ARTICLE: Found in the Bin

I talk a lot about trashing ideas that don’t work. I write over and over about me having no mercy for ideas that don’t help the game.  About the fact that a designer should not be attached to any of his ideas and be ready to change them on the fly.

Let me give you some examples from Rattle, Battle Grab the Loot. Good examples always help to get the picture. Today, I’ll tell you about drunken pirates.

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It all began with a little bit of deck building. Each player was starting with deck of cards that represented his crew. He had four average sailors, a first mate and a captain. Each round in Port he was able to hire more crewmen and build his crew. It was super smooth and easy to understand. Visit Port, hire pirates, add them to your deck.

And here comes the twist…

Before a quest, each player was shuffling his deck of pirates and drew half of the cards from the deck. These guys were ready to sail. The other half? Drunk too much previous night and didn’t make it in time to board. You literally had only half of your pirate deck sober. Rest of them? Hopefully you’ll see them next time. Coolest rule I ever designed.

It was thematic.
It was ridiculously funny.
It was marketing nuke I could use to promote the game.
It was inspiration for dozens of cool characters.

I had Master Drunk who had a skill to sabotage other player’s crewman by drinking them under the table.
I had Priest who had a skill to forbid one of your crewman to drink any alcohol – and that pirate card was always sober.
I had Lady First Mate who had a skill to take half of those drunken suckers and kick their asses so they got immediately sober!
I also had a French Officer who has no skill whatsoever, but this is different kind of story…

It was a perfect engine: thematic, funny and very catchy – I could easily make good marketing around this. Just imagine these banners at BGG: “The game with drunken sailors!”

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There was one small problem though.
It didn’t work. It didn’t work at all.
Each round the players drew random pirate cards and there was no way to build any synergy between them. No control over your deck. Yeah, it was funny but I had to remember – I don’t work for Comedy Central. I work for Portal Games.

After few weeks of testing all kind of variants of this drunken crew rule I gave up. I trashed it. No mercy for ideas that don’t work even though you really really really love them.

P.S. There is small piece of evidence that’s left. Look at the artwork of O’Donnel sailor. At that moment it was artwork for back of the pirate deck – half of the pirates face up, half of them face down, with this picture side up. 🙂