Cosmere: The Game location samples, Plus: White Sand vol. 1

Last week you got to see a sample of some of the cards that are used for my game Cosmere, based off of the works of Brandon Sanderson.  If you missed that, check out the post here: Cosmere Game.

This week, I am showing you some of the location cards used in said game.  Once again, the artwork is taken from off the internet, and I don't have any legal ownership of it, I merely use it to give me a feel for how the final product of the game will work.

First off: Arelon Palace, from Elantris.  If you have a person here and are losing at the location, it gives you a nice bonus of one extra card at the start of each of your turns.

The Court of the Gods, from Warbreaker.  This is the place where all of the Returned live, who are treated as Gods by their people. As such, at this location no one can be harmed or damaged.

Also from Warbreaker is the D'Denir garden, filled with hundreds of statues.  It rewards the players based off of how many people they had on it when it scores, allowing them to draw cards as soon as it does so. 

The City of Elantris from the novel Elantris.  During the course of the novel, Elantris is cursed and a nightmare slum for its neither-living-nor-dead occupants. Thus, I made it so that you lost something every time you put a card onto this location. Elantris is also the highest scoring location in the game, which kind of makes up for that.

Fadrex City is a city that contains one of the Lord Ruler's supply caches.  When this location scores, all of the equipment, instead of going to the discard to be lost, is instead put on top of your deck to be reused on a near future turn.

Kharbaranth, from the Stormlight Archive, houses an incredible library full of awesome knowledge. Thus, when you have a person on this location, you can access that knowledge, and look at the top 2 cards of the Time deck.

Kredik Shaw, home of the Lord Ruler, who has ruled for a thousand years.  In this location, only the most powerful may go: those of rank 3 or higher.

The Purselike is a great place for chill people to hang out and live.  Invite your chill friends: every time you put a person here of rank 1 or 2, you can place another.

So there you have it: 8 of the 16 locations for the game.  When I get around to it I'll put numbers on the three shards in the upper-left corners telling the players how many shards they get from winning at that location.

Meanwhile: Guess what book I checked out from the Provo public library today?

White Sand! (Volume 1)  For a preview of some more of the pages, go here: White Sand.

Cosmere: The Game

When I was a Senior in college, my college capstone class was The Literature of Awe.  In this class, our final paper and project had to deal with literature and awe, and had to be related to each other.  I chose my topic to be Brandon Sanderson and his literature. Brandon's 0th law is even: "Always Err on the side of what is Awesome."  My entire final paper was about his books and magic systems and the Cosmere and his awesome putting-the-pieces-together-at-the-last-minute-to-solve-the-problem-satisfyingly endings.  As well as the paper, I also had to do a project.  Hmm... give me free range to do a project, do you?  Watch yourselves, here comes a game.

So I developed a card game based off of four of the major magic systems in Brandon's Cosmere works.

Here's the promo video I made for it, which I put on Facebook and now don't know how to get it onto Youtube: Cosmere Introduction Video

The idea is simple: you choose a deck (it comes with four), the other players choose a deck, and then you battle each other for control of shards throughout various places found throughout the Cosmere. The first player to 16 shards wins.  Each deck consists of its own magic system. There are the Elantrian deck, the Allomancy deck, the Awakener deck, and the Surgebinder deck.  Each deck uses its own unique system of magic.  And, just as Allomancy's metals can be categorized into an awesome little chart:

So can the powers that each deck offers you:

Time for a little bit more explaining. [Note: all artwork is prototype, taken from off the internet. It is just sample artwork.]

Elantrian Deck: The Elantrains are capable of harnessing the Dor (a source of great power) by drawing certain symbols. Depending on what the symbol looks like depends on what it does. Elantrains are the people that can draw these symbols, called Aons.  In my earlier drafts of the game, this was by far the most powerful deck, and thus broke that game. I fixed that (I hope, more play testing needs to be done) by categorizing the Elantrains into beginners, intermediates, and experts, which can each draw Aons only if their skill level matches the complexity of the Aon. Before, I allowed all Elantrains to be able to draw all Aons, and that was too powerful.  In this deck, you have to attach an Aon card to an Elantrain for the Elantrain to draw it, thus activating the Aon's power. This is the: Everyone can do everything, Magic from external card, deck.

