Pax Robotica Retheme vs. The Cringe Rule
by Gil Hova
Hello again.
After BGG.CON, I thought Pax Robotica wasn’t playing right. It had some minor issues, but its biggest problem was that it wasn’t playing like a robot fighting game. It really played more like a typical Euro cube-grinder.
Publishers and designers don’t like Euro games with American themes, so I decided that I’d American-ize Pax. But I liked the game as it was. So I figured I’d split off the current version as a generic Euro city-building game.
I just had my first playtest of the game this weekend. And it broke the Cringe Rule.
What’s the Cringe Rule, you ask? Simple. If I cringe while teaching the rules, even a little, something’s wrong. All game designers know the cringe. You’re up at a point of the game rules you’re not 100% confident about, and you figure that if you speak a little faster, or maybe mumble that bit, the players will just nod and you can move on.
More likely than not, they’ll ask that you repeat the cringeworthy part, and then you’re stuck in a positive cringe loop. Nothing worse than that!
So I cringed a whole bunch during the game, and I decided midway through the first round to go back to some kind of war-profiteer theme.
Now I’m not sure what to do. Do I continue with the American-ization of the game (which seems to have stalled, out of typical lack of time)? Do I go with some silly fantasy war theme for the game currently known as Pax? It is possible.
We shall see. For now, I’m happy going back to fighting robots. It’s a better theme. People like it. And I promise you, folks: I will never again think of designing a game about city-building, or constructing a castle or cathedral, or trading silk in the 16th Century Mediterranean Sea. I promise.
Formal Ferret Games 
Gil,
I certainly know what you mean about feeling embarassed/guilty over some particular rule in a game — that’s a great red flag for rules that need to be simplified or cut out.
With Pax, it’s true that you have a fairly serious game about what seems like a fairly breezy theme. But I think the problems in really selling the theme, to the extent that there are any, might relate more to the facts that (a) we’re building fighting robots, but they don’t actually fight (except through a very abstract area majority mechanic with some mild restrictions), and (b) the robot-building is pretty scripted. What if players had more flexibility to customize their robots? Maybe they can have one model of robot that’s in R&D, for which they are acquiring technologies, and another that is in commercialization, which goes out to fight as is. And what if, then, when a battle is triggered, there is some quick but non-trivial combat mechanic in which the robots fight using the technologies that you’ve built into them?
This seems to offer some potential of player interaction; if I’m trying to decide who to develop robots for as a target market, my decision to slap pontoons on my robot to make it sea-worthy might be influenced by whether other players are tooling up to sell to the “aquatic” zone or not.
I’ll leave the practical details of how to implement the idea to you, if it’s at all interesting. But thematically, it seems you want the possibility for all sorts of wacky interactions between the techs; you want the “buzzsaw” attachment to be able to lop off an opponent’s missile guidance system, resulting in missiles that go askew and hit targets randomly, or a “pea shooter” attachment that can pop an opponent’s “mylar balloon” attachement, sending that robot crashing to the ground, unless it has the “pogo stick landing gear” attachment, in which case levitating and dropping then becomes a strategy, etc.
When I played the game at BGG.con I don’t think the problem was that the game wasn’t “Ameritrashy” enough – the problem was that it wasn’t evocative of the theme. We liked the theme of the game, but we thought there were some things that would better evoke the theme. Like Jeff says above, it’s agame about robot fighting, but the robots don’t actually fight.
However, I think it’s important for the “fighting” to resolve in a snap – the game isn’t really about the fighting itself, it’s about selling robots – the robot fighting has a large impact though on your choices (or I think it should anyway). So the combat should be straightforward (players should know how it’ll play out), but interesting (players should be able to directly affect the outcome by selling robots).
My main suggestion after playing was that when you line up robots against each other (as you already do) – they should actually fight the opposing robots directly – rather than “the weakest robot furthest to the right dies”. If the robots face off directly, then it matters where you place each robot.
And if the resolution of a 1-on-1 fight depends on who’s fighting who, then it also matters which robot you place in a particular location. If I recall, my thoughts on that subject were that a stronger robot facing a weaker robot would have an advantage, and also there could be a sort of rock-paper-scissors relationship between the robot types. So a fairly simple comparison of the 2 robots indicates the result.
As for the overall battle result, after the robots show down it must be decided somehow which side “won” the battle. It stands to reason that the side with stronger robots would win the battle… 3 level 3 robots should win over 2 level 3 robots. However, maybe 5 level 1 robots should win vs 1 level 3 robot.
The resolution of combat could take all that into account and once a winner is determined – the whole point here – players can be rewarded for having helped them win. The other main issue I remember after playing was that you were rewarded for surviving robots on either side of the fight, when really you should be rewarded only for robots on the winning side. Thus, selling robots to anyone makes you money, but selling robots to the eventual winners scores you points. This allows players to make strategic decisions about which bot they sell and to whom they sell it.
What I don’t think the game needs is a complicated system of upgrades, weapons, armor, and modifiers for combat. It may sound like that’s what I was suggesting, but I think the combat could be very streamlined, yet have some of those elements built in. Too much effort on the bot combat takes away from the meat of the game which is actually “which bots do I make and who do I sell them to?”
