Chaos theory has been adopted by plenty of books and films about parks filled with dinosaurs over the years, but in my eyes, the best way to explore it is in games. A game can give you a simple set of rules that turn into a complex minefield of deep strategy and forethought within a couple of turns, and it can really make use of the butterfly effect in interesting ways. Of course, striking the balance between elegant and oversimple is what game design is all about, and almost all the games at this Playup were aiming for that sweet spot. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to play all the games on show, but that doesn’t mean I was ignoring the games altogether, but we’ll get to that!

Flip Flop

Keeping it small and deceptive was Eeshwar Rajagopalan’s Flip Flop, a two-player game about territory and shape-making. The last time I saw Flip Flop was at Playup 5, and it’s obvious that the game’s had an overhaul based on the feedback it received. The small board was still there, but the focus has shifted from cascading flips to positioning an agent and controlling token colours on the board. If you can make a shape out of your colour that matches a card on the table and your agent is in it, you get points. It’s great to see these changes, especially because they work so well.

As it stands, the mechanics are solid enough that Eeshwar could release the game right now. The rules were so simple that newcomers could pick up and play it but offered enough depth for a satisfying amount of challenge. The addition of the agent made all the difference, since it allowed me to draw my focus to specific regions of the board instead of having to take the whole board in at once. The only thing the game really needs now is balancing.

Due to the simplicity of the rules, the scoring system was a little broken. When you made any shape apart from a line, you could score one point, but a line would get you three. Getting the line was difficult, but I managed to get it, and from that point on, the game was mine. There was no way that I could be beaten, which made the game less tense for me and my opponent, but that was the only real problem with the game! The improvements made since I played Thirtysix have really helped it evolve, and I’m really glad Eeshwar has listened to the feedback to improve the game!

Newfoundland

Rolling with the evolving complexity approach was Alex and Chris’ Newfoundland, a settlement game with a board that took up an entire table. I would love to describe exactly what the game was about, but a playthrough took a few hours, so there was only one group that got to try it for the whole Playup session. The game was explained to me by the devs though, so I did understand some of the core mechanics involved. The most important one that I saw was the way that players were broken into the rules.

Despite the huge board size, the game introduced players to the rules as the game progressed. Tiles were put on the board in player’s turns, so the rules only came up as they were needed, and there was no laborious set-up beforehand. The game was so easy to grasp that the kids playing it weren’t phased by the hugeness of the board. Apart from thinking this was an ingenious way to design a game of this size, once it got going, everyone still had a firm grasp of what was happening.

The board went from barren to seemingly incomprehensible in the space of an hour, but what surprised me was that none of the players (including the kids) were overwhelmed. The slow break-in meant that what looked like utter chaos from the outside was perfectly reasonable to someone playing the game. On top of that, the size of the board meant that the simplicity of the rules could be taken to logical extremes, which is always awesome to watch unfold. I would have loved to give it a go myself, but hopefully we see it again at a future Playup!

Pyrrhic

The other entry from Alex and Chris was a decidedly more traditional game that shared many traits with Newfoundland. Introduced to me as their “wargame offering”, Pyrrhic is all about positioning your troops and utilising terrain. Again, I wasn’t able to play the game since it took at least an hour to play, but I had a very close eye on one playthrough. It shared the same tile placement system as Newfoundland but opted for a troop deployment system before the game began. While it wasn’t quite as newbie friendly as their other game, Pyrrhic was still accessible to anyone willing to try it out.

Both games Alex and Chris offered seemed to go with the ‘simple rules done big’ mentality. Pyrrhic had four pages of rules that were easier to wrap your head around than an episode of Parks and Rec, and this was the game that was meant to be more complex. Pyrrhic required a bit more investment, but the basic ideas of laying down terrain as the game progressed and playing on a huge board were carried across. It was all very quick to learn and easy to play, so the next step is to appeal to veteran wargamers.

While I can appreciate the straightforward rules, there’s room to give players more freedom in how they enter the game. Pre-made armies are great for beginners to absorb the rules, but old wargamers like myself like to have a bit more control over our army’s composition. There’s already very little set-up for the game, and the base is solid, so the devs should think about rules that add a bit more nuance and player control to the game to attract those who want something a bit meatier. I wanted to try it out quite badly, but alas, time wasn’t on my side.

This Playup was a bit like looking at different ways to approach the same challenge of balancing complexity with simplicity. Some were big, some were small, but they all brought something to the table. I may not have been able to try out half the games, but I’m hoping I get to see them come back for future Playups!

