Earlier this year, Skotos Tech & RPGnet released my sixth iOS card game, Michael Schacht’s Web of Power Card Game: The Duel. Because I wasn’t really writing board game articles at the time, I missed out on writing an article about the development of the game, as I have with Money, High Society, Kingdoms, Modern Art: The Card Game, and Michael Schacht’s Gold!
Rather than leave that gap in my iPhone series, I’ve opted to put together this article, somewhat after the fact. As with some of my other most recent iPhone articles, it’s a rambling look at several of the most important decisions that went into the creation of this game. However, I’ve opted to change my focus somewhat this time, by talking more about the publishing decisions we made than some of the programming specifics.
Some Origins
Before I start, though, a few notes on the games origins: Michael Schacht (who I wrote about in “Three Colloraborative Designers”) approached me in 2010 to see if I’d be interested in adapting some of his games to the iPhone. Since I was a fan of several of Michael’s games — including Hansa, China, The Hollywood! Card Game, King’s Breakfast, and (of course) Coloretto — I was happy to say yes. The only question was: what?
Michael suggested a card game of his called Richelieu. I hadn’t previously played it, but I corrected that lack after Michael sent me a copy. It turned out to be a majority-control game of collecting country & power symbols. It had good strategy, some depth, and perhaps most importantly it had a fiddly physicality to it, thanks to its grabbing of tiles from a grid in the middle of the table. This “fiddliness” is one of the points that I highlighted in “What Makes a Great MobileEuroGame” — and I think one of the most important, as it helps to break down the barrier between a player and the game that is created by the iPhone’s shiny screen.
(As it happens, Richelieu overall met four of my five criteria from that article, omitting only “compactness” — and fitting a 4×12 grid of tiles on the screen proved to be hard, even on the iPad.)
After playing through the game, Michael & Skotos Tech came to an agreement on licensing. The game got sidelined for a bit because we decided to first put together an iOS version of his then-newest game Gold!, but Web of Power Card Game: The Duel eventually came out this year.
But it wasn’t a simple or obvious path, not even in the days before I put code to computer screen.
The Setting
Michael Schacht has published a series of closely related games released under a variety of different names and a variety of different themes. The best known of them is Web of Power (1999), a board game of majority control set in Dark Ages Europe. It was released in Germany with the same theming, but under a different name: Kardinal & König (2000). The original Web of Power is now out of print in the United States, but several years ago it was rereleased with some slightly polished rules and a different theme as China (2005).
Michael quickly followed up on the success of Web of Power with a card game that developed the same themes. It was released through his own small-press in Germany, and thus it was called Kardinal & König: Das Kartenspiel (2001). By the time the concept of a Web of Power card game got to a larger publisher, it had changed a lot; the mechanics and components were still pretty similar, but it was essentially a new game. Its theme also changed from being a large-scale European game of the Middle Ages to a game about France of the 17th Century. And that finally brings us to Richelieu (2003).
For every other game we’ve published, we stuck with the then-current theming of the game’s tabletop variant. I feel that it’s generally useful to provide a bridge between our iOS games and the tabletop brethren. However for Richelieu, the game was 9 years’ old, out-of-print, and had never been in-print in the US. Beyond that, a game set amidst the provinces of France didn’t seem like it’d appeal to an international audience. Fortunately, we had two other choices that would still link up to the other games in the series: China or the Web of Power setting. Choosing Web of Power’s Middle Ages was easy. Though it may not be currently in print either, I think it’s by far the most evocative of the settings — and in the fullness of time, I have every faith that all of these games will return to their original theming.
In my opinion, the decision has proven a good one. Neither of our Michael Schacht games — Gold! or “Richelieu” — is that well known in the United States. However, Web of Power Card Game: The Duel currently sells about 2.5x better than Gold! on average; to date it’s sold about 50% as much as Gold! in less than a quarter of the time. I think that’s largely thanks to the evocative theming that we picked (and that Michael came up with ‘lo these many years ago).
Surprisingly, this decision defined the first work for the project. I had to sit down and remap all of the cards from Richelieu provinces to Web of Power countries. These decisions weren’t always obvious and the numbers didn’t match in the two games. After a day’s work, however, I had a listing — which Michael was kind enough to OK.
We were on our way.
Web of Power Card Game: The Name
As I’ve said, the game we opted to license was Richelieu. If that was all we were thinking about, we could have just called it Web of Power: The Card Game and been done with it. It would have fit in nicely with our Modern Art: The Card Game release and our pending King Arthur: The Card Game — all card-based variants of board game play.
