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Shucks, I don't get me many visitors this far up the creek, especially when accounting for the "injuns". Could be that hereabouts I'm as popular as a wet dog at a parlour social. I've been up here in the mountains so long that I know all the bears by their first names.
So, you folks wanna hear me talk about my card game? Must be crackers – I doubt you could cut a lame cow from a shade tree. You'll not live long in these wicked parts. Saying that, prolonged life has ruined more men than it ever made.
[Spits, just missing your boots]
Well, unless you is planning on joining me for a rendition of "Green Grow the Rashes", I suggest we get started.
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Hello, and welcome to my designer diary for Revolver: The Wild West Gunfighting Game.
This feels like an unnatural thing for me to write, a diary that isn't a diary and all that. Also it's a bit of drawing back the heavy velvet curtain revealing the guy pulling the levers, and demonstrating that he's not a great and powerful wizard after all – secrets laid bare for all eyes to spy.
Anyhow, before I recount the tale of making a card game about Old West heroes and villains, I must drag you back two years in my life.
[Steps inside the TARDIS]
So, about two years ago I decided to make a game about the movie Alien, which was directed by Ridley Scott, as I'm sure you know. Many, many ideas flew about inside my brain, and I spent some days mulling over how the whole shebang would work - how to make it great to play as either "team" (alien or Nostromo crew), and how to maintain an element of tension, surprise, and fear of confronting the perfect organism (Kane's son).
The main two "problems" to solve are the alien's hidden actions, and most importantly the "lack of action" the film has. Let me explain: Alien is one of my all-time favourite films, no question, but there are no true confrontations in the film that would make for interesting game play. Yes, Parker attacks the alien, only to be swiftly and easily despatched. Not much fun there. Thinking on these lines made my mind struggle to comprehend a complete game that I would want to play and that featured the theme of Alien while being true to the source material. You know, I'm still trying to make up my mind how that game should be made. Board game? Card game? Both? I have a prototype board with Commercial Towing Vessel Nostromo mapped out upon it and a deck of action cards that look like ALIEN collectable film cards sitting in my office.
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The only idea that was concrete, at that stage, was to have all the Nostromo crew on cards, laid out in front of one of the players. Pictures and stats of Dallas, Ripley, Ash, etc., with the order of death different from the movie and decided by the actions of the game players. I planned that anybody could be the incubator for the alien creature, and anybody could be the Company android, and anybody could blast the alien out of an airlock. You get the idea. The cast would be "life points" and when the final crew member died, the alien would win. I couldn't decide on anything else, and, obviously, that was a problem.
This thinking brought me to James Cameron's film, Aliens, the best science fiction sequel ever made, and in my top five films, unquestionably. Part of me wanted to do Alien first, and then tackle Aliens; it should be done in the same sequence as the films, I supposed.
Now I had a choice: Struggle over Alien endlessly and probably never get anything finished, or tackle Aliens.
I chose to go with Aliens. Immediately two problems were solved: I no longer had to worry about hidden actions, and I no longer had a "lack of action" - Aliens is an all-action war movie in space!
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Cannibalising my own idea, I decided that the crew members on cards – which was the only thing that worked for my Alien game project – would be perfect for Aliens. The game would be played all on cards and feature battlefields that were cards turned sideways. This was a cheap and portable option and easily solved by my hugely limited graphic design experience and facilities.
Probably the biggest hurdle to making a film-game is that it has to stay true to the source material. This is key. If you can't do that, don't bother making the game. I strongly think that you cannot have too much theme in such a game, as long as the game is still fun to play and plays fairly briskly. I had also never played a decent Aliens game, or, for that matter, a film-linked game with movie images. It's commonly accepted that all film tie-ins are crap, and mostly they are. Mostly. The cost of buying the licence must drain the publisher of the monies that would otherwise be spent on a decent game-design – I really don't see any other reason, other than cheap cash-ins by folks who couldn't care less about the brand. I very much do care about the Aliens brand. I don't much care, and largely ignore, all but the first two Alien films (and wait expectantly to be disappointed/amazed by Ridley Scott's Prometheus). But I didn't want to put my name to an Aliens game that was rubbish – even if I was "stealing" the IP of an amazing film from the 1980s that I endlessly watched in my youth on an ex-rental VHS tape, whilst I should have been out chasing skirt.