Social games are a rare experience here in Perth. It’s not often that something like an escape room shows up, and it probably goes without saying that this is true of past playups too. Playups usually have a bunch of different games in the room that don’t take too long to try out, but this time was a little different. First, we had a special venue: Carpe Coffee, which was generously kept open late just for us. Second, instead of getting as many devs into the room as possible, the evening focused on Anthony Sweet’s Mafioso-inspired work in progress: Grand City. Controllers were traded for conversations and the smell of betrayal was in the air (as well as a good dose of upbeat jazz), and it was evident that Anthony got plenty of ideas from watching our organised crimes pan out.

The basic premise of Grand City is that the players are Al Capone wannabes in 1930s Chicago, vying for a place in one of three big families. The game was introduced to us, by Anthony, as an eclectic mix of smaller games that came together through socialising and, uh, murder. There was a little card trading, some territory control and a whole bunch of other mechanics that fed into who you talked to and who you, uh, murdered. With that in mind, I donned my new persona of Allegra DeLinguini and started grovelling to the first head honcho I could find.

After the basic mechanics were explained, three family bosses were chosen, each appointing a right hand man/woman. From there, it was up to each player to get chatting, pick sides and complete tasks for the bosses to try and earn respect for the family. The trick was that the bosses couldn’t get their hands dirty, so it was up to the underlings to do their organised bidding. Of course, the underlings might want to rise up, and there were plenty of freedom in the game to let someone gang up on someone higher up, or pull off something even more devious.

About an hour into the game, people started noticing two unaligned criminals making a name for themselves. I had to act before they started getting a little too much respect to be dealt with, so I started planning out a hit. No one really understood how a hit was carried out, but this was organised crime, and I had a card up my sleeve. Literally; I had a Contract Hit card, but I wasn’t sure how it worked. If was there was one thing that needed improvement, it was the way game mechanics were explained to players, but there was a lot of fun to be had in having secrets floating around the room.

The word was spreading that a hit was being planned, but who exactly was getting hit wasn’t out yet. Paranoia was in the air, and it didn’t help that these two unaligned crims owned more cards than everyone else combined. At the rate they were going, they were on their way to declaring themselves a new family… Which they did. It wasn’t that we were told that we could make a new family, but Anthony was more than happy to accommodate a new lineage of organised crime. I really enjoyed that fluffiness of the rules, since it also allowed me to kill off poor old Glen (pictured below, post-death) after a sneaky last-minute target change.

… Trust me, he was way cheerier after I killed him.

It wasn’t easy watching the life fade from another man’s eyes, but the respect I’d earned for the family made it a bit easier to gloat about. Glen may have been sleeping with the fishes, but the original problem still remained. The two card-hoarders were cementing themselves as the new unofficial family to look out for, and no one else was willing to rub them the wrong way. So, some of the families started bargaining with the powerhouse duo to try and get the game moving again.

See, the new family wasn’t a problem because they were getting the most respect, but they were stifling up the card economy by holding onto everything. The card aspect of the game worked by getting ‘tips’ (or jobs) to complete using other cards, like baseball bat cards for a stick-up tip, which gave out respect and new cards. The tip cards were never reshuffled into the deck that everyone drew from though, so when those two rogue gangsters held onto all the cards, there was no way to get new cards. My first reaction was to try and kill them, but then something funny happened.

I don’t know if it was part of the game, but the person who rewarded us for finishing jobs kinda broke the rules. Without letting Anthony on, she snuck a tip card into my hand. Remember what I said about the flexibility of the rules? Turns out that it ran both ways. This was, for me at least, the best part of Grand City. Here we were, supposed gangsters and kings of organised crime, playing with poker chips and clearly defined rules (for those in the know, at least), but breaking them was totally fair game. Despite the generosity of this corrupt jazz club owner, there was only a few minutes left in the game, and my family’s fate was sealed.

Anthony called time and unveiled which family ruled this town, but he also explained a few other things. His intent is to use the game at something like a dinner event, which sounds spectacular. I can just see a room of well-dressed gangsters eating politely while the evil eye circulates like a family tommy gun. The other thing Anthony mentioned was that he intended for the cards and other items to be used by the players however they wanted, even destroyed. For a social game, destroying valuable items offers a lot of potential for mind messing, but the general response was that this would need to be made abundantly clear to the players from the start.

Regardless of a few opaque rules, everyone thought that Grand City was a great game brimming with potential. It was clear at the end of the night that Anthony had taken a lot from what had happened, and I’m excited to find out what changes are made going forward! Of course, a huge thank you to Carpe Coffee for hosting the event and everyone who helped out running the game! As for the next playup, I’m sure we’ll announce something soon, so stay tuned!

