It’s been a long time since I’ve designed anything new. I’ve been in a serious slump this year that’s impacted my life in all sorts of different ways… but mostly has caused me to feel less… creative. I’m not meaning to whine here, just setting up the scenario.
A week ago, I was fed up with feeling creatively dead. I turned to my favorite source of inspiration, Twitter, for help. I received all sorts of interesting replies:
Motorcycle Stuntmen
Performing Circus Clowns
Goose Migration
Kittens Hunting Ostriches with Lasers
Illegal Pet Trafficking
Exterminator
Alien Autopsy
Bury the Body
Collecting Candy during Trick or Treat
…and quite a few more!
One response immediately jumped out at me. It came from twitter user Eric Handler:
It grabbed my attention for a variety of reasons. I wanted to design a card-only game. Something that’s easy to print and play and cheap to produce via print on demand services. I also love trick taking games. I mean… I LOVE trick taking games. With this sort of design, I don’t have to balance weird card powers or introduce mechanics just for the sake of designing. All I needed to do was come up with a unique twist on a classic card game system and I could prototype it with cards I already have. No need to make anything extravagant.
As I mulled over the other suggestions in my head, this one kept coming back to me. It was such a simple idea, I just had to give it a shot. I made up my mind when I suddenly had the breakthrough idea: what if there were multiple active tricks?
Not only is this a compelling thought for trick taking, it also fits the theme perfectly. When shooting clay targets, it is very common for the shooter to face two clays, one for each barrel in the shotgun. My mind immediately went into overdrive and I had all sorts of thoughts. The main challenge was to figure out how the clay targets worked. Did players “lead” them out like other trick taking games or should there be some sort of mechanism that starts each hand? I settled on having a deck of cards to represent the clays. Flip two cards over and those are the targets for this round. Each clay card would be from one suit and have a point value assigned to it. The suit of the clay would determine trump for that trick. Simple enough.
The next challenge was that I wanted it to play as an individual game from 3-? players. Making the deck 60 cards means that it is easily divisible by any number of players between three and six. It also gave me the ability to use six suits for added variance. Again, I went to Twitter for help and asked about clay shooting terms and the types of targets that are thrown. With a bit of help, I designed the six “suit” symbols.
I was originally going to use a deck of Rage cards to mock the game up. If you aren’t familiar with Rage, you should be. Buy any decks you can find anywhere. They are an invaluable prototype tool because it is a six-suited deck that goes from 0-15. A perfect prototyping tool for rapid design. Anyways… I was going to do that, but as usual, I couldn’t stop thinking about the game, so I fired up Inkscape and made a quick mock-up. I used Phase 10 and Uno cards as inspiration for the layout. This isn’t final by any stretch of the imagination, but it’ll work just fine for playtesting and the first round of print and play. I have plans to make the cards all pretty.
I didn’t get to test it the first week, which turned out to be a good thing. It allowed me the time to write the rules and really think about the design objectively. I realized that without the players controlling the lead cards, there is very little strategy if any at all. It would always be in the players best interest to play high which means that the deal determines the outcome, not the player skill. I decided that introducing a bonus rule might help and I thought that any player who could claim both clays in a single pair should score extra points. I mistakenly thought that this would help, but in reality, it was still entirely dependent on the deal and the flip of the clay cards.
My solution? Team play. I had been avoiding it to this point because I was hoping to achieve something inspired-by but not necessarily in-the-genre-of trick taking games. The truth is, however, that partnership games are great BECAUSE of the partnership. Playing spades without a partner is useless. There are almost zero decisions to be made. Simply adding partnerships to Pull! introduces all sorts of subtle strategy. If I lead a low card on the second clay, am I telling my partner that I am strong on the other? If I lead a middle card am I asking for help or am I signaling that I’m low on that suit? Suddenly, the game made sense and I was excited to play it.
Testing Makes a Difference
Going into testing, I had my doubts. The game still seemed to lack strategy in my head. I had pretty low expectations, but I was honestly satisfied with myself that I came up with something so quickly. As we began playing, it worked pretty well… but after a few hands, it was obvious that clever play wasn’t really a part of the game. At this point, there were 12 clay cards… two for each suit. They were valued at three and five points. You only played through 10 of them, but it was always best to just save your high-cards for the five value card in that suit because trumps beat everything else too easily. Players only really threw non-trump cards when the highest had already been played or they were out of a suit.
We talked a bit about how to make it better. We discussed making the deck of clay cards a bit more random… one playtester suggested the two things that took the game from “meh” to WOW!
- Add negative cards to the clay deck
- Make trump cards only win ties
The first idea we discussed, and really liked was making the clay deck a bit more random. As it were, you were basically sure you were going to see two of most colors which made the decision to play or not play pretty lame. Making the deck more random means that you are taking bigger risks if you play out early on low point cards. Adding negative cards also means that you don’t just toss out your lowest cards constantly to hold on, hoping for big points. This makes the cards in the middle spectrum a little more and less useless simultaneously.
The huge change, however, is making trump cards only win ties. Previously, as with most trump games, a trump card of any value would always beat any non-trump card. With this game, however, the players aren’t in control of the lead, and you don’t have to follow suit, so it rarely makes sense to play off cards. You almost always just play your high trump if you have it. Making the clay deck more random means that you might not get a chance to use that blue 8, but if trumps only serve to win ties, all cards become important. It really opened up the game while simultaneously making it more interesting.
To counter-balance the randomness of the clay deck, I reduced the size of the shot deck and deal the entire deck out now. It was possible before with a 60 card deck, but each player would be dealt 15 cards and only play 10. It’s not easy to hold 15 cards in the first place and not using five of them felt weird. Since I had all but committed to making this a partnership game, I can focus on the four player version and tweak the rest in if possible… which is what I did. I reduced the deck to 48 cards. Now, each player is dealt 12 which means you only discard two. Card counting is also now possible which is important when the randomness of what you will see each hand comes from the clay deck.
The Release?
So, it’s been a while since I’ve shared any of my early designs as print and play. I started this site with the intention of doing that more often… and I’m not really sure why I stopped. Many of my designs have become complex to prototype and I guess I just assumed they weren’t worth the effort. This design presents the perfect opportunity however, so it’s live. All you have to make is 72 cards. Heck, you only need to make 24 if you have a Rage deck lying around! Grab a notepad and pencil and get to it!