I’ll admit that the game, when I’ve played it, seems to be more about the economic engine than it is about fighting. The removal of robots doesn’t feel like combat.
What about tweaking the theme a bit?
Here’s one idea that gets rid of the war but keeps the robots: The robots do various kinds of jobs and replace human workers. Robots are removed because the old, lower level models become obsolete. Alternately, the human population dwindles and doesn’t need as many robots any more; perhaps they eventually become sentient and destroy the city where they’re working.
I am not sure how much of the game mechanics would need to be reworked to fit this alternate theme, but it would make sense out of the economic focus of the game. Once a player sells a bunch of janitor robots to Central City, that player doesn’t get to control the robots directly but does have an interest in them doing well.
I agree with Seth that a quick-to-resolve combat mechanic is key, and a 1-on-1 comparison of bots is a fine way to do that. I don’t agree that special powers should be dismissed out of hand. It all comes down to what the goal of the game is. At present, the technology system really just boils down to “where am I entitled to place bots”, which is fine if you want this to be an economic game, but if you really want to bring the theme front and center, giving some flavor to the technologies is a good option to consider. I wouldn’t advocate using an RPS approach, but it might not be necessary to go all the way in the direction of fully customizable bots as I suggested, either.
Maybe it’s simply that each bot type has a special power that goes along with it; maybe it’s somewhat dependent on the other bots that are near it. For example, maybe there’s a “ski bot” that can “sweep down” out of a mountain space and assist a bot in a plains space next to it (thus possibly fighting into two battles in a single turn), but it needs to be airlifted to the mountain space by the “heli-bot”, which can reposition bots, etc. Thinking about simply, terrain-specific functionality that each bot could have could give the ability to form combos and interesting combat effects.
However, this idea actually places more emphasis on the combat system vis a vis the economic system, because a bot’s true “value” becomes more positional. That’s why I’d lean a bit more towards a “customizable bots” approach, because you can get the same effects, but all hard-wired into a single bot, and the number of effects on a given bot set its particular value. So the cost/benefit calculation is easier to run for the player, even though the complexity could be a bit higher.
Whatever way you go, the important thing is that the players need to care who they sell the bots to. That’s your theme. You make money by selling bots, but in order to score well it needs to matter which bots you sold and to whom you sold them.
Combo-ing bots is an interesting idea, but I think it might be out of place here because it puts more emphasis on micromanaging the battles, something I think shouldn’t be too prevalent here.
Battle resolution COULD simply be “add up the total attack value of each side and the bigger one wins” – but that takes away from the “which bot do I place and where do I place it?” question. You don’t want people just piling on bots in the ‘winning’ side of a fight in order to capture points (or do you? I thin that would not be as interesting).
Another aspect of the combat which I think would be good (and this goes along with 1-on-1 robot fights) is that a robot might live through a battle, but if it does it ought to be damaged some. This could be as simple as reducing a level 3 bot to a level 1 bot (since it’s “damaged”), or it could be a damage counter (several of which will destroy the bot), or a health indicator at one side of the bot tile, and you rotate the bot to show mow damaged it is (like In the Shadow of the Emperor)… some simple way to reflect that the bot has been ‘used’ a bit. The reason this could be important is so that a country which ends up buying a bunch of high level bots will not simply win every battle – they will suffer attrition and the opposing country could potentially win the next battle. This is probably a necessary component if there is to be incentive in investing in a country that lost a prior battle.
I’d like to re-read my post-playing-the-game-email to see what I was thinking at the time.
I like being a war profiteer and not a general. I don’t need to see immediate results for battles of bots I constructed. Too many other games do that. I like the fact that the battles are just confirmation of good economic decisions and timing, and not head-to-head combat. As in life, an entire line of robots is likely to attack simultaneously, and they are unlikely to maintain formation like some 18th century European army. The weaker and less experienced bots are more apt to be defeated, so the current setup matches the theme.
All I’ve ever thought the game needed was some balancing of numbers — income, costs, VP. Many of the revision suggestions above would really complicate a good straightforward game.
It makes me think of my reticence to ask for comments on nearly finished games from boardgame nerds, or worse, other board game designers. They usually suggest really great creative changes that would make it an entirely different game.
I know a lot of folks go for the theme first, and give it primacy, so that the game play must conform to it. For me, I appreciate game play most, and theme just helps with remembering rules and banter. 🙂
Wow everyone, thanks for the great input!
I’m still not sure what I’m going to do. All this feedback is fantastic.
I’m not too sure which tack I’m going to take yet. Seth’s one-on-one idea has always had appeal (and your idea of stocks for nations still might end up in the game), but I like the way the current system minimizes decision points. Instead of having five different boxes per country to sell to, you have just one.
Perhaps I can have it both ways. I may try the one-on-one thing in my next playtest. That would mean allowing upgrades, because if someone places a 6 across from your 3, you should have a way to react.
