Ok I won't go that far back. But I will set the context in the fact that this idea cropped up in the middle of attempting to work out the kinks in two other game ideas I was kicking around, both of which ended up being incredibly large ideas and also basically done before by games I hadn't heard of yet. Many of the mechanisms are based on things I've tried in various forms over and over, and the influences go back to my very childhood.
So this didn't fall out of the sky.
The start of the idea was this birthday gift from one of my daughters:
Obviously, I was touched to be given a gift my kids, but why a seashell-themed paperweight topped the list I'm not entirely sure. As it sat on my desk, I had to marvel at just how much my kids love seashells and collecting them. They are all over my house, and they never get tired of them at the beach. As I was walking with them in the sand one day, I was reflecting on this, and their simultaneous love for hermit crabs, and crabs in general. We saw a pile of hermit crabs having a shell exchange and I thought of how cool it is that there is this natural draft taking place, and the lightbulb went off. Just like always, "That could be a game."
So I started to turn over ideas in my mind.
I decided that a set collection game was the most fitting. The game engine being used is 5 Card Draw Poker, because I wanted to develop a game and didn't want to get mired down in figuring out how to balance a whole deck of cards. The odds are already calculated, and I know them well enough that I can test this game and see if it works. The players draw from a pool of face up cards, or take one without looking from the deck(more on that later).
I have always thought there is something special about face cards, that they should somehow behave differently than the pip cards. So I thought, maybe these are the ones that are big enough to move into!
At this point in my game, Aces were equivalent to '1', and the game was a race to get to the King Shell. This game was boring to even think about.
Inspired by the antique socialist meaning of the French design of the Ace card, I had the Aces kicked the other crabs out of their shells. Then I changed it so that the size of your shell would determine what you can collect, and sets would be worth points. This got interesting. I picked the sets I wanted to include based on their odds, grabbed a deck of cards, and ran a few solo playtests of 4 player games, and ran into one major flaw: every turn, everyone had a Flush(the highest value set).
This is why immediate playtesting is crucial. The game simply didn't work, and I would never had known it. Basically, the first player goes for a Flush because he can, then the next player does the same--except his choice of suit has changed, since the first player took some of one suit out of the mix. So he picks another suit. The third player does the same, and the fourth ends up with whichever suit nobody has picked. You are literally sorting the deck out. The solution? Not allowing players to pull from the deck. Simple fix and lesson learned.
So I started to turn over ideas in my mind.
I decided that a set collection game was the most fitting. The game engine being used is 5 Card Draw Poker, because I wanted to develop a game and didn't want to get mired down in figuring out how to balance a whole deck of cards. The odds are already calculated, and I know them well enough that I can test this game and see if it works. The players draw from a pool of face up cards, or take one without looking from the deck(more on that later).
I have always thought there is something special about face cards, that they should somehow behave differently than the pip cards. So I thought, maybe these are the ones that are big enough to move into!
At this point in my game, Aces were equivalent to '1', and the game was a race to get to the King Shell. This game was boring to even think about.
Inspired by the antique socialist meaning of the French design of the Ace card, I had the Aces kicked the other crabs out of their shells. Then I changed it so that the size of your shell would determine what you can collect, and sets would be worth points. This got interesting. I picked the sets I wanted to include based on their odds, grabbed a deck of cards, and ran a few solo playtests of 4 player games, and ran into one major flaw: every turn, everyone had a Flush(the highest value set).
This is why immediate playtesting is crucial. The game simply didn't work, and I would never had known it. Basically, the first player goes for a Flush because he can, then the next player does the same--except his choice of suit has changed, since the first player took some of one suit out of the mix. So he picks another suit. The third player does the same, and the fourth ends up with whichever suit nobody has picked. You are literally sorting the deck out. The solution? Not allowing players to pull from the deck. Simple fix and lesson learned.
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