Ahoy there!
In this blog post, I will share some of the design lessons my co-designer Matt O’Connor and I learned while designing our game Yargh! An Odd Dice Odyssey. This essay will show how we approach design problems as a team and some of the mechanics that make Yargh fun!
I’m not going to explain the rules of Yargh within this post, so if you’re unfamiliar with the game, I recommend reading our description here or watching the video explainer below:
Evolving Towards Fun
Designing Yargh was fun because it evolved organically. We started with mechanics we enjoyed, combined them together, playtested them, then solved the problems that emerged. There was no grand vision at the project’s offset, so there was room to marinate on problems and grow the game towards fun. For this reason, I will structure this essay chronologically. In each section, I will discuss design problems that arose and how we solved them.
Our sell sheet.
north stars
Though there was no grand vision for Yargh, there were principles that my co-designer Matt and I adhered to from the beginning. Above all, we subscribed to legendary game designer Sid Meier’s idea that great games are fundamentally a series of interesting decisions. Whenever we were unsure of what to do next, we aligned the game with this maxim:
“Games are a series of interesting decisions.”
— Sid Meier
Matt and I started work on Yargh because we were part of the same board game group. More importantly, we liked the same parts of games: the deckbuilding of Dominion, the drama of Yahtzee, the teamwork of Gloomhaven. These shared tastes served as a foundation for many of the mechanics in Yargh.
Our first step towards Yargh came from a prank. At the time, I was often playing Super Mario Party, which has an interesting mechanic where each character has their own custom die. Wario, for example, has a dice block that can roll either a -2 or -6. I thought this was a fun way to represent characters, so I bought several wooden blocks and began drawing odd sets of numbers on them in sharpie like [0,0,0,0,1,-2], [5,5,5,8,8,20], and [1,1,10,10,20,20]. I would then sneakily substitute these strange dice into dice-centric games like Catan or Yahtzee and act offended when they weren’t recognized as legal dice.
There was something toylike about rolling these funky dice, which we nicknamed Chaos Dice. Matt and I noticed that people enjoyed playing with these dice, so we decided to make a small game with them.
The other half of our core loop was our Action Cards. These were inspired by Dicey Dungeons, one of the all-time great dice games. Among other things, I loved how Dungeons handled combat – Players would roll standard D6s then place them on cards that would activate abilities. Players could create combos by placing dice on cards that would allow them to draw more cards or roll more dice. It was an elegant system that was addicting and easy to understand.
We wanted to put our own twist on this idea by combining our Chaos Dice with our own set of brand-new “Action Cards”. Below is a picture of our early cards. This combination of our new Action Cards and the Chaos Dice immediately felt fun and fresh - if chaotic.
With our core loop in place, we needed a framework to give this gameplay meaning. An early touchpoint for us was Marvel’s Legendary, a semi-cooperative deckbuilding game. In Legendary, you and three other players build a deck of Marvel heroes and deploy them to fight a series of villains pulled from the top of a “Villain Deck”. To end the game, you have to battle a tough “Mastermind” character like Doctor Doom or Ultron.
Players would either lose to the Mastermind as a group OR defeat the Mastermind as a collective. The surviving players would then count their scores and a winner would be declared. This structure fostered a gaming experience that was mostly “Nice” cooperative play with a little “Mean” competitive play at the end. The only problem we had with Legendary was that it was boring to wait for other player’s turns to end. So we wanted to try a similar structure with an increased emphasis on player interaction.
We called our “big bad” a “Terror of the Sea” and we made the objective of Yargh to defeat this ultra-difficult monster. The survivors of this battle would then enter a scoring phase reminiscent of the standoffs in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies - this helped differentiate from the earlier games mentioned and fit snugly with our pirate theme.
Lost at Sea
Legendary and other cooperative games like Pandemic would often guide players through their “campaign” with a deck. At the start of each turn, Players would draw from the top of the campaign deck and then resolve whatever “event” was on that card. This was a fun design but it did make those games feel predetermined and linear at times. So we experimented with ways of presenting choices to our Players that were more dynamic.
After trying a couple of ideas, we came up with the idea of having the “Crew” of Players choose between three Monster-Island pairs that were drawn and paired at random. After the Crew chose a pair, they would fight the Monster then visit the Island. To give the game a greater sense of danger, we instructed Players to turn the third Monster-Island pair face down so that it was effectively random. The choice of which Monster-Island pair to visit was interesting because sometimes a difficult monster would be paired with a good island and vice versa. We designed our monsters and islands to be pointy - good in some contexts, bad in others - so that it was never an easy decision to visit one island over the other.
