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To be clear, I am eternally grateful that I have even one game with my name on it that's considered a hit. Many a designer would sell various body parts to various elder gods to have a game as well regarded as Alien Frontiers, but the "one-hit wonder" phrase? That is the very definition of being damned with faint praise.
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Man, I was goofy looking 3½ years ago!
There's only one thing to be done, and that's disprove it! So here we are, talking about my next game: Pay Dirt, a worker placement/resource management/auction game about leading a gold-mining operation in modern day Alaska, America's last frontier.
I originally designed Alien Frontiers because I misunderstood how another game worked and wanted to make a game like my misunderstanding. Pay Dirt is a very different game, and it started in a very different way.
After the success of Alien Frontiers, my creative process was a bit disrupted. Every design I came up with, I disliked. My mind was stuck in a rut of thinking about my last game. "This new game isn't nearly as good as Alien Frontiers, so into the garbage it goes!" As you can tell, shooting down ideas like this is not productive or healthy.
I eventually figured out that holding myself to an insane standard was counterproductive and decided to approach things in a new way, asking myself, "What things in the world mirror how a board game works?" My thinking was that such things would be ripe for adaptation into games and good for inspiration. I came up with a definition for gameliness as "being structured as a competition, possibly involving multiple participants, and having a defined goal and endpoint". My search for gameliness focused on history, nature, and pop culture. I found plenty of gamely things out there, including several that had been adapted into many, many games already. (Roman history, I’m looking at you.)
One evening I noticed that this reality show my wife and I liked met all the criteria of gameliness. The second season of Gold Rush on the Discovery Channel was about a competition between miners to see who could mine the most gold before the end of the season. The more I thought about it, the more this theme engaged me and the more game-like the whole thing sounded. All the gold-mining games I knew of were set in the past, not modern day, and few of them looked at this element of competition against rival mining crews and against the harsh conditions. I researched small operation placer gold mining and saw gameliness everywhere.
"Mining crews racing to mine the most gold before the ever-dropping temperature shuts them all down" was the starting premise. One piece that I came up with almost immediately that didn't change at all was the pay dirt tiles. These tiles start as part of a claim and are processed through equipment to become gold. How much gold depends on the value on the underside of the tile you grabbed, but that's an unknown before you're done processing. It's a gamble, just like small operation mining can be.
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Early prototype of Pay Dirt tiles
Pieces of mining equipment that form a "path" for the unearthed material from dirt to gold seemed natural from there, as did acquiring new equipment to make your "path" more efficient. The worker placement mechanism was a good fit to represent workers that operated the equipment, but I wanted each player's mining operation to be a totally separate entity, which meant that the traditional "If I go here you can't" element of worker placement was out. I began to see the workers in this game as a resource rather than a method of action selection as in some games. The game developed so that the workers are there to make your camp work and are resolved simultaneously with the other players. This change sped up the game play considerably, which is a big plus.
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Workers processing pay dirt through the mining equipment
I wanted to make the process of acquiring better workers, equipment, and pay dirt tiles part of the competition, too, so auctions were a must — but what kind of auction? Thousands of auction games are out there, and they each have their quirks and advantages. For a while I tested a method that forced the player to commit a worker to each bid. It was interesting, but ultimately it meant that you couldn't do much else if you were active in the bidding, slowing the game down and discouraging players from bidding back and forth. I settled on a more traditional type of auction with a twist: One item per player will be up for auction, and while players choose which item to auction from a selection, each item must be a different type than the last item auctioned. Fro example, if your opponent bid on and purchased a new Loader, you can't choose to put another piece of equipment up for next auction. This restriction forces players to consider what they want and what their opponents want, even when selecting the item to be bid on.
The next question to be answered was the relationship between gold and money. Obviously miners are after gold because it's worth money, but I wanted the game to be about the gold, not its monetary value. Gold became equivalent to victory points but points that you could sell for money. This created a fun tension for the players: You want money to win auctions to get better stuff, but you have to sell your victory points (gold) to get money — and once it's been sold there's no going back. In early versions of the game, I experimented with a variable gold market that rewarded players for selling gold early, but I scrapped that idea because it didn't add much to the game and didn't fit when the worker placement mechanism became simultaneous.
Personnel cards from a late prototype
Another idea that survived from the earliest prototype was Hardship cards. I wanted mining to be harsh so that you felt you were overcoming a challenge every game. I put a Hardship phase that inflicts random malfunctions, mix-ups, and personnel disputes at the end of the round, but I learned quickly that total randomness isn't as much fun as controlled randomness. Instead of each player getting one Hardship from the deck, players now draft Hardship cards, with the losing players getting first choice. This became another place for interesting choices and great "screw your neighbor" moments, as well as a minor catch-up mechanism.
Hardships also drive the temperature down, bring on the end of the mining season. Because water is an important part of the wash plant that separates gold from dirt, the gold mining season ends when the temperature stays below freezing. This event fits well in the game, but the exact number of degrees that drop is variable. You know that winter is coming, but no one knows exactly when. This was thematically fitting and created more choices for players about when to invest in your operation and when to focus on hoarding more gold.
While playtesting and polishing the game, I happened to play it with a friend of mine, Patrick Nickell. At the time, his company Crash Games had published Rise! and its next title was up on Kickstarter. He told me that Pay Dirt was HIS kind of game, which is a high compliment. Later, he decided he had to be the one to publish it, which is another high compliment. There have been bumps along the way, but Patrick's passion has kept things going strong. Crash Games found an amazing artist, Naomi Robinson, and an equally talented graphic designer, Darrell Louder, to realize the game visually. I've been genuinely blown away by their fantastic work, and the end result is a game that looks and plays like a gold mining expedition in the wilds of Alaska.
Another thing that I'm proud of is that Pay Dirt is a totally different game from Alien Frontiers. Some people might have been happy with another "dice as workers" game, but I wasn't. It was important to me to do something new and fresh, and I think Pay Dirt delivers that, ideally keeping me from going down in board game history as a one-hit wonder...
Tory Niemann
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