Date of Posting: 06/12/2023
The Crows Know is the third game in the Alphabet Superset series I'm working through. I've just released the eighth of these (Haunted House), and had to take several weeks off to relocate, so I'm somewhat behind on the blog posting! This one is a two player game about challenging communications, collaboration, describing the future, and language barriers. It's a lot of things at once. It's also quite absurd.
The simple premise is this: A disaster is about to befall a small town, a deadly phenomenon known as "The Creeps" resulting from a chemical spill, is moving in on the wind, and will cause terrible harm to the residents and industries of this town. One player (The Keeper) embodies the authorities of the town, emergency response and disaster management, and must act in order to secure the townspeople and minimise the impact of the disaster. However, they have zero certain knowledge of how the disaster will unfold- only that it will. The second player (The Crows) has perfect knowledge of what is about to happen, in what order, and where. However, they are a murder of precognizant crows, and therefore can only communicate in ways that crows plausibly could.
It's an absurd teamwork based game which may or may not be very hard to succeed at. Ideally I think you'd want to play through it a few times, sticking with which player is which, just re-rolling the scenario randomiser to prevent The Keeper from figuring out what the progression sequence is. This would give each player time to acclimatise to the strange restrictions on communication, and (hopefully) work to develop their own codes and little language tricks to begin to understand each other better. If you could re-run the scenario without the Crows changing their communication of each element, I think you'd start to figure out ways of expressing what the future is going to be. After all, they can make sounds and place sequences of objects in The Field, as well as position themselves on a square of the map or peck for emphasis.
The prospect of communicating the future using these tools seems overwhelmingly hard, perhaps impossible at first glance. Almost like it's actually a joke. In a way it is- I genuinely do find the concept behind the game quite funny because at its core this is a game about bureaucrats asking a bunch of supposedly psychic crows for advice about how to save the lives of an entire town. But The Crows *do* Know. And they really can aid The Keeper in saving the town. Lots of things seem impossible until you start taking the scenario apart to see how it works and breaking down the comically large task into smaller pieces.
I honestly really struggled to get The Crows Know to become a coherent game and end product. I'm very pleased with the final result, but it was an absolute pain to wrangle all the ideas I had for this into something workable. As noted in my previous blog, I had some of the basic ideas for this during week 2 and had to shelve them as nothing was quite coming together and it clearly needed more time to brew. Once I came up with the name I knew at a fundamental level what the game was going to be about- communicating with an extremely limited expression set in order to communicate complex information about the future. Making game systems that facilitated this in a pen and paper setting proved to be vastly more challenging.
The system you can see in the finished product is actually the third iteration on this concept. The first two were far too complicated to be practical. The first iteration involved generating a map of the town collaboratively, giving it a name, and having The Crows draw it out on their secret notepad. This is all before the game even starts, after which The Crows would discover which of 6 different plagues were about to affect the town, each of which had different characteristics and spread mechanics. You can see the remnants of the 6 different plagues in the final flavour text box "Excerpt from Novel Disease Record 20XX", in which I was able to at least salvage the plague descriptions as some nice lore material. Here's an example of just one of the six plague profiles and spread mechanics - bear in mind that The Crows would be completely responsible for calculating this and secretly monitoring its spread while also trying to tell The Keeper about it by making bird noises and moving sticks around!
"Telephage starts in the Factories. It spreads telepathically without requiring a direct path. Every night it springs from any affected Location to the nearest Location in a line directly in any of the 8 cardinal directions (up, down, left, right, diagonals). Underline every Location affected by Telephage. Once every possible location is affected (the map layout may isolate some Locations), mark an X under every affected Location instead of spreading it further. At 2 Xs the game ends instantly in absolute loss- the Telephage becomes unstoppable within this region. Any time prior to this, Medical Countermeasures can save everyone affected."
What does all that mean in the context of an actually playable game? I'm not sure! I was churning out novel mechanics and content but it was rapidly becoming an unmanageable mess with no scope for balance and probably completely impossible to win through anything other than luck. Also, despite producing quite detailed profiles of each of the plagues, the actions The Keeper could take to save the town were still quite rudimentary and I was struggling to give both players something interesting to do. Plus, as noted, the burden on The Crows in this version is hugely disproportionate. It's not fair and it's probably not fun. It was time to try and scale things back a bit.
