Court de Capitate: New Playtest Cards

So here's my bright idea for making this game available to all of you: Business cards!

All you need is eight sheets of business cards, size 2x3.5 inches; in my experience you can find decent ones for less than $5 at any office supply store or big retail outlet. Print this document onto those pages, and you'll have all 80 cards needed to play a the game! I do suggest scrounging up a d10 for each player, but a pencil and scratch paper can fill the same role just fine.

I'd wanted to share this ages ago, but my perfectionism and urge to tinker have been getting the better of me in the rare moments where I had time & energy to spare for this game. On the plus side, I can say with confidence that this delay has resulted in a better and more playable game (though there's still plenty more I can do to improve it!). Now I just need to finish an update to the manual. To bad I'm terrible at writing those. Maybe I'll just record myself the next time I explain the rules to someone in person?

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I Live!

Boy, it sure is nice to come back from PAX and take a much-needed rest. Or so I assume, since I for one had to immediately dive into a 45-hour work week. I'd like to say I've now made it to the weekend and can finally get started on all the follow-ups I wanted to do. But the truth is that I'm writing this on my lunch break, because my one day off was yesterday. That day was spent getting some much-needed extra rest, catching up on a boatload of household chores & errands, participating in an experimental game of Dawn of Worlds (more on that in another post) and determinedly attempting to improve the playtest cards for Court d'Capitate (or deCapitate, or duCapitate; I'm try to make a final decision there too).

That last item wound up being my main playtest/demo focus for PAX- I spent half a day trying to figure out how I could import info from a google spreadsheet into a card template automatically, then threw up my hands and put the whole thing together manually. $5.50 at Target got me 25 sheets of 2x5 perforated business card paper, enough to print 3 complete 80-card sets (and for you to print a copy now and have enough left for the eventual stage 2 tests, where I add cards for Events and your own secret identities). There are a few quick changes I want to make to their format to help make the mechanics clearer, and a bunch of little playtest tweaks I keep stopping to add in, but I HEREBY SWEAR that I ON THIS VERY NIGHT (Edit: Yeahhowaboutno, I wound up spending the better part of three hours walking home after missing the last bus and have another early-morning shift, we're pushing this deadline back 24 hours) I will:

A-Somehow make the time to meet my self-imposed perfectionist standards,

OR

B-Deal with it, i.e. recognize that the cards are fully functional and format's all placeholder anyway, and release them along with a bare-bones version of the revised rules.

PAX was fantastic, by the way. I met a bunch of great people, ran alot of productive playtests (i.e. the type where you run into a buttload of things to improve on but the core game proves itself as solid), got to play a bunch of interesting hobby games with mechanics I'd been wanting to check out. . .I'd love to talk more about it, but I need to actually follow up with all those people first :P.

For now, I'll just say that the two best games I discovered at PAX were both tabletop games- Ascension and the Marvel Superhero Squad TCG. Both are simple card games (to the point where many cards only have a name, 1-2 numbers and a type symbol) that take a core element of the formula and twist it around in brilliant, elegant ways that make them truly fun to pick up and play. Check them out!

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So I'm going to PAX!

I've been on a tight budget for a while, and hadn't planned on attending any conventions. But last friday an opportunity came knocking (as illustrated above), and these last several months of overtime have earned me both the disposable income and the time off I needed to attend.

This means. . .several things.

First, PLAYTESTS! At each of the three conventions I've gone to, I've wound up spontaneously doing tests & demonstrations for one of my games; mainly Trigger Discipline, since these were all anime-oriented cons. This time, I've got plenty of different games I could take for a spin; Court deCapitate and Trigger Discipline are both ready for some more test runs, and there's an embarrassing number of other options I could have playable by friday- Divers, Mass Effect, Avatar. . .

Mind you, I'm not sure just how many of those I'll be able to get shipshape. So I'll take requests. If you'll be attending PAX, and would be interested in trying out one of my game ideas yourself? Let me know via the comments and I'll do my best to have it ready. And of course, even if you're not inclined to try a game or two I'd still love to meet you guys in person. Send me an e-mail and I'll give you my phone number.

