Point-a-Pile

Welcome to the devlog for my game Point-a-Pile. The game is part of the SwiftSmash Saga collection, which is all about games where you simultaneously reveal cards and must then be the first to smash (or just tap/pick) the “right card”.

Of all my ideas, this one is the furthest removed from that core mechanic. It’s still clearly a SwiftSmash game, with a lot of the same DNA and gameplay, but, well, the title betrays its uniqueness. It’s not about smashing or tapping the right card first. It’s not about speed at all.

It’s about (simultaneously) pointing at the pile of cards you want … and hoping nobody else pointed at it too.

What’s the idea?

I write on the game page that this game was quite directly inspired by Let’s Hit Each Other With Fake Swords (by the developers of Exploding Kittens).

The first two lines of the rules are basically the same.

• The current (active) player draws some cards and splits them into piles.
• They count down and everyone simultaneously points at the pile they want.

From that moment on, however, our rules diverge quite heavily :p

In that game, if two people want the same pile, they must fight it out with swords. (And text on the cards gives a unique twist to how they must do so.)

In my game, I use the “divide and conquer” approach.

• You’re the only one who wants a pile? You get it.
• Multiple people want one?
  • Split the pile again.
  • Point again.
  • Repeat until everyone gets something or the pile can’t be split further.

When I wrote that down, I was like “Yeah, that’s it, should work”

Refining the idea

A few months later, I could actually make this. And as so often happens, while specifying/executing the idea I stumbled upon a few more questions to answer.

How do you win? I considered doing the same as Fake Swords and say you need X cards of the same color. This, however, falls apart with my “divide and conquer”-approach.

• If the pile can’t be split further (it’s 1 card), then nobody gets it.
• This means that if there’s a card some player wants/needs to win, you can always keep them from winning by pointing at that card.
• (On the other hand, if there are multiple such cards, then you can’t do anything to stop them, which is just as bad for gameplay.)

This is a problem we can solve in two ways.

• Make the winning condition more variable or dynamic.
• Add an extra wrinkle to gameplay about what happens to discarded cards.

You know me. I did both things.

Change #1: You win by scoring 10 points. Some cards have a fixed score, but that’s the least interesting. Of course everyone will go for the highest score. As such, cards still have a color and many other cards score by saying something like “I’m worth your number of BLUE cards”.

This means that someone’s proximity to winning is a bit more obscure (unless you work really hard to track/calculate that), but it also means there are multiple avenues to getting ahead. To getting zero points now, but lots of points later. Or a few points each turn, which will eventually get you to 10.

Change #2: Instead of pointing at a pile, you may also clearly point at nothing. (Just the table in front of you, I guess.) If only one player did so, they get all cards that would otherwise be discarded. Otherwise, such players get nothing at all.

This is a gamble, yes. But it’s a simple rule and a high risk/high reward thing that anyone can go for. It means the game doesn’t just stagnate with players pointing at the same piles over and over until nobody gets anything.

With that in place, I found the core rules solid and balanced.

Expansions?

As usual, I had way more ideas than this, but they were all moved to expansions.

• Cards that forbid some players from pointing at that pile.
• Personalized missions that create even more “score obscurity” and more ways to win.
• Cards with actions to execute; you lose that scored card, but get a powerful action to cause chaos, which is an interesting decision
• Cards that, if on top of the active player’s score pile, change some rule about how pointing and resolution works.

These one-liners basically explain the whole expansion, which is always nice. Writing those rules and ideas was almost no work, but drawing all the darn icons for all the different texts was a lot of work.

Let’s make that

Code

As stated, the rules for the game and the code to generate the cards wasn’t noteworthy.

• It simply distributes the 4 colors fairly over all cards.
• It draws from all possible actions/rules/missions, taking their custom probabilities into account. (For the base game, for example, the most interesting and simplest cards have a much higher probability, so they appear more often in the deck.)
• Many texts are a template where things are replaced afterward. For example, “You win if you have %num% %color cards”, where %num% is then replaced by a specific number and %color% by a specific color.

This ends up generating a nice list of cards with simple ways in which they score, distributed over 4 colors.

Simulation

The rules for this game have an interactive example that generates a random turn and shows you how that would play out. Whenever I do that, I merely need to flip a switch and it can simulate 100,000 such games and give me some statistics.