Allomancy Deck: Allomancers are able to burn (in other words, metabolize) certain metals to harness and use specific powers. For example, an Allomancer that can burn tin swallows tin and then burns it to enhance their physical senses. An Allomancer that can burn zinc can pull on others' emotions. Mist born can metabolize all the metals, while Mistings can only burn one. In this deck there are 2 Mistborn, and all the other Allomancers are Mistings, meaning that most of the Allomancers can only utilize one metal. Metal cards need to be played on the Allomancer for him/her to burn that metal. There are eight different Mistings, one for each of the eight basic metals (physical and mental). This is the: Specific Magic powers per person, Magic from external card, deck.

Awakener Deck: Awakeners get their power from the number of Breath they hold. There are Breath tokens that you place on your Awakeners to tell you how many Breath they have. Breath can be transferred from person to person, and the more Breath one has, the more powerful they are. Having more Breath gives the Awakener inherent special abilities, such as looking at the top card of your deck or the Time deck. The deck also comes with items that you can invest Breath into to have them do your bidding magically: for example, a rope, which when you put a certain number of Breath into and give it a certain command, can grab items or tie up an opponent. Unlike the Elantrian and the Allomancer decks, the magic can be used without any external cards. This is the: Everyone can do everything, Magic from self, deck.

Surgebinder Deck: Surgebinders can use magic if they have a certain amount of Stormlight in them. This Stormlight comes from the money cards of this deck, and is placed onto the Surgebinders so that they can perform their abilities. There are ten abilities, and each Surgebinder only has access to 2 of them. Some of them include: using illusions to disguise yourself, teleporting to another location, using Stormlight to stick your opponent so that they can't move, and so forth. There are ten different types of Surgebinder, each with a unique combination of exact 2 powers. This is the: Specific Magic powers per person, Magic from self, deck.

So there you have it: the four different decks you can use, each with its own unique system of using magic.  During early play testing I tweaked the rules, and will continue to do so with further play testing.

Question and Answer Session:

Q: Are you planing on getting this published?

A: Yes, but I don't own the intellectual property for this stuff, Brandon Sanderson does.

Q: Have you talked to him about this game then?

A: Yes, I have contacted him once.  Here's how it went down: I took this concept and emailed the CEO of Mayday games with it.  This is the e-mail I sent:

Hello Seth:
My name is Andrew Perazzo, and I am currently in a class at BYU.  In this class, my classmates and I are creating our final projects.  Because inventing tabletop games is my hobby and passion, I am creating one as my final project.  Tara and many others in my class are interested in my game and want to see it succeed, and Tara and others suggested I try to publish it.

I am contacting you to hopefully start going through the process of getting this game published.  A URL to a short video of me explaining my game is below. (It will go to Facebook, which is where the video is embedded . . . I'm not sure how to change that.)

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=10203354885579073
Please e-mail me with any questions, comments, or concerns, at [address].  Also, my personal cell-phone number is [number].  I look forward to hearing back from you soon.

Sincerely,

Andrew G. Perazzo

After this email, I got an email back:

I love that you contacted me Andrew AND that you know Tara too, it is a small world!  I watched the video and like it, but there is a huge problem... getting the intellectual property from Brandon Sanderson will be a very tough battle unless you have some connection.  Great ideas for a game, but it just isn't realistic to think you can get the license to make a game of Brandon's out of the gate.

On a personal note I'll say I'm a stormin' huge fan of his work though, I finished Words of Radiance way too quickly!

Regards,

Seth Hiatt

Mayday Games Co., Ltd.

