I like to do in depth post-mortems of my games because frankly I forget many of the details of my thoughts on what worked and didn’t, so having something to read back on and can pull from things that worked and avoid things that didn’t.
I’ll talk about challenges individually but first some thoughts around game design:
- So the basic premise of this game was to give lots of little advantages to people who did well early on in challenges but make sure they didn’t heavily affect the game in a way that detracted from gameplay. I think it largely did. I’ll talk about the idols in a moment, but just focusing on the non-idol advantages, they worked pretty well. People figured out it was happening quickly, which I knew would happen. The reason for this is that in the tribe section of the game too often those who do really well don’t get quite enough in my opinion. It paints them as a target especially after the merge while often not being important enough to win challenges on their own. I also thought giving a “hook” for things for people to talk about and think about early game wasn’t a bad thing.
- I’d make a few changes to advantages. For example, although it increases the power dramatically, combining the avoidance advantage with the walkie talkie advantage would have been better. Or at the very least make it more likely that the person who gets the walkie talkie advantage would get the avoidance advantage too.
- Idols! The Class B and Class A idol thing was interesting. I don’t think I’d do it that way again. The difference allowed us to award idols with this risk/reward system. You go for more, you get a better idol. I think that part worked okay! I think an idol that can’t be detected is fine. But if differentiating between two types of idols I might figure out a different way to make it more powerful. For example, a Class A idol can be played conditionally or something. But I actually didn't love the nullifying nature of the Class A idol. CM1 going out on it was fun, but DK not having any idea that his play would do that made it feel a little bit random and unfortunate. It saved Ani and helped DK because of that for what was actually an incorrect idol play. So I think I'd probably go back to the drawing board on that front.
- In general, I fully intend to allow conditional idol play in future games. It’d be limited in the way it could work, but essentially “If X plays his idol on himself, then I play my idol on Y” or whatever. I think that would both allow the game not to drag out, still keep the game from needing truly live TCs (which are interesting but don’t really work well for our site), but still allows idols to be played in a more interesting way.
- I liked idols being awarded in known ways. There are pros and cons of both methods, but I think it’s likely something I’d continue with.
- More of this game was known than practically any other game. That’ll likely be the case for any game I run. I prefer to have information known ahead of time. That doesn’t mean there’s not room for mystery (which advantages are used, for example), but I like players to know the universe of possibilities that might occur. I think that’s friendlier for newbies; I think it allows for more advanced planning; and I think it avoids some bad mod tendencies that often occur when mods are there to amuse themselves rather than their players and their spectators.
- Firemaking Challenge: So I think the pro of this was that it accomplished what I wanted in that it involved players in the game on a regular basis, added some meme material, etc. I’m not sure I’d do it again. First and foremost, it was horrible from a mod standpoint to count. Second, I think as we got closer to the end I realized how boring the actual f4 tiebreaker would be. This is a place where it would be SO tense and the challenge so important and everyone would hang on the results to see who was in the finale. But with the firemaking challenge although it was theoretically unknown, there wasn’t much you could do at that point.
- I think maybe the most important design element of this game was fully embracing Discord. It was a lot of work to make it operate, and I didn't always get permissions right, but I think doing it this way really payed off for a non-anonymous game. I hope you agree.
- ProductionBot is kind of an afterthought because it was most helpful pre and early merge, but it was SO helpful to listen in on people's conversations with each other. It really added understanding to things that Ariel and
I could convey to the spectators.
- Speaking of Ariel: just awesome.
- Non-anon is always a double edged sword. I think once a year or two years is about right for non-anonymous survivor games on this site because of the problems inherent in them, but I think there's a lot of value in hosting them occasionally as it lets people connect on a more real level and that's actually quite helpful for building community.
- That said, my next game will likely be an anonymous game of some sort.
Challenges Generally:
- D3f made this comment before and I wholeheartedly agree with it: pre-merge the strongest challenges tend to be ones that have tribes working together. I wish we had done more of that. I really don’t like when it feels that a challenge shuts down communication between players. The difficulty with this is if you’re going to avoid live challenges (i.e. those that have to have people on at the same time), you’re somewhat limited in what you can do. And I also think there’s some necessity to somewhat match what you do in the pre-merge with what you do in the post-merge. If you plan to have puzzles in the post-merge, you should have them in the pre-merge. I think there’s some room for a group doing a puzzle together, but generally puzzles have to be solitary events. That said, I agree with D3f. The most fun I had watching people do challenges was when they were planning and overplanning.The other thing to avoid though is if you increase those types of challenges is that you run into potentially too many quarterbacking situations where one or two people really control what everyone else does and it’s not really a team event at all.
- The role of “crapshoot” challenges: Love them or hate them, they have a role to play in game design. The only true crapshoot we had was rock, paper scissors. Thumbtacks and Seesaws were both gameable and we got a lot of great conversation about how to win those. Dice Roll Endurance was a crapshoot in the sense that you could theoretically win on your first roll but could influence how likely it was you were going to win by having better endurance than others. Teamwork Timing was more of a crapshoot than I would have hoped just from how good players were at it. So it leaves only RPS as something where you have very limited agency. I wish RPS could have been done in two stages or something so that people had at least some gameability for it, but think it worked pretty well in its spot.