Below are some of our Monsters and Islands.
Tiebreakers
However, there was no tiebreaker if half the Crew wanted to visit one Monster-Island pair and the other half wanted to visit a different Monster-Island pair. To solve this problem, we introduced Duels – when two Players disagreed about anything, they would each roll one of their Chaos Dice. The Player who rolled the higher number would win the Duel and get their way.
As you can probably tell, this gave a huge advantage to Players with Chaos Dice with higher numbers. Thus, the Tide Coin was born. The Tide Coin was our way of creating parity between high-rolling and low-rolling dice. When the Tide (Coin) was High, high numbers won Duels. When it was Low, low numbers won Duels.
too much random
Once we had these core mechanics in place, the game took on a new wind. Yargh had a unique feel because it combined crunchy sudoku-like number-puzzling with twisty dungeon-crawling. However, at this point, there was too much randomness in our game. When a Player was rolling Chaos Dice to combine with their Action Cards, it was too easy for them to get a roll that was incompatible with their Action Cards. Playtesters enjoyed how unpredictable the game could be but didn’t feel like they had enough agency.
To give the Player more agency, we introduced Charms. Charms were tokens that Players could use to reroll their Chaos Dice. This gave Players the chance to achieve more powerful dice-card combinations.
The question quickly came up in subsequent playtests – could a Player reroll another Player’s dice? Our gut reaction was that that would feel unfair. But then I remembered a lesson from one of my first Game Design courses at NYU: don’t introduce exceptions to your rules! So we tried a version of the Charms where they could reroll ANY dice and immediately knew it was the right direction. It was particularly fun to reroll dice during Duels, where the Player would have strategic decisions to make about which dice to reroll.
Boredom during Other Players’ Turns
To paint a simplified picture of the game at this point in development:
The “Crew” of Players would choose which Monster-Island pair to visit during the Navigation Phase. When there wasn’t a consensus, they would Duel.
They would fight the Monster guarding the Island.
During Combat, each Player would take their turn:
Roll their Chaos Dice.
Use Charms to Reroll any dice they didn’t want.
Place their Chaos Dice on Action Cards to attack the Monster.
Repeat this cycle until they fought a Terror of the Sea at the end of the game.
While our Action Card/Chaos Dice gameplay was greatly improved by the Charms, there was still a big issue – the game was boring during other people’s turns. Since it took each player a while to figure out which dice they wanted to combine with their cards, there were long lulls in the gameplay loop.
To decrease player downtime, we made two key changes. First, we made it so that all players would roll their Chaos Dice and take their turns simultaneously.
Second, we introduced dice-trading. This meant that all Players could trade their dice 1-for-1 during Combat. This mechanic changed Yargh from a competitive game to a semi-cooperative game. Part of the reason I think this cooperative gameplay immediately resonated with players is that it increased the number of fun moves a player could make while not making Combat any more complex.
With this new rule, player interaction flourished: players could help their teammates do 4 or 5 times more damage by trading the right dice. On the other hand, they could kill their teammates by withholding a die that could activate a much-needed health-giving Action Card.
Trader Woes
But dice-trading also created new logistical questions: if you traded your dice, would you get it back at the end of combat? If so, how would you know who owned which dice? What if a player didn’t want to give a die back? After many playtests where these questions slowed the game’s momentum, we decided on a colorful solution: place a unique sticker on at least one face of each die.
These stickers gave each die a unique identity but also raised a new question: what did they mean? When answering this question, we asked ourselves what we could do to allow for more impactful choices and dramatic moments. From there, we came up with the Fate Die: the Fate die was a D20 that would control the value of all dice faces that had a sticker, which we called Fate Faces.
Combined with the Charm mechanic, the Fate die was an immediate hit with playtesters because it allowed Players to drastically change the state of the game in one roll. If a Player rolled a Fate Face during a Duel, they could choose to either reroll the Fate Die or their own die.
Dropping Dead Weight
While these mechanics were being developed, we were also blind-playtesting our rulebook. This meant inviting over a few friends, feeding them pizza, handing them a rulebook, and seeing what happened! Though it made us cringe at times, we did not help our playtesters unless they were way off in the wrong direction or completely stuck. This helped us get a clear idea of when and where questions would come up for first time players.
