Behind the Curtain

So, you’ve read the description of the game or looked at the pictures of some playtest graphics, and you want to know more. Well, come on over here, mind your step around the 4-sided dice on the floor there and please ignore the man behind that curtain. That’s just Chad – hard at work on a game.

What is he doing? Probably writing the rules to Welcome to Centerville. No, I’m not kidding. It’s always the last thing to get done and the game just lives in his head until he is forced, through deadlines, to finally put it all down on paper. There’s no point in doing it any earlier in the process as things change so quickly – sometimes a small tweak, sometimes a drastic overhaul – and he would waste time writing and re-writing.

And before we go any further, let me state that all graphics used here are PLAYTEST GRAPHICS ONLY! We need something to print out so we can push around the pieces for playtesting. Once we get far enough along in the production queue, we’ll get the final art in place – but we’re not there yet.

The First Piece of the Puzzle

I’m not going to walk you through the whole game – it would take too long and the rulebook will be available shortly. What I will do is give you a glimpse of how things can change as a game develops. For Welcome to Centerville, I think a good example is the Vocation option.

What are Vocations? I’m glad you asked. On each of the six dice, one face – called Education and represented by the mortarboard icon (you remember, that goofy hat they made you wear at graduation – yeah, that…) – provides access to the Vocation tiles. There are 45 tiles, representing nine different types of occupation in our little town of Centerville. There is one Energy tile, two Transportation tiles, et cetera, on up to nine Retail tiles in the mix.

You can collect them in sets to gain Wealth or Prestige (the two types of victory points in the game). If you want Prestige, you collect sets of the same type (eg., three or more Factory tiles). If you are after Wealth, you want to collect as many different types of Vocation as you can (eg., a Finance, an Energy, an Arts, a Services, and so on). And, yes, you can do both. We call collecting sets of the same as “going deep” into a Vocation. Collecting different types is “going wide”. I’ll be using those terms later on.

The numbers on the tiles are an indication of how many are in the draw bag. In our samples above, you see the one Energy tile? That’s all there is. There are three Finance, four Tourism, etc. So the higher-numbered Vocations are more likely to be drawn and there are more of them to collect in order to make your sets.

Okay, now you have an idea of how Vocations work in the game. Collecting the tiles and how they score Wealth and/or Prestige for you has not changed since the original design concept. What *has* changed – quite a bit – is how you get them.

In the beginning

On our first pass through the game, Vocations were all in a bunch. There was one holding box for five tiles. Rolling Education icons gave you access to all of them, your choice. You could choose any one Vocation with a single Education icon. Two more Education would get a second tile. Three more would get a third one. Any empty spaces were refilled with randomly drawn tiles at the end of a player’s turn.

Those question mark icons are called “Fate” and they serve as a wildcard. They can be paired up with any other icon. In our example above, the purple Education with the yellow Fate makes a 2-value Education roll capable of selecting a second Vocation tile during your turn.

The problem with this approach was that it was very easy to either go wide or deep, depending on what was drawn from the bag. It was too random and the in-game costs didn’t line up with the victory points earned by the end. You could luck into your desired strategy if your tiles were drawn right before your turn started or get screwed just as easily by having your desired tiles drawn after your turn ended and other players could grab them up before your next turn rolled around.

It also meant that if you rolled an Education icon on your final roll for the turn (and were using the rest of your dice in other areas), you could just grab whichever Vocation tile best suited you at that time.

So Vocations went back to the drawing board.

Round Two

The next idea was to use the same method of paying dice for the tiles but instead of “one for the first, two for the second” out of all the choices it became “one for the first of a type, two for a second of that same type, etc.” So, for example, say you already have two Retail (9) tiles and a Tourism (4) tile from a previous turn.

 

But this still doesn’t work right. Why not? Because you can still grab the lower-numbered tiles to go wide just as easily as the higher-numbered tiles to make sets. Back to the drawing board one more time.

By Jove, I Think We’ve Got It!

So by now, we have figured out that we want it easier to go wide but not as lucrative points-wise. And if you are building sets of the same type of Vocation, it should be harder but pay off better. In order to make that dynamic work properly, we decided to have the value of the tile determine its accessibility. And we added a few more spaces, so more tiles are available at a time. Now the board looks like this:

        

And the new tiles pulled from the bag now get placed (and re-arranged as needed) so that the higher-numbered tiles are placed at the top and tiles decrease in value as the board fills downward. That final arrangement gave the push-pull we wanted the players to deal with when deciding on set collection.

As Easy as That

Sure, that looks like a simple progression. It’s just refining a single idea after repeated play in order to create a bit of tension in the decision-making for players. Nothing to it, right?

Actually, there’s quite a bit of math going on behind the scenes – things like combinatorics, probabilities and statistics. Sounds like fun, yeah? There were Excel spreadsheets dedicated to calculating the chances of certain things happening in the game. It’s complicated and, honestly, I only really follow about two-thirds of it on a good day. But trust me, the math is in there and you can be glad someone else has done it for you.

You, lucky you, can just sit back with a cold drink in one hand and a bunch of colorful dice in the other and enjoy what comes next. Mind your step on the way out after your game, and thanks for stopping by!

Author: Kai Jensen