So then I emailed Brandon Sanderson with these emails attached, and here's what he said:

Andrew,

Thank you for sending this! Your ideas are quite good, however, you'll need to go through my agent with a proposal on game designs as everything like that goes through him. You'll have a better chance at getting him on board if you team up with someone like Mayday Games, who is experienced in the industry. I will forward this on to my agent with a note that you might be contacting him with a proposal at some point, but it would be good to contact him sooner rather than later to find out if the rights have already been sold to another company.  My agent's name is Joshua Bilmes and his contact info can be found here: [contact info]

Best,

Brandon

So then I contacted his agent, Joshua Bilmes, and here's what he said:

Dear Mr. Perazzo:

Brandon is personally designing his own Cosmere card game, so this is a sno-go.

And that was his entire email.  So . . . was there another publisher or not?  I don't know. So I let it drop after that, figuring I was busy with school and everything else. My question is: If Brandon was designing his own Cosmere card game, then why didn't he tell me instead of asking me to talk to his agent? Maybe he just didn't want to tell me to my face, or maybe he mentioned it once to Joshua and then forgot about it, or maybe Joshua didn't want an unknown game designer working on the project?  I don't know.

Q: So what are you going to do now?

A: I'm going to continue working on the game and making it the best it can be, working out the asymmetrical decks until they're balanced, and making the gameplay smooth and fun.  Then I'm going to give a copy to Brandon and talk to him about any future it might have.

Q: Any ideas for future decks, such as Hemalugy and Feruchemy?

A: Yes, although I am going to focus on the four decks I have right now and making them the best they can be before making other ones.

Q: Oh! Does that mean--

A: Yes, I already know what you're going to ask, you're going to ask if you can use hemalugy and feruchemy with allomancy to create compounders.  The answer is Yes, but like I said, I'm focusing on the first four decks first before I delve into anything else.

Q: Do you need help play testing Cosmere?

A: Sure, just let me know. I'm a bit busy with school right now, but during Christmas break we can definitely play.

Interstellar Pig and Chaosmos

Interstellar Pig is a book by William Sleator. In the book, the main character Barney goes on vacation to a beach house, where his new neighbors befriend him and, throughout the course of the novel, play many games with him of the board game Interstellar Pig. A game inventor as I am, I had to create it in real life to play.  And so I did.

In the game, everyone is trying to get the Piggy card in their hand by the time the game ends. If they have the Piggy card, they win. The board consists of different planets, and planets can have different atmospheres, gravity, light, and temperature. Everyone gets a hand of cards, which could include weapons, thermal suits, light sources, breathing apparatuses, and so forth. And one card out there is the Piggy.  When you land on a planet, you can look at the cards there and even exchange some of them for the cards in your hand.  You take turns moving around, and you can combat other players to get their cards, all trying to find the Piggy.  If you have the Piggy, you can either keep it in your hand, or hide it on a planet and hope that no one lands there and takes it, in the hopes that you can get there later to get it back.

There are the equipment cards as mentioned before, but there are also event cards which trigger if you roll a certain side on the star die, and character cards. At the start of the game you choose a character you want to be, and that determines your IRSC (your IQ) as well as what atmosphere you breathe and what temperatures you can stand.

It was fun, and my brother Ryan is super excited to come visit so that he can play it again.  Because of this, I decided to look at it again and maybe tweak some things.  So I looked up Interstellar Pig again on Wikipedia, and saw near the bottom this: "A board game released in 2015, chaosmos, seems to have the same premise as the game from the novel."

What the wha?  I wa planning on maybe sending in this game to publishers.  But now it looks like there's a game that has already been published that IS Interstellar Pig?  So I looked it up on Board Game Geek.  The game, Chaosmos, is rated fairly high.  But check out the description of the game from the website:

The universe is about to collapse, and your final hope lies in an ancient mysterious artifact, the Ovoid. Whoever controls this "cosmic egg" can shape the birthing of the next universe according to their own agenda. Players are secret agents from a handful of surviving worlds, zipping from planet to planet in special “amnion suits” that allow for interstellar travel, space combat and planetary landings.

