by MantaScorp
From ShipShape designer Rob Daviau:- - - - - - - - - -
Keep it simple. See what happens.
I’m known for making big games – long, legacy games with lots of emergent parts. This is why I was so excited to be part of the Titan Series from Calliope Games. It was a chance to do something closer to what I used to do at Hasbro - a smaller game that you could teach to non-gamers, something that had some table presence. Yet something that was a little different.
I don’t know where the original idea for ShipShape came from. I had the crate idea, something about putting items into crates and pressing your luck on contraband and maybe trying to get to port first to corner the market. But how you build a crate was the big question. I wanted it fast and intuitive, not a complicated market. Reiner Knizia’s Medici did auctions and ship loading very well so I also wanted to stay away from that lest my game be seen, justifiably, as a watered-down version.
Luckily, I have a lot of good friends, allies, and playtesters who kept me from driving this into a ditch.
My original notes from 2014 and 2015 show a bunch of card bidding ideas that seem ludicrously overwrought in hindsight. Also, nearly indecipherable. If anyone can turn “Highest card takes trick and gains Resource B. Order of cards is choice of picking Resource C. Cardinal ranking of cards lets you set Resource C to next time.” into a game, be my guest.
During the summer of 2015, I was mentoring a high school student in game design. We were talking about the game and got to the idea of a 3x3 grid that formed the crate and you physically built up your crate by putting tiles on top of each other. I think I was thinking they would be clear acetate where you could see through them. This student, Gus, thought we could do something different and ran off as homework to create the tiles that are in the game now. Instead of clear crates, the tiles are physically cut out. We played around with what went onto the crates and then the idea got even cooler.
My wife, Lindsay, who works with me full-time (both on original designs and at Restoration Games) set out to do the grueling task of making a prototype using form core, lots of Xacto blades, and many hours of cutting. When they were stacked up in a pile, I realized you could see into the stack of tiles and have “spoilers” as to what tiles were further down the stack. I instinctively said, “We’ll have to find some way to fix that” to which she replied “No, that’s the cool part.”
She was right.
I now had a game where you could draft from a pile of tiles that you could kind of see into. Each player had a different view so each player had a bit of different knowledge. Players could draft three tiles, stack them on each other and, if clever, could combine all three tiles into a full 3x3 grid with no wasted space.
Now what? A hand of cards let you pick your bid. A simultaneous “auction” of putting your bid card face down came next. Some playing around with what time of auction worked best until we settled on the final version. What about ties? Ties created a good chaos in the bid system, surprising people who thought they knew exactly what they were going to get. Not a great idea in a weighty bidding game but it fit perfectly on something this light-weight. At first, the bid cards had powers but the overall system kept getting lighter and lighter so those got cut.
But what about the contents of the crates? Old notes show six different goods and some sort of evolving market where they changed values. Seemed too complicated. Let’s cut to the chase – Gold, Contraband, and Cannons. Gold was the steady point generator: you added up the value. Something simple and easy to understand. Contraband would be the push-your-luck scoring. Contraband scores like gold except for the person who had the most, who gets 0. Finally cannons. This took a while to get right but then we made it the opposite of contraband – you score 0 if you have the least and everyone else gets something. So you want the most gold, anything but the most contraband, and anything but the least cannons.
After that it was adding some rules and components for keeping the leaders from running away in round one, closing up some edge cases, and coming up with a delightfully punny name.
Proud how this one turned out and I hope you like it.
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ShipShape will be available worldwide in July 2019.