One unexpected game design lesson from Rebirth’s Ireland side for me is this:
The game has random distribution of “Tower” powers and in a two player game, a random eight of the twelve goals will be public and a random two will be available as private goals and two won’t be in a game (in a four player game all twelve will be in the game).
That setup variability doesn’t matter that much.
Now, I’m not saying it matters zero. It does matter. A little. I usually like to start near one of the 2× tiles, for example (since I often like to rush for the 24-point connect-four-castles goal) so it matters to me where that tile ends up. And knowing when to use a “time walk” tower or a “brainstorm” tower is a key part of the tactics in the game.
But the flip side is that usually most of the players will visit most of the towers especially at 2p. Even at 3p I’ve noticed players take care to at least get most important towers on their itinary. Eventually.
Same with the goals. We sort the public goals after drawing them so they’re easier to keep track of (settlement goals, coastline goals, connection goals, surrounding goals etc) so which eight are drawn doesn’t matter as as which two aren’t in the game (because they’re the two goals at the bottom of the private goal deck).
It’s “false variability”. The game wouldn’t be that different (and the setup time would be shorter but the i18n story would be way harder, at least for goals if not for towers) if the goals and towers were pre-printed on the board. I’m not saying to literally do this. The little variabiilty that is there is fun. Kinda. Even though it feels like it’s much much less than other vartiable setup games like Chess 960 or even Caylus or Star Realms.
Because of the lacklusterness of this setup variability I started worrying a few plays in that the game would feel samey and not have legs.
Then over Christmas I had the chance to play Samurai again. It doesn’t have any variable setup at all. Yet every game feels different—because of what my opponents are doing and how they are playing and the decisions they’re making (along with the luck of the draw throughout the game, just like in Rebirth). When we got back home we brought Rebirth [Ireland] back out and wouldn’t you know it? Same thing. The games started feeling different because my opponent stepped up his game and started becoming more aware of bottle necks and blocking and edge patterns. Some of the thick layer of sameyness that had gathered on top of this game (in just a little over one year since it was released) was cleared off.
And that’s the game design lesson of today: how putting in a variable setup on the Ireland side of Rebirth’s game board kind of hurt the game because that draws the eye, that makes me think “Okay this is gonna matter, this is what’s gonna make each game different” when it’s not at all. That’s not where the variety is hiding. The variety is all in what my opponents do and how I need to react to that and vice versa. I’m not sure I’d go as far as saying it’d’ve been better if the towers and goals had all been fixed, (because once we can see through the illusory nature of their variability, we can appreciate the little variety it does bring without placing undue expectations on it), but maybe. Yeah, maybe a little. Affordance and conveyance is a huge part of game design, and a fixed setup would’ve more clearly conveyed the reality that “hey, this setup is more or less the same as it always is so what matters is what ruckus you are gonna bring so step up.” and not as much “hey, wow, look at these eight random goals that were drawn, can you catch them all, they’re gonna super matter and so is the tower distribution, you’re gonna really be where all those 3s and 13s are” which is only such a small part of the game compared to basics like points from clusters, settlements, and castles.
I’ve said before that the first food farm I play away from my big cluster is -12 points. The second one is -11 points, and the third one is -10 points. It might not look like that if I play away from it in the beginning (“I’m only giving up three points with this play since my existing cluster is only two big”) but that’s gonna be the end result once all your food farms are out, and ditto of course for power farms. There’s not a lot of goals that can compare to 12 points. A castle is a 10 point swing in a 2p game and most goal cards are only 8 points. Now, conversely, this doesn’t apply to playing apart but connecting up later. 1, 2, 1, 4 is correctly read as only two points short of 1, 2, 3, 4. The “away” I’m talking about is a food token so far away that you’ll won’tc connect up to it in time. That’s worth it but only when it results in a commensurately big point swing somewhere else. Like, playing a loose food farm next to the final 13p tile is minus twelve plus fourteen for a 2p gain so it’s better there than in your main cluster. Or, a loose food farm that cuts off and isolates three tiles from your 2p opponent might cost you twelve points but cost them ((12+11+10)-(1+2+3)) = 27 points if they were gonna link them all up, for a net +15 point delta for you, making it worth it to play away. This sort of play is often worth way more than the goal points, tower points, and off-shore farm points. (And yeah not every farm away is gonna be -12. The average value of farms in a big cluster is 6.5. Pretty good compared to playing four tiles in Dublin for 4.25 points per tile. But I like to think of the farm tiles as worth 12, 11, 10, 9… etc, i.e. mentally reversing the order of them compared to the order they’re actually scored just so I can remind myself early on of how valuable they actually are; I give up twelve points with the first played away, eleven with the second played away and so on. If I end up with a cluster of say eight farms, that’s only 8+7+6+… uh, 4.5 points per tile! I could’ve gotten way more if I hadn’t played away as much!
So while I’ve started becoming a li’l suspicious that Rebirth might not go the distance, I’m not counting it out just yet. The comparison to Samurai—a game without any setup variability at all—made me remember how vital the actual interplay of farm placement can be. Real interaction with a real human.
Now, I’m still not happy that the Scotland side has so few of what we’ve started calling “meadows” and too much “forests” where food farms must go and “mountains” where power farms must go. That kind of fixed, paint-by-numbers game play that reduces the game to only a matter of timing and miai values is a much bigger threat to the game variability interest than any fixed-vs-varied setup issue.