Fabulous Beasts — a game design deep dive

(This post assumes some familiarity with the basic systems in Fabulous Beasts. For a primer, please read over any of the review articles or Let’s Play videos on our content page.)

We’ve been prototyping, playtesting and developing Fabulous Beasts, a tabletop / digital hybrid game, for about a year now. It’s an interesting game to demo to a group of experienced players. First reactions are often to see the colourful pieces, connected tablet and assume that it’s a cute electronic toy. Then they try and build a tower, score a few points, and we tell them the current high score is over 10,000… Then they pause and give the game a second look.

Inspirations

We started playtesting for Fabulous Beasts with a survey of current stacking games. There are some really great ones out there, and we documented some of our favourites in this post. Something that we kept coming back to is that there isn’t a great deal of reward in stacking games for strategic play while you are building the tower. You can always lose a stacking game, by knocking it over, but there are few stacking games you can outright win. Our biggest source of inspiration for a game that really blends dexterity and strategic play is Bausack. The different game modes are a bit like a game designer trying all the different combinations in turn: what if we tried a resource mechanic? what if we tried a reverse auction? It felt to us that there were levels beyond Bausack that could be reached — a more coherent, integrated system.

Creating an economy

One of the key choices we made early on our game is to let players choose any piece at any time. It might have little or no effect in-game, but you can still play it. With the core set of 24 pieces, this means that there 6.2044840173e+23 different permutations of towers you can build. That’s as close to infinite as makes no difference.

Our game economy is to do with stacking pieces in order to create, evolve and manage a world full of beasts. Put simply: the more beasts you have, the more fabulous you make them, and the longer they survive, the higher your score will be. Jeopardy arrives in this world in the form of jealousy, which causes the value of affected beasts to decline, possibly to the point where they expire. Players need to manage their choices carefully to maximise the in-game value of each piece. But, the more useful a piece is, the harder it is to stack.

One way this works in the game is with the Miracles. These pieces confer a x2 bonus on the score each turn, but as well as being really tricky to stack, also come with an additional dexterity challenge players have to accomplish to keep that bonus going. The first two Miracles are Haste (time limits) and Distraction (arcade-style challenges on the connected screen). Play your Miracles early, and you destabilise your tower and give yourself a lot of extra work to do. Play them late, and a truly fabulous world will be beyond you.

This means that two towers built with the same pieces can have very, very different scores…

Designing for replayability

We’ve been thinking a lot about designing for replayability — we want Fabulous Beasts to have depth and interest on your 100th playthrough. That’s harder in a co-op game — one of the easy ways to variety is the infinite array of brilliant and dumb things players do while trying to win a game against their friends. Even a genius system like Pandemic can start to feel a bit like a solved puzzle eventually.

We’ve kept a degree of randomness in the current game. The challenges that the Miracles serve up are randomly drawn from a pool of options, and the Cross and Migrate pieces generate a random Fabulous Beast from the available stock in the world.

The other element that keeps the game fresh is the complexity of the piece geometry. We’ve gone through dozens of iterations with a 3D printer to introduce many hidden elements and challenges. Some pieces go together nicely and form a stable platform, but not many… This type of challenge is connected to the rule that if you knock anything off the tower, you have a few seconds to replace it all before the game ends. This is easy to do if one piece falls, but rapidly gets very challenging. What we’ve often seen in playtesting is a hastily-rebuilt tower that’s far less manageable than its predecessor. Experienced players can use the instability mechanic to their advantage — re-fashioning their tower within the time limit to fix a badly placed piece or even create cantilevered platforms.

Our goal with Fabulous Beasts is to still be making this game — as in, designing it, playtesting it and evolving it — in 10 years’ time. We want to create something rich enough that we can find new avenues for growth in the play experience, created in dialogue with a group of enthusiastic players. We’re really inspired by Mark Rosewater’s Drive to Work podcast — 200 episodes of chewy, fascinating detail about how a brilliant design team have kept Magic: The Gathering fresh for 20 years — and that’s who we’d like to be when we grow up. Kickstarter is an amazing platform for this as well — the way that Greater Than Games has built out the Sentinels of the Multiverse series is another inspiration.

That means we’re (in our dream scenario) 1/10 of the way through the design process for this game. Here are a few of the ideas lurking in our notebooks, in rough order of achievability:

• a Versus Mode, for competitive party play
• Artefact expansion sets — adding in new versions of the Artefact types we already have, or even adding in entirely new types
• Streak scoring mode, so that highly-skilled players who regularly build complete towers can move on to new challenges
• A deck of NFC-enabled Moo+ cards, introducing deeper competitive dynamics for players
• A Story Mode, giving players designated roles and powers, and creating a goal to strive for over multiple play sessions

Machi Koro is a great example of a game where expansions have radically altered the play experience – a great example for us.

At the time of writing, we’re exactly half-way through our Kickstarter campaign and 62% of the way to our goal. Thanks for reading — if you like the sound of what we’re doing, and want to be a part of the journey from here, we’d be hugely grateful for your support.