Short Attention Span Games

Game Of The Week 3

Mon, 21 Apr 2014 13:55:20 -0400

So I took a week vacation from Game of the Week (which isn’t a good sign after just 2 weeks), and this week we have chosen to combine the #GameAWeek challenge with the #EasterEggJam challenge and do a Easter-themed game. This week I decided to do a training/debriefing game using the plastic Easter Eggs and Easter candy.

Debriefing Egg Hunt:

Objective: To find a question & answer pair of eggs and collect Easter egg candy points and to share debriefed learning from a shared event.

# of participants: 8 – 20

When to use this activity: After a shared experience to debrief. This could be a training class, a lecture, or after playing a different game or simulation.

Set-up:

– Facilitator brings in many different plastic Easter egg shells and colored post-its or index cards.

– Divide the Easter eggs by color to make 2 roughly equal types (such as blue and green together and yellow and orange together). In this example, the blue-green eggs would be question eggs and the yellow-orange eggs would be answer eggs.

Game Play:

Distribute 4 eggs to each participant- 2 question eggs and 2 answer eggs.

Have the participants think of a question & answer pair from the training class or activity. Without telling anyone else, they write down the question on one post-it and put in in the question egg and write down the answer in the answer egg. Repeat for a 2nd question and answer pair.

When everyone is complete, the facilitator collects the eggs in 2 baskets (questions in one and answers in the other) and then redistributes new eggs to every participant.

The participants need to find their 2 matches for their new question and for their new answer.

The facilitator will start the activity and the participants will get up and pair up with a random person to ask each other the question in their question egg. The pairs should discuss the correct answers to the questions (if known) and decide if they have the solution in one of the answer eggs. If there answer is found – bring the question & answer eggs back to the facilitator for the candy prize, and collect a new question or a new answer (whichever the person turned in).

Find a new partner and continue to ask your questions and search for the answers to the question. Whenever a match is found, collect your Easter candy prize (but don’t eat it yet until after the scoring tally).

After 5 minutes, the facilitator blows a whistle to signal an end to the game. You can tally up the Easter candy for a winner, distribute the rest of the candy, talk about what question-answer pairs were exceptionally hard to connect and some of the best questions – answer pairs with the entire group.

Game A Week 2

Sun, 06 Apr 2014 22:55:01 -0400

The good thing about #GameAWeek is that it is also called Failure of the week and how you learn from your failures and you get a fresh start the next week. I do want to learn some of the electronic game-design systems out there and make something with Twine, Unity, etc, but I wanted to start with what I thought I knew how to do, which was board and card games. I think I did okay with my Week 1 game, and I was going into week 2 thinking that I wanted to design a dice game. I was thinking of all the things you can do with six-sided dice mechanics and drew off of Yahtzee, King of Tokyo and the roll 3 times mechanic improving your roll. The Dice as workers mechanic with Kingsburg and Alien Frontiers to power a bigger game. The stacking of like dice with Stack. The press-your-luck mechanic with dice and Zombie Dice, Cosmic Wimp-out. And even the lying around dice with Liar’s Poker dice. I was sure that I could find something new to do with dice, but Monday and Tuesday went by and I was stumped.

So I moved back to cards (maybe a card/dice blend, I thought), and thought I could do a dungeon crawl game. One neat mechanic that I’ve enjoyed in one game that I haven’t seen since was in Girl Genius, where you layout the board in cards that are 90 degrees from each other. That is neat in Girl Genius because the cards act as gears and the board rotates for various reasons. I built a maze dungeon with a “treasure” in the center and was going to have the players go from their starting Ace and build to the center with an ever increasing number, avoiding/encountering the face-card monsters. I couldn’t get it to work well enough for me with the various rules that I tried.

So it is now Thursday and so I simplified again and instead of a 6×6 maze of cards to maneuver, I went with the same starting at the Ace and needing to get to the King, but the player had to play an “Idiot’s Delight” game mechanic to move forward. It was an alright solitaire game, but almost no skill/challenge (which is what the idiot’s delight mechanic brings).

