in the center of the table), or do one of each in the order of their choosing. This was a solid and workable system. Importantly, this system introduces player interaction into the game to pull players in and keep them invested between turns. This rule added so much to the personality of the game and allowed players who weren't only engaged by their personal puzzle to look elsewhere and engage more broadly.
Finishing the Plume with the Stellar Calliope Games Team
The final touches to Enchanted Plumes came from Ray Wehrs and Chris Leder after Calliope Games agreed to publish the game. The two core changes they made were wonderful, and I'll always be thankful to them for the tweaks they made as they're brilliant.
The first was to add feather cards with a value of 0 to each suit. To this point the game had been made up of cards ranging in value from 1-9. For some reason I'd resisted this change during testing, but it was absolutely the right change. Integrating 0-value cards made endgame scoring easier since any 0-value feathers could be ignored outside of bonus points, speeding up the scoring process. It also enabled us to push the player count up to six players, adding in values to the deck as the player count grows. Additionally, 0 is a powerful number. Humans love things that are "free" — I'd underestimated the psychological benefits of slamming down two 0s to start a peacock. It feels great, and I'm thankful those moments are in the game now.
Calliope's final contribution was that the last card of a peacock is played face down. This change accomplished two things in the game. It made card counting more difficult and added some uncertainty to the system. Players who didn't want to carefully track other player's peacocks didn't feel like they had to, and the likelihood for analysis paralysis and tanked turns was reduced thanks to an increasing degree of uncertainty as the game state's complexity grew.
This change also brought the card design full circle, increasing its harmoniousness. The card back in Enchanted Plumes depicts a peacock's body, and this mechanism finalizes the motif and rewards the player with a moment of pattern completion for finishing a peacock, plumage and all. The concept of a table full of entrancing peacocks was fully realized through this rule change, and the game's art — Echo Chernik's beautiful work — became another aspect serving the overall aesthetic goal of the game.
With Enchanted Plumes, my design goal was to create a whimsical card game that anyone could pick up and play. I'd hoped to craft something fun, rewarding, and at times a little heartbreaking, in accordance with its peafowl courtship theme. Enchanted Plumes is a harmonious 2-6 player card game that's a joy to play from top to tail, and it will be available from Calliope Games in June 2021.
Brendan Hansen
An abbreviated version of this diary was previously published in Game Trade Magazine Issue 254. Many thanks to them!
:strip_icc()/pic6237488.jpg)
:strip_icc()/pic6231474.jpg)
/pic5212561.png)
:strip_icc()/pic5939863.jpg)
:strip_icc()/pic6230803.jpg)
