A short postmortem on a big design failure for a board game I tried to create last year. I never really got back to it as it was just so bad, but after finding my old play-field its rather fun look back at what happened.

Basically, whats seen above its a Pinball board game; I wanted to see if I could recreate a similar feeling and mechanic from a regular Pinball machine into a board game, and lets just say that I did not succeed very well. The problems where many but I will try and make a short description of what I made, and what went wrong.

The game became a turn-based, two-player game with a time limit, where the goal was to get as much points as possible. The players had a “ball” each that at the start of there turn was “shoot” from the bottom of the play field, here there where a few choices the player could take, that helped controlling what “direction” and “speed” that the ball would take. After the ball was shoot, the player no longer had any control over it, instead have to move it in its current direction, and in its current speed. With the ball on the field it could hit different point giving markers, representing the point giving mechanisms of a regular pinball machine. After the ball was shoot and moved, the player could also try and effect its balls movement indirectly, by being able to rearrange some markers of the play field (so the player did not remain completely passive after shooting the ball). The markers mostly gave points, but could also affect the direction of the ball, and so the player could try and keep it in play as long as possible. The main point was to plan ahead: To calculate what rout the ball would take (as the movement was rather strait forward) and replace markers to your advantage.

A rather short description, as it was a lot more too it, but that’s also one of the main problems: It was just way to complex and cluttered with information. The point was to make to player have the possibility to indirectly control his ball as he wanted, but to plan how and where it was going to go was just to difficult. Also, things gave different amounts of points, and to have a time limit, on top of trying to keep track of what points you get was just not fun… Secondly, I tried to hard to directly replicate the shape of a pinball game, rather then the “feeling” of it. Basically, the core principal why a pinball game is so fun is the flow of it; the speedy ball traveling around a very colorful field, the instant gratification of getting those points and doing crazy combinations. My game just became way to slow, and way to formal, it had no speed, no action and no gratification or even indication that what a player just did was something good.

If I had to remake it, I would first never have made it a turn based game, its just was not a good idea. The transfer of the mechanic from a regular Pinball game requires it to be allot simpler, as there is no physics to help the player move anything. Therefore the actual moment needed something that can be done fast and without thinking to hard about it. Instead what could have been done is a similar system of how it works in chess when they use a time limit. There you want to finish your own turn as fast as possible so you don’t waste your own time, and also stop your opponent from being able to plan for to long. The use of a punishment for taking to long doing a move will speed up the game greatly, and make it valuable to be done fast but also comes with the added risk of making errors. Also getting points needs to be more effectively given to the players, maybe the use of cards or with the help of a mechanical system, that instantly gives out points after a move from the player. Or that instead of the points being counted during the match, different “action” tokens are instead collected that are then combined at the very end of the game to get different combos that award different amount of points.

In the end it was a bast trying to create this mess of a game. And I would strongly recommend trying out strange challenges if you want to learn how to be a better designer.