Designer Diary: Interior Design for the Discerning Overlord, or Making Dungeon Decorators Shine

Introduction with designer Jeff LaFlam

I never thought Minecraft was a game about decorating...but in some ways, and depending on the person, it is. That person is my son. He would spend hours and hours in that game building all kinds of interesting buildings, then he'd call me over to show me what he had built. He had a tour route already planned where I would see each room one by one. He would go into extreme detail: "See the torch I placed onto this wall so that you can see in the hallway", and "I put this chest next to the bed so a person can grab their stuff when they wake." He had a reason for just about every item he placed, where he placed it, and why that all made sense. It wasn't as much about the buildings, it was how he decorated them — and that's how my idea for Dungeon Decorators started.

I immediately began building a prototype. I made some simple two-, three-, and four-way hallway tiles on the top half of cards and decorations on the bottom half. Before you knew it, I was at a Protospiel running a test of the design. I quickly learned through experience that tucking cards under other cards was a real pain while building your dungeon. Shortly after that, chatting with some designer friends led to the idea of making decorations into tiles instead of cards. I started to test with that, and all of a sudden a decent game was formed.

The game had two types of objective cards that players could work on during play. One was based on the shape of your dungeon layout; I called them shape goals. The other was based on decorating. I noticed that some playtesters enjoyed doing one type of goal over another; some just wanted to do a cool layout; and others wanted to intricately place objects in their dungeons, so I needed both. While designing goals, I thought to myself, "What would a skeleton want to have to be a part of my dungeon?" Maybe it needed a sword rack and a few cobwebs. Maybe it'd like a cluster of rooms at the end of a long hall. What about other monsters? I would build from there.

Every turn, players had to choose between a hall or room tile with which they could extend their dungeon or a decoration tile that they could then place next to an existing wall. A decoration could be placed only on a wall, not on an opening to a room or hallway. This was fine...unless you lacked an equal amount of decorations and dungeon layout tiles, which is why the double-sided tile came into play.

With this change, you had an equal number of decorations on one side as the number of "exits" on the dungeon layout side. What's more, you never needed to flip over a tile to see what kind of dungeon layout tile was beneath. If the tile had four decorations, you knew a four-way hallway was underneath; if it had one decoration, it was a room; and so on. Drafting those tiles was working at that point, but it still had some issues.

Eventually, I added an ordering system and some player-drafting powers to each of the tiles so that drafting was more interesting to players, similar to Kingdomino. Sure, you could take the best tile this round if you were first, but then you would select last in the next round. Next, I had to figure out how many rounds a game should go for and how many tiles the game needed to support that game length.

In playtesting, I found that when people knew the game was coming to an end (as they could see just a few tiles left), they would give up on their objectives and just try to find points here and there. That is when I changed the end of the game to be when the third of three endgame tiles from the second-half set was revealed.

Players would see the first endgame tile come up and you could see them take that as a warning. When the second endgame tile arrived, players were on edge since they really wanted to finish off their current objectives! Now, the game was usually ending before players wanted it to, and that was a great moment, just like Ethnos.

I had a game, but now what?

There was a game manufacturing trade show in Reno where they had a "pitch" session for designers and publishers. I set my game up and waited for publishers to come by. Those that were interested sat down and asked questions, while others moved by. I had a few bites that night that I followed up on, one of which was SlugFest Games.

I ended up creating a Tabletop Simulator version of my game so that they could test it online since the company is comprised of people in different areas of the country. I was asked a few questions about my design choices, then eventually they announced they wanted to sign my game! We had some great back-and-forth during the development of the game, which was interesting and rewarding to see for the first time. They streamlined the game and left some of my design out for potential future work.

My game design started from watching my son play Minecraft, and then realizing what made that game so much fun for him. I wanted to capture that fun in a board game, so that is what I set out to do. I usually get inspired by playing a game myself or seeing something inspiring and thinking, oh, what if this was to happen? It never occurred to me that you can also get ideas from watching and analyzing others play. My eyes have a new filter on the world now, and it's fun.

And now SlugFest Games chimes in, with Jeff Morrow!

For many years, the GAMA Trade Show has been a great venue for publishers to meet prospective game designers and look at their creations. At the 2019 show, we saw a game by designer Jeff LaFlam. It was a bit rough around the edges, but it was highly flavorful and had the elegant mechanism of players drafting double-sided tiles and deciding which way to place them when building their dungeon.

After a bit of exploration and discussion post-show, we decided to license the game and start digging into it. This post talks a bit about what we changed and what we didn't.

Let's start with what we kept: the draft mechanism and the tiles survived almost unchanged from Jeff's original design. The main changes we made were adding a fifth and sixth tile color, as well as slightly tweaking some of the assistant abilities. We also moved the "draw/mulligan" spot from the end of the line to the middle and changed its functionality ever so slightly.

One other small change that we made was to the draft process. In the original game, you would fill the draft board each round with N tiles, where N is the number of players in the game. We changed that to four tiles regardless of N. This was easier to remember, and it ensured that the game lasted the same number of rounds no matter how many players were playing.

SlugFest is best known for our flagship comedy card game The Red Dragon Inn. While we knew that we didn't want to try embedding this game in the RDI world, we felt it would be a good idea to add some "dungeon comedy" to the game, so while the original game had somewhat generic elements like goblins, rogues and skeletons, we went with cards like the Dragon Day Care Center and the Sharp Pointy Object Storage.

Where we ended up making more extensive changes was in how players score points. In the original design, players had a hand of decoration goals, there were one or two shared shape goals on the table, and there were no boss goals. The decoration goals worked pretty well, but the shared shape goals were worth lots of points, were rather difficult to make, and gave diminishing point values as each player achieved that shape.

Unfortunately, this tended to make them very decisive; players were generally forced to go after them, lest they find themselves in a big hole relative to the players who did. So we made shape goals easier, and we made a new deck out of them. This gave the players more agency since they could decide whether to focus more on decorations or more on shapes.

However, we later decided that it would still be good to have some kind of shared goals. For this, we turned to an experimental mechanism that Jeff had just added to his prototype: "overlord" cards, which eventually turned into boss goals. By creating two different decks of boss goals and having one of each at the beginning of the game, it allowed us to make a mechanism that gave gentle nudges to players. This, in turn, made it so that each play of the game was somewhat different, while also mitigating the problem mentioned above in which shared shape goals were super important and therefore also super high-stakes.

After making these changes, we kept playing the game, and we kept liking it. For those of you not in the industry, we should explain: Most of the time, after we playtest a game for a while, we get really, REALLY sick of it. We knew this game was special because that never happened. In fact, it STILL hasn't happened. We still really enjoy this game, and we hope you all do, too.

Thanks for reading!