Hello friends! I'm back again with a continuation of my designer diary of Evoke. If you haven't read part 1, read it here: https://www.sunandshieldgames.com/post/designer-diary-of-evoke-part-1
To summarize, we talked about the genesis of the idea and its first very rough prototype. Before I get into more details about the evolution of Evoke, I wanted to encourage any aspiring game designers to not get hung up on how fancy (or not) the prototype is. My recommendation is to get your ideas into a digital file quickly so that you can iterate on them easily. The method that I evolved to when designing board games over the years works well for me. Feel free to copy all or some of this process if you think it will help! I don't have too many fancy tools - I use what I have and know so that I don't have to think too hard. I use PowerPoint all the time at work and know a lot of its features. It is faster than Canva for me... but I've used Canva as well.
Here is my general method:
Brainstorm ideas in my head & imagine how experience, mechanics and theme could work
Document the vision in a paragraph of what the user experience should be. Bounce it off of your trusted inner circle of friends, family and game designers to make sure it is something that people would get excited about
Make an Excel sheet with specific mechanics or ideas... and stare at them for a bit
Make another Excel sheet called, CardDB for cards, and create all the fields / components needed for a card
Create the graphic design in Nandeck (http://www.nandeck.com/) and tie the Excel sheet to it
Make a PowerPoint for boards as needed
Print all cards and boards, cut cards and gather components from around the house
Test the game with a local gamer / designer group (and my family) and gather feedback on my phone with copious notes and ideas.
Make updates to the Excel / PowerPoint / Nandeck scripts, re-print and repeat! Always go back to the vision and feedback notes to make sure I am on the right track.
OK! Back to the specific design of Evoke. When I left off last time, the theme was Rebels and Vigilantes with almost D&D-like attributes (Strength, Dexterity and Intelligence).
After some teaches of the game and playtests, it was obvious that the Intelligence stat was underpowered and it was really awkward to have the combined strength of the person breaking someone else out of jail added to the person being broken out. I needed to simplify the mechanics, but I was worried that it would lose the fun.
I was wrong, of course. By the time the fourth person told me the attributes were burdensome - I took strength, intelligence and dexterity out of the game and the only thing I really lost was the difficulty of explaining extra mechanics. In tandem, I made a change to give everyone a special ability face up at the start the game instead of as a face down memory (if they were lucky). This took away a lot of awkwardness and clarifying of rules.
The first few versions didn't flow very well, but I knew I was onto something. The thing about a social deduction adjacent game is that it is much easier to iterate on component / card changes than say, a heavy Euro game or epic space exploration game... but it is much harder to curate social interactions. After version 3 or so... I had to pay closer attention to what people were doing and saying to see if it was the kind of fun experience I was looking for.
I upgraded the "user interface" a bit to better differentiate visually across the table to distinguish the teams as well as the two sides of the player aids:
So... you may notice that the actions available are very close to the actions in the final game. Some of the energy costs are different - after playing the game so many times, I was able to naturally understand what they needed to be.
But there is an action I had to definitely take out the game: "Reject". This action allowed the player to remove one of their memories by discarding it to the center of the table.
I played one game of Memory Wipe (version 4) with a group of 8 people and.. they made a pact to go "All Vigilante"! They wanted to know if they could all win together. Reject made that ALMOST possible because they looked at each others memories through the Converse action and then rejected the Rebel cards. In fact, 7 of them were Vigilantes at the end of the game and the 1 Rebel was jailed. It was not a fun experience for everyone. I got a lot of feedback that playtest...
The other big piece of feedback I got was that Rebels and Vigilantes as a theme was difficult for some people to process. They thought that a rebel and a vigilante were too similar and would forget which side was which. So I had to figure out how to re-theme it. Some ideas were to make distinct warring "gangs", which wouldn't have been too hard to translate to. But what really made me pivot to warring wizard guilds was the need to have a player be able to break out themselves. I could only think of a player being able to do this with technology, magic, or finding random keys in their cell. I was struggling with the background of explaining technology and started to get excited about the idea of what else magic could bring to the table... literally.
By version 6... I fixed/added the following:
Streamlined adding unique (magical) abilities to tiebreaker cards with an initiative attribute to disambiguate first player
Started the game with 2 Released players to create tension and spread the power of releasing out
Players can break themselves out by channeling the power of their known memories - so that players are never fully stuck in jail
Mostly balanced the remaining action - energy points after removing Reject
Used a scaling formula to balance the rarity at each player count.
Changed magnitude of memories from 2, 4 & 6 to 1, 2 & 3 - I made the tiebreaker of no value instead (basically, a .5)
But the "gamechanger" (I need to chill with these puns) was when I decided to haphazardly add a third faction to see what would happen... Earth.
THAT was the moment when almost every person who has played the game since has provided me with overwhelmingly positive feedback.
Find out next time... in Part 3!
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