Designer Diary: Ramen! Ramen! and Rule Turns

Ramen! Ramen! simmered for quite some time before it was ready to serve. I started designing the game in the second half of 2015, nearly five years to the date that I am writing this. If days were measured in bowls of ramen — which in an ideal world they would be — 1,818 bowls of ramen would be behind me. That's a lot of ramen.

The final, satiating product is a card game that pits 1-4 ramen cooks against one another and the ingredient cards in their quest to serve the most and best bowls of ramen. Ramen! Ramen! is a numbers-on-cards style game that's rife with tension.

Each turn players play two of the four cards in their hand to two out of the three bowls being prepared in the kitchen. When the sum of ingredient cards (which have values 1-7) in a bowl is greater than or equal to fourteen, that bowl is served and scored by the player whose ingredient card tipped the value of the bowl over 13 — but at the end of the game, points for each bowl of ramen are awarded solely on the basis of deliciousness, e.g., the number of unique ingredients in the bowl. This creates a tense back and forth. Players carefully collaborate to construct beautiful bowls of ramen in hopes of being the cook who'll get to serve it, while trying not to overinvest, lest their opponent ultimately be the one to reap the rewards.

Kitchen Prep

When I sat down to lay out the earliest version of Ramen! Ramen!, all I knew was that I wanted to design a card game that put players in the position of a ramen cook. I'd recently moved to Austin, Texas and become obsessed with the legendary local ramen spot, Ramen Tatsu-ya, whose transcendent ramen shook me to my core and helped foster a love for the dish, not to mention a love for well-made ajitama, a cured egg commonly included in ramen that sports a center-of-the-earth-like transcendent molten core of runny yolk goodness. For me, if a bowl of ramen were a universe, ajitama would be its center.

From the outset, the idea for Ramen! Ramen! and the driving force behind its design was all theme. A common pitfall that I fell into, and many less-practiced designers fall into, is following theme down the road to simulation.

It's understandable why this happens. Your brain tries to get at the new task of design from an angle that it already knows. My brain went visual. What does the environment that I am trying to create look like? Surely there would be ingredients, customers who place orders, a wait for service. Maybe there would be a special, spills in the kitchen, collaborations among chefs to get bowls out the window to hungry, waiting patrons. This was my thought process as I created systems I thought needed to be represented in the game to give the player the feeling of making ramen in a ramen shop.

Ingredient cards and bowls

There is nothing wrong, of course, with simulation games, but I knew that I wanted to create something simple and elegant, something I could as easily play with my friends who were always asking to play Fauna, Dominion, and Camel Up as I could with my cousins who hadn't touched modern board games and probably last played card games during childhood trips to the beach.

Chasing the theme, the first Ramen! Ramen! design was messy, bloated, and far from fun. Here's a list of just some of the features packed into that early design:

● Three unique decks
● A customer ticket system
● Daily specials
● Mechanism to toss ingredients into the discard (spills)
● Tokens
● A variable ingredient scoring system
● Asymmetrical card ingredient counts

Early messy prototype as I tried to cram a lot into the game

To top it all off, my initial design didn't work for more than two players — I'd thrown everything in the fridge into my pot. The putrid amalgamation wasn't working together. I was discouraged and frustrated. I didn't know how to edit my design. Hopeful that some time away might allow me to look at it from a new perspective, I put the game aside for a few months.

Miyamoto's Axiom

At some point in that window I came across a quote from one of the most sublime game designers ever, Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto, in a 2010 interview with Eurogamer:

Quote:

A good idea is something that does not solve just one single problem, but rather can solve multiple problems at once.

I found my perspective. Wielding Miyamoto's axiom, I took to the design to carve out new systems that could solve multiple design problems at once. How did I do this? Having experienced a number of rough playtests with friends and by myself, it was clear that the customer ticket system was causing a lot of issues. I looked there first.

The initial customer ticket system was very literal. It consisted of a deck of ticket cards, each of which listed all the ingredients you'd have to add to a specific bowl for it to be considered "finished", meaning that it could then be "served," i.e., scored within the game and sent off to point wonderland for the player who successfully completed the bowl. A card might read:

● 2x Noodles
● 1x Chashu
● 1x Nori
● 1x Corn

Both players were working on the bowls together — drawing open-faced cards into two-card hands — and I liked the idea of a tug of war and tension between making progress towards completing the bowl but also wanting to be sure you, not your opponent, was the one to complete it. In this early design, players had only two cards in hand, so generally one could too easily work out whether your opponent could serve a bowl if you made some progress or not, so there wasn't any tension, especially since players drew ingredient cards openly from an array of face-up cards I called the fridge.

The game, if there was one, was remembering what your opponent had in their hand. For the most part turns were deterministic. The ticket system was so cantankerous I'd added rules to try to make it work. Some tickets were easier or more difficult, but I thought it would be clever not to assign individual point values to the tickets to avoid players lucking into outsize points by randomly having the ingredients to fill tougher orders. Instead, ramen tokens worth one point each, simulating time passing, were added on top of cards/bowls each time a turn ended and the order remained unfilled.

In practice this mechanism was fiddly, added unnecessary components, and left turns feeling stale. Players would do as little as possible to make progress, hoping new ingredients that would come into play wouldn't set their opponents up to score the shared bowls.

I didn't know the term yet, but the game basically came down to output randomness. (Devouring the entire Ludology catalog multiple times gave me the language and concepts I needed to design with intent, and I'll be forever grateful to Geoff Engelstein, Gil Hova, Emma Larkins, and all of the other brilliant hosts throughout the show's lifespan.)

