From Battle Factory to Pax Robotica
by Gil Hova
I’ve been casting about for a new name for Battle Factory for awhile now, but I think I’ve finally hit on one: Pax Robotica.
My problem with the old name was that it sounded too much like a wargame. I strongly believe that a good game name prepares players for what they’re about to play. If the name is misleading, it creates a dissonance that the game has to overcome.
Like Hey, That’s My Fish. This is a tense and somewhat savage little board game whose title and cover art turn off anyone over the age of eight. I’ve had to twist arms to get people to play this game, and people are usually surprised at how much fun the game actually is. Even a more generic name like “Penguins” would have been more inviting.
Why borrow trouble? Name the game properly the first time, and players know what they’re in for.
So I have this economic game that sounds like a wargame. No good. I opened the issue up to my Twitter friends, and I got some great responses, especially from my friends Brett Myers and Sean Weitner. Brett eventually coined “Pax Robotica,” and Sean immediately jumped on it. I think I’m going to keep it.
As for the game’s latest playtest: it went very well. One of my playtesters, A, was playing her third game and won. She’s become one of the game’s most vocal fans. Pretty good for someone who wouldn’t play the game originally, and only relented when her boyfriend promised to buy her dinner.
It was interesting, because the other two players bid each other up like crazy on the first round. I think the winning bid was in the mid-twenties. That hurt them both for the rest of the game, as A and I were able to get bots on the board in the first couple of rounds. That seems to be a huge key to success in the game, as we made a good amount of money and points from it.
I suppose I could introduce rules to limit players’ bids in the first round, but I’d rather not. I can’t hold their hands, and I especially don’t want do do this with more rules. They’ll just have to figure it out for themselves (although a tip in the rulebook is probably a good idea).
I bought a Level 5 bot in Round 4, and that seemed to be my undoing. A entered the last round with more money than me, and overtook me with some big builds. She won by 9 points.
I’m now at the 80% mark, which means I’m halfway done. Any game designer can tell you this: half your work is getting your game to 80%. The other half is getting that last 20% done. Sometimes getting from 90% to 95% can be excruciating, because you have to tear down game elements you’ve trusted for months. You’re taking two steps backwards for what you hope will be five steps forward.
So what’s left?
My biggest concern with the game is still the complexity of building robots. Building a bot means getting money and victory points from the sale, and I don’t know if there’s any way to simplify that without lobotomizing the game. If I specify in the rules that one player is responsible for the scoreboard (like how players divide themselves in Power Grid into Banker, Resource Schlepper, and Power Plant Card-Flipper, or how there are Security and Communications Officers in Space Alert), then it might not be too bad.
I’ve finally gotten around to updating the components, and that’s made bot building much easier. Bots now stand in plastic stands, color-coded for each player. This makes bot placement more intuitive, because players can’t place the bots without the stands (before, they had to place their bots on cardboard squares, and this was easy to forget).
Ideally, I’d like there to be a tough choice between spending your money at the auction, on one big bot, or several smaller bots. Right now, it seems that several smaller bots is the dominant strategy. I may have to tweak some numbers to make the other two strategies more viable.
I’ve raised the High Bid reward to three points. I was worried that it was too much during our game, but now I’m thinking it’s okay. Lowering it back to two would make the auction irrelevant. I may even raise it to four or five, just to see if I can make the auction too powerful. Once I get to that stage, I can split the difference.
The game took about two hours with four players. So I’ve decided that this is a four player game at maximum. No more five-player dreams. Maybe I’ll make a lighter game with this auction mechanism for 6.
My first few playtests of a game are always with other designers, just so no one gets disappointed playing a broken game. With a new name, better components, and solidifying rules, I think Pax Robotica is finally ready for a non-designer playtest.
Pax Robotica is a great name. Will we see it at Protospiel?
I just picked up Hey, That’s My Fish recently. Good game. Yes, the title sucks.
Scotto and I just did a sort of conceptual prototype test of my 2009 Protospiel project yesterday. It was encouraging, but I still have a lot of work to do, and only about two months left!
Yes, Pax Robotica will be at Protospiel. Looking forward to seeing you there!
If you want the bot-buying strategy to vary more, you probably have to increase the price of bots in general, make sure that it’s only slightly cheaper to buy a level-2 bot than to buy 2 level-1 bots (and on up the hierarchy that way, so that the higher-level bots are always slightly less expensive than any combination of bots that would equal the same number, e.g., a level-3 bot would also be slightly cheaper than a level-2 and a level-1 combined), and make the victory points for higher-level bots higher than all lower-level bots (so no two levels offer the same number of victory points). I think that would do it.
On a side note, you may end up having to include extra bots for 4- and 5-player games, since they may be running out just a bit too early in those larger games as is.
Congrats again on getting Prolix licensed!
It’s a good point, Mark! I’m actually approaching it from a different angle. This probably deserves its own post, but I’m going to try having only three levels of bots: Level 1, Level 3, and Level 6. With 5 levels of bots, I’m seeing that two Level 4 bots are clearly more powerful than a single Level 5 bot. The idea with the new system is that one Level 6 bot will be about as powerful as two Level 3 bots. This will be a big carrot for players to upgrade.