They’re always interesting to share, I think. (And learn from, if I see issues.)

• % games ended by score: 90%. (This means that 10% of games continue until the deck is simply empty, others are won by the player who got 10 points before that moment.)
• Average score by the end: 6 points. (Averaging all players, when the game ends, they have 6 points each.)
• # of “pointing cycles” per round: 1.5. (This means that once every two rounds, a pile will need to be split up and pointed at again. On average. This is very doable and not overwhelming.)
• # of rounds per game: 5.5–6. (This is perhaps a bit on the low side, but remember that this simulates for player counts 2 to 6. And yes, with a lot of players, the deck will empty really quickly. I could add a few more to the standard material. But my general vision is that players just add expansions when they want a longer/more complex game. If I make the base game already quite heavy on material, well, then the expansions will have nowhere left to go and will be too much.)

This is all completely random play. The computer isn’t smart, the computer doesn’t care, it just points randomly. In a real game, players will probably win by score 100% of the time, and the average score will be higher.

Because the entire game is about pointing at the exact pile you want, and not getting any other, the simulation shows a large fluctuation. If the computer happens to play smart, then it indeed reaches much higher scores and quicker games. If the computer happens to play dumb, then the average final score (over ~100 games, when I do a quick test run) might even be negative :p

As such, I had to bump the number of repeated simulations to a really high value this time to get accurate results (on average). All in all, I think the interactive example ended up very clear and a very good test of the game’s general balance, which it passed.

Visuals

As stated in all the other devlogs for SwiftSmash Saga, the theme here is really simplicity. I didn’t want to add any more texture or detail to these cards. I really wanted them to just be a solid color with simple flat icons.

That’s what I started with. A solid block, with a color (and pattern, to help colorblind players), and a part cut out for the text.

Then I experimented a bit with where to show the type of the card, which ended up in a pretty common place: the corners.

Then I decided that any cards that score a specific number of points should show that too. In that case, their score value is clearly visible in the other two corners.

My biggest issue was with the illustration. By instinct, I left a large gap for some illustration above the text.

But it felt weird to just use the type illustration for that. It’s not important enough. It also makes all cards look repetitive and same-y.

No, in a game with so many different actions or scoring methods, I really want unique icons per unique card. I want players to immediately recognize what a card (generally) does, just from glancing at its icon.

This meant … manually drawing nearly 50 icons. Yeah, that was a long morning that tested my discipline, but we got through it.

It just didn’t look great to have black-and-white icons. It was a bit too simplistic. A bit too generic. These are silly little party games, yes, but that doesn’t mean they should look like they were made in 30 seconds.

As such, I decided to add “nails” or “parts of fingers” to the icons. (In a stylized way, of course, otherwise it’d be horrific.) Whenever an action is about cards or the deck, I added a small thumb to the side to make the card look like a hand.

Just some tiny things to make it distinct and to reiterate that theme of pointing fingers.

I also did this because I couldn’t use colors (or anything with lots of contrast) for this. It would mess with your perception of the “color of the card”, if the icon had three different colors. So yes, all icons are still mostly black and white, but that’s fine.

All in all, this brought us to the following sketches.

And here’s a screenshot of the first two pages of the final material.

I’m still not entirely sure. It’s just … a type of look I never really did before, partially because the heading font I chose is so odd and distinctive. But that’s why I did it! Extra challenging, more diversity in my card designs, and at the very least it looks clear and good enough.

Now that we’re on the subject, let’s talk more about my visual designs …

General thoughts on game design in 2024

Okay, so, I’ve made nearly 100 board games the past 2 or 3 years. Especially this year, with my Pandaqi system very efficient and well-developed, things happened very quickly and mostly smoothly.

This means that, as of this writing, I am already done with all board games slated to be published in 2025. And it’s currently October 2024.

My hyperactive brain (and body) might have moved a little too fast. I still have lots of ideas for new games and mechanics, all of them promising and probably good enough to turn into great games.

But the other parts became very repetitive. The rules, code and devlog writing are all a pile of work—but not the problem. I am a writer first and foremost, and I write thse devlogs naturally to sort my thoughts, so that’s not too bad.

