Eight years ago, I was fresh off of a board game design defeat, and I was ruminating about what hadn’t worked. That game had been a two-player abstract war game, and with my next game I wanted to try to design the opposite: a wide player-count, thematic Eurogame. With that goal in the back of my mind, I was walking through my local Dollarama when I came across these little wooden cubes and thought – these look fun! I took them to a café and started stacking them, and in stacks they looked like skyscrapers. That was the seed that eventually grew into Rebuilding Seattle.
The product’s development was very much a “Ship of Theseus“; aside from the game remaining a city-building polyomino game about taking care of a growing population, pretty much every aspect of the design changed, sometimes multiple times. For each core element, I’ll break down the development process by describing how the game used to work, why I changed it, and how it works in the final product.
Element #1: The Win Condition
Early versions of the game were humorously dystopian and structured around a negative victory track that represented a player’s citizens’ quality of life. Players were trying to avoid scoring points as that represented their quality of life decreasing, and the player with the fewest negative points at the end of the game won. If you dropped below various victory point thresholds, you’d have to roll a riot die, which could cause one of your buildings to be destroyed!
What I discovered through playtesting is that most players don’t like it when bad things happen to them, even in a board game. The riot die was a particularly bad piece of design since it functioned as a negative feedback loop — the worse you were doing, the worse you would do in the future. But in general, the experience of losing points over time was dour.
Now, players win by having the most victory points. (A shocker, I know!) For me, the takeaway is that there’s something about human nature that craves progression and improvement over time. A negative victory track fought against this basic desire in too major of a way, and that’s why it had to go.
Element #2: The Action Mechanism
In early designs, players could take one action per round out of six possible actions. During that action, you could build as many of a given type of building as you wanted (there being six types of buildings). Each building cost a fixed price. There were seven rounds, so players would always take seven actions in the game before it was over.
There were many issues with this design. One was that it contained many new player traps. Some actions were practically guaranteed to cause you to lose if taken at certain times, or if the player didn’t spend all of their money building the maximum number of buildings possible each turn. Another was that there were just too few actions in the game, so each action was super weighty and important, and this slowed down the pace. Another was that the structure of the actions didn’t contribute towards replayability because they didn’t change from game to game.
Now, players have around 20-25 actions per game rather than seven. Each turn, players have three kinds of actions from which to choose, but the main action is still buying and placing buildings. The differences between then and now for buying buildings is:
• Buildings are on cards, and you can buy only one at a time.
• Buildings are all different shapes and sizes.
• Building cards also come with an additional upgrade, making each building card unique.
• Building cards have variable prices depending on how they’re laid out.
The final design avoids all of the previous design’s new player traps. It also offers a far more interesting puzzle for players since each round and each game, they have to solve for what the best deals are with the random assortment of offers and prices available. The takeaways, for me, are that:
• I should narrow the play-space between a good action and a bad action as much as possible to help prevent players from falling behind too much, and
• I should always look for ways to build variability into each and every aspect of my designs.
Element #3: The Conflict Mechanism
The main conflict has always involved caring for your population; the more population you have, the harder it is to provide for them. However, the implementation of this idea changed radically over the years.
For the longest time, the design was structurally pinned to the exponential doubling of wooden cubes. They doubled each round; players started with 1, then they had 2, then 4, then 8, all of the way to 64 cubes!
I was so enamored by the elegance of this exponential growth and the physicality and table presence of the wooden cubes that I took to ignoring the negative impacts they were having on the player experience. The main issues with this design were:
1) Players don’t understand or enjoy exponential growth.
2) Counting and doing math with 64 cubes is a fiddly nightmare.
3) The rigidity of the doubling logic made it not-tunable, which meant every other aspect of the game had to try to prop up this rigid mathematical structure. This led to all sorts of weirdness in the player experience like wildly different endgame scores.
Eventually, I abandoned both the cubes and the doubling, and the game was far better for it. (Though it hurt to scrap the cubes because they looked so good when stacked!) In the final design, population is instead measured using a track, which makes comparing your population with your amenities for scoring far easier than it used to be.
Element #4: Building Effect Activation
In early versions, building effects activated at the end of each round. This seemed to intuitively make sense. However, having six different building types meant that players had to do six different types of upkeep at the end of each round, so they took one action, then performed six upkeep tasks.
The design took a really big step forward when I performed a simple exercise in which I labeled moments of the game experience as either good or bad. “My turn” was good. “Your turn” was bad unless it positively affected me in some way. “Upkeep” was bad because it was passive and didn’t involve any choice making.
I realized then that most of the moments in my design were labeled “bad”, and I started looking for ways to turn some of those “bad” moments into “good” moments. That’s when I realized that almost all of the upkeep actions to activate building effects could be turned into active, universally “good” actions by transforming them into event cards that aided every player and granted bonuses to the player that activated them. Eureka!
Element #5: Land
It is a truth universally acknowledged that buildings have to be built on something. For the longest time, players started with an 8×8 board that never grew in size, and they had to use the space they were given wisely. All players started off with the same plot of land, and terrain types didn’t yet exist as a concept in the game. For many years the game was built on top of this assumption, which succeeded in introducing stakes due to the inherently limited space available, but also, a feeling of claustrophobia.
At some point, I realized that having land to build on was “good”, and thus, it was a missed opportunity that I was granting it all at the start of the game. Rather, it should be turned into a resource that could be earned in greater or lesser quantities.
Furthermore, land, like the rest of the game, should be variable – but how can I vary land? By adding terrain that grants bonuses, of course! This thought process lead directly to me introducing board expansion through trains that grant suburbs, and once I did that, the whole feel of the game became a lot more freeing, and I never looked back.
Element #6: End of Game Bonuses
The final big discovery was the landmarks. Early versions of the game didn’t have any kind of end of game bonuses. At some point, I realized that this was another missed opportunity; end of game effects help build excitement and add mystery as to who is going to win, so I should try adding them.
In middle-development versions of the game, there were these “super building cards”, which were expensive, provided a normal building, and had a powerful end of game bonus. Also, they were in the market for anyone to buy. They played a similar kind of role to today’s landmarks, but with some notable differences. Since anyone could buy them, multiple people would often be working towards buying the same “super building card”, then the player(s) who failed to buy it had their game’s grand strategy totally thrown off, and it was a real feel-bad moment.
Eventually, I realized that using normal buildings for this design element was a totally wasted opportunity; they could and should be big, flashy polyomino shapes. Compared to the super building cards, today’s landmarks feel more unique and powerful, and because you start with them, you can count on being able to build them, and all of this leads to a much better experience.
Element #7: Being Wrong
The biggest obstacle to improving my designs has always been me. It’s a lot of effort to redesign something that is already working decently well, and my redesigns are sometimes worse than the original. When that happens, it feels like I wasted my time, even though it’s not true. Also, it’s always hard to admit that an idea that I was really excited about and believed in turned out to not work as well as I thought it would.
It’s a really weird mental headspace I need to get into to be able to work on an unvalidated game by myself for years without giving up on it. I have to believe in myself and my capacity to make a game that is better than most of the games on the market. Otherwise, I would have given up on the project a long time ago. On the other hand, my designs wouldn’t have a chance of being able to truly compete in the market if I weren’t willing to look at them objectively, tear them apart, and start over.
The way I navigate this motivational contradiction is to tell myself that the prototype in front of me isn’t my game at all. Rather, it’s a rung on the ladder that will eventually lead to my game, and that game is fantastic and worth all of the effort that I pour into each rung.
Designers/iterative artists, I’d be delighted to hear how you motivate yourself to keep working on your projects!
