Slicing Time and Space: The Value of Game Design Budgets
When my students show me their early game prototypes, one of the most common issues I see is that they are too long - by a lot. Unfortunately, the duration is often baked into their design choices. There are just too many turns, or too many phases, and substantially shortening things requires radical design changes, or the throwing out of large amounts of work (cards created that will never be used in a shorter game, for example)
Which is why for my next class I will be giving an early lesson about the importance of developing a Turn Time Budget (TTB) for your game.
Introducing the TTB
The concept is very simple. First answer two questions:
How long do you want the full game to be?
How many turns do you expect that each player will take?
Your TTB is the total length divided by the total number of turns.
For example, let's say you want your game to take 90 minutes with four players, and you expect that each player will get 10 turns. Your TTB is:
90 / (10 * 4) = 2.25
Your turns should average 2 minutes and 15 seconds.
This looks simple on paper. But I bet that many people have no idea how long a turn takes in many games. For example, how long do you think the average turn takes in Monopoly? Risk? Catan? Terra Mystica?
And do you know how many rounds the average Catan game is? Or Monopoly? (In my experience, Catan takes about 15-20 rounds, and Monopoly about 100.)
Next time you play a game, think about these parameters. It will give you a much better feel for your design, and how much players can be expected to get done in a given amount of time.
Another consideration is whether you expect that your turn length will vary as the game goes on. Most of the time turns get longer as players gain more resources and options, but sometimes it does get shorter. In either of these cases, you'll need to factor that into your calculations. A 30 second early turn may be a 2-minute turn near the end of the game.
Negotiation and discussion can and should factor into your TTB estimates. And that can be longer than you think.
Knowing your TTB will go a long way to helping your design process. Each step you add, each little adjustment players need to make, each step that is done sequentially instead of in parallel - these all will eat into your TTB.
An Example
When I start working on a new game idea, one of the first things I do is to try to figure out my TTB. For example, let’s take a look at my design Zheng He, currently on the GMT Games P500, and co-designed with David Thompson (Hey! A stealth plug!) This is a solo-only game, and I'd like it to play in 30-45 minutes. Here are the considerations that went into TTB. Note - this was originally written before Zheng He was designed, and so it is in the future tense. At the end I’ll add a comparison with where the final game ended up.
Each game of Zheng He covers a historical event that took about 18 months, and the seasons are important. I envision a calendar track of some type.
Two natural durations would be either 18 turns (monthly turns), or 9 turns (bimonthly).
If I go with 18 turns, that's about two minutes per turn. If I go with 9 turns, that's a more leisurely four-minute turn.
The current thinking is to use a card-based system, where each has a primary action that it performs well, and a secondary effect. There may be light deck-building elements, but I don't envision the deck changing that much during the game. Most likely it will be 'deck construction' where you build your deck at the start of the game before starting the journey - to represent your equipment and training.
If I go with 18 turns, that means that I need to be careful to make the resolution of each action fairly quick. If there's going to be combat each turn, for example, it can't be a complex process. Maybe a quick die roll or card flip to determine the outcome.
Of course, if combat is only happening every third or fourth turn it can be more complex.
But if I want detailed action resolution, with modifiers or detailed player decisions, I should probably go with the 9-turn structure.
From TTB to CCB
The idea of developing a time budget can be extended into other aspects of your game design as well. I like to use it to start to map out a component count budget as well - a CCB.
This works particularly well with card decks, or with map spaces. Let's say I want the player to travel 36 spaces during the game. That means I need to average two spaces per turn in the 18-turn version, or four spaces in the 9-turn. And maybe I'm not moving every time - maybe I need to camp occasionally.
This adds some constraints on the size of the map, and the movement system I decide to use.
The map planning is pretty basic. But it gets more interesting when you get into the cards.
Into the Weeds
This may be getting too detailed, but perhaps some of you may find this peek into one person's design process helpful.
When starting a new design, I like to list all the actions I may want the player to take. Then I think about how I'm going to prevent them from just doing everything they want - maybe you need to spend resources to do something, or maybe there's just some interesting action selection mechanism. Often, I'll go back to the theme - what mechanism would fit with the theme?
In this case, it's a voyage, so the player should not be able to plan too far ahead. You need to react to changing situations - weather, obstacles, pirates, etc.
I think drawing action cards from a deck will give the players a random mix of what they can do - 'bad weather' might translate to 'didn't draw any cards that let me move'.
But before I sit down to design any cards, I like to have a card budget in mind.
Card Budgets
There are several aspects to card budgets - the number in the deck, how many you draw each turn, how many you play, etc.
As a starting point, let's say I draw the Deck Building standard of 5 cards. If I play every card each time that means I play either 45 or 90 cards during the course of the game (9 x 5 or 18 x 5).
To make the rest of this discussion simpler, let's assume I've settled on 18 turns. So I have 90 card plays.