It’s mostly the graphics design. I just feel like I’m stuck in the same habits, patterns and workflow now. And it’s hard to break out, because it is very effective. I’ve learned so much and grown so much as a designer, that creating an entirely new aesthetic became very fast and smooth.

At the same time, it means I’m not really taking risks here, and most of my visual designs are just “fine”. I am too tired from making games (fast) to really spend a lot of time and energy into growing my drawing skills and creating truly beautiful cards. At the same time, I’m too much of an artist and perfectionist to let myself create mediocre or uninspired designs for a year.

As such, this felt like the best time to take a step back. Let new designs and visual ideas inspire me. Take the time to try new habits or workflows. I’ve basically pushed everything I can about what I can currently do and how I currently approach each game. Doing that any longer feels like getting stuck and making the same thing over and over.

Sure, I might still do the other prep work for games—finalize rules, keep my thoughts in a devlog, etcetera. But the visual side, and thus the actual finishing and publishing, will be delayed. Just to make sure I can really take the time for some fresh and completely new types of graphical designs. Just to make sure my next batch of game ideas won’t all look and feel identical to the ones before.

Also, it’s just good to take a break. Actually play games instead of make them all the time :p

Perhaps this feeling is stupid and unfounded, but I sense that some big break is coming next year. I’ve been making great quality games (and stories, in fact) for years now. My portfolio has grown immensely. I’m slowly getting noticed at writing competitions or gaming websites. At some point, I think, there has to be some snowball effect and the weight of my work will hopefully pull a lot of people along with it.

Maybe I feel that way because I hope for it. Making all these games that I know are pretty, and good, and fun, without any sort of response is a bit disheartening sometimes. Writing the Saga of Life, which is over 400,000 words now and has many quality stories, can be a bit lonely when you don’t hear anything from readers.

So I guess I just want to take a step back for half a year or so, let my board game work breathe, and see what fresh wind starts blowing.

Conclusion

Perhaps it’s a bit weird to include that stuff inside a devlog about a tiny, unrelated party game. But it was the only place, really, as this is the final devlog for the final game I developed in 2024 (for 2025).

As for this game itself, I am on the fence about it. The rules and gameplay are solid. What you’ve come to expect of me: really simple rules, really minimal and accessible, yet lots of depth and expansions if you seek more.

The core idea of “have people point to what they want at the same time” also revealed itself to be much stronger than I thought when I tested the game. There’s this whole psychological warfare, bluffing, double bluffing thing attached to it! “Oh but you want that card, but you know I want it too, so will you change your pointing finger for that, or will you actually think I am bluffing, …”

Weird negotiations start happening. People play egoistically and therefore lose out on the one card that would make them win; some people cooperate until they realize the same pile would let them both win. People are so stressed about pointing at the same pile as another, that they literally have a trembling finger and try to sneakily change its destination as they point.

Honestly, I could’ve removed all the special cards and it would’ve been a game too xD I wrote this down as the “kids version” or the “simplified version”. A version of this game without text on the cards, it’s just a few colors and simple icons, because the “simultaneous-pile-pointing” mechanic is so juicy and strong just on its own.

But that’s for the next batch of SwiftSmash games.

Why are you on the fence about this one, then? Well, this is the reason for my entire section about how I feel the visual design of my games is stuck in a loop. I think the game looks just good enough, but also a bit wonky. Is that fine? Is that distinct and fun? Maybe. I don’t know. It doesn’t feel like that at the moment, but I’m also not motivated to change it or completely redo the game.

I chose a bit of an odd font, a bit of an odd general design, and even a bit of an odd name. I guess I should just accept that this inevitably results in a bit of an odd game :p There’s still some part in me that wants to “appeal to everyone”, even though I know that nothing is for everyone. You should just make something for its target audience. And this game, well, I think it will do great with certain wacky playing groups, and be “too weird” for many others.

Perhaps the biggest lesson here is that I should just really accept that I can’t always make games that appeal to “everyone”. And that’s fine. Good, even. Most things made for “everyone” end up being for “no one”. Who knows. Maybe after all this rambling, Point-a-Pile ends up being the breakout hit of my 2025 games, because it’s so odd and distinctive.

Until the next devlog,

Pandaqi