So then I took the diamonds out of the deck and decided to make them the “store” that the adventurers can purchase before entering the dungeon. This had a bit more promise and the player had choices to have a large deck of random cards hoping for a higher number, or spend some of the random cards to get some of the numbers you need to succeed. The board was layed out as:

Ace of Diamonds — Face down 1 — Face down 2 — Face down 3 — 7 of diamonds — Face down 4 — Face down 5 — Face down 6 — King of Diamonds. (I changed between 3 face down cards and 4 face down cards between the 1 and 7 and King).

With the 9 cards down and the 10 diamonds and 2 jokers available to purchase, that left a deck of 33 random cards that the player can choose to spend on the diamonds or wild jokers (at 5 cards for a diamond or 9 cards for a joker). On this now solo card game, you flip over Face down 1 and hope it is a low number like a 2 or 3 and if so, you probably want to keep it and move forward otherwise you can play from your hand (diamonds/jokers that you purchased) or play random cards from your remaining deck.

I had created a solitaire card-based dungeon crawl game and it mostly was fun, but I took a break and read the board game news of the week. I usually just skim headlines, but I see the following “New Card-based RPG dungeon crawl game available for print and play at http://www.myobrpg.com”. I went to the site and while very different from my game, it was much better and disheartening to see my exact idea on the same week as I’m doing my game. (On the same note, my first game prototype was a dog-walking game on a set of tiles which was kind of fun and involved the strategic use of doggy poo was called “Walk the Dog”, and I was discouraged when I saw a game with that name come out the same year as my prototype and I never did much more with my version of the game.)

So tomorrow starts a new week and a new game and I track this up as a part of the Failure of the Week, but you can see Colin Carroll’s game of card and dice based dungeon crawl and play that. (Or try to play my starts of games from my sketches of rules above). This turned into a reflection post, without much of the game post (though I will still reflect on my fellow #GameAWeek friend’s games.

Game Design book review 1 – The Grasshopper: Games, Life, and Utopia

Mon, 31 Mar 2014 18:30:20 -0400

I decided that in my sabbatical from work, that I would read through some of the great books from game designers and I had a shelf of them to go through and put my comments to. But when I asked the very respected, recently departed Richard Powers on what to read, his suggestion was The Grasshopper: Games, Life, and Utopia by Bernard Suits. What I thought I was getting into was a book about creating games, but I was given a philosophy book about what really are games and why pursue them. I haven’t completed the book yet, but it takes the Aesop fable of the Ant and the Grasshopper and changes the morale. In Aesop’s fable, the ant works hard and has food stored away for winter, while the grasshopper plays during the summer and needs to borrow from the ant to survive the winter. Bernard Suits seems to postulate that it is better to be the grasshopper and game-playing is the supreme human good and that playing games are what he should have been doing and worthwhile despite the lethal consequences.

He is not saying that a life of leisure is the answer either. Stamp-collecting or lying on the beach is not the Grasshopper way, but it is the playing of games that makes life worth living. If the goal of golf is to get the ball in the hole, it is not fun to just pick up the ball and drop it in the hole, but to follow the rules and hit it with the club and play it where it lies. The rules is what makes it a game and not the objective or graphics or ending.

I bring this up because on my first day of my sabbatical I have a potential game design project. A company has an RFP with GP Strategies to design a game experience to help train the workers on internet security. But as we talked before the meeting, we came up with all kinds of possible games to get these learning objectives across in a replayable manner. But the actual meeting with the client was not that, but it seems that they want a glorified simulation or exercise with cool graphics. They want the players (about 3000 employees) to set-up the website security in a very structured manner and then for us to add a time-element, a score-keeping element, and a graphical build element to their structured steps. We can probably make something like that look good with a timer on the top, a running score, a 3-D security image turning from red to green as you completed the steps, but is it a game? If there is one starting place and one finished solution with a pretty structured set of instructions on how to get there, all you can do is work on your speed and memorization of these steps, but there isn’t much in the set of rules to follow or bend to help you. I felt like Tom Hanks in the movie “Big” where the toy company is making a transformer building and he says “I don’t get it – how is that fun?”.

I don’t know if we’ll win this work and they might be able to make a real game out of the experience that they want the end users to have and it might be fun, but from the first description, it doesn’t sound like something that I want to leave my sabbatical for just yet.

I look forward to finishing The Grasshopper and I thank Richard Power’s for his recommendation and advice in his last days before dying from ALS. Richard’s smile, fun, history and 70’s style games for learning will be missed at NASAGA.