Of course, one of my other priorities here is going to be the blog itself. This site is supposed to be a portfolio of sorts, and I've been unearthing alot of old documents as of late while reorganizing my hard drive- piles of various campaign ideas & brainstorm transcripts. It's high time I started sharing some of those. . .

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Court d'Capitate: Beta playtest rules

Oh right, you guys still need the rules for how to *play* this thing, don't you?.

Fine, here you go.

I've been striving to crank this document out in my spare moments, which are still fairly scarce; let's just say that my last 2-week paycheck had 96 hours on it. You can thank a couple different folks I ran into IRL I ran into last week for providing the motivation; turns out they've actually been hoping to see more of this. (Seriously, it gets hard to keep making these things in a feedback vacuum. Those of you who do make those thoughtful comments are helping more than you could know.)

It's been a little surprising to realize just how bad I am at doing manuals. I have no problem explaining my games when I demonstrate them to someone in person, but when the time comes to lay out all that info in the form of a text document I tend to gloss over lots of vital details. Attempting to buckle down and lay everything out step by step produces instructions that, as someone said about an early draft of Trigger Discipline, "read like a legal document". Hopefully I've been able to put a little more natural voice into this one.

Can you tell this another one of those sleep-deprived posts? If not, you will soon.

I've gotta balance this part of the game first, but I can tell you now how those Mastermind cards will work. You each who you're playing as from several random draws, but your identity is kept secret for as long as you like. Revealing your identity grants you the benefits of your character (such as larger hand sizes, cheaper turn point costs, conditional bonuses, that kind of thing) but also makes you a target- you now have a Luck and Paranoia score, and can be targeted just like any of your Pawns. On the plus side, your hand becomes the scheme cards you're carrying, so you can reveal ones with defensive abilities.

What makes this interesting is that lots of Event cards involve characters which may or may not be one of the Masterminds a player drew for this game. If the next round's event card involves a speech by Prince Albert, and gives Prince Albert's stats as well as a fat style bonus if someone manages to whack him, and you're playing Prince Albert (and don't want anyone to know). . .well. Things are about to get interesting.

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Court d'Capitate: Schemes

O, what tangled webs we weave! The other vital part of the alpha playtest build, schemes represent the various individual steps of your grand master plan. (You do have a grand master plan, right?)

As you'll see, most schemes are used in murder plots. These cards all have three scores, which are added together to determine the total score in each area for the plot itself: Lethality (The target dies unless their Luck exceeds this number), Cunning (The plot is exposed if the target's Paranoia exceeds this number, and if the target was also unoccupied you must frame and sacrifice one of your pawns to avoid being executed yourself), and Style (You get this many victory points if the plot succeeds without being exposed).

Two more card types will be worked in as the playtests proceed. First, there's Events- whatever's going on in a given round, and the mechanical tweaks (and potential targets) this introduces. Each event is revealed the round before it goes into effect, so people have a chance to plan ahead.

Second, there's Masterminds- the various nefarious minds at work in the court, their identities mysterious and plans most adversarious. Each player selects one of these characters, through whom they'll act in a manner vicarious NO BAD DAGDA STOP RHYMING YOU'LL BE HERE ALL DAY. Ahem. Each mastermind grants some neat bonuses, that tweak core rules like turn point costs and maximum hand sizes; but you have to reveal your identity to get those benefits, creating an alternate loss condition where someone can try to assassinate you directly. Fun times!

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Court d'Capitate: Pawns

Squint hard enough and you can just make out one of the notecards I made for the playtest.

I've made a few vague references to how I playtested Court d'Capitate back around Christmas. Here's the full story: Every year my dad's side of the family (the grandparents, their three children (all happily married) and their ten energetic grandchildren, of whom I am the eldest) all pitches in to rent a big vacation home for several days, so that we can all be together. We arrived the evening of day one, and would be leaving the morning of day five. I had dice, a set of blank notecards in different colors, and the core rules sorted out on my head. On day 1, I spent my spare time brainstorming the cards out in my notebook. I spent most of day 2 actually writing all the cards out, often while holding a week-old baby girl in my left arm (creating a rather striking clash of mindsets- Lady Macbeth quotes spring to mind). On the third day, I massaged my aching, cramped hands while roping various family members into the actual playtesting. And it was good.