The game sure felt bad, win or lose.

Taking Stock, Making Stock

I knew the order system had to go. I'd made multiple concessions in the design to make it work, and it still wasn't working, really. Anytime a system has to be designed to fix another system, designers should think long and hard about whether the right decision might be to strip out the system that's causing problems rather than trying to bandage it up.

I went back and thought about the core of the game. What did I find the most fun and interesting about it? Combining different types of ramen ingredients to make unique bowls of ramen. Ingredients are evocative and fun; they look good on cards; and the process itself — adding ingredients to different bowls, seeing what ingredients came together in different bowls — was satisfying. There was a kinetic joy to this similar to lining up runs in rummy. Sometimes the bowls themselves would tell little stories: "Wow, this customer must really enjoy ajitama with three of them in their bowl." Still smitten with the idea of a communal workspace, I wanted to work that into the game as well.

A quick side dish on theme and lessons learned designing my first published game, to quote Eric Martin in his New Game Round Up from September 7, 2020: Ramen! Ramen! is "the sixth game about ramen in the BGG database since the first ones were added in 2018. Not necessarily the hottest trend out there, but certainly the savoriest..."

No matter how fresh you think your theme is, chances are someone out there has a similar idea. When I started working on Ramen! Ramen! in 2015, I'm sure these other savvy designers had already begun simmering their own ramen games to life. Design what excites you, design what you love — you'll make a better game for it and your passion will shine through in the design — but don't be excited about a theme simply because it's "original", and certainly don't fall in love with a theme just because it's "original". Chances are even if your idea is original at conception, it might not be at publication. Fortunately, at the heart of my excitement for Ramen! Ramen!'s theme is my adoration of ramen and love of cooking.

But First Ramen, Then the Turn

We've now reached the most difficult part of the design processes: Imagining a made thing differently. Oftentimes designers talk about the process of design as a core iteration loop of:

Design → Playtest → Design (new version), repeat

Many of my designs have followed this pattern, but with Ramen! Ramen! this is the point where I designed a new game, as opposed to a new version, with the pieces I'd liked from the old thing. Sometimes you have to toss out the whole soup and start fresh.

I knew the problem I needed to solve: If the game at its core consisted only of a deck of ingredient cards, how will players know how to construct a bowl, how will they know when that bowl is complete, and how will they know how many points they should earn for doing so?

For the game, those are the three core questions of play that a more abstract, less simulated "order" system would need to answer in the course of the game for the player. I was stumped. This was a lot of questions a single, more abstract system would need to be able to answer, so I did what anyone would do — ask the question: How have others done something like this before?

That's how I realized I needed a "turn" in my new system. Reiner Knizia is a master at creating depth through relatively simple rules and thus Dr. Knizia's designs are a treasure trove of examples of "rule turns". A rule turn is a rule statement that through the use of one "but" creates nuance and depth, making the whole game roar to life. For example:

● In High Society, the player with the most points at the end wins but you cannot win if you have the least money left.
● In Tigris & Euphrates, the player with the most victory points at the end wins but only the victory point type out of the four in the game that you have the least of counts towards your score.
● In Lost Cities, a player may start as many expeditions as they'd like but starting an expedition gives the player -20 points.

A rule turn is an excellent way to sneak depth into relatively simple rulesets, so I designed a rule turn into Ramen! Ramen!.

In culling out the previous "order" system in favor of something more abstract, I realized that if I wanted the game to primarily be made of a single deck of ingredient cards (the fun part), then that deck would need to do a bit more work. I redesigned the ingredient deck — leaving seven ingredients in the game — and added values 0-7 to the cards. Now each ingredient card had two things associated with it: an ingredient type and a value. I had my deck.

Hanging on to that desire for tension between players building bowls together but vying to be the one to finish them, perhaps not unlike a real kitchen environment, I found my turn. Players would be working on up to three bowls simultaneously. When it was their turn to play, they'd play two cards to two different bowls, then they'd check to see whether a bowl is served. Here comes the turn:

● In Ramen! Ramen!, bowls are served when the sum of values of ingredient cards in a bowl is ≥ 14, but a bowl's value in points is equal to the number of unique ingredients represented in the bowl.

Later prototype that I made by stickering playing cards; this is time consuming and a bit expensive,

so I don't do this with prototypes I make these days, but these prototype cards felt nice

Soup's Up!

Players now would be rewarded for serving bowls of ramen with more of the seven ingredient types in the game and there's more nuanced decision making: "Can I risk putting this bowl's total value at 7?" "Do I think I'm more likely to serve this bowl, or is my opponent more likely to serve it, and if so what type of ingredient do I want to try to add?" "Am I pushing this bowl towards being served or being perfected?"

There were a few more small problems. The open information system was easy enough to solve. I kept a face-up display of cards for players to choose from at the end of their turn, so a fridge is still present, but players also gain one card blindly off the deck. You can't always know what your opponent has, but shrewd players usually have an idea. It's difficult to overstate how important the rule turn is for Ramen! Ramen! It's the core of what gives the game depth without complexity and the core of the tense, finger-numbing, gut-churning feeling of playing down a card and hoping with all your gaming being that you'll be the one to finish the bowl you just added another ingredient to and not your opponent.

With this ruleset, the game is able to accommodate up to four players and be played solo. Ramen! Ramen! is a raucous good time and available for ramen connoisseurs, card game fanatics, and anyone looking for a simple chewy game to sink your teeth into from Japanime Games as of late May 2021.

For details on how to play, you can find the full rules document for Ramen! Ramen! here.

Brendan Hansen

Turn overview excerpt from the final rulebook