Each planet has its own envelope of cards. When you arrive on a planet, you decide which cards you want to take and which to leave behind. Knowledge is the most powerful resource in the game, and being able to predict the cards your opponents possess at any given time is a powerful advantage as you build up a handful of weapons, tactical gear, vaults and traps, as well as cards that counter your opponents' cards. The best players will keep their hand fluid, constantly changing tactics while they search from world to world for the Ovoid or find a safe place to stash it.

Balance your hand of cards, spend your turn actions wisely, and cleverly use your special alien powers to stay one step ahead of your opponents. When the Chaos Clock reaches zero, only the player who possesses the Ovoid will become master of the new universe.

Sound familiar?  If you scroll down on that page, there's even this: "Chaosmos is unofficially, but faithfully, based on a fictional board game described in William Sleator's novel Interstellar Pig."

So... Somebody beat me to it.  Somebody had the idea, implemented it, and got it published.  What does this mean for me?  It means: a) I want to play Interstellar Pig right now.  b) I also want to try out Chaosmos. c) I need to get on the stick when it comes to getting my game ideas out there.  I have a lot of good ideas, but I need to get them play tested and sent out to publishers.

Now, is that the only reason I make games?  No.  Why do I make games?  Because I can't help it. I can't stop myself. I love it. It's my passion, my greatest hobby.  Even if I never sell a single game, I'll still make them, and play them.  There's an inherent joy to it.  But on the side, yeah, of course it would be good to get some of them published.

In a few weeks when Heather and I have a free weekend and when Eric and Ryan come down to play, my version of the Interstellar Pig game will be one of the ones we'll play (as well as Elysium and Istanbul, which neither of them have played yet).  I am also hoping to play the latest version of Cosmere, which is a card game I created based off of Brandon Sanderson's epic fictional universe, which he calls the Cosmere.  Look forward to it.

Next week: I talk about my game Cosmere, and give a bit of back story and details about it.  Plus, some files for the latest prototype cards. For now, here's a video of Tom Vasel of The Dice Tower doing a review on Chaosmos:

The Gospel and Games; or, Games about the Gospel

Alright, so the thing about really great tabletop games is the fact there there are often multiple ways to win, or different paths to victory.  That's why I love the games Dominion and 7 Wonders so much.  For example, in 7 Wonders, am I going to try and win by getting a lot of green cards?  I could, but I could also win by going for blue cards.  Or red cards.  Or stock up on brown and gray cards.  Actually, going for just one of these won't work, so I'll have to figure out which combination I'll have to go for (going for green AND red cards, for example).  The point is, in 7 Wonders there's not just one pathway, not just one strategy that will cause you to win if you take it every time.  The fun of the game is figuring out which of the many strategy to take, and which combinations work best together.

Dominion is the same way: which cards should I buy, and which combinations should I go for?  And it's different every game, because every game will have different cards that can do different things.  The major idea and fun factor behind the game isn't even really playing the cards, it's deciding which strategy and combination you want to go for.

Let me give you a bad example of this, or, in other words, a game where there is no multiple pathways to win.  There's just the one path, and if you don't follow it, you'll lose.  Monopoly.  My sister loves Monopoly, and this Christmas break when I'm back home I fully intend on playing with her.  But Monopoly is a game where in order to win you have to rely on just one strategy.  When you land on an unowned property, you can do one of two things. You can either: (a) buy the property, or (b) not buy it and put the property up for auction.  If you choose (b), you are going to lose. That's not even a choice--you buy the property no matter what when you land on it.  So Monopoly is an example in which one strategy is always better to take than the other.

Now, I've tried making games about the gospel, and about church topics and so forth.  But here's the major dilemma I get when I try this: if I want to make the game spiritually accurate, one path always has to be better than the other.

