Theory – Encounter Table Games

The Infantry Trilemma

There’ll be another update out shortly to discuss the state of the game and progress towards the various goals I’ve set for the year. In the meantime, I thought it might be interesting to take a closer look at one of the final tweaks I’ve made to the squad leaders expansion.

Feeping Creaturitis

‘Creeping Featuritis’ (or its spoonerisation in the title of this post) is a common problem in pretty much any area where projects are managed. There are lots of different terms relating to it, all reflecting different emphasis – feature creep, scope creep, mission creep, and so on. But they all get to the same essential point: things keep getting added to the plan, and trying to include them messes things up. Close Encounters is no different. Here’s a brief insight into how it’s affecting my development work.

Work in Progress – February 2022

Welp, we’re into the new year, and that means it’s time for a sitrep on what’s afoot. In my last post I talked about some of my goals for the coming year. The scaling up is actually pretty boring to talk about – it’s mainly a set of emails, online conversations, and so on – so unless and until I have something substantive to report about that, I won’t bore you with it. Instead, let’s talk about the two main strands of development work that are going on.

View From the Tabletop: Equipment

I’ve taken a break from the higher-priority expansion work and switched focus to equipment. Partly this is so that I can leave the other stuff for my subconscious to go over, partly it’s so that I can see if adding equipment will break anything I’ve already done. Mostly, though, it’s so that I don’t burn out by focusing on one topic for too long. Burnout is a real thing, and I find changing the task I’m doing can help with preventing it. I also thought it might be interesting to get a sort of snapshot view of part of the playtesting process.

The Playtesting Conflict

Getting the most value out of playtests is a problem when designing a game. Here’s how the problem presents itself to me, and how I’m trying to deal with it.

Mechanics vs. Themes

Sometimes, it’s the assumptions we make which block us from moving forward. Becoming aware of what they are, and questioning them, can show us new ways to achieve our goals. In my day job, this is something I do with clients early on, but it’s easy to forget about in this context for some reason. Here’s an example of how using this technique solved a development problem for me.

Deconstructing a Bloodbath

In my last post, I talked about how the first mech playtest was a complete bloodbath. It’s worth digging into that a bit more, in an effort to understand how it turned out that way, so here’s how it went down.

Gradients in Practice

During playtesting in the weekend, I realised that cognitive load is a big problem for some players. This isn’t exactly news, of course – right from the start I’ve been trying to minimise it, especially for expansion content. But it’s one thing to be aware of this idea, and another to see it demonstrated in front of you. Fortunately, there’s a way to cope with this.

Content Modularity

We’re back in the world of Close Encounters for this post, and specifically the expansion pack content I’ve been working on for it. As you’ll know from previous posts on the subject, I have plenty of content for expansions, and testing and tweaking isn’t a huge obstacle – the issue is figuring out how to group all the content together. I still haven’t made a final decision about that, but I do have an interim plan.

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”.