We Three Kings design notes

Okay, so the idea for We Three Kings started about maybe four years ago. The idea basically hasn't changed since then. You were on a randomized hexagonal board that when you got to a tile you'd flip it, although my original version didn't have tile bonuses. You would buy and sell gifts, and there would be six, not just three. The Star Path idea was the same. The idea of not getting points unless you donate to charity was the same, but in the original version there were no Charity cards, everything was just printed on the tile. I realized that for variety's sake that wasn't feasible and so switched to the whole Donation Request card idea. That original idea still shines through on the two give-to-other-players tiles.

In the original idea, the Christ child would be discovered as soon as the very last tile was flipped over. I play tested that my very first time, then realized that I didn't want the game to end four rounds into the game, so came up with a new end game condition. Inspiration hit me about it being a certain number of blessings a player got, which I first thought 20, then 10. Then I play tested it. And made it 6.

The original idea had the Christ child being found on the tile that fell mathematically on the star path where it first crossed itself twice, but then that was dumb so I made the whole roll a die twice thing, which I think is really fun because you can still use probability to figure out the most likely tile it will be, but it's still unknown until the very end. The idea for the Prediction board was new. At first it was only used for getting points at the end, but then the Shepard spots were just lame, so I came up with the idea for the bonuses you get.

Originally the middle space action would allow you to rotate tiles to change the star path, but in my playtests no-one ever used it, plus it would have been super lame to know the probability of the star path and make super awesome predictions only to have it changed on you. So I decided it would be more fun to have it not change, and that as soon as a tile was laid down the star path wouldn't ever change.

The idea for movement changed before the very first playtest. My original idea was that your piece faced a specific direction on the tile, one of the six, and that when you moved you would have to rotate your piece to face a different side before moving it forward. And your cards would be like, 6 and 7 and stuff. But looking at the size of the board, I decided that that was dumb and instead of having you face a certain direction, I would just do you could move to any surrounding tile.

And your hand would consist of the Rest card as well as a 1, 1, 2, 2, 3, and 3, which then changed to just a 1, 2, and 3. The star path card was created to make the star path more important than just this weird end-game thing. And it worked. Suddenly the direction and path of the star path became a lot more important than just this thing that happened once at the end of the game. The star path became an integral part of the movement and play experience.

The idea for different types fo blessings, small, mediums and large, was in the original idea for the game. I'm not sure where the idea came from that it would be unknown how much you'd exactly get, like 1 or 2 points for the small blessings, 2 or 3 for the next, and 3 or 4 for the biggest. It kept things tight and tense to the end, not really knowing how much your opponents really had.

The end game was hard to figure out. Like, really hard. Then one day inspiration hit and I realized I was thinking of it wrong. See, what I had originally had was that when a player got 6 blessings, then every player would have one more turn, and then you would roll the die twice, find out where the Christ child was, and then all tiles would lose their actions, and the only thing left to do was go and visit the Christ child. I tried that once, and. . . it didn't work. Everyone just used their one extra turn to play their Rest card, then went straight to the tile as soon as it was revealed. I still had the idea of having the first one to get there gets more points than later ones to get there, but with that idea it was just, the first player to go would get the most points.

I knew that there had to be a reason to maybe not get there as soon as possible. But what? Then the idea hit me to have the Christ child's location revealed as soon as the 6th blessing was gotten, and to have the tiles keep their actions. Also, players would get a bonus point for every two gifts they had, plus another bonus point if one of their gifts was the one they started with. And giving them three turns allowed them time to quickly nab that last Donation Request card they needed to fulfill, which was a more fun alternative than "oops, I know you were just one turn away from getting 3 or 4 points but I just ended it sorry haha." And when it comes to game design the golden rule is this: Do whatever is the most fun. And the three turn limit still made getting there the fastest still matter, like you couldn't just say, "oh you got there, well now I'm going to take 12 turns and get three more blessings haha."

