This week Apple released my fourth eurogame iPhone release, Michael Schacht’s Gold!. It was a particularly exciting release for me not just because it was my first chance to work with Michael Schacht, but also because it was the first-ever (as far as I know) simultaneous release of a professional print game and an iPhone adaptation. Michael revealed abacusspiele’s edition of Gold! to fans at the Nuremberg Toy Fair on the same day that the iPhone edition became available in Apple’s iTunes stores.
To commemorate that release, and talk some more about the lessons learned in iPhone game designed, I’ve put together this article, discussing some of the more careful details that I had to consider when creating my newest game. If you’d like to see some of my other discussions of iPhone game design, I’ll point you toward Turning Reiner Knizia’s Money into an iPhone Game, Making Computers Think Like Auction Players (which I wrote for the release of Reiner Knizia’s High Society), and What Makes a Great Mobile EuroGame (which I wrote for the release of Reiner Knizia’s Kingdoms).
Before I get started on things learned from Michael Schacht’s Gold!, I should give you a quick synopsis of the game, since it’s not generally available in the USA yet. Basically, you’ve got cards in six colors and you’re trying to create triplets of the same color as the game proceeds. You do this by taking cards from a central set of cards which is periodically refilled. You have three ways to do so: by trading a donkey (-2) for any non-donkey; by trading a card for a card with a lower value than it (other than a donkey); or by taking the lowest value card. Those constraints create the fairly thoughtful strategy of the game.
With that said, here’s some discussion of three details:
1. Human Attention Needs to Be Carefully Attracted
One of the biggest problems with programming an iPhone game is keeping your players’ attention on stuff that’s happening. That’s because the iPhone game is behind a big “wall”: the capacitive multitouch screen. As a result, it’s easy to have a player’s eyes slide right past a change you’ve made if you don’t really highlight it.
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The way to highlight it is through the use of movement, which goes directly to the hard-wiring of our eyes and brains. And that’s exactly what I’ve done for most of our games, generally late in the development process (which means that I need to learn that this sort of thing is required, early on).
This iPhone screen shot nearby shows an example of what I mean. If you look you’ll see a fairly prominent triplet of cards to the left of the middle of the screen.
Whenever someone gets a triplet in Michael Schacht’s Gold!, it’s moved out to the middle of the screen, then moved back to the player’s hand to be stored. The two movements — with a pause in between to display what happened — were exactly what was needed to catch the eye.
I did the same sort of thing in Reiner Knizia’s Kingdoms, pulling a tile out of a player’s hand and enlarging it before moving it onto the board.
2. AI Can Be Written in a Multitude of Ways
Back when I wrote about Reiner Knizia’s Money, I said that for the AI “general strategies tended to produce better results than algorithms”. While that was certainly true for Money, it hasn’t followed through all of the games.
In fact, what I’ve discovered is that not only is AI one of the most challenging aspects of iPhone game design (right next to figuring out how to get everything into a 480×320 pixel viewscreen), but that it needs to be approached anew for each different game. Sadly, I’d had dreams when I wrote Money that I could keep reusing the same AI ideas, but other than certain administrative routines, that hasn’t been the case.
Michael Schacht’s Gold! required the most logically process-oriented AI of anything I’d written. The best AI was a long set of conditionals, that went something like this:
Can I swap a -2 to complete a triplet?
No. Can I take a low card to complete a triplet?
No. Can I swap a high card to complete a triplet?
No. Can I keep my next opponent from completing a triplet by taking a low card?
No. Can I keep my next opponent from completing a triplet by swapping a -2?
No …
This really contrasted with the more quantitive valuations I was able to write for most of Reiner Knizia’s games, where I crunched numbers and calculated values, threw everything into a pot, and eventually could make a decision based on these raw values. Contrariwise for Michael Schacht’s Gold! I really had to figure out what I thought was the best strategy, breaking it down step-by-step in my head, and then programming that in. (Fortunately, Michael was terrific about suggesting strategic nuances that I was missing.)
I think much of the difference comes from Knizia being a mathematician whereas Schacht is not, but it really underlined for me the different ways in which players — and programmers — need to think about game strategy.
3. Player Count Can Make a Huge Difference
Clearly we all know that player numbers make a huge difference for any game. For example, I personally find The Settlers of Catan a very enjoyable game for 3 or 4, but excessively long for 6. Whereas 7 Wonders works well with any number of players, though it starts to improve with 4+ as interesting patterns of waves and troughs appear for military strength and for goods production.
With Michael Schacht’s Gold!, you can only play with 2 or 3 players (though our iPhone version only supports 2 due to space concerns), and I really had to think about how the strategy changes between those two player counts.
For example, with two players, it’s a pretty high priority to stop your opponent from making a triplet. With three players, you probably still want to stop the next player from making a triplet. But do you stop the player two away from you from making a triplet? Even more complicated, do you do the first step of making that third player not get a triplet and depend on the other player to take the second step, if there are two cards that would need to be kept from him?
Round timing also raised an issue based on player number. A new set of cards is dealt to the middle of the table each time all of the cards are emptied from the middle of the table. However, the timing of that can change depending on whether players take a card or swap a card. And, this can be very relevant, as you generally want the first pick of a new set of cards, especially if you’ve got one or more pairs that are waiting to get that third card for completion, and especially if you have one or more -2s in your hand which would make it easy to take any new card.
So, how do you ensure you get that first grab? If you’re playing against a single opponent, it’s easy to do a swap instead of a take to make it so that you get the first shot at the new cards instead of your opponent. But, again things become more complicated with 3 players. If your right-hand opponent would usually get the new cards, you can similarly do a swap instead of a take to make yourself the first player. But is it worth it? How about if your left-hand opponent would otherwise get the first draw? Is it worth it for you to get the 2nd draw instead of the 3rd?
With a game like Reiner Knizia’s Money I could broadly assume that the game played similarly with each different number of players. In Reiner Knizia’s High Society, the AIs largely set the valuation of items over the course of the play, which allowed for automatic adaptation based on player count. However, Michael Schacht’s Gold! again offer up a different sort of game where very different strategies might be required.
Around the Corner
All of my iPhone games continue to be available through iTunes: Reiner Knizia’s Money, Reiner Knizia’s High Society, Reiner Knizia’s Kingdoms, and of course the brand-new Michael Schacht’s Gold!.
Beyond that, let me say welcome back! This is the first new gaming article that I’ve written since the death of BoardGameNews. My new material is going to be a bit erratic for the next couple of months as I slowly edit through five years of old material and make it available here. I do have some other new articles available for the near future, beginning with a continuation of my series on cooperative gaming.
My board game reviewing has also been pretty erratic lately, due to a massive writing project that I’m finishing. Since the death of BGN, I’ve written reviews of Sobek, Water Lily, Small World: Be Not Afraid, Lords of Vegas, Small World: Necromancer Island, and Sneaks & Snitches. You can also find all of my older reviews here at BGi (and I expect to add these newer reviews to the database as time allows).
This article copyright © 2011, Skotos Tech Inc.
Author’s Note: Alas, BGi — the site I used for this blog following BGN’s death — never bloomed as I hoped it would. Thus I never finished converting my old articles, and my board game writing stayed erratic for the next 17 months. That “massive” project (a now published AND out-of-print book called Designers & Dragons) helped out by eating up time for months further. Now that I have my own Mechanics & Meeples domain, I hope you’ll be seeing more new stuff here, and I definitely plan to get all the old stuff onto this site — though it might take a full year to do so. —SA, 6/24/12