Game of the Week reflections

Mon, 31 Mar 2014 17:34:27 -0400

I’m enjoying the experience of a Game a Week, and wake up everyday, now, thinking about the current game I’m designing or the next week’s game.

I wanted to create a game that I could play with a standard deck of cards. I also wanted perhaps use one of my game design journal themes. One theme that I wanted to do was a Fish School with guppies, cods, squids, sharks, etc. So I had that in my mind as I started playing with a deck of cards. I knew that I wanted a “trash” power like in Dominion, and in my mind that was the shark’s power. But as I thought of the other card powers that I wanted, they didn’t line up with the Fish School theme, so I abandoned it for the moment and just played with a standard deck of cards.

I also thought about making the Prize Deck be powerful cards that you can add to your deck to make it better. I still think that would be a great variant, but also rejected that for this week as I wanted the game to be easier to pick up. In my first playtest of the game (with Clay Jeffreys) I had almost all of the rules as they stood, but with 2 key differences. In the original game, only 1s were available as reinforcement cards, but we found the totals were rarely separated by just 1. Also in the original write-up, you had to put 3 cards down, instead of the 1-3 cards. This complicates it because you have to decide and then reveal at the same time, vs flipping the cards when everyone had put 3 facedown cards. But I liked the flexibility of strategy for not having to put 3 cards down.

The name came from the inspiration of War, but my wife suggested Bid War, since it is not so much attacking, but bidding.

Overall, I’m actually fairly happy with how it turned out and I hope my next design works out as well.

I also enjoyed playing the other participant’s games:

Other Games from Week Four

Anastasia Salter’s game [I’m enjoying the experience of a Game a Week, and wake up everyday, now, thinking about the current game I’m designing or the next week’s game.

The name came from the inspiration of War, but my wife suggested Bid War, since it is not so much attacking, but bidding.

Overall, I’m actually fairly happy with how it turned out and I hope my next design works out as well.

I also enjoyed playing the other participant’s games:

Other Games from Week Four

Anastasia Salter’s game](http://selfloud.net/Boxes/ “Boxes”) has great prose and had me put knowledge of text-based adventure games that I haven’t played in years. You are just exploring a single room, but I know that I began to get wet eyes as more of the backstory is revealed and the small details of her husband keeping a post-it note that says “Love you =)” and the newly widowed wife dealing with the clean-up. I really enjoyed it, but for the life of me I couldn’t find the ending as I thought I had cleaned out the room. I also enjoyed some of her previous week games such as My Town , Nowhere, and Balance.

Melissa Peterson’s game Sagan is a map exploration game that I have played through, but I didn’t see an ending. I got past the biggest bad guy by using my Star-stuff, but after getting to him, it was just a dead-end, not an exit. Still impressive for a week.

Dennis Ramirez’s game is a joke about the impossibility of the IRB process (which as a non-academic, I had to ask my wife to find out that it means Institutional Review Board) with The IRB Revision Game. Yet again, I think I broke the game, because I did play this pong like game long enough to “beat” it and got my dot passed the IRB paddle on a lucky bounce, but there wasn’t a win screen and I needed to reload to continue.

Mark Danger Chen looks to be making something neat with this screenshot of his Space-based cooperative game.

Game of the Week 1

Fri, 28 Mar 2014 20:34:41 -0400

So I’m joining a other game designers in a Game of the week challenge, where we design board or video games for a week and get many ideas and go through many failures to find some successes. This challenge was given by Rami Ismael at Gamasutra.

You can follow other games on twitter by following the #GameAWeek hashtag. So here is my first game attempt in the challenge.

Bid War

A Deck Trimming Bidding War game

Game Design by Greg Koeser, March 2014

Number of players: 2-4

Estimated time for a game: 15-30 minutes

Objective: Collect the most points by playing a 1-3 card bidding war game. You get additional points for collecting your own suit, and the most points for collecting the jokers.