Challenges Specifically:
Google Trivia: I liked this challenge as one to start off with. It required teams to work together to assign topics, it wasn’t hard, it didn’t take long, etc. It was the amuse bouche of challenges.
Sliding Puzzle: A classic for a reason. The interesting part to this was the 4x4/5x5 idol stuff and I think that worked as intended.
Find the Word: A word search. I think maybe swapping Seesaws with this would have been better. Get tribes working together, we had already had a couple of puzzle type events, etc. But the challenge itself is solid.
Tribal Thumbtacks: It was fun watching people work together to try and find an optimal spread for their thumbtacks. I think this challenge could have used an element that increased the possibility of one player going rogue in a selfish move because the tendency just to have one person assign everyone else their numbers was strong.
Youtube Search: A classic for a reason.
Maze: I think this worked well and again the major point of interest was the multiple mazes/idol nature of it. I think though that I’d probably make the second and third mazes substantially easier than the first to increase the odds people went for multiple.
Cheaters Prosper: This is probably the challenge I messed up most on. I had a clear idea of what I wanted it to be in my head: people using all those tools we suspect others of using to win things like sodoku but also if you were fast at doing these it was faster than cheating. But instead players got understandably creative in how they wanted to cheat. So if I was going to do this challenge again, I would be much clearer about exactly what I meant by cheating. Also the cryptogram was too hard.
Teamwork Timing: This challenge wasn’t quite what I hoped it’d be because players were just too good. If I were to do this challenge again, I’d do something to make it harder. More times you have to hit and multiple of them, perhaps times that only pop up after you’ve done other times, etc. as it stood it was incredibly close.
Shaping the Future: A monty puzzle and I think perhaps the most successful one. It sort of registers at the right amount of hard that good puzzle solvers did it quicker than those that weren’t but that those who weren’t were still able to solve the puzzle.
One Line at a Time: Probably my favorite idea going into the game and it was my favorite coming out. I don’t think as a designer you want many subjective challenges in a game. In fact, one is probably the right number. But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t fun. Anyway, I’d still change things a bit if I did it again. Not so much because it didn’t work this time but because I think anyone who saw the challenge again would work out the optimal strategy even absent the ability to communicate: everyone posts once and then the two best writers alternate writing a story together. So I’d probably insert something that required more participation from more people. There was some talk about allowing coordination beforehand, but I think not allowing it is better.
Kanye: It was a flash game idol hunt. I wouldn’t do Kanye again (the joke is played out now) but it worked in its place.
Arcane Incrementalist: Again, I wouldn’t use this specific game again, but the “hour to get the highest score you can on an incremental game that you haven’t seen” was I think a pretty good challenge. Yes, the game itself wasn’t terribly complex or interesting.
Logic Puzzle: Too hard. I picked a middle difficulty logic puzzle from the book of puzzles my wife does at lunch, but I now realize that just because it’s middle difficulty for someone who does a ton of these doesn’t mean it’s remotely easy for someone who doesn’t do them at all. Still, I think a much easier logic puzzle could be perfectly fine.
Dice Roll Endurance: I think this was a simple game to play. I think if I did it again in the future though I’d probably add an element that rewarded the endurance slightly more. Something like “Your highest roll + the number of rolls you made during this game” would probably work.
Nurimaze: Another Monty puzzle. Seemed fine to me. The difficulty for puzzles is making sure they aren’t ones that people have built solvers for. It’s very important to me to not do puzzles that can be cheated (except when that’s the intent!). I think this one worked really well. All but one solved it but there was a wide disparity in how fast.
RPS: I’ve already sort of discussed it, but I think this was probably TOO crapshooty. I like to include a few crapshoots, but I like them to have an element of skill or outhinking. I think if I was doing RPS again it’d need to be one where you did it in rounds. But that probably makes the game last too long so I probably wouldn’t do it again.
Jigsaw Puzzle: I hate jigsaw puzzles. I think jigsaw puzzles are great as an individual challenge.
OLAAT Redux: Perhaps I shouldn’t have pushed the name again as it was totally different, but this was a pretty good challenge I think. The downside is that technical trouble can really bite you in the ass on this one. Perhaps upping it to 90 seconds would have been better. The other thing that makes me hesitate to use it again is that it’s a pain to “grade.” I have to first make sure that all entries are on time, then make sure that they use the right word, then i have to make sure (and this takes the longest) that no word is reused. So if everyone does their entry toward the end (as many did here) it means I’m giving results quite a bit later than I’d like.
Number Grid: WAY too hard. A challenge that no one finishes is just not one I want in a game I run. Yes, the puzzle challenge threats had been largely removed, but even Vash didn’t finish this as a spectator. My bad.
Game Quiz: I love the game quiz as the FIC. It requires some skills (looking up things), knowledge of the game, good guesswork, etc. I kind of wish we had turned a few of the more guessy ones into multiple choice, but otherwise I thought this worked well.
And that’s it for now at least. Maybe I’ll edit in some more later as I have a few more thoughts. I’m exhausted from doing this, but thank you all for playing and watching the game. It was a lot of fun to watch, and Jess is a very deserving winner.
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Maybe more players should have asked me to get my crack team of puzzle experts to help them. You suck Vash for getting eliminated two seconds after 
