They say you never forget your first (don’t they?).
In which case this is a significant milestone in my attempts to become a game designer, as Arctic Roll is my first published game and has just gone live on Kickstarter. As I didn’t have very much to do for the campaign itself, I was compelled to write a ‘designer diary’ to coincide with the release. This is far too long for a single post so I will be breaking this down into somewhat manageable chunks.
Arctic Roll Designer Diary
Arctic Roll is a novel roll and write game which sees players competing on the same sheet of paper. It is being released through Kickstarter as a Print’n’Play — players will receive a series of PDFs to download and print at home.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rollingrhinogames/arcticroll
The Idea
Many years ago 5 dice were thrown and I was told “There are 12 Polar Bears around 3 holes”. The challenge was to work out through repeated rolls and a process of elimination, what was the secret code.
Essentially the central pips on a 1, 3 and 5 are holes, and all the surrounding pips represent polar bears. It stuck with me. So when, in January 2020, I decided to design a roll and write, the basic mechanic was there—as was the theme.
What’s in a Name?
I used to do some kayaking, so when I came to look for a name, Eskimo Roll was the first to come to mind. As a name, this was dismissed as culturally insensitive so I switched to Arctic Roll. Of course only the Brits will remember this seminal dessert from my childhood, but I can’t resist a good pun.
Making the most of the “dice” / “ice” pun potential the earliest version of the game, saw each player stock a “dice-flow” with 1 more dice than there are players, then pass these dice flows round the table drafting a dice from each. These dice were used to drop hunters, dig holes and move.
What’s the (Power)Point?
I created a physical prototype in time for UKGE and playtested several times during that event.
Around this time I also entered Arctic Roll into a couple of design competitions. One was specifically for a print and play Roll and Write.
Another required a video. Now I would simply record a screen capture from Tabletop Simulator, but at that time I resorted to PowerPoint.
We are much more familiar with high quality editing of videos nowadays, but at the time I knew I could do what was required in a program with which I was already familiar.
Even now I see designers using PowerPoint for online pitches. Presentations can be much easier to script and control than a live virtual setup. Each slide can be a new viewpoint with a new arrangement of components. You can make text appear and pieces move around. You can add sound. With animation you can make everything do what you need it to do.
When finished, you can convert the presentation to a video format. Don’t bother watching the embedded video, unless you have a genuine interest in trying to use PowerPoint to produce playthroughs.
Virtual Playtesting
Shortly after, I began playtesting online. The vast majority of my design, development and testing is now carried out virtually in Tabletop Simulator, with my playtest group Virtual Playtesting.
I have written previously in this blog about the benefits of playtesting online.
https://www.thegamespeople.co.uk/playtesting-in-pyjamas-why-havent-we-all-been-doing-this-sooner/
https://www.thegamespeople.co.uk/getting-the-most-from-virtual-playtesting/
Perhaps one of the greatest benefits was the access to other designers across the world. I have lost track of who gave me input on which iteration of which game so I can really only express my indebtedness to the Virtual Playtesting community as a whole. You guys are great!
Ditch the Dice
One of the first significant changes that my playtesting community all agreed on was to reduce the number of dice. I wanted the game to be able to accommodate up to 6 players, and my first version, used 7 dice per player. 6 dice were sat on a ‘dice flow’ which floated round the table from player to player while they each chose a dice, before passing the flow to the next player.
This was essentially a card drafting mechanic from Sushi Go translated to dice, but 42 dice were not an expense that the game was likely to bear.
It is well worth considering production costs at the earliest stage of game design. Certainly games existed with 50+n dice—but they were generally big box games, not humble roll and writes. So I went back to the imaginary drawing board to find a new way to draft dice.
Dice Drafting
Looking back, with the benefit of hindsight, and aware of how the game has since developed, I can see that a Sushi Go type draft was not the best choice to use with dice. The value of each Sushi Go card changes, as each hand plays out, and tension is created when you have 2 of the 3 cards required to complete a set but don’t know if that card is out there, or whether the player ahead of you will take the card that you need.
With all the dice visible on the table, it was easier to see what might be available 2 or 3 turns ahead, but as some values were inevitably better than others the tendency would be that the dice left at the end would be lower values that would simply not be as useful or as interesting. I think that would have created a cadence in the game which would have reduced interest just at the point where you want the game to be ramping up.
So, I am very happy with the alternate draft which found its way into the game.
