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Many readers might have missed all three of those games, and I can't blame you. Deduction games are both polarizing and obscure: polarizing because some people hate them with a passion and would rather not game than play a deduction game, while others like me seek them out, and obscure because they are often somewhat abstract with a theme that's not terribly robust. As such, they are rarely eye-candy with spectacular bits that people covet. In other words, they lack beautiful acrylic purple penguins.
In 2012, I played two new-to-me deduction games close to one another, multiplayer games of Telepathy, designed by Derek Chinn, and P.I., designed by Martin Wallace. Both games have a left-right binding, that is, each player is trying to determine information about his left-hand-opponent. In a four-player game, you care when you are being questioned and when you are questioning, but the other half of the game is not relevant. Sure, games are social, and I enjoy that about them, but I also like caring about everything going on around me.
This was the genesis of Plunder. It started as an attempt to emulate some of my favorite deduction games, while deviating from them for specific reasons. In some ways, Plunder is my response to some of the aspects of those games.
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A trip back in time, from the finished product back to the prototype
First, deduction games are incredibly dependent on the players. If you play a two-hour deduction game and one person makes a mistake, the game is effectively ruined. You'd think not making mistakes would be easy, but imagine you have four cards from a standard deck in your hand and someone asks you whether you have a certain card. It's natural for you to occasionally mistake a club for a spade or a 6 for a 9. That's just the way the brain works. Avoiding the potential for such errors is part of why I like to play Black Vienna online. One goal for Plunder was to decrease the probability of player error.
Second, deduction games can rely on complex notation. For some, such notation is fun, but for many it's counterintuitive and frustrating. If A has a heart and B has a club, does that mean C has a spade — or could A have a spade leaving C with a diamond or a second heart? Yes, I like Bridge, but I'm not an accomplished Bridge player because I am discouraged by the complexity of the bidding systems. Another goal for Plunder was to have a simple and intuitive notation system.
Third, deduction games can take a long time to play. Analysis paralysis is one reason for slow games, but in deduction games, you are thinking hard, drawing conclusions, and having "a-ha" moments. Nothing is worse than being hurried and making a notation error or being snippy with a fellow player. Another goal of Plunder was to simplify the system to facilitate drawing conclusions in a reasonable period of time for a non-hardcore deduction gamer.
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At that point, I had some islands, but that's not really fun. Next, I added landmarks. Each island has typical piratey landmarks: skull rock, anchor, palm tree, etc. For me, that lent more concreteness to the theme, but it was still not populated with excitement. I decided on a third feature — a pirate guard — so now I might have a treasure on Aruba by the shipwreck guarded by Black Billy. Now we have something. I want to find your treasure, and you want to find mine. That's all fine, but remember that I did not want it to have the left-right binding of some deduction games.
Now comes the first problem. How can everyone be involved? If you ask me whether my treasure is on Tortuga by the anchor guarded by Callous Cate, what should I say? The traditional answer is a number: 0 if none of your details are correct, 1 if one of the three features is correct, 2 if two of the three are correct, and 3 if all three are correct.
The game can certainly be played that way, but it can be somewhat anticlimactic in two ways. First, let's say I get lucky and ask you a question to which you answer, "Two". You could be out of the game quite quickly as I just have to figure out which two they are, then get you to say "1" to lock down your answer.
The second problem with the number answer is that several players often get the answer at the same moment. How should a game settle ties? I have thought a ton about this, well before Plunder, and had no satisfactory answer. For me, the goal is to spread the learning so that not everyone can conclude the same thing at the same time. In Plunder, I partially succeeded — then the excellent development team at R&R Games added a way to resolve the tie, having a chest in which answers are stacked. The first answer into the chest has a slight scoring advantage, but it's not winner-take-all. This takes the sting out of ties while avoiding a game in which everyone ties at the end.
I still had the number problem and the desire to avoid lots of ties. Telepathy has four characteristics you are trying to determine: row, column, shape, and color. Players have identical grids and are trying to deduce the secret spot on an 18x18 grid. The cool part of Telepathy is that you don't respond to questions with a number, but with a simple yes or no. "Yes" means that at least one of the characteristics is correct, while "No" means that none of them are. Telepathy has eighteen rows, eighteen columns, nine colors, and nine shapes, however, which is a bit much for what I was shooting for.
Okay, I had a game with islands, landmarks, and guards. The next piece of the puzzle was determining how many characteristics I should have and how many of each type of characteristic. I tried as few as two characteristics with four of each, which was trivial, and as many as four characteristics with eight of each. There's a benefit in having more islands, landmarks, and guards, namely that if you have eight of each, your game can potentially support up to eight players. If you have only six of each, you can support only six players if everything is allocated to players.
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The design also had yellow chips that said "Aye" on one side and "Nay" on the other so that you didn't have to remember what people said for that question.