However, we also licensed the closely related game Kardinal & König: Das Kartenspiel. The original K&K:DK was more complex than Richelieu and and it had even more issues with compactness — due to the fact that there are several different majority control symbols within each country. The fact that it played with 4 players was also a problem given the games’ wide grid of tiles which took up our iOS screens from left to right.
Thus, though we knew we were going to initially release Richelieu, we wanted to keep our options open for a later release of Kardinal & König: Das Kartenspiel if the initial release proved sufficiently popular. So we had to make sure that our name for Richelieu would allow for a second and distinct Web of Power card game in the future.
That’s how we came up with Web of Power Card Game: The Duel (from a list of dozens of options). It’s a bit long and clunky, I know, but I felt that by including the word “Duel” we would make it obvious that we were presenting the (simpler) two player version of the Web of Power Card Game rules. Though it’s not currently on my schedule, I am hopeful that we’ll eventually be able to produce the other variant of the game, which I’ll call Web of Power Card Game 2: The Meeting (or The Alliance or The Crossing or something).
And that’s why our Richelieu‘s name is so long!
Some Thoughts on Similarities
Earlier this year I wrote a pair of programming articles for Safari Books Online that was inspired by my work on The Duel. At the head of the article I included a pair of screen shots for our first and latest iOS games: Money and The Duel. Given that they both were built using the same “MobileEuroGame” library, I was somewhat struck by how different they looked:
At first, it may seem ridiculous that these games could have anything to do with each other. However, there are actually a number of commonalities to their underlying structure — of the sort that I write about in articles like “A Theory of Board Game Design” — and they made it well worthwhile to build both games on the same foundation.
The most obvious similarity is that cards and tiles are the same thing. They may look different on the tabletop and on your iOS device, but they both represent arbitrarily randomized objects. The main difference I can think of is that you often have a lot more tiles on the table than cards — but the screen shot of Money sure shows a lot of cards on the table too.
Both games also have game turns broken into two phases. In Money you make a bid (bidding phase), then select a lot when it’s your turn (selection phase). In The Duel you take tiles (tile selection phase), then optionally place an ownership marker (ownership phase). The big difference between the games’ phases is how they’re organized. In Money all the players bid, then select, while in The Duel each player selects then places ownerships during the same turn.
Beyond that, there are a lot of big picture elements that we might take for granted in a card game, but that nonetheless required programming that was the same for both games. By this I mean: you have individual players, and they take individual turns, and they end up owning cards. Slightly more unique is the fact that each player has a deck of winnings (your hand in Money and your pile of collected tiles that you never see in The Duel) and a player’s final score can be determined solely by looking at that winning deck — without having to know about anything that happened during the game itself.
Because Money and The Duel are computer games, they also got to share ideas (and code) about their artificial intelligence (AI) and user interface (UI) that went beyond the actual mechanics of the game.
There are a number of very distinct AIs in Money, but at least a couple of them (Val and Vern) are purely value-oriented. They make all of their decisions based upon how they think each lot is valued to them. Although The Duel has very different decision making, it’s similarly value-oriented. Many possible outcomes (e.g., getting the majority of a set, getting closer to a majority, shutting an opponent out of a set, claiming a bonus disc) are each given a value. The AIs thus look at each tile they could take, value it based upon about a dozen criteria, and finally choose the one that’s worth the most to them.
The core UI of The Duel comes straight from Money (via our other games). It’s modeled around the core ideas that a single tap means selection and a double tap means action. Mind you, having old UI like that sitting around can get you into trouble too. Early on I tried to let players drag their ownership markers out to the tiles they wanted to claim — because that UI is also found in Money, where you drag your lot out to the lot you want to swap with. Because The Duel’s tiles and ownership markers were both pretty small, I found the result a little awkward, and thus I eventually went to the double-tap methodology instead to place an ownership marker.
(But, here’s a secret for you guys: you can still drag your ownership markers to tiles if you want to. It’s not documented, and it may not stick around forever, but I ultimately decided there was no reason to pull out the code.)
Conclusion
Though I’ve often talked about the challenges of creating AIs and UIs for tabletop games on an iOS device, that’s really just a part of the work of a tabletop conversion. Especially for a game like Richelieu, you might have a lot more to think about before you ever get to the coding.
I hope you found that all interesting. If you want to see more about the game, visit Michael Schacht’s Web of Power Card Game: The Duel on the iTunes Store.
Next week I’ll be back with yet another deckbuilding article, this one covering Martin Wallace’s A Few Acres of Snow.
This article copyright © 2012, Skotos Tech Inc.