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Okay [puts hands in the air] – I admit that using someone else's IP is wrong. Yes, it is. You have to realise, however, that when I made the Aliens: This Time It's War game, it was for my friends and I to play. No one else. It was not for sale. I was to make no money from it. This was a private project to be enjoyed by folks in Nottingham and York and not much further. Then, when it was done, I decided to share the creation on the Internet. There was a largely positive response, and only a few pointing out that I should not have done what I had done. They were correct, and I had every intention of de-rezzing the whole lot if someone objected. (They still haven't.) The main thing, for me, was that I had made a game I had always wanted to own, but nobody seemed willing or able to make for me to buy. I had always wanted a non-CCG Aliens game. I shared it on BGG, and that winding path has brought me to penning this "diary".
Once I had pushed myself to completing an Aliens game, I knew that each deck of cards had to be different, so the game was to be asymmetrical. I didn't want both sides spawning alien drones or firing pulse rifles; that just would not be seemly. So this was the birth of two separate decks, and the battle to keep them equal but different. I also wanted there to be a huge amount of card-killing – removal of game elements on a quick-fire basis. For those of you who have played Magic: The Gathering, I wanted that it to feel like both players had a hand of "Lightning Bolts" and "Swords to Ploughshares" and were constantly blowing away the other player's cards. Soon I had two decks on cut-in-half index cards that featured titles and powers only, with the Colonial Marines on blank credit cards. Here's a taste of the original prototype:
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Oh, I forgot to say, the biggest design hurdle a decent card game must leap is that of card construction cost. To be clear, I mean how much it costs a player to put a card into play. If that's wrong, you have no game – or at least not a very good one.
I have a few ideas on how players should pay for "casting" or “building” or "playing" a card from their hand, and they all suit different themed games. To my mind, however, the system used primarily in San Juan is the Emperor of resource cost design decisions. I first saw this used years before San Juan in Magic, with two of the first "pitch" cards being "Balduvian Horde" and "Force of Will". You could cast one of these for "free" or at a discount if you discarded another card when you played it. When Wizards of the Coast first introduced this concept, a lot of players I knew didn't rate the cards as they put you at a card-count disadvantage. What they didn't consider early on was these cards' utility and speed of play. Most resource cost systems rely on luck of the draw, and if you don't draw the resource-producing cards you're screwed. And, later in the game, if you draw too many resource cards you are also screwed.
Now I adore many games that feature these systems, but I prefer the San Juan method. You are never hosed. Players can always do something on their turn. It also adds more interesting decision-making to the game. What do I discard to pay for this card? Do I wait? The only fault of a game built on this architecture is that if you make too many, or any, of the cards easily identifiable as weak, they simply become "coin cards", a phrase conjured up by a playtester friend of mine. Any cards that were regularly used as coins were beefed up (to make the decision of discarding them more difficult) or trashed from the game.
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Balancing asymmetrical sides, and taking into account first-player advantage and different players' style of play, was the hardest part of making the game. Playtesters groupthink can cripple an embryonic game – but saying that, if everyone plays a game one way, and you want it to play another way, something is wrong with the game's design. I created a points system, known only to me, keeper of potions and cantrips, to balance the two decks. It's not an exact science, but it's my balancing apparatus and it seems to have worked. Early to middle feedback was that the aliens were too strong. Late FB said the opposite. Now it seems on a knife edge. A little turning of gears here, and oil applied there did the trick. Oh, and changing numbers on some of the cards worked, too.
I have been brought to task on many an occasion by people saying that I should design a game with a theme of my own creation, clear blue water separating it from all other themes. Come up with your own damn ideas, they say. Well, if folks only ever made things based on their own IP, then we wouldn't have Cameron's Aliens in the first place. I can see this point of view, but discard that methodology of design. The essence of me and my
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I design games, based on films, in the same manner that Martin Wallace or Bowen Simmons create games based on historical events. We all research the subject matter exhaustively, then use that information to marinate the game structure. They make games about Napoleon, whilst I make games about Antarctic bases assaulted by protean alien beasts, or about shark-hunters called Quint, or about Doctor Who. I regard the films as historical happenings.
So, that outta the way, to make a bug-hunt space marine card game, I think if it isn't based on Aliens or Starship Troopers, you shouldn't even bother. (Space Hulk is an exception, but it's really Aliens in drag and lipstick and fools no one.) For me, they're the high watermark, the gold standard. If folks had made truly brilliant games set in the universes of the films I love, then maybe I might have looked to doing my own thing. Maybe. Actually, no, I'd just play those games with my posse.
What people who haven't designed a game don't know, or don't care – or do know and don't care! – is that a game with no theme or theme that is thinly spread on has no "wrinkles". Abstract games don't need wrinkles – they are pure and elegant, and slightly boring because of it, but they do have a purity of design. A game-wrinkle is an element in the design that you would not have considered putting in if it weren't in the source material. Some of the game-wrinkles in my Aliens game are the way that Burke works against the good guys, but is a team member; or that the grenades cannot be used in the Reactor battlefield; or the card that allows the Alien Queen to move battlefields; or the airlock mechanism at the end of the game. These wrinkles make a good game great, I think. You would not have these, mostly, in a theme-less game.