The game was a hit with playtesters! Players loved our combat and the many twists the game threw at them. But there was one big problem: playtesters would lose steam halfway through reading the rules. Though our game was fun, it simply had too much going on. We had to take a tough look at what we had built and start cutting certain features.
Our approach was to delete or consolidate any rules that provided tedium instead of interesting choices. This forced us to make some counterintuitive cuts. Most significantly, it meant cutting the concept of “Gold”, which was our main way of enabling players to buy new cards and keep track of their score. Players could earn Gold through visiting islands, defeating monsters, and deploying Artifacts. They could spend Gold at the Port, which was a Shop that sold Chaos Dice, Action Cards, Charms, and more. At the end of the game, any Gold they had acquired would count towards their final score.
Our “Market”
Why did Gold have to go? It made other mechanics worse, particularly Dueling. One of the things that gave Yargh its unique flavor was that two or more Players could Duel for any Chaos Dice or Action Card that they both wanted. By selling items in the Port, there were more cases where Players would not Duel for a Die, Card, or Artifact because they either did not have enough Gold or thought the price was too high. Thus, Duels, which made the game unique, became less common. Since the Tide Coin determined whether high or low numbers would win Duels, Gold indirectly made the Tide Coin less relevant as well. The game had many mechanics that were somewhat important instead of having a few mechanics that were crucial.
We couldn’t cut the Port entirely because it provided Players with a consistent opportunity to get better Dice, Cards, and Artifacts. To retain this functionality while streamlining the game, we decided to instead give Players these items after each Monster they fought – one for each Pirate. However, we didn’t say who got which item. This meant that Players once again had to Duel to determine who got which prize.
The other problem with Gold was that it changed how Players viewed the end of the game. Since Gold counted towards each Player’s final score, Players would hoard their Gold throughout the entire game by not buying Dice, Charms, or Action Cards. In short, they were disincentivized from engaging with the fun parts of the game. Because they were weaker, they would also often get beaten in the battle with the Terror of the Sea as well. This was not the game that we wanted to design, so we cut Gold entirely and instead tracked points through Artifacts, which were similar to “Items” in Gloomhaven or Munchkins.
analysis Paralysis
As we consolidated our game around a few core mechanics, our rulebook slimmed down, and playtesters entered the “fun” of our game more quickly. We added and subtracted many mechanics during this period – but the most interesting of these was a “Color” pass we tried for about a month.
Throughout the design of Yargh, we held to the principle that giving the Player interesting choices was our top imperative. During our “Color” pass, we created a new set of Action Cards that would be activated by the color of a dice or the color of its text. Though we were initially very excited by this idea, this design gave us literal headaches. It opened the amount of possible card-dice combinations up so much that it became difficult to feel like you ever found the optimal match of dice and cards. Ultimately, we realized that sometimes too many choices can be just as bad as too few choices.
The reason I think that our “Color” pass was a failed experiment was that we didn’t follow the “Magical Number 7” rule. This rule, which I also learned at NYU, states that humans can carry about 7 chunks of information in their working memory at a time. During a playthrough of Yargh, Players were thinking about (1) their cards, (2) their dice, (3) their teammates’ dice, (4) their teammates’ cards, (5) the Monster’s dice, (6) the Monster’s ability, and (7) their Charms. By adding more concurrent elements for our Players to focus on, we introduced too much complexity and suffocated the fun.
A Pirate’s Life for Us
The last piece of the puzzle for us was to figure out the art for our game. Our number one priority was to make a fun game first, so we never made any decisions about our game that triumphed art over design, especially since we understood that a future publisher might want to retheme the game. We knew that there were about a million other board games with a Pirate theme, so we wanted to find a unique angle into that world.
Some of my favorite art growing up was the woodcut art seen in portraits of famous pirates and “Here Be Dragons” style maps, so we commissioned some art in this style for some of our cards. Though we loved this art, it was a bit static and dry. So we tried a more humorous approach. We struck a funny contrast by using this more “serious” art style to depict silly pirate puns and visual gags. Here are some of our favorite cards:
Though we are now pitching our game to publishers, we continue to blind-playtest and tweak our game. Our biggest priority is streamlining the onboarding experience while retaining what makes the game fun and unique. While we expect the game to continue to grow (and in some cases, shrink), we’re happy with the game we’ve made so far and excited to bring it to publishers.
If you’re a publisher interested in our game, please click the button below to contact us!