Well, it was a nice idea, but not as much fun as I had hoped. After all, if you need to find out whether someone's treasure is on Aruba or Barbuda and no one rolls either of those, you are jammed. You are sitting there waiting for the dice to do your bidding, which as we all know never happens when you want them to. At this point, I introduced the idea that you could rotate one die to the face of your choice. A substantial improvement! This change also added an interesting wrinkle as players started to look at which die was being changed and what it was being changed from and to. Wow, I had not thought of that level of analysis. I loved that moment.
That change had some problems, though. Dice are expensive to fabricate, especially if the game is going to require three different custom dice of which one is a geeky d8. I jettisoned the d8 for a third d6, hoping that would bring the cost down and make it more attractive to a prospective publisher. I liked the idea that in a six-player game at least two cards would not be in play, but I wasn't sure how many people would play the game as a 6er. The second problem is that people fumbled with the die while trying to find the face they wanted. Many know that the pips on opposite faces of a die add up to seven, making it easy to find the face you want, but this process is much harder with a custom die that lacks that mnemonic. Plus, it was fiddly — yet I persevered.
I had not yet addressed anything other than giving out the treasure locations and the questioning mechanism. At this point, I had paper slips on which you noted the player, island, landmark, and guard, then you tossed the slips in the middle of the table in a pile. At the end of the game, all correct answers split the treasure. Picking 6 or 12 for the treasure value was the most natural as it could be split by one, two, three, and (for 12) four players.
It seemed like a good idea, but players rebelled. They wanted an order so that the first player in got the treasure. At that point, I tried a variety of tweaky things and settled on having "turns" in which you tracked how many questions had been asked on a central board, then wrote the turn number on the slip as well as the player name, island, landmark, and guard. Fiddly city! R&R's crack development team solved this issue, too, creating the pirate chest in which the results are placed so that they are kept in order vertically, eliminating the need to track turns — awesome!
At one point, I miscut some slips so that they had only the island, landmark, and guard. I used them in a playtest, and doing so proved to me that stating who owned the treasure was unnecessary as it was almost impossible to guess John's treasure and accidentally find Susie's. Thus, I boiled the slip down down to just the three necessary elements.
Are you still with me? Thanks a ton for reading this far! Writing a designer's diary feels grossly self-indulgent, but also a bit sentimental, like that walk on the last episode of each Survivor series during which you revisit those ideas that fell by the wayside. Anyway, we are almost there.
Players split on two big issues: recording responses, and whether the questioner should have to answer his own question. If I roll Aruba, skull rock, and Awful Annie, then change Awful Annie to Dreadful Dave, let's say the other four players in the five-player game respond "Yes", "No", "Yes", "No". Should the question and the answers be kept on a central board so that everyone is working from the same objective data, or should each player note that information for himself? There are great arguments both ways, but in the end, we went with personal recordkeeping.
The second question is whether I should have to respond to my own question. Some said yes because doing so would minimize the first-player advantage while also speeding up the game by giving more information per roll. The other side persuasively argued that having everyone answer would increase the number of ties. In the end, we went with the questioner not having to answer his own questions.
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Note the icons on the cards and on the guessing card
There was a final cosmetic change. Instead of having a named guard, which wasn't very thematic — after all, how could my guard be guarding your treasure? — we changed how the treasure was being guarded, bringing in weapons, traps, and so on to make the game more thematic and add a bit of an Indiana Jones feel.
So the game had twenty cards, three dice, slips of paper for submissions, and sheets of paper for recording who might or might not have what. It worked. I went to a gaming event in 2012 armed with this little game and showed it around. Others have said it, but this bears repeating: Game companies are all looking for different things. What bores one company excites another. Whatever you do in the game design world or any other creative endeavor, don't take rejection personally. It's a matter of fit, a two-way street. In this case, I showed my game to several companies that I thought might like a thinky game. Nope, nope, nope. Good reasons, good comments, cordial interchanges, but no bite.
Then there was Frank DiLorenzo sitting in a chair. I think of him as Mr. Time's Up, General Smarty Party, and Captain Thingamajig, all of which I greatly enjoy. I said, "I'm sure you're not interested in a deduction game." He looked up at me and said, "I love deduction games". I thought, well, okay — so we gave it a whirl. I was fortunate that some super positive players were at that first table. Frank asked to borrow my crappy-looking prototype with clipart pasted on die faces and went off in search of other players. At that point, we parted ways. Later in the con, I heard a wonderful compliment from Kevin Nunn, stating that he liked it enough to want a copy to play. Done and done. Super. Later, Frank came up to me and said he wanted to do it. Wowie!
The Jolly Roger lives to fly another day
Now, about eighteen months later, here the game is ... without dice. Frank also had the idea of bringing the price point down while improving the game by adding three small decks of cards: one island deck, one landmark deck, and one protection deck. Instead of manipulating the fiddly die, you now flip one card from the deck of your choice and get what you get. This change nicely removes the doublethink about what you rotated the die to while keeping the deduction about why you discarded whatever you did, which is more appropriate for a deduction game of this weight.
Thanks to all who played a role in the process of this game's creation!
Jonathan Franklin
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