At any rate, today I'll be sharing the first half of the information on the cards I made back then. Here are all the pawns I came up with. Pawns are the hapless fools under your control, whether or not they realize it. All pawns have three scores- Luck (How hard they are to kill), Paranoia (How hard it is to get a way with trying to kill them) and Ability (How many of your scheme cards you can attach). Since you have a limited number of Turn Points each round, you want to have a large number of Pawns to attach scheme cards to- that way on future turns you'll be able to do more at once, since pawns can occupy to play attached cards free of charge.

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Court d'Capitate: Mechanics Brainstorm

"Patience, my pet. Soon you will have a chance to sate your bloodlust."

I've been working on coming up with potential mechanics for this game. As a part of this effort, I've been rereading my copy of Hobby Games: The 100 Best, which consists of 100 articles by various industry veterans. Since most of these articles dedicate at least a page to the game's mechanics and the interesting/unique effects those mechanics create, it's a great source of inspiration.

At this point, the ideas are crystallizing into something that could be really elegant. The items on this list in bold are ones I've currently decided to use.

-Scheme cards in your hand can never be used directly. They always have to be played face-down during your turn, attached to a pawn or plot. (I actually came up with this back when I was writing the earlier post on this game, and revised some of the description accordingly)

-During your turn you invest some form of "currency" (points you gain and/or spend during the game) in your pawns, and regain those points at the start of your next turn- if the pawn is still alive.

-At the start of each round, a number of pawns are laid out equal to the number of players. Players bid for the pawns they want, and no one can receive more than one.

-At the end of each round, players secretly bid a currency in an attempt to gain the king's favor, which probably means you receive victory points.

-The turn order varies randomly each round.

-Combining elements of the above three: Lay out 1 pawn per player, then secretly bid Turn Points to determine turn order. At the start of your turn, pick a pawn for free.

-Scheme cards can be discarded from your hand during your turn to gain extra turn points.

-Paranoia scores come in pairs; the second, presumably lower number being used when the pawn is occupied.

-Event cards are revealed at the start of the *previous* round, giving everyone a turn to prepare.

-Assassination attempts against unoccupied pawns cause you to lose victory points equal to the amount by which their Paranoia exceeds your plot's cunning (assuming it does so).

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Trigger Discipline: The Dice Game

I had to run into town for an errand today, and swung by a local game store. I wound up recruiting a couple of the other patrons for impromptu playtests of TD's new core mechanics as a standalone dice game, sketching out the "board" on the back of a notebook page. As I'd hoped, the system proved fairly playable on its own merits, and the players in both tests commented on how simple it turned out to be once you'd played a turn or two. (In other words, it's alot easier to *show* people how this game works rather than telling them. I might try to put together a demonstration video using my webcam, if I can work around the hurdle of said webcam being builty into my laptop)

To play the Trigger Discipline dice game, both players take 3 d10s and place them how they like on the three spaces on their side of the board (the ones separated by the two dividing lines). They use one hand to cover up theirdie placements until both sides are ready to reveal them. Next, players roll the dice they allocated to Row A (i.e. Traits). Every die that comes up with a result of 8 or less is a success; if one player gets more successes, they have won that row, and place a die in the center to mark this victory (in longer-lasting matches it becomes important to place two dice when your margin of victory was greater than 1). The process is repeated for row B and row C, except that the dice have to lower to be considered a success; 5 for row B and 2 for row C. (To play the game with six-sided dice, change the values from 8-5-2 to 5-3-1).

