Encounter Table Games

Expansion Pack Contents

A month or so ago I shifted my development focus to expansion packs for Close Encounters. In some earlier posts I mentioned my thinking about them at the time, and then later on that I had more to think about in that respect. As I mentioned then, one issue is that there’s a great deal of content which could be added to expansion packs. How to package it, and what to include in each package, is a topic I’m constantly chewing over in the back of my mind. I think I’ll probably end up making some changes to the structures I’ve talked about already, although I’m not sure yet what they’ll be.

Project Management with Colours

I know a lot of people manage projects in one way or another – even if you don’t do it for money, it’s the sort of thing that comes up a lot. Building a house, organising a camping holiday, writing a book proposal… they’re all projects, and they all go better if you manage them.

In my day job, project management is something I run into fairly often. Working on Close Encounters and its expansions is also a project, so when I started seriously developing it I knew I needed to get organised.

The Advantages of Abstraction

When people play Close Encounters, one thing that gets comments is the close combat system. It’s fairly simple: each side totals up the bonuses they receive from participants, covering fire, and so on, and then they each roll a dice, add it to their total, and compare scores. The winner inflicts a casualty and forces any survivors to retreat.

This simplicity seems to be quite popular, and it speeds up the game. The most common alternative, where each figure involved makes its own die roll, would be an unwieldy mess in my opinion. That sort of thing might work well in games where there’s a strong focus on simulation, but for a fairly fast-paced game like Close Encounters it just wouldn’t be appropriate.

Instead, the close combat system relies on abstraction. I assume that the close combat will be a frantic melee with everyone in the tile taking part in it, doing their best both to strike and evade their opponents while everyone else does the same. Nobody is politely lining up to take turns here! That means we can consolidate the contributions of everyone involved into rough totals for Side A vs. Side B, and that abstraction of individual participation into a collective result is what makes the system work as well as it does.

The Agony of Choice

In the last few posts I’ve been talking about my plans for expansion packs for Close Encounters, and that’s where my development effort has been focused. Once I started getting to grips with it all, however, I found that there was quite a lot of stuff that could be included, and I started wondering if my plans for what goes into each expansion would cope with that.

Work In Progress – February 2021

With Close Encounters complete and marketing for it underway, my development focus has shifted to an expansion pack for it. For the moment, I’m prioritising what I think of as “Strapped and Packed” – an expansion which includes heavy weapons for the troopers, equipment cards for them to use, and some bigger and nastier bugs to oppose them!

Working Within Limitations

When you engage in creative activities, you often hear things like “free your mind”, “think outside the box”, and so on. It’s important to hear those things – being free to come up with whatever is in your mind is arguably the essence of creativity, and you need to know it’s okay to pursue that.

However, once you’re on that path, it can be a useful exercise to choose some limits to work within, and see what you can do with that. That lets you focus your creativity on certain aspects, and makes you think about how to take advantage of what already exists. It also prevents the paralysis that can be caused by staring at a blank page and wondering how to fill it!

I ended up doing something similar during the design of Close Encounters, and I think the game ended up better as a result. Here’s how it all worked out.

Alternative Expansion Splits

In the last post, I talked about my current thinking on how to split up the expansion packs for Close Encounters. I think the plan there would produce good results for both me and customers. However, I’m not married to the idea. Here are some of the alternatives which are lurking at the back of my mind.

Expansion Packs Update

Close Encounters is now pretty much finished in terms of development. I’m still making occasional tweaks to the phrasing of some of the booklets, but it’s all basically finalised. While I work on marketing for that, I’m also putting some of my attention into expansion packs for it.

I’m Proudest Of…

There are lots of things about Close Encounters I’m pleased about.

For one thing, the rules are robust and snappy – I was always fairly confident about that, but it’s nice that it’s stayed true through all the revisions and tweaks that have been made.

Another good point is that the flavour text is (in the words of a playtester) “surprisingly non-cringe-inducing”. That sounds close enough to being a compliment to me; I’ll take it! I’m not putting this in the category of epic fiction, but it’s good to know that it’s making a positive contribution to the experience people have of the game.

But there are only three things that I could really say I’m proud of.

First Sets Complete

Today is another big day here at Encounter Table! With the help of NZ Post yesterday, I finally have all the components I need to assemble complete sets of Close Encounters!

Now, these are still pre-production sets – not everything is coming shrink-wrapped from a factory. But the components are all there, and the game can now be purchased.

What’s that you say? You want to see what it all looks like? Well, since you ask so nicely…