The Editingator

Its one thing to "have an idea" quite something else to write down the steps to recreating it. After that how do you go about refining what you have said so that when another person reads the words they can see the rules and directions and understand where they take you. Add to this the question as to if the game mechanism suits your design and moment within the game.  What began as a series of iterations was refined and refined and edited and is still in my view unfinished. 

A Token Gesture to an Utter Card

When I first envisaged the game mechanics I had in mind some form of resource pool of tokens that would be pulled blind from a bag and allocated to the minis to "activate" them. I tried this in several variations but all the while It felt like you had too much random noise in the decisions a player could make and created moments of analysis paralysis. 

I then looked at if I could create cards from which you could pull actions and moves from a deck but soon discounted this as I wanted to make something that could be "rules and print" without too much hassle over how you assembled the game or court. To that end lots of cards with art and graphics was further than I wanted to be in this first iteration 

I settled first on playing cards and at this point I realised I had something that offered a number of range values when it came to random. From the simple Black and Red of the card suit giving me a 50/50 chance. To the card suits creating a 1 in 4 range and the Numbers themselves with offer a range from ace to king giving me 1 to 14. This felt like I had a mechanism for choice and with it something I could create a space where players would select , show , move and react and all the while the ball anger mechanism has a range to choose from. I also inadvertently discovered a way to handle "critical" success in the Ace which also felt like a good term to use in sporting terms.  Which is how we are here today . With a deck of cards handling the Random Number generation and the decision trees available to the player each turn. 

Explain it plainly

Pulling the above though into a Game Rule moves it from something as simple as describing a dice mechanic as each moment in the game and subsequent team actions need to be clearly explained a to why some cards have purpose and other do not. Explaining the game setup and layout without referring to the image of the board is something I am iterating around; if feel if I can clearly explain it in words before I draw a picture then the image will add more value rather than prop up the text.  I am not sure I am quite there yet on that edit but it is something in the creation of the game rules that I feel quite strongly about.