It seems that the more Playups we hold, the more I run into board games and VR. When you think about it, board games and VR games are two sides of the same reality. Both involve that fleshy body of yours to make things happen, but only one of them requires you to be rendered sixty times a second. Still, both provide completely different avenues of expression for developers to explore, as evidenced by the fine games from the latest Playup!

Thirtysix

Well and truly cemented in the world of bone and blood was Eeshwar Rajagopolan’s Thirtysix, a competitive board game about flipping dice and territorial dominance. The game is played on a 6×6 board of squares with 18 dice per player (three 1’s, three 2’s, etc). The idea is to fill areas of the board with your colour of dice, a bit like Go. The trick is that any dice placed adjacent to another dice with the same number (including your opponent’s) flips face, so a 6 goes to a 1, a 5 to a 2, and a 4 to a 3. This creates a ripple effect on any unflipped dice, but this mechanic led to a few issues.

While the game is simple to grasp, the crucial mechanic that needed to be finalised is how the dice flipping is resolved. Resolving dice by flipping lines was the original mechanic, but flipping adjacent die one by one was suggested to make tracking which ones already flipped easier. The thing is that these two methods make for very different outcomes, and flipping by adjacency caused more of a headache than flipping by line. However, the question of which method of flipping would be more suited for the game required factoring in the way territory is gained.

The main way of gaining points is through holding territories, areas of same-coloured dice that doubled their face value of at the end of the game. Flipping had no reward by itself, but you could wreck your opponents territory with a well placed die to flip them all to a lower face value. The thing is, there was no incentive to play aggressively because you just needed to make sure you weren’t flipped to ensure a decent score. Depending on if flipping was rewarded and how it was resolved would promote different strategies to be used. This comes down to the sort of game Eeshwar hopes to make, but he’s onto something good, it just needs the kinks worked out.

If you’d like to check out Thirtysix for yourself (which I’d recommend doing), you can check out the game’s website.

DrewFX Nanotek Gladiators

Hiding behind a cacophony of blackboards and wires was DrewFX’s Nanotek Gladiators, a game that brings everything ’80s games wanted to be to life. If you’ve ever seen Tron, you’ll know exactly what this game is about; Two players stand atop neon rings, blasting away at one another to knock the other off. The game is played with a Kinect and an Oculus Rift to really hammer home that you’re inside this awesome digital world. It’s definitely a cool concept, but it’s translation from the big screen could benefit from some tweaking.

Fundamentally, the game is about shooting at a stationary target. While that’s fine for a movie, it doesn’t do much in helping engage the player in an actual game. You can move your physical body, but your feet are firmly planted on your rings in the game world. The only significant movement you can make is adjusting your shield, so the game feels quite static. If there were multiple rings that the player could jump between or integrating movement in other ways, it might help to alleviate this feeling. However, the big issue was with regards to the game’s elaborate set up.

Before being able to hop into the game, it needed to be set up. This involved setting up both Kinects, Oculus Rifts, a server, and the two clients with the players. This not only involved a lot of wires but also a lot of places where the game’s system could fail. The design of the game required a lot of moving parts, but if there was anywhere that could be streamlined (making a client a server, only using one Kinect), it would remove hassle while setting up and when trying to test the game.

If you’d like to see more of drewFX’s work, you can drop by his website.

Wick RPG System

After coming back into reality, I snuck into Eeshwar’s Wick RPG system, a simple set of rules that only required two decks of cards and some poker chips to play. The system was designed for quick RPG sessions, like Fiasco or Paranoia without the character sheet. In lieu of niggly statistics, everyone is given a number of assets (ie., poker chips) to play cards that help them make actions. Everyone has their own mini decks, a hand of five cards for each challenge they face and that’s pretty much it.

The simplicity of the Wick system means that anyone can come in mid-game and get involved within a couple of minutes… Which is exactly what I did. After watching a challenge be overcome, I understood how the system worked. I didn’t need a rulebook or a cheat sheet, I could just sit down and play. If Eeshwar was out to make an easy system to grasp, he did, and it’d be a shame if future iterations sacrificed this simplicity for nuance. That said, the current mechanics didn’t give a lot of wiggle room for complications.

While the mechanics were easy to grasp, they were very one-offish. Challenges appeared, actions were taken and then resolved, but there was no room for the GM to deliver a multi-layered challenge. There were talks of implementing rules for competition between players, but the underlying mechanics would need some more elaboration before developing rules for in-fighting. Once the system is ready for providing interesting and varied challenges, then the focus should move into making everyone hate each other… In the most fun way, of course.

It was a small Playup, but it was filled with great feedback from all involved. Even without any ‘real’ video games on show, everyone got into what was on offer and helped out the devs. VR and board games are very different from our usual line up of controllers and mobile games, but it’s always good to see the variety of games that come through these events.