I had an idea for a game of Life where you have to make choices involving doing what's right or what's wrong, whether you should pay tithing or whether you should keep that 10%.  Here's where the problem comes in: if I want to model the game after real life, then paying tithing will always, always trump not paying it.  You paid your tithing?  Sweet! Here's two blessing tiles, which will improve your score 10 times more than keeping that extra 10% of your income would have.  I get into the Monopoly problem: one strategy is always better than another.  So why would I ever go for the crappy strategy?  Why would I ever not pay the 10% in tithing, getting two blessing tiles, whenever I cross a Payday space?  I wouldn't. That would be stupid.  (A side note here: maybe I should make this game anyway, just so that children could be taught the principle of always paying tithing.)

Another problem I have run into with making games using gospel topics is the idea of rank, that one thing is better than another.  For example: I created a game called The Golden Plates.  I spent months inventing, play testing, and designing it.  Covenant Communications wanted a prototype to see if it was something they'd want to publish. (Which is totally awesome by the way!)  The game made it through the first couple rounds of play testing with them, and I thought for sure that they would end up publishing it.  Unfortunately, however, it hit a snag, as was later reported to me by one of their playtesters. The main concept of the game, you see, revolved around giving suggestions to which plates/records to include in the final version of the Book of Mormon.  Each cards was thus ranked, and the highest ranking one would make it in.  The problem was this: the testers were concerned about the idea of one scripture being more important than another, and that it would teach that some scriptures are just better or more important than others.  Okay, yes, I saw this as well and I agree that it isn't the best thing to teach kids.  Unfortunately, that mechanic was central to the game.  So now what?

Here is the idea that one gospel principle isn't really technically better than another.  (I went to the Temple 5 times, which beats your home teaching 8 times!)  In the gospel context, they're all the same amount of importance. -ish, I mean, in my Plan of Salvation game I have Christ being the most powerful card, because of well, yeah. Let's be real, Christ is better than repentance because without Christ there would be no repentance. Christ is better than resurrection because without Christ there would be no resurrection. He's the center of the entire plan and the most important part. And so I reach another dilemma, because in many if not most games, certain cards ARE going to be more powerful than others. That's just the way it is. In Monopoly even, sure Park Place is more expensive than Tennessee Avenue, to kind of balance out how awesome it is, but if I were to try to trade you my Tennessee Avenue for your Park Place you would say, "Heck no."

A shout out to my brother Eric for doing the artwork on these cards!

There you have it: two main dilemmas that I have come across while trying to make games centered on the gospel and church-related material. Either I have unbalanced and thus not fun strategies (obey the gospel or not? Hmm, I wonder), or else I have one gospel principle being unrealistically better than another (because no matter what my game might say, the Book of Alma is not really better or superior than the Book of Enos). As I continue to make games, maybe I'll figure it out.

Classes on Game Design: A Misnomer to Me

My wife is so great.   She and I were looking at Master’s programs that I can take to get my Master’s degree, and we were looking at an online program for Southern New Hampshire University.  Along with the normal Master’s programs such as Math and science and English was one my wife found: A Master’s in Game Design.

At first, of course, I was really excited, because number one I love Game Design and designing games and playing them, and number two I have always wanted to take some sort of class on that because it would offer me great insights as to how to do it better.  The closest thing I’ve found to a class on tabletop game design is this guy right here:  Classes on Game Design That, of course, and my own Game Design class I teach at my school during three weeks in January.

So this idea of a Game Desing Master’s sounded really great to me, although I had my fears.  My fear was this: nearly every time (I say nearly because once it hasn’t been: Classes on Game Design), nearly every time there has been classes or educational programs or Master's degrees on Game Design, they have been about Video Games, not tabletop games. As so it was with this.  The classes all turned out to be computing and programing classes, not classes about tabletop mechanics.

So I decided on an MA in English and Creative Writing Master's instead.  It's too bad that the Game Design class wasn't what I had hoped it would be.  There are still a lot of other resources out there (on the internet) that I can look at to teach me more about game design.  Links: Game Design Channel, Games Precipice, and Game Development.

The structure of my game design class is going to be a little bit different this year.  After teaching it for a year, I know what works, what doesn't, and what adjustments I need to make in it to have it be a better experience.  More on that topic in a later post.