My first stand alone tabletop design was “Bloodthirsty Capitalist Backstabbing Hogs” back in 1989 (no, it was never published).  It was a game about corrupt governments using the military and the stock market to take over the world.

I created a prototype for BCBH off the top of my head.   Back then I used poster board, magic markers and borrowed my friend’s Mac to make simple cards to print at the local Kinkos.   It took a lot of work to build a prototype.  Even more work than today.  After a few tests, it was obvious the game was broken. The economics were off and combat was not balanced.  I used the “gut” method to adjust the game the best I could and tested again.   I was still broken.  I repeated this process for over a year and it was never right.    The foundation of the game was broken at its core.  This is when I learned an important lesion, math is king.

This is why I started on my Excel mathematical model for Dragon Brew before diving into other aspects of the game.  Dragon Brew is essentially a resource conversion game at it’s core.   Players use their brewers (workers) to gather and convert resources into gold, victory points, recipes or ingredients to brew beers.  The brewed beers are used to win victory points (from judges or by themselves) and gold.  Gold is also used to purchase ingredients, recipes and temporary workers.  At first glance it seems like a daunting game to balance, but really, it’s not.

The first step I do with every model is to create or pick a single value of currency for the game.   In this case I choose gold.  The entire model converts every action and resource into a common value of gold, allowing me to easily compare the values of different resources.

Next, I decided on what “labor” would be worth. How much value would using a worker create?  I chose five gold per labor action.  So, from there I broke out the core player actions in the game such as harvesting grain, boiling mash, researching, collecting magic ingredients and brewing beer.  I then had to average out the average output for these actions, accounting for growth, over three turns.  My computations ended up at:

Ingredients:

  • Grains = .7 Gold
  • Wort = 2 Gold
  • Magic Ingredient = 4.2 Gold
  • Mana Weed = 5.2 Gold

Now that I had the costs for each resource, I computed the purchase prices for the ingredients in the market trader cards and the return for each worker action.

Ingredients are added to recipe cards to build beers.  Each recipe cards gives provides a statistic (strength, color or bitterness), victory point and/or gold.    The values of these recipe card benefits are:

Recipe Benefits:

  • Gold = 1 Gold
  • Statistic = 2 Gold
  • Victory Point = 4.5 Gold

Matching the ingredient value along with the benefit, I insured the recipe cards were balanced.  It was important to me that all of the recipe cards, although different in benefit, had roughly the same value.

Lastly, I needed the model out the judge cards.  It was important the three judging characteristics (strength, color and bitterness) where evenly distributed through the deck so that one type of beer did not have an advantage.

The creation of a basic game model did not guarantee Dragon Brew game will be fun, but the foundation was mathematically balanced.   From there, I was ready to create a prototype.

Next chapter:  Chapter 3 – Creating a Prototype

dragon_brew_notes

In future chapters I will continue to tell you more about how Dragon Brew went from a concept on a beach to a Kickstarter project two years later.
Written By

Daniel George

Fellow geek and lovers of wine, women and song.... and board games.. Gotta have my board games.