On the Prediction board, I used to have it that the first player to get the correct spot would get 4 points, the second player to guess it would get 3, and so on. Playtesting it, no one would go on the same spot because they all wanted that one extra point. I changed it so that the correct prediction would get 2 points no matter when you guessed it, and it was a lot better, because now all you worried about was the probability of a spot being the right one, which I think is really fun, and the bonus it gives you, which I also think is really fun. You no longer had to worry about getting to a spot first. So that worked out alright.

The tile bonuses. At first, the only reason the bonus was there was for you to get it when you flipped it over. That was it. No, actually, they were also usefully because I did have the rule that if you were on a pot and someone else came to that tile you would get the tile's bonus, making it so you wanted to go to tiles others would go to their next turn. Kept up the player interaction. Playtesting it, I realized that it was tough getting gifts if they only came from, like, three spots, and tried it out having it so that players could get the bonus instead of the action by paying a coin. And that turned out to be a lot more fun, and kept the options open more, so I kept it.

Player special powers. I don't think they were a part of my original thinking of it, but came about when I was making player boards. It was originally a way to make more use of the bonuses. A mentioned, at first they had like no purpose, so I made a player power that said he could get the bonus instead of the action. When I changed the rule so that you could pay a coin to get the bonus, it was a simple fix to just say he got the bonus for free.

Other player powers I came up with were: draw two Donation Request cards and pick one, which was too weak in play testing so I change to to three cards; have an extra star path card, which I also added having an extra two precision chips to it; having a hand limit size of 5 Donation Request cards instead of 3, which I had always coupled with using the center tile as a Charity spot, which is actually pretty useful is some situations; starting with an increasing holding capacity, which sounds like a stupid power until you play with him and realize it's awesome; and the impossible to get right power involving the Traders, which had three or four different iterations to try to get correct until the one you see now.

The Inn card idea used to be just the "Mary" spot, and "Joseph" was going to be another spot, but I couldn't figure that out so I just made it the "Mary and Joseph" spot until I realized that that made no sense thematically at all, so I changed it to the "Inn" spot. Shepard spots were always shepherds, I thought it fit in thematically that you would get points for making a right prediction because that meant you correctly helped some shepherds so you got blessed for that. Not sure how getting a bonus for choosing a particular spot ties in thematically, though.

Other things? You're probably bored reading this blog post and don't really care, but I like writing about how the game slowly came to be. Wow, I just looked and this is a long blog post. Maybe I'll add pictures in it to break things up.

Oh, yeah, the starting number of coins was toyed with a bit. It was 8, but then I tested it and no on ever needed the extra storage space, so I changed it to 6. Still the extra coin storage space isn't as good as the extra gift storage space, even after changing the Trader's action from 'you can only sell one gift' to 'you can sell as many gifts as you want.' I made up for that a bit when I had the Inn card give you 2 points for all coin storages, but the one for all gift storages only gives you 1 point.

The Traders used to give you less money (1, 2, 3, and 4; which is now 2, 3, 4, and 5) and you used to have to spend more money to get gifts (2, 3, and 4 instead of the 1, 2, and 3). I changed those through play testing to make the game more fun (golden rule of game design).

The prices for the three Camel movement upgrades changed around a ton of times. As did the way the Rest to Rest-and-star-path power worked. It was took powerful, then too weak, then too powerful, until I wrestled it down to it only gave you the star-path movement if it was your last or second to last card in your hand. It was still not optional, until I play tested that and it wasn't fun at all, and in sticking to the golden rule I did what was more fun and had you moving along the star path optional.

The idea of having three tiles never used per game stayed the same, and allowed me to have some free space for ideas, giving me three more tiles to squeeze ideas into. In the end, it also creates a variable play experience, when you're never really sure which tiles won't be making an appearance this game. I also changed the frequency of tiles based on how useful they were. I only had two expand-storage-space tiles and three camel-upgrade tiles until I realized that storage space was better than camel upgrades, so changed it to 2 camel upgrades and 3 storage expansion tiles. The camel upgrades were 2 per tile, with 3 tiles, making the upgrades different per tile, but by making it 2 tiles I had to put all three options on each tile.

Anyway, I'm sure you're done with me talking about this, so I'm going to end my post here. Anyway, long story short, is making a game is lot of hard work. If you do end up playing it, let me know what you think.