Okay, so it was time to pull things back. let's not have 6 different plagues. Instead, lets generate a random sequence of events and we can then have that dictate the progression through the future and how things are going to develop in the town. I decided I could just use the various plagues for other projects further down the line, and instead of having loads of different spread mechanics and things to track, we'd cause there to be one thing to diagnose and then a series of events that take place, using tables to produce a sequence of events that can be telegraphed by The Crows. I produced a bunch of tables, based on this sort of structure: 1. Infection, Explosion, Conditions Worsen, Mutation, Conditions Worsen
So for each of these particular events in the sequence, there'd be modifiers that we'd also roll for to give a vast range of possible progressions to be communicated, for example:
Infection Spreads
After 5 turns the game would end and you'd get a score based on how much of the town was saved. This was slightly more manageable than the previous iteration, you didn't have to do quite as much management as The Crows, but it still felt overly complex and fiddly. I didn't want either player to have to do loads of drawing and notetaking and calculations, the focus is on already knowing what's going to happen, and working to communicate that and help The Keeper make good choices. I was producing all this procedural content to make the game less predictable, but not knowing a sequence of events is already very hard! I was overthinking it again!
It was time to really pull back, rein it right in. We decided a few things.
At this point I had spent about 4-5 hours already working on this, and needed to get on with actually turning it into a real game. But with these new more focused decisions made, things actually became much easier to assemble. We would produce three progression maps (initially I wanted to do lots but we can only fit so many on a page, and rotating them gives enough variety. Plus they were kind of annoying to make), one main map, and finally come up with a proper scoring system.
As we'd already outlined the core mechanics and were just struggling with the future seeing component this whole time (shocking to discover that it's hard to make a game where one player can literally see the future) things came together quite quickly after that. Obviously I didn't get rid of anything I'd written prior to this. My notes document I produced while working through the design process is over 2,700 words long, and I also have a couple of pages of sketches and rough design notes on paper to accompany that. All this stuff can be referred back to in future and anything I discard now as unsuitable for this project might actually be usable later on.
Within a couple more hours I was able to assemble all the actually *good* parts I'd managed to produce and there we had it, the full game. One day ahead of schedule, too! I'm really pleased with The Crows Know, as a product. It has a couple of flaws (for example I provide a table for rotations but somehow thought that you could roll up to 14 on 2D6, and at one point I refer to Vaccines when I clearly mean Medicine) but overall I think this is one of the better ones I've produced, with a decent aesthetic, innovative mechanics, and fairly novel concept. I'm proud of the work I did.
They say a very hard thing to do as a writer is editing out material that isn't important, rewriting things, and overall getting rid of stuff that doesn't actually help your work. As much work as I'd put into the two systems I produced for the game, they simply didn't work. While I really loved all the plague descriptions and the novel disease spread mechanics, none of them actually served what I was trying to do, which was to make a game where one player can see the future but struggles to communicate it. So I had to start from scratch. Twice.
Had I kept hammering away at these dead-ends just because I'd worked hard at them (sunk cost fallacy) and because I liked what I'd made I'd never have ended up with the satisfying end product which I have now. I actually think the resulting system is much better, because you can see it as a visual diagram and follow the progression much more readily than trying to calculate it based on a series of instructions. It's simpler, but that's often better anyway. Plus, everything I cut out I can always plunder further down the line for other projects. In fact, as of writing I've referred to the concept of "Bunkritis" in 3 separate games, and was able to adopt some basic elements of these spread mechanics into my recent release "Fire Season", which is about containing fires instead of diseases.
Firstly, I learned that it's very hard to make a game about seeing the future. Secondly, this was a good exercise in the limitations of physically based games- a videogame would be able to automatically calculate all those spread mechanics for you in the background, that's part of the point of videogames, they can do this work for you. You cannot achieve the same level of mechanical dynamism and complexity in a board game as you can in a videogame, and that's fine, but it does mean you have to step back and make sure you're not accidentally trying to do that sometimes.
Secondly, I got a lot of experience in writing out complicated systems that ultimately don't work. That might seem unhelpful, but the mental workout this provided was quite substantial (and rather straining), and I think it's given me a better understanding of fitting together moving parts in tabletop game systems like this.
Thirdly, given how mechanically dense these past three games had been, I decided to try some different things for my next couple of games. There'll be more on that in the next post in this series, about the codebreaker puzzle game, DECRYPT.