Game Design Friday: Petrol Panic (Final Version)

Designing Petrol Panic

Concept:
I first conceived of Petrol Panic after completing work on Fictionless. Working off the basic mechanics in Fictionless, I wondered how to add a storyline to make the gameplay experience more enjoyable. An initial suggestion led me to the game's current plot: vacation-goers racing (or crawling) down the highway, constantly needing to buy and sell gas.

Design:
Working with the fiction, the gameplay mechanics actually changed immensely. Gone was the idea of "selling" rolls, instead replaced by the roll representing traffic congestion, and signifying both the number of spaces to move, the current price of gas, and the price at which gas can be sold back to the stations.

Of course, each of these numerical values required tweaking and balancing throughout the game design process, and here is where I encountered my first major design road block. Attacking the balancing by brute force iterative playtesting was near to impossible: the sheer number of permutations for these values meant that some other means of deduction had to be applied. Luckily for me, my friend the economist was visiting.

Number crunching has never been my strong suit, but apparently former economy majors were born (or, at least, taught) to number-crunch. Over several long lunches by the Mediterranean, we discussed the desired player behavior, and how we could enforce it through the numbers.

One of the most important strategies to downplay was "arbitrage," an economic strategy where players inflate their money exponentially by always buying and selling at certain times. To avoid this strategy - which easily breaks the game - we tweaked the values to be closer together, and opted to keep the toll booth mechanic from Fictionless, which forces players to more carefully balance their cash and gas reserves.

Though this is the form the game finally took, another entirely different mechanic was considered. Owing somewhat to Friedeman Friese's Power Grid, there was the possibility of making the game's gasoline reserves a limited resource, where each purchase and sale of petrol would affect the market price. This idea comes from Power Grid's Resource Market mechanic, although Petrol Panic's resources would be set at the start of the game, and would not refresh each round. Ultimately, the decision was made to stick with the current roll-as-traffic design, for fear of being too derivative (as well as starting over from scratch with design and balancing).

Result:
In its current incarnation, Petrol Panic is a slow-paced game with numerous pitfalls. A careless player can easily run low on both gasoline and cash, prematurely ending the game (or at least their role in it). And despite the caution and attention required by players, Petrol Panic still relies heavily on randomness.

Perhaps I'm being too negative, however. There is something fun in Petrol Panic's unpredictable gameplay. And as a first endeavor into full-on board game design, I'm decidedly pleased with the outcome. Perhaps for next month, however, I'll try for something less daunting.

Click here to download the game board for Petrol Panic.

Game Design © 2008 by Scott Jon Siegel
scott@numberless.net | http://numberless.net