Increasing Interaction
Laying the dice out in ascending order, players make a choice which determines both the dice they want and their turn order for the next roll at the same time. Higher value dice would naturally mean that players would have a later choice in the next round. At this time, every player was still playing on their own ice sheet and this increased the sense of interaction between players, which is often difficult to establish in multiplayer solo games. Once this link to draft order was established it became so clear that this was an improvement that an alternative system was never considered.
The draft has of course continued to evolve. Adding bonuses to make low value dice better, or make it easier to use high value dice for movement, was so well received that it was a natural step to add a different bonus to each dice on the draft board. Playtesters often comment on the fact that this or that bonus is powerful and should therefore be further up or further down the track, but while there is certainly no science to it, and there certainly remains scope to rearrange the bonuses on different maps, there is a consideration of the value of the dice that are typically at the top or bottom of the drafting track. Bonus movement is typically available alongside dice of value 1 or 2, whereas the ability to change direction during straight line movement becomes much more useful when players have drafted a 5 or 6.
Rolling Doubles
The final piece of the puzzle was to give players 2 dice (and therefore 2 actions) each turn rather than just one dice which they could use for either movement or placement. Placement was fun, whereas movement was necessary and always felt a little bit of a down turn. The obvious strategy was to collect 2 dice adding up to 7, which always allowed 1 hole with 6 hunters around it, before using another dice to move on, rinse and repeat.
Giving players 2 dice with a requirement that they place and move each turn, allowed the game to progress more quickly, but also created additional decision points. “Which of the dice available do I use for placement, and which for movement?”
More importantly it broke the obvious sequence. It wasn’t always possible to fully populate each ice hole, creating an imperfect placement that players were required to optimise. This was further enhanced by creating a fish stealing mechanic (the Publisher wouldn’t let me call it “What an Icehole!”) which gives an attractive bonus if players are able to place hunters beside a hole that an opponent has already dug.
But where to get the second dice? The tried and tested Roll and Write solution is to make it a shared dice that every player uses. So the final player to choose their own dice also chooses a second dice—assigning this for all players to use.
A Cold Draft
So in Arctic Roll, when players make their choice, they are now in a position to consider;
1. the value they need for movement;
2. the dice face they want to place;
3. the dice they expect to be chosen as the common dice;
4. the bonuses associated with each dice;
5. the dice that opponents may want;
6. the affect it has on turn order – which can be critical when players are in close proximity to each other;
7. and the drafting order – the order they will choose dice in the next round.
All these factors create multiple micro-decisions and significantly ramp up the opportunities for interaction between players.
A cold draft indeed.
Area Cont-Roll
Around this time, one of my playtesters suggested playing the game on a shared ice sheet. This was such an obvious way to play the game that I tried this during the next playtest. It elevated Arctic Roll from ’just another roll and write’ with some novel mechanics, to a game which seemed to be somewhat unique. While I would be hesitant to claim to be the first roll and write to allow multiple players to play on a single sheet of paper, I am not aware of another one, and certainly this is unusual enough to justify becoming the primary way to play the game. This obviously dramatically increases the level of player interaction, elevating a game which revolved around an efficiency mechanic to a genuine area control game. I enjoyed the elegance of playing a game with a single sheet of A4 paper and a handful of dice, and never one to run away from a bad pun, particularly enjoyed the chance to brand Arctic Roll the first ‘Area Cont-Roll and Write’.
Kill your Darlings but not your Polar Bears
The earliest prototypes began with a series of Calamities represented by a series of black dice on a shared ice flow in the middle of the table. There was a genuine drafting dilemma where players would have to forego one of the good white dice in order to take one of the black dice. The black dice all allowed a players neighbour to place something bad on their ice sheet (a little like the monsters added to the maps in Cartographers) but as the calamities were not all equally bad, players would have to choose how long they could wait taking the best ‘good dice’ without being left with the worst ‘bad’ ones. It was a sort of reverse hate draft, or push your luck draft which I would be keen to reintroduce into another game, but it didn’t really work with the new drafting mechanics.
Polar Bears and Walruses survived the move onto a shared map. They started in the middle of the map, but could be moved around chasing away hunters or fish, thereby creating a further opportunity to mess with opponents. One of the drafting bonuses allowed players to harpoon the walrus and another to shoot the polar bear (sniping across the map if players were able to position themselves along the same line of hexes as the polar bears current position). Some playtesters commented on the fact that they did not like the feel of hunting large mammals (fish were apparently fine) so bear spray and a beach ball to distract the walrus made a brief appearance, but overall the negative player experience of one player destroying something that another player had created was unpopular, so it was removed.
By this time I was actively pitching Arctic Roll to publishers at UKGE and Essen…. But more of that in Part 2.