A good deal of the fun I had creating the "real" cards came after the game was finished - choosing the screenshots that would grace each card. I just had to have a different alien exploding for each pulse card (that was tricky!) and other silly birds of thought that flew inside my head, squawking. Naming the cards was done during playtesting – Aliens is filled with quotable lines, and I never ran short. Not once. One of the reasons I love James Cameron's films so much is the design detail he puts in, and the fetishist naming of every bit of kit the cast use. This all went into the card game. M3 grenades: check. M41A pulse rifle: check. On and on I went. It has to be right and correct or you might be beaten to death by fat geeks with paddles in the street.
Suffice to say, a lot of love and care went into the making of the Aliens game. It's a game-homage to that science fiction classic. Side note: I have yet to see a CGI showdown that matches the alien queen melee with the powerloader for look and intensity and "realism". I'm not a CGI-hater – far from it as I loved the look of Avatar – I'm just saying.
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Aliens: This Time It's War is a heavily disguised Euro, so I am informed by my learned friend (a master of wooden cuboids, and keeper of hens, and player of games set in Medieval Italy about growing cabbages). This accusation could be levelled at any card game, I might add (and I'm not sure I wholeheartedly agree). My game has an Ameritrash theme and is played using decks of cards. Crucially the game utilises no dice, and follows a loose blueprint from what I think are interesting two-player card games with slim themes from the good Doktor Reiner Knizia: Knights of Charlemagne and Battle Line. Games in which numbered cards are played in columns. Wow, that sounds like fun!
Anyhow, sometime after the game had been released into the backwaters of the internet, I was asked to send a copy of my game to the Netherlands. The nice people of White Goblin Games, specifically CEO Jonny de Vries, decided that my Aliens game would fit snugly into their 2011 schedule. Would I be interested in selling them my game? Hmmm, let me think about that for a nanosecond. Okay, yes, that is something I would like, Mister De Vries. (Also, interestingly, that's the name of the only super-villain who gets to thwart Inspector Morse of the television series of the same name in the episode Masonic Mysteries, but now I really am rambling.) They promised that the artwork would be amazingly good (it is) and that they would produce a fantastic product that gamers will want to buy (they, and you, will). The only initial bugbear was the theme - this is the part where I gallop the diary's direction around to the Old West – I knew we'd get there eventually! – and make sense of the title and intro.
The theme! No one was ever going to contact Fox about buying the doubtless, hugely expensive brand, so we have to broach that elephant in the room, the words folk don't like to hear, especially under midnight trees: RE-THEME. The game had to be re-themed. Of course it did. WGG initially wanted to make the game a clone-like bug hunt with buzz-cut space marines. I had to steer the pony around to some alternate options. (And about some of them, some of you will no doubt say: "It should have been that! If it had been 'that' it would have been brilliant.") Here are some of the discarded ideas:
-----• Zombies vs. Survivors: I happen to like zombie games and felt a massively bloodthirsty urban zombie game could do very well. WGG did not agree.
-----• Pulp WW2 Soldiers vs. Nazis: I likened this to The Dirty Dozen meets The Guns of Navarone. Cigar-chewing All-American heroes mowing down hordes of Nazis in a Nazi-infested mountaintop castle in Nazi-land. WGG did not agree.
-----• Dungeons & Dragons Style: A fellowship of dwarves, muscle-bound barbarians, and chainmail-bikini-wearing warrior ladies fighting their way out of (or into) a suitably imposing dungeon complex, while being hassled by goblins and dragons – probably because nobody built toilets or restrooms in their workplace... Could have been brilliant! WGG did not agree.
The best choice was always a The Good, Bad, and the Ugly-style Old West shootout game, and this is the theme you will be presented with when you buy the game in November 2011. WGG loved this idea, and the CEO seemed to have an encyclopaedic knowledge of Wild West six guns equal to my geek-lore of Aliens, The Thing, Doctor Who, Lifeforce, Halo, and Fright Night – which helped.
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So that is how Revolver was calved. The gameplay is 95% the same as when the game was based on Aliens, and the Old West theme is a snug fit, in my opinion. The main changes were for clarity. A WGG chap named Jeroen Hollander cleaned up the game's wordage and did a stunning job rewriting the rules. If folks still have questions (and they will, they always do), it won't be for lack of trying on the part of Jeroen to shave off the game's rough edges. All that will make the game-playing experience as smooth as it can be. Three new cards were also added.