My only problem with all this, as Mark points out, is that it’s all a little athematic. We’re not generals here, just war profiteers. We should only have mild interest, at best, in which side wins (so I disagree with Seth on that point!). If I can get the game to be about most money instead of VP, then it would be even better… although I can live VP representing prestige or success, hackneyed as it is.
“We’re not generals here, just war profiteers. ”
I think it’s possible to have a combat mechanic that is scripted, and therefore out of the players’ direct control, but that still is interesting in some way.
Let me play devil’s advocate on the theme for a minute. If we are simply war profiteers, why do we care about the battles /at all/? Why aren’t we simply filling orders for bots? The answer will likely be along the lines of, “because we have to see how the bots perform in battle to decide whether they were good enough”. But here’s the thing — there is no sense in which the bots “fail” in battle; it’s simpy a question of whether the players as a whole sold more valuable bots to one side or the other. But the countries will buy bots, at full value, regardless of whether they actually derive an advantage from them or not.
So, a slightly more convoluted combat resolution would provide a way for bots to truly need to perform in battle. A different way of achieving a similar effect, albeit in a totally different way, might be to have a variable payout matrix. Simply put, a country that is currently losing a battle will pay more for a bot that pushes them over the edge than they will pay when they are already in the lead. This would tend to make the battles closer, will create some risk for players in buying that Level 5 Airbot — they may not be able to sell it for any more than a Level 1 Airbot, eg — and may add some nice brinksmanship.
I agree with Jeff – that it’s possible to have a combat mechanic that is scripted, and therefore out of the players’ direct control, but that still is interesting in some way. And to answer his question (“If we are simply war profiteers, why do we care about the battles /at all/? Why aren’t we simply filling orders for bots?”), in my mind that’s the crux of the theme, war profiteers deciding the course of battles! I haven’t described my entire set of suggestions which I sent Gil, but part of it was a sort of reward for players to ensure one side wins the fight over another. Gil alluded to it in his last reply, to do with “stock” in a country. That probably sounds more complicated than I think it really is, but in short I was trying to suggest that the game would be more interesting (and the war profiteer theme cooler) if the players were interested in who won the wars as well as just who will buy their bots. If all they care about is selling bots, you could forget the whole war system altogether and make the game like Automobile or something! I contend that would be lame.
As for the one-on-one robot fighting, that too was more a part of a larger suggestion for how combat is resolved – the bigger picture in my full suggestion was that the entire force of bots attack the other entire force, and any uncontested robots “do damage” so to speak to the country itself, and the battle rages on until the country has taken (say) 3 damage… so if you block a big bot with a small bot, it’ll stop the big bot from hitting the country once, maybe twice, but will then die (having damaged the bigger bot) before the bog bot actually damages the country – and if the little bot in that example was on the side that outnumbered the opponent with bots, then the battle might end before the bigger bot ever actually damages the country. To me that did a number of things to help the interestingness of the game – it supplied a reason to sell THIS bot to THIS country, it supplied a reason to put the bot you sold in one slot over another, it made the winning side lose power (attrition) so that the same side wouldn’t necessarily win each battle, and it was easy to resolve and streamlined the game (all the complication was built into the system, players simply place bots and get paid).
To address Gil’s comment “if someone places a 6 across from your 3, you should have a way to react.”: yeah, you sell another bot to the country!
I agree that a side which has lost might ought to pay more money for bots, that would add an opposite incentive to the “supply the same country over and over” incentive you get from (a) Gil’s discount cards (which I’d replace with…) and (b) my “stock” mechanism suggestion (which I think was similar to the discounts he had). In addition, there’s already a limited amount of space for bots, so at some point it might be worth selling a weak bot to a country you’d like to see lose, if it won’t change the final outcome of a battle because it’ll get you cash, and maybe it’;l also help make sure the country you want to win is weak enough to need more of your bots.
So with the Damage thing, it sort of IS like a sense that they fail in battle. Not fail perse, but they would die over time.
Gil, as far as minimizing decision points, I think one “problem” with the game was that the decision points (especially if there were extra ones) were not in the right place. It’s a game about selling bots to countries – the decision points should be “which bots do I make” and then “who do I sell them to” – those decisions need to be driven by things like “what will this country pay” and “how do I score points (or otherwise progress toward winning)?”. It’s possible that $=VP is a good idea in this game, as you’re a “Profiteer” and are therefore out to profit… I personally prefer games in which the resources are distinct from the score though because it tends to offer good decisions such as “do I sell this her for more money, or over here for more points?”
I haven’t read the suggestions I sent Gil, but I could probably dig them up and post them here if anyone is interested in reading the full thing. Most of my game comments sort of go together, so the stuff I’m saying might make more sense if viewed in context. Let me know if I should post that here…
There are enough suggestions here that it’s worth doing a solo playtest. Sadly, I won’t have time to do that until next week at earliest.
I’d like to try the one-on-one rule.
There’s already a rule that makes players care about what side they’re selling to, but it only kicks in at the end of the game. I’ll take a look at how it could work with the one-on-one rule.
I may bring Pax to Spielbany, but if it comes out, it would be with the current rules.