How many times do I want to go through my deck? Thinking about this question, I think about what the deck is going to look like. As I mentioned earlier, I'm thinking that cards will have a primary effect, and maybe a secondary. For example, a card might be a MOVE 4 or an ATTACK 3. And maybe you can also use any card for a '1' action (MOVE 1 or ATTACK 1).
I'm using 'maybe' a lot here. And that's fine - I still have yet to prototype anything, and all of these ideas will probably fall to pieces once playtesting starts. But you have to start somewhere. Don't be afraid to stick a stake in the ground and say I'm going to go with this mechanism, even if it's over-used. In my experience even if you start with a tried-and-true mechanic, once you get into the meat of the design you'll tweak it to make it work in your project, and you will bring something new and innovative to the table.
OK - so back to our deck. I want variety on the quality of the action cards. How often do I want, say, my best Attack card to come up? For this particular historical situation, conflict did not occur all that much - so maybe I want it to be used maybe three or four times in a game.
We want to cycle our deck four times in 18 turns. This means deck size is around 20 cards.
Now I can start to plan out what those 20 cards will look like. Let's say I have five types of cards:
Move
Trade
Build
Attack
Resupply
I could do four of each, but I probably don't want an exact equal distribution. Moving and trading are probably the most common activities, so let's say:
Move: 6
Trade: 5
Build: 4
Attack: 3
Resupply: 2
It's as good a place to start as any. Now I can figure out what the cards look like. I've now reached a manageable, actionable part of the design.
Having a budget like this helps me immensely through the rest of the design. Some considerations I'm already thinking about:
What impact will a larger or smaller hand size have? How does that modify the deck size choice? How does that impact my TTB?
I am assuming I don't keep cards from turn to turn. What if I do? Does that mean I need to change the quantity or distribution of cards? How does that intersect with hand size?
What if I decide to go back to 9 turns? That would require a smaller deck, which means there's less variance in each hand. If I have a 10 card deck, I draw half each turn. Maybe that's better for the experience, or maybe it's worse - but something to think about.
I hope you begin to see the value in figuring out your TTB and CCB and how those can guide your design choices. I see it similarly to calculating probabilities. You can 100% not do any probability calculations and just playtest your way into systems that feel right. But doing the calculations up front will get you there faster.
Same with TTB and CCB. Having those guideposts at the start of your design will help you get to the right place faster. If you just jump in and start making cards and playing, you'll realize the issues eventually. But the journey will take longer.
Do you have any other metrics like this that you use in your design? Let me know and I'll share them in a future newsletter.
The Aftermath
As mentioned at the top, the above was written at the very beginning stages of the design of Zheng He. So where did we end up?
Time and Turns
The final game has 22 turns. The turns were very quick, so we went with monthly. However, the initial tests with 18 turns didn’t quite give us the feel we were looking for, and made it feel rushed and difficult to reproduce what was accomplished historically. So rather than mess with the base systems, we extended to 22 turns, which gave us the feel we wanted.
Here’s the board, showing the track with 22 turns. You can also see the board spaces. We ended up with point-to-point movement, focusing on 18 key ports that factored into Zheng He’s voyages.
NOTE: NOT REAL ARTWORK. This is the prototype artwork we used for playtesting. This was not done by any of the graphic folks at GMT. It’s actually way better than what I usually do, as this was done by David. But it’s just for testing!
You can see the turn track at the bottom. The two different colors represent monsoon seasons, when the prevailing winds change.
In my budgeting notes above, I estimated that the players would travel 36 spaces. In the end we cut that way back by just having movement be directly from port to port, rather than having intermediate ‘mid-ocean’ spaces. A number between ports acts as a way to express the distance or difficulty of the route. In most voyages players will make perhaps 10-12 stops (visiting some places twice). So that part of my budgeting was off.
Cards
My rough card estimates above survived pretty much intact! Which surprised me when I went back and reread this. I’m usually not that good. But in the final game we have 20 card decks, with four of each type of card. David made the brilliant observation that there were five types of ships in Zheng He’s fleets, so we just mapped that to the main action on the cards, which worked out great:
Patrol Ships: Scouting
Equine Ships: Construction
Treasure Ships: Trading
Supply Ships: Resupply
Troop Ships: Attack
You’ll note that there is no Sail or Move action. Since that was the most common action, we just added it as a secondary action to most cards. Here are some examples (again, not real artwork!):
The core play mechanic is just having a standard hand of cards, being able to do up to two actions per turn (playing cards to accomplish each), and then drawing one. You don’t discard your hand like a deck builder. This allowed us to include the Resupply action to draw more cards to simulate the rhythm of sailing/acting/resupplying that happened historically.
Because of this, each turn is fairly quick. We actually are a little bit past our desired goal of 30-45 minutes and are more in the 45-60 range, partially due to going to 22 turns. But we decided that this was still acceptable.
I am a firm believer of doing this type of analysis at the start of a project. Having a reasonable idea of where you want to go, and the trade-offs you may have to make to get there will streamline and focus your design process tremendously. The faster you can get your game to a good spot, the more time and focus you will be able to give to that final polish.