Once all dice have been rolled, the round goes to the player who won row C. If there was a tie, it goes to the one who got row B, and then to the victor for row A. At the end of the round, both players make a side roll using a single d10; a result of 5 or less means yourdie pool's size increases by 1, up to a maximum of 7. If one of you won the round, that player instead gets an extra die if their side roll comes up as 8 or less. If a player wins a round and already has a fulldie pool, they get a bonus die on the next round that's allocated and rolled after all other die rolls have been made (giving them a chance to break a tie, or create one in a row that the enemy only won by a margin of 1).

If a player wins two rows (and neither are trumped by a row the opponent won) they've scored a Double. This earns them a Victory Point, 3 of which are needed to win the match. If they win all three rows, they score a Triple and earn both a Victory Point and a bonus match win! First player to get 3 match wins has won the game.

Several fixes were made mid-playtest; I changed the scores from 3/5/7 to 2/5/8, changed side roll win bonus from 7 to 8, added the mechanic for the post-roll bonus die to avoid prolonged stalemates. At this point, I think the numbers involved have been tweaked enough to approximately produce the results I'm after in Trigger Discipline. When the second playtest was coming to an end, I was still concerned about the length- though I didn't keep track of time, the game was certainly feeling long, and I fully expect the length of each round to double when the winner is also getting to narrate his hot-blooded mech pilot's attack. But then I weighed in a couple other factors- that this was the most involved form of the conflict rules (with two full-fledged main characters doing battle, rather than one main character fighting a weaker challenge represented by prearranged die assignments), and that I'd expanded the scope of the dice game to something that approached an entire RPG session in order for triple successes to count for something. Taken by itself, a single match now seems to allow for a full range of possibilities- from battles over in moments (He puts all 3 dice into GAR and gets nothing, I put 1 die into each row and all 3 succeed) to long, drawn-out slugfests, with both those extremes being possible but not *too* likely.

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Court d'Capitate

Lady Andrea d'Capitate, seen here shortly before her death under mysterious circumstances involving an unlocked window, a blowgun dart laced with Kroazian Happy Juice, and a greased pig that had somehow gotten loose inside the royal ballroom.

Picture a game taking place in a royal court that's practically overflowing with backstabbing and intrigue. Players start by each selecting a Mastermind character- many of these characters are members of the host family (the wealthy and influential d'Capitates), but just as many are guests (members of other noble families, a foreign ambassador, a long-lost heir to the throne). The Masterminds (each of whom has their own mechanical quirks that influence how they play) then spend the game vying for influence, until one of them finally becomes amasses enough that they can order that all their rivals be beheaded for treason. They do this in two ways: acquiring Pawns to manipulate, and carrying out increasingly convoluted murder schemes.

The game would be played via several sets of cards- first would be those Mastermind cards listing your stats and special abilities. Second would be a deck of Pawns; I imagine that players would flip over the top card of the deck once per turn, and then take turns bidding on that Pawn to determine who acquires him. Third would be the hand full of Scheme cards that each mastermind has; each will either be an Assassination cards that represents an individual element of a murder plot, or a Plan cards you play face down besides one of your Pawns, to be activated when the prerequisites are triggered and the time is right. Fourth would be event cards, with a new one each round that changes the conditions based on what's going on in the court, such as a musical performance or a toast to the king's health.

Every Pawn has a Luck score (which determines the total Lethality an assassination attempt needs to kill them), a Paranoia score (Which makes it more difficult to get away with assassination attempts), and an Influence score (which gives you points towards your eventual victory so long as the character is unoccupied, i.e. untapped, at the start of your turn).

Masterminds create new assassination plots by writing down the name of that plot's target on a slip of paper, folding it up, and then placing an Assassination card face-down on top of it. Each turn they can add more Assassination cards to the plot. Each card has a Lethality score (for successfully killing the target), a Cunning score (for not getting caught, lest you have to pin the blame on a pawn that will promptly be executed), and a Style score (the number of Victory Points you'll receive if the attempt succeeds); an attempt uses the total of each card's score in each area. And naturally, killing an opponent's pawn means they must discard any Plans attached to that pawn.

That's the gist of the idea. What do you think?

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