Daniel Solis

Last week I tested an early alpha of Dung and Dragons that incorporated a sort of tug-of-war mechanic in which players lured dragons towards them by a number of different mechanisms. We tried making pulls a free action, but you had to push an equal number of cards towards your opponent. We tried making pulls cost you a card, sometimes a matching card. We tried both mechanisms at the same time. All resulted in awkward emergent behavior or stalemate situations. Every solution we tried out that night would just add complications and further grit in the gears. You recall my advice on playtest hangovers , and I certainly had a small one going the next morning. Ultimately I realized that I just needed to rip out big chunks of an overly complex system rather than tape it up to justify the complexity. So here's what I'm thinking: Instead of multiple tug-of-war steps towards getting the various components of your ranch, I figured it should instead be more like a drafting game,...

Shock of shocks, I'm actually working on Dung & Dragons again as a legit, no kidding, actually coming out game some time this spring. ("Dung & Dragons" is just a working title, remember.) Long-time readers know this has been my white whale for ages. Tip: When you start with a theme, but don't have a core play loop in mind yet, settle in for a long meandering series of half-starts and unpolished ideas. But I've got a really cool mechaphor worked out for the game and I think it'll really do well as a light strategy card game with an interesting drafting mechanism. Theme You're each dragon ranchers luring wild dragons into your stables, in hopes of harvesting their valuable poop. See, dragons poop gold. Obviously. For now, let's use standard playing cards as examples and assume you start with a hand of six cards. On Your Turn... On your turn, you may do one of the following actions: Pulling a Dragon Build New Stables Feed Drago...

While I've been exploring the mechanics of trick-taking games lately, I stumbled across this odd notion of using the trick you win to trigger a cascading series of mechanics that you would normally find in a more formal euro strategy game. Usually about farming. (Looking at Agricola here, mainly.) What if by winning a trick, you also acquired various resources and quests from that trick? It's worth exploring, if for nothing less than just pure giggles. Naturally, when I start thinking about a farming mechanic, my mind drifts back to a theme that has so far eluded a really solid mechanical framework. Dung & Dragons is about a group of people raising dragons for their valuable poop. See, dragon poop has lots and lots of gold coins in it. (Smaug was absolutely filthy, by the way.) So these ranchers raise dragons, feed them their favorite foods, and literally rake in profits. Here's a loose outline of how I think it could combine very fast trick-taking tactics with...

Heyo! So here is where my head's at since the last time I talked about Dung & Dragons . I'm continuing the central idea introduced in that last post. Each player chooses one numbered action card from his hand each turn. Then all players reveal their cards at the same time. Actions may incur bonuses if the total of all numbers is above, equal to or below the average. There are six actions, you may only do one on a turn: Shovel earns you 1, 2, or 3 victory points for shoveling your dragons' stables. There are two Shovel cards in your hand. Build lets you add 1, 2, or 3 buildings to your ranch. Raise lets you advance your dragons 1, 2 or 3 levels. This growth can be spread across multiple dragons or focused on just one. Feed lets you give 1 or 2 food to your dragons. Hatch lets you add 1, 2, or 3 dragons to your ranch. Upgrade lets you advance your buildings 1, 2, or 3 levels. This growth can be spread across multiple buildings or focused on just one. Th...

Dung & Dragons is one of those long, slow marinating ideas that occasionally needs to be stirred before being put back on a low heat. Right. To catch up newcomers: The game tentatively titled Dung & Dragons concerns a hippie collectivist farm that raises and cares for dragons, who in turn poop gold that keeps the farm self-sustaining. The whole idea came from an episode of Firefly where the crew was bartering various chores as currency. This struck me as a very cool idea for a game, trying to get the jobs you like while also maximizing the effect of those jobs by negotiating with the other players. Love it. I've gone through a few different models for how to design a game around this idea, but this week's exploration of trick-taking games has me thinking about a new way of doing things. Let's run through the basics. Above are the nine basic action cards. There should be one of each per player in the action deck. Shuffle and deal a hand of nine to each pla...

