Design – Encounter Table Games

Work in Progress – December 2021

We’re getting close to the end of the year! In January I’ll do a ‘state of the game’ update, like I did this year, but for now let’s look at what I’ve been working recently.

Diving Into Dungeons

Close Encounters is taking up most of development time these days – or, more specifically, expansion content for it. I’ve talked a lot about that recently, so today I want to change topics a bit. Let’s talk about a project I am currently thinking of as “Crypt Encounters”.

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.

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.