With some incredible help from one of the playtesters, I created backstory for all the characters and the locations featured in the game, anchoring them in a fictionalised West that feels like it may have come from the real gunslinger legends that inspired a Hollywood genre. Where Revolver differs massively from Aliens: This Time It's War is in the motivations of the two sides. In Aliens it's perfectly obvious who the bad guys are. That would be the acid-for-blood xenomorphs, if you hadn't guessed – Burke not included.
In Revolver, I wanted the sides to be equally "badass". Yes, Colty's gang have done bad things, but the posse chasing them are not as white as snow. Also I wanted some perceived genre inequalities to be addressed. Revolver has a large number of strong female characters, and Native Americans are present on both sides. White Goblin Games agreed.
Now fast forward roughly two years and we arrive here and now with you reading this, wondering whether to subscribe to the Revolver game page (you should) and also counting down the days when so many stupid questions are asked on the forums that you unsubscribe from the game. Mansions of Madness go stand in the corner of the class! And, yes, you too, BattleLore!
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One thing that I am really pleased about (and why I'm attending Spiel this year) is that I will now finally get to play my game again. "Eh, what are you on about?" you ask. Well, imagine you are me. You have designed a game you really like and enjoy playing it. When game night comes around, people ask "What should we play?" I will not suggest my own games. Who would? It's so egocentric. "Yeah – you can come over and play, but it's got to be a game I've designed!" That would make me a mighty prat, so I don't get to play them much. Boo-hoo. Me. Me. Me. Now that the game's to be released, it adds weight to the chance I might get to play, especially if I don't tell people who I am (nobody of consequence in the world really, except to my family).
So I urge you to support this card game (buy it) in a largely unsupported gaming genre (the Old West), and you may very well see a rather interesting stand-alone expansion for Revolver – and possibly more games from me – if it sells well enough. And I also hope for the nice people in the Netherlands that it does.
Nice chatting with you, partner.
Waitin' for this game to be published, friend, has made me as nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs.
Hope you liked my tale. Thankee.
Mark Chaplin
•••
Game preview, by W. Eric Martin
Mark has done a fantastic job above of laying out the game's backstory, but what does that mean for you as players? In Revolver, the Colty gang (one player) has just robbed the bank at Repentance Springs and is heading for the Mexican border, with Colonel McReady and his posse (the other player) racing to catch and kill them before they can escape. The storyline is played out over a series of five locations, with at least two turns taking place in each location. If Jack "The Crow" Colty lives to the final turn of the final location – 3:15 Express from Rattlesnake Station – or twelve markers are removed from the Mexican border card, then the crooks escape and Colty's player wins. The only way for Colonel McReady to stop the crooks is to kill them all.
On a turn, the Colty player advances the turn marker, draws two cards, and plays any number of cards that he wants to play and can pay for. He's limited to playing three firepower cards into any location, presumably because cramming any more firepower into a single location would make the entire gang easier to find. (One-shot effects can still be played in a full location.)
After this, the McReady player draws two cards, plays any number of cards that he wants to play and can pay for, then attacks in the current location, comparing his firepower against that of the Colty gang. If McReady has more firepower, then Colty must lose a bandit, with the lowest-valued bandits being removed from play first. Some bandits have penalties for the Colty player when they die, so even the lesser members of the gang aren't simply expendable. If McReady doesn't have enough firepower, one of the Mexican border tokens is removed.
While the turn marker advances automatically, it can also be affected by card play and bandit death. For example, if "Kittens" Mackenzie is killed before the gang reaches the 3:15 Express, then players undergo two additional turns in Rattlesnake Creek. (I'm guessing that Kittens was the snake expert in the gang, and now they must tread more carefully and slowly through the creek.) Other cards move the turn marker directly – but since players must pay for them by discarding other cards, they need to weigh the merits of advancing/rewinding the clock versus more direct actions that could have an immediate impact. (To continue Mark's references to Magic, actions that affect the turn marker are akin to "milling" effects that move cards from an opponent's deck to the graveyard. Milling often has no impact on game play on a turn-by-turn basis, but do enough of it and you kill the opponent when his deck runs out.)
Some characters bear True Grit tokens, and a character can gain True Grit through card play. When one of these characters dies, the token is removed and the character lives on, gritting his teeth and holding the wound closed with one hand while continuing to shoot with the other.
Once whatever is left of the Colty gang is aboard the 3:15 Express, the Colty player has a special one-shot "Derail the Train" action that removes all cards in play from that location and kills all of the bandits still alive at that point. Wait, killing bandits is a bad thing for the Colty player, right? No worries – the Colty player can discard any number of cards from hand and save one bandit for each card discarded. This desperation measure gives Colty one final chance of escaping from the posse. Will it pay off? Time will tell...
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