On the left you see what it looks like when I sketch out cards by hand. I usually just plan ahead for the kind of info I'll need on the card and watch out for space issues. On the right, you see how that translates to an alpha prototype with stock illustrations and vector icons courtesy of The Noun Project. In its current state, the game is about workers at a communal ranch. They raise dragons for valuable poop. Yup. Each round involves the players performing various ranch duties. The whole deck is 48 cards divided into six alphabetical suits representing the duties you'll do around the ranch. The suits are A-Shovel: Take X cubes from your dragon and put them into your supply. B-Feed: Deposit X brown cubes onto dragons. C-Shop: Spend blue, red or yellow cubes to draw X, Y, or Z extra cards from the deck. D-Breed: Add a dragon to your ranch. The total Love in your ranch must be equal to or greater than the new dragon. E-Expand: Add a staffer or building to your ranch....

Because there are some obvious copyright problems with the title "Dung & Dragons," I've been calling the game "Dragon Ranch Co-Op" as a bit of a joke. It's a co-op game about a co-op ranch. Get it?... Okay, maybe it's only funny to me. Completely by accident, this name abbreviates to DRCO, just one letter shy of "DR A CO." My mind wandered across various options until "Anarchist" popped up. I thought that was funny, too. What if the theme wasn't just a simple co-op ranch, but an anarcho-utopian commune as well? How that might affect the mechanics of the game? As you know from previous posts , the central mechanic of Dragon Ranch is everyone choosing actions, then the number of matching choices affecting the potency of those actions. For example, sometimes more people on a task is good, like shoveling poop from the stables. Sometimes it's not, like feeding the dragons too much and causing them to get sick. Everyone d...

I've been on the road a lot the past few weeks, which means I had a lot of time to marinate on some thoughts for Dung & Dragons . I got to thinking about ways to adapt some mechanics from San Juan, Pandemic, and Yspahan. Here are my loose notes from the road. Welcome to Dragon Ranch Co-op, a group of free-thinking dragon breeders raising the finest dragons, drakes, coatls and winged serpents in the tri-county area. No corporate stakeholders allowed here, just free-range dragons raised the old-fashioned way. There are no managers or corporate execs running the show. Every day, each rancher chooses the duty he or she would like to perform. If others join in, so be it! Of course, getting these people to work as a team can be harder than raising a fire breathing reptile! OVERVIEW OF PLAY Each player coordinates their own workforce to perform various duties on the ranch. Inspectors arrive periodically to grade your ranch's performance thus far, in one of several categorie...

Sometimes I think of game mechanics in the abstract, without a theme in mind. Actually, it happens a lot. This time, I got to thinking about a role selection mechanic that was paired with a dice pool. For context, I'm referring to "action selection" games like Puerto Rico, Agricola or Citadels. Say there are six actions, corresponding to each face of a six sided die. At the beginning of a round, a pool of dice are rolled. When you choose an action on your turn, that action might have a more potent effect if there are dice matching that result. So far, this turns out to be pretty much how Yspahan works. Now I'm mulling a slight tweak, wherein that dice pool is not rolled at the beginning of the round. Rather, each player has one die with which they secretly choose their action. All players then reveal their selection at the same time. Again, those actions are augmented by the number of matching results. So, part of the game might be coercing other players to follo...

It started as a joke. I asked a simple question: "Tell me anything about the game ' Dung & Dragons '" What followed is a bubbling stream of brilliance from my friends online. » A game about managing a dragon ranch, focusing on the stable hands' daily duties » Naturally there are fundamental differences between the poop of the metallic vs. chromatic vs. mineral dragons, and each color of dragon crap differs from those of its brothers. At least some varieties need to be smeared on like face paint to work. Other types must be eaten. » Purists long for the days of 1st edition where, as they put it, they had "less crap to move around" » It totally needs rather large dragon cards (possibly the front of the egg-deck) so you can place them face up in your stable and then place foodstuffs (cubes or disks of course, wooden and in nice colors) at their heads, and then turn by turn move the foodstuffs down (I imagine, head, stomach, and ass, but there ...

This is my process for putting together some concept art for a game. Concept art is not intended to be final. I'd give this to a proper artist to produce something more professionally polished or include it in a pitch document to a game company. Sketch I began with a loose sketch in red pencil, traced over that with a normal pencil and traced again with a sharpie. Then I scanned that and desaturated all the red out. Then I increased the contrast so only the sharpie would be visible. With that image, I can begin the vectoring process. Vector I use Freehand MX for my vectors. It's a defunct program no longer supported by Adobe, but it's what I learned back in college. I could never figure out Illustrator's idiosyncrasies. :P Background For the background, I cobbled together some stock vector elements from Shutterstock: A farm illustration and a dragon silhouette. I took that into photoshop to do the same dissolve brush coloring. Color These vectors make i...