Not Perfectly Folded Birds

Okay, so in the previous post regarding Paper Birds, I talked a bit about how it worked, and the thoughts behind the design.

This is what didn't work.

Cut for length:

As part of OMGAM, I tried to keep it as short as possible. Micro-game, and all that. In principle, I should have kept all of the OMGAM submissions to a single page. In practice I often stretched it a bit. As published, Paper Birds was four pages including two-sided cards to cut out, a cover, and a bit of fiction. Even so, I cut a lot to keep the word-count down.

The player is told how to play, but a better written game would have led in with an outline of the turn structure, explaining the whole process in brief before each part was explained in detail.

Most of the rules and tactics were left to be inferred from careful reading, but the player would have been better served if they were front-loaded.

It would have helped to tell players up front to move negative-point objectives below their target, and positive point objectives above it. It would have helped to tell them to perform their initial ordering starting with the bottom, so they didn't have to figure it out on their own — or to do the opposite to other players orders if they wanted to be adversarial.

Too much omphaloskepsis:

Part of that was trimmed for length, to keep it all short. But partly, I was just being a little more coy than I should have been. I thought I'd let people feel clever by figuring out the nuances of how each system worked, but I think it ended up making the game less approachable than it could have been.

One thing that is intentionally unexplained, and far too many words go into not-explaining it, is turn order. I guess I assumed it was trivial and meaningless enough that people could use any order they liked, but it would have been a lot less irritating for the reader if I had just provided a simple order of players.

Not enough specificity:

The core game loop has players maneuvering their drone swarm by shifting objectives up and down. There are a few problems here:

First, a few edge cases go unexplained: Do the top and bottom of a list wrap around? Can pinned objectives be jumped over? A very literal reading of the rules gives you these answers, but it would have been better if I had spelled it out.

Something less than fun:

Finally, the core maneuver loop isn't super interesting. I assume the players can figure out that they're not actually moving objectives — they're maneuvering their swarm and the motion of the objectives is relative to that and abstracted from 3D space — but if they don't then the whole thing probably feels a bit random and pointless.

What is worse, despite careful design to support positive sum outcomes, the core loop is basically zero-sum. Played competitively, Fudge dice are not strong randomizes and tiny shifts up and down dont make strong progress. The players are locked in something of a perpetual stalemate until one gets bored and pulls the trigger.

Played cooperatively, there just isn't any dramatic tension.

Paper Birds would have been much more in theme with the other games in the Sad Mech Jam if each turn involved a conversation about the drones' emotions or the inherited memories from their original pilot. As it stands, the players don't interact directly with any narrative components. It is all inferred from a random scatter of positive and negative numbers, and this might all be a bit too dry.

If I was to re-make it, I think I would let players spend-down the capacity of their swarm while engaging with the narrative by talking about the drones' emgrams. Would probably include active opposition that resisted the maneuvering of the swarm, which might have made the game more interesting in the cases where players cooperate and even give them something to cooperate against.

Maybe a second edition will roll out sometime, I feel like there is something here if I can get it sculpted into the right shape.