Set-up:

Take 2 decks of cards and separate by suit (hearts, diamonds, spades and clubs)
Each player selects one suit and the cards from 1-10 (20 cards per player)
Combine the Jacks, Queens and Kings in the suits playing and a joker per player – this becomes the Prize Deck. Shuffle these cards and place in the center of the board.
Everyone shuffles their 20 cards and draws 5 cards from their deck

How a turn works:

Everyone draws back up to 5 cards from their personal deck. If your deck doesn’t have the cards, shuffle your own discard deck to refill your personal deck.
Flip a prize card from the center
Jacks are worth 5, Queens are worth 10, Kings are worth 15, and Jokers are worth 25
Your own suit is worth double for you
Players can play their action cards (2s and 7s)
Players decide on 1-3 cards to bid for the prize
When everyone is ready everyone simultaneously reveals the bidding cards
After cards are revealed, reinforcement cards (1s and 3s) can be played from your hand
Count the total value of each player’s 1-3 cards and the highest number gets the prize. Everyone should keep their own prize pile which you should keep separate from your draw, discard, and trash piles
Everyone’s bid cards goes to their own discard pile. Unplayed cards stay in your hand
In the case of a tie, no one wins the prize and a new prize gets added to this prize for the next round.
The game ends when the last prize is won. If there is a tie on the last round, you replay the round for the current prize without a new prize added.

Each card is worth the value of the card, but many cards have an additional power as well.

1s and 3s can be played after cards have been revealed to add to your total number
2s can be played as an action card before revealing cards to draw 2 additional cards into your hand. They could also be used as one of your 3 facedown cards.
7s can be played as an action card before revealing cards to remove a card from your hand from your personal deck. Put the 7 in your discard pile and your “trashed” card in a separate pile. When you need to reshuffle to draw cards, do not shuffle in the trashed cards.

The game ends when the Prize deck is empty and the last round does not end in a tie. Everyone counts the cards in their Prize piles (Jacks being worth 5, Queens worth 10, Kings worth 15, and Jokers worth 25, with the value doubled if in your own suit).

Example of play:

Alice (hearts), Betty (spades) and Carl (clubs) are playing the game. At the start of the round, the prize deck is flipped and a Queen of spades is revealed. This card is worth 10 points to Alice and Carl, but 20 points to Betty, since she is playing spades. Alice has a 2 and chooses to play it to draw 2 new cards, she draws another 2 and plays that – she now has 7 cards in her hand. Carl has a 7 and chooses to play it to “trash” his 4 of clubs – Carl now only has 3 cards in his hand. Betty does not have any action cards. All three players decided on their 1-3 cards to bid, when they are ready in they reveal their cards. Alice shows a 9, 6, 5 for a 20. Betty shows a 10, 6, 4 for 20. And Carl shows a 5 for 5 points. Seeing the tie, Betty plays a 1 from her hand to bring her score up to 21. Alice doesn’t have a 1 or 3 to answer and so Betty claims the prize for the turn.

Everyone draws back up to 5 cards (for Alice, this is just one card, for Betty this is 4 cards, and for Carl, this is 3 cards), and a new Prize is turned over.

Strategy:

– For a 2 player game, there are 14 rounds, 21 rounds in a 3 player game and 28 rounds in a 4 player game. It is important to use your 7s to trash your lower value cards (4s, 5s, and perhaps 1s) early and then later in the game use the 7s for its value and not the trash power. Trashed cards are not reshuffled into your deck and give you a stronger deck in future game rounds.

– If you don’t think you can or want to take the current prize, use the turn to get rid of your lower cards. Even if you don’t particularly want to take the prize, you might bid 3 lower cards, just to be able to draw more cards at the end of the turn. 8s, 9s, and 10s are your power cards and 4s, 5s, and 6s are your lower ones in this game.

– You might also play your 1s either in the 3 cards bid or as a reinforcement cards even if it doesn’t change the balance of the bid, just to cycle through them in hopes of drawing better cards.

My hopes for this blog

Wed, 26 Mar 2014 16:53:58 -0400

I have lots that I want to accomplish with this sabbatical and business start-up. Some things that I plan to do include:

– Read through the Games for Learning greats books and write up what I learn from them

– Start up a new business that can do independent games for learning consulting, and board game / app design, and balloon twisting / clowning, and hopefully 3D printing for myself and others. And dealing with all the legal, accounting, and other things that will mean

– Prepare the house for the new baby coming this summer. This includes creating a nursery, creating an office, remodeling the master bathroom, and besides the electrical work, I hope to be able to do much of that myself (or with my wife who has been great at these projects with me in the past)

– Network with board game groups, games for learning groups, clowning/balloon twisting groups, and local Atlanta groups and share what I learn about that as I’ve never been one to sell myself naturally

– Design games – I’m joining some friends who are doing a “Game a Week” challenge to create a new game every week for as long as we last. I’ll share what I design here as well

I know that I’m well past the blogging craze and I don’t need lots of followers, I just need a journal to put my thoughts down into and knowing that there could be a few readers will hopefully motivate me to keep it active.

