Today's post is about the approach we've taken to designing Trekking the World 2nd Edition:
Our first value is continuous improvement. We consider ourselves successful when we learn from each published game and refine our approach to make the next one better.
Here are the average Board Game Geek ratings for the games in our Trekking line, in the order they were published:
- Trekking the National Parks - 7.0
- Trekking the World - 7.1
- Trekking through History - 7.7
Each game has been rated more highly than the last. Trekking through History’s rating is a lot higher than the other two. It's our new benchmark:
The experience of making Trekking through History led us to think we could improve Trekking the World, and our improvement principle demanded we try.
A False Start
When we first set out to create the 2nd Edition, we took the usual path. We tried to refine the existing mechanisms.
Our refinements were helping, but not enough. Over many tests, and much analysis of customer comments, we realized there was a problem with the core mechanic that couldn't be merely finessed.
Many players report the economy of 1st Edition feels "tight". You need to spend cards to do just about everything in the game, and players too often feel like they don't have enough.
The first obvious solution is to give players more cards. Alas this didn't solve the problem. Rather it made the game feel slack and rote. It was as though we could make the game either too tight, or too loose, but never just right.
Many players report the economy of 1st Edition feels "tight". You need to spend cards to do just about everything in the game, and players too often feel like they don't have enough.
The first obvious solution is to give players more cards. Alas this didn't solve the problem. Rather it made the game feel slack and rote. It was as though we could make the game either too tight, or too loose, but never just right.
Then we realized Trekking through History offered a potential solution, but it would require completely overhauling the game.
Here’s the lesson:
What we learned from Trekking through History
Trekking through History is often praised for how easy it is to play, relative to the strategy it harbors.
Why is it easy to play?
The biggest reason: each turn starts with the simple act of choosing a card that tells you what to do on that turn:
This has four virtues, the last of which is most relevant to this discussion:
This has four virtues, the last of which is most relevant to this discussion:
- It makes understanding how to take a turn easy
- It allows the designer to build variety into what can happen on a turn, by building it into what the cards tell you to do.
- Because each card tells you to do several things, it creates trade-offs between those things. If done well, it can make evaluating your options tricky and nuanced.
- You don't spend anything to acquire a card. You just take one and do what it says. This triggers less loss-aversion than 1st edition's "pay for everything" system, and thus less "tightness".
This seemed like a perfect solution for Trekking the World: to start your turn, you could choose an itinerary from several options. It would tell you what to do.
The problem was that this is a core mechanic: a mechanic that constrains all the other mechanics. We'd have to overhaul the game. So we did.
In 1st Edition, you manage a hand of cards and the rules tell you how you can spend them. Now in 2nd edition, the hands are gone. Instead, you start your turn by choosing an itinerary which tells you three things you’ll do on the current leg of your journey:
- move across the world map
- withdraw money from your bank account
- If you’re in a certain location, get one or two souvenirs
However, where you can move, the amount of money you withdraw, and the number and type of souvenirs you can get are all different from card to card, and balanced between one another.
This creates variety and nuance, and also feels a little more thematic because an itinerary is a real thing in travel and an abstract hand of cards isn’t.
The risk in this approach
Our playtesting suggests it's had the effect we'd hoped. We’ve run many split-tests where testers play 1st edition and 2nd edition back-to-back, and we ask which they prefer and why. The vast majority have said they prefer 2nd Edition.
However, the quality of a board game is not a function of just one design choice. It's a gestalt experience defined by hundreds of choices. By choosing to overhaul Trekking the World, we had to make a lot of new ones. That introduces uncertainty. I don’t think we can know whether we’ve cleared our quality bar until we publish it.
This is usually the case in game publishing, unfortunately.
In the meantime, we’ll post more about all the other choices in the coming weeks and months.