Playup After Dark #4 is already in the works, so make sure to stay tuned for when dates are announced!

After a few months of downtime, Playup Perth was back, and word had spread quick. Maybe it was the heat, maybe it was the allure of beer, but the SK Games office was packed out yet again, and whatever feedback the devs were hoping for they got in swathes. There were games for PC, board games, a mobile game, and games that people just brought along to try out, which meant there was something guaranteed to salivate everyone’s gaming tastebuds. So, how were the games?

BrambleLash

Occupying the inside projector was Bytesprite’s Bamblebrash, a two player single-stick bullet-hell game that required communication to succeed. You control one of two flower-people joined together by a long strand of thorny bramble, which is your one and only weapon against the waves of poisonous enemies coming to get you. You and whoever is controlling the other flower-person must co-ordinate your movements to use the bramble, destroy the enemies and survive another wave. It’s a unique mechanic that works nicely, but a few niggly things bugged the testers.

The most prominent annoyance was one of the enemy types that spawned, lovingly coined ‘The Red Dude’ by those who endured it’s punishment. The Red Dude wasn’t red himself, but he did fire little red pellets that broke the bramble, which effectively stopped everyone from getting past that wave. Part of the problem was that there were no obstacles or terrain that could be used to block the shots, but lowering the frequency of the shots was one suggestion to avoid the feeling of hitting a wall.

Another suggestion was with regard to the pulling mechanic. As long as the bramble was still connecting the player, one could pull the other closer to them by holding a button. They couldn’t pull them from one side of the level to the other, but the player being pulled was invincible while being dragged. One suggestion was to make this ‘pull’ directional to open up some more interesting tactical movements, something the devs hadn’t contemplated including. Whether it’s included or not, the game was a hit with everyone who played it, myself included!

You can follow BrambleLash from the developer’s website, facebook or Twitter pages.

Arbalest 3035

Out the back with another projector was Arbalest 3035, an Asteroids-esque multi-player game with a nifty power up system. It’s hard not to compare the game to Asteroids because it shared the game’s toroidal geometry mechanic (ie., one side of the screen joined the other), but there was more to it than just blasting rocks. The fact that it was multi-player focused added a completely different twist to a classic game that I had never even thought of, and while it was definitely cool, there were some possible improvements on offer.

One of the major suggestions was making the power up system more transparent. As you flew around, coloured orbs would show up. Pick up three of them, and you got a power up. Depending what order you picked them up in would determine what power up you got, but until you used it, you wouldn’t know what power up you had. Given the frantic nature of the game, holding off on a power up was an issue as well, since you’d be hammering away at the shoot button until your finger broke. Showing what power up you had, making them last longer and slower shooting speed were all thrown around as suggestions.

The other main aspect of the game was colliding into other players. Whenever you rammed someone, you’d both spin out of control for a few seconds and be unable to shoot. Some people (including me) thought this went on for way too long, but others thought it felt too short. One suggestion was to keep the duration the same but allow the player to still shoot wildly so that they didn’t feel totally helpless. Despite these issues, the game was highly enjoyable, and I’m excited to see what direction the Bear Studios takes it.

You can follow Bear-Tooth Studios on their website and on Twitter.

Hostile Encounters

Set up on the mobile projector in our pockets was Hostile Encounters, a real time strategy game for mobile where the player must destroy the enemy space ship. The dev wasn’t to be at the event proper, but he was there in spirit (and through Skype) and hopefully still got some helpful feedback. I wasn’t able to speak to him at the event, but I did try the game out once I got home, and while the potential is there for a killer game, it just needs some tweaking.

The first time I played the game, I was a bit bewildered by what was happening. There were buttons to push, a ship to take down and not much in the way of on-screen feedback. I had a vague idea of what each button did, but there wasn’t any indication as to what they costed, how long they lasted or whether they were successful or not (which was a problem when it came to hacking). Putting in more visual feedback would help in solving the problem, as well as making it easier to break newbies into it.

The main concern I had was in the game’s simplicity. There’s a lot of potential for a great game, and it’s still early in development, but one of the key parts of star ships battling one another is movement. As it stands, the game boils down to shooting weapons without much in the way of deep strategical thinking. Adding in movement, firing arcs and all sorts of other mechanics should help bring the game up from a nice concept to a killer time-waster.

You can download Hostile Encounters from the Google Play Store.

Playup Perth was well and truly back, complete with free games and helpful feedback. It took a megaphone to kick everyone out, but, alas, it needed to be done. All the devs I spoke to were ecstatic to have all the advice from everyone that played their games, and all the players were just glad to have played them. Keep your eyes out for the next Playup, which should be happening very soon…