Thanks for reading and encouraging me,

Greg Koeser

The Journey Begins

Wed, 26 Mar 2014 10:55:26 -0400

I have had plenty of jobs and plenty of projects, but I’ve never left on my own terms. The summer internship ended or the ERP project was over and I was waiting for the next to start. I’ve now given my notice to my current company, GP Strategies, which I’ve been with since August 1997. I’m going to try to make a business in doing what I love to do.

During my 16 1/2 years at RWD/GP I’ve been a training developer, tech lead, project manager, training data lead, and change manager. I’ve delved deep into SAP, PeopleSoft, Oracle, and some custom ERPs and I’ve developed over 100 courses, thousands of work instructions, and dozens of eLearning courses. I’ve seen or participated in over 50 ERP Go-Live events at over 30 Fortune 500 clients. Some of these include: The Coca-Cola Company, Delta Airlines, General Electric, Genentech, Johnson and Johnson, IBM, Bristol Myers-Squibb, Burger King, Exxon Mobil, Welch Allyn, Tellabs, Publix, AMP, Halliburton, Sage Software, Polaroid, Merial, Citrix, Adventist Health Systems, REC Silicon, FMC, CVS Caremark, Florida State University, and more. Or by government agencies, passing multiple background checks and working for The Centers of Disease Control and Prevention, Fairfax County Government, Gwinnett County Government.

I was honored by the US Army Medical Materials Agency as an honorary Sergeant and given challenge coins. I was certified as a project manager before a board of RWD leadership and I project managed dozens of projects. I received multiple awards for excellence for my project work and dedication over the years for which I am thankful.

I’ve been able to see the world and I’ve had projects in London, San Francisco, Scotland, Puerto Rico, Atlanta, Princeton, Chicago, Los Angeles, Houston, Skaneateles Falls, Harrisburg, Tallahassee, Miami, Orlando, Lakeland, and more. I’ve seen many different industries and my favorite part was being about to see the plant tours of how things are made.

RWD/GP Strategies has been very good to me and I’ve learned so much during my time there.

But 7 years ago, when [I have had plenty of jobs and plenty of projects, but I’ve never left on my own terms. The summer internship ended or the ERP project was over and I was waiting for the next to start. I’ve now given my notice to my current company, GP Strategies, which I’ve been with since August 1997. I’m going to try to make a business in doing what I love to do.

RWD/GP Strategies has been very good to me and I’ve learned so much during my time there.

But 7 years ago, when](http://2014.nasaga.org) (North American Simulations and Games Association – nasaga.org) came to Atlanta in 2007, I saw the flyer and decided to go check it out. My pre-conference session was led by Bernie DeKoven and I was blown away by the conference and what people were using games for learning. I had “found my tribe” and I knew what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wanted to combine my love of board and video games and my desire to train people and combine them into games for learning. While at RWD/GP Strategies I did some pretty neat things in that vein, but it was always me adding to the projects or events with my specialty and not the reason for the project.

So I’m taking the step and leaving the comfort of GP Strategies and try to pursue working from home as a game designer, a consultant for games for learning, a balloon artist/clown, and all the other things that I want to pursue.

One other driver for this change is that my wonderful wife, Rebecca is 16 weeks pregnant with a boy, and I want to establish a business that I can be home with the baby as much as possible (something that is hard with consulting).

So I’m embarking on a journey of a new business and a journey of fatherhood. I have some home projects to accomplish (setting up a home office and a nursery, plus redoing our master bathroom), some challenges to take on (business set-up, health care set-up, etc), and some personal goals to achieve – such as taking on this Game a Week challenge with some other NASAGAn people and reading/note taking from the Game Designer greats out there and the books that I have to sort through.

Thanks for reading and I hope you continue. (If you really care to read my old adventures, I used to blog my adventures at gkoeser.wordpress.com – but I haven’t blogged much at all since getting married and haven’t posted since 2007).