Game Design #4: Action Stations

Tenby is going full steam ahead, and for one simple reason. It now boasts a functional action system, and is therefore now, technically, a game. A fun one I hope, but nevertheless, a game it now is.

Tenby has come about it perhaps an odd way. I’m not sure if it’s an odd way as my own sample size of ten games or so doesn’t feel as though it is representative of all creative processes. However, to my relatively unexperienced eye, it has sort of brought itself into life, with a little poking and prodding here and there.

A Game Without Rules

A decent proportion of my ideas for games come to me in dreams. Not even joking. I’ll wake up having been playing a game with friends and I’ll scrabble to write down all of the details I can clutch from disappearing strands of thought. I get maybe a couple of these a month on a good month, and less on others. It’s not my main source of ideas, but not insignificant either. I don’t know if I should be worried about this or not, but at least my sub-conscience is clear.

Tenby didn’t come from the dream world, in fact quite the opposite. The beautiful seaside town is a familiar location to many holiday goers, and is certainly a very memorable place, not least for its colourful terraced houses overlooking its long and golden beaches. There’s a lot more that makes Tenby a stand out town, but the colourful houses is what got me thinking.

I’ve lived in Wales all of my life. I grew up in mid Wales in a small town, and moved to Cardiff for university, after which I stayed around for work in the entertainment industry, writing music for TV shows and the occasional film. I have much to thank Wales for, and to be grateful for. I’m not exactly what you would call a nationalist, or perhaps even patriotic (except for a rousing sympathy with the Celtic peoples, mostly when watching the six nations), but I do feel that one should represent some aspect of the culture from which you have grown. Tenby is an attempt of mine to represent some small aspect of Wales, and to help bring the town’s beauty to the attention of the world.

The components of the game came quickly. I don’t know what possessed me, but without knowing the slightest bit about what the mechanic of the game would be, I set to work making the cards for the game. I created a spreadsheet with card lists including features, types of cards, points for adjacent features, pretty much the whole thing. And, perhaps due to some ground in response to completionism, I set about making all of the cards, and didn’t stop until they were all made. The whole process probably took about two weeks.

Great! I had all of these cards. I got them all uploaded into Tabletop Simulator, and… Yeah. Well done me. I had created a huge number of cards with pretty colours and cute features. I had made a portfolio of fantasy properties, not, as I had intended, a game.

A Few Months Later…

So I shelved the project. This was back in February 2023. Two weeks of hard work on an idea that I just assumed would create itself. Making the cards had gone smoothly, so why wouldn’t the mechanism design?

I got lucky. A few months later, after working on a few of the other game ideas and getting them to their next stages, I turned back to Tenby, as was hinted at in the last blog. Luckily, I had played a lot more games and experienced a lot more life in the mean time, and the distance between myself and the concept of Tenby the game was large. Large enough to dissolve the dissatisfaction I had with the time spent on its creation.

And so came the action mechanism. It was inspired by two games: Electropolis, and Kingdomino. I knew I wanted Tenby to be a drafting game. I had fiddled around with card draw and selection in various different formats, but it just didn’t feel fun. My own personal taste is that a game should feel as far away from drawing and playing as possible, but that’s just my taste, no shade on snap lovers.

I knew I wanted a drafting mechanism, but simple turn based, first player passes to the left, or any of its derivatives, also just didn’t feel fun. Furthest card away from deck is free; first player gets first choice; all these and more just felt parochial and like treading along a very well worn path. Now, there’s no need to reinvent card drafting entirely, but I wanted something dynamic, something that would be a conduit for meaning and narrative. After all, why do we play games if not to be drawn into a world, even for a short time?

Then came along Electropolis, which I had the good fortune of reviewing; a really clever city builder type game with a dynamic tile selection system. Go and check the game out, it’s definitely a keeper in my mind. It’s tile selection system reminded me of Kingdomino, importantly that there is a tradeoff between selecting the higher value option or the pole position for the next round. Both Kingdomino and Electropolis are genius in their simplicity, inspiringly so. What was left for me to do but put my own spin on this dynamic mechanic.

Day And Night

Creating a player order system which was dynamically tied to action selection then became easy. There was some trial and error around the number of actions and their relative power, and the eventual introduction of a complimentary currency system, but the Day and Night cards pretty much implemented themselves.

Players would set an initial turn order by placing their player counters on a set of cards numbered from one to however many players are in the game (Night cards), but beyond that, everything would be strategic decision making. Random cards drawn from a deck of cards with actions on them (Day cards) would be placed in ascending numerical order underneath the Night cards, and in Night card order, players would take it in turns to select a Day card by moving their player counter to the card they desired. Once all players had selected a Day card, then the Day cards would be activated in ascending order, with lower numbered cards being less powerful and high numbered cards more powerful. Once a Day card had been fully carried out, that player would move their player counter to the lowest available Night card, setting a (potentially) new player order for the next round.

There’s a fair few words, and there doesn’t seem to be an easier way of explaining it, but I was convinced that once players had played one round, they would understand exactly the mechanic and also the trade off between power and position.

Many adjustments have been made to tweak the system, but largely, this is how the system has remained, and will probably remain, right up to the release of the actual game. I can’t wait to share more about how Tenby will evolve, especially as I get closer to being able to create prototype copies to send out!

Thanks for reading, and happy gaming!