I’ll have to change the bot quantities (and I may tailor them differently for 3 or 4 player games – no more 5 player games) and the money, but I think I have an idea about that. But overall, three bot levels makes the game simpler but hopefully stronger, and that’s a tradeoff I’m always willing to make.
We had a group of 5 players on Thursday night, and only one brought a game for more than 4 players except me, so 2 of the 3 we played were mine. If you can increase the number of players just by making a different amount of bots available and maybe a different amount of starting cash, it might be worth it.
Your solution seems fine except given the limited number of turns (5) and the multiplicity of battle fronts(8), it will be interesting to see if only 3 bot levels is enough. Let me know how it goes. Are you bringing it here on Saturday perchance?
The problem with 5p Pax Robotica is that the Bot Phase takes a long time to resolve, and a player who’s out of money may have to wait 15 minutes for other players to build and sell their bots. This wait isn’t so long in a 4p game, but it’s just too long in a 5p game.
I have some thoughts on splitting building and selling into two different phases to speed each one up, but it would make the game more complicated. I may save it for an expansion, if I can get the base game somewhere. That may allow a fifth player to join.
I don’t think there’ll be a problem with less granularity in the bot sales. I think it’ll make turn order more important, but I’m okay with that. We’ll see how it plays out on Saturday.
Mark, your feedback has been great. Please keep it coming!
Gil, I’m happy to help, and you’re a talented designer to take on such a complicated mechanic and get such good balance already that it keeps us coming back to play it again and again.
One way designers seem to get around waits is to give each player a maximum number of actions, so that all the phases can be done, but perhaps not in the same turn. I don’t know if you’d want to go there with Pax Robotica, because it could seriously throw off your balance, but imagine that the auction only gave you the order in which you took your turn, and every phase after that is an action choice, not an inevitable phase. Perhaps breaking up even the manufacture and the sales of the bots into two separate actions, as you suggest. Maybe making the scrap heap worth one or two actions instead of being a card, so players without money still had an option to sell bots.
With multiple action choices, even players who are awaiting their turn become involved because they may have to revise their choices once they see what previous players have chosen to do.
I still think it’s possible that the number of available bots and the starting cash would be the only things that might need to change if you vary from 2 to 5 players. I noticed in the last play test with just four of us how quickly the bots ran out, but that might be inevitable: If someone starts specializing in one type of bot, it’s possible it might drive the other players into building only the three other bots and depleting their supplies earlier.
I think you’re really close to done with this game. I’m having to take a break from redesigning Laundromat, because I hate doing major revisions. In the meantime, I’m procrastinating by writing a novel, which is not bad, since that was what I was trained for. 😉
Thanks for the kind words, Mark!
“One way designers seem to get around waits is to give each player a maximum number of actions, so that all the phases can be done, but perhaps not in the same turn. I don’t know if you’d want to go there with Pax Robotica, because it could seriously throw off your balance, but imagine that the auction only gave you the order in which you took your turn, and every phase after that is an action choice, not an inevitable phase. Perhaps breaking up even the manufacture and the sales of the bots into two separate actions, as you suggest. Maybe making the scrap heap worth one or two actions instead of being a card, so players without money still had an option to sell bots.”
Yeah, I really don’t want to go there with Pax Robotica, because I don’t want players to have to account for built but un-sold bots. The game is complex and fiddly enough, and I think that would put it over the top.
It’s funny, because my idea for the expansion is almost exactly yours: split up building and selling bots into two actions. It would introduce the potentially nasty problem of not being able to sell a bot that you built, but I’m envisioning being able to sell to a black market for lots of money but not a lot of points, or to the government for a lot of points but not a lot of money. Maybe even having a rule that if the black market’s robot power becomes more powerful than the government by a certain amount, something Really Bad would happen.
It’s intriguing, and it might be ultimately faster… but it would be much more complicated, so I’m thinking of leaving it as an expansion.
“I still think it’s possible that the number of available bots and the starting cash would be the only things that might need to change if you vary from 2 to 5 players. I noticed in the last play test with just four of us how quickly the bots ran out, but that might be inevitable: If someone starts specializing in one type of bot, it’s possible it might drive the other players into building only the three other bots and depleting their supplies earlier.”
My concern with the 5-player game isn’t the resource count. I think the resource count is easily modified to account for the extra player. The problems are that a 5-player game takes too long, and that players have to wait too much time between turns. The expansion rules may fix that, but the base game will be 3-4 players.
I don’t see Pax Robotica being a 2-player game, just because I tend to not like 2-player auction games.
I don’t mind the bots drying up, forcing players up to the next level. It might be a little too tight right now, but I want limited bot count to be a factor in the game.
“I think you’re really close to done with this game. I’m having to take a break from redesigning Laundromat, because I hate doing major revisions. In the meantime, I’m procrastinating by writing a novel, which is not bad, since that was what I was trained for.”
There are much worse ways of procrastinating! And you’ll get back to Laundromat with a fresh perspective. That’s always so invaluable.
I’m glad you think I’m close to done! I tend to fiddle with my designs too much, so I never see myself as close to done. 🙂 But I’m quite surprised at how quickly this game matured.