Developing the Impediments Game
I was inspired recently by a twitter post from Elizabeth Hendricks where she said she was working on an impediments game. I thought that was an absolutely wonderful idea, so I wanted to take a swing at it myself. Once I finally managed to summon the courage to try I sat down and put together a preliminary set of rules. Here is my first attempt (first iteration):
Overall the game is organized as a straightforward racetrack, first-to-finish objective. Gameplay is in rounds, where each round consists of a capacity roll and an impediment roll. Capacity is the number of spaces a given team may advance. A roll of 1-3 means a team must take an impediment from the impediments deck. Impediments are subtracted from the teams capacity each turn and have a fixed cost that must be paid in order to remove them. In each turn a team can decide to spend their capacity on forward advancement toward the project finish, or apply some or all of that capacity toward resolving impediments. The team that reaches the project finish line first wins the game.
So there you have it, a set of rules to begin with. They’re pretty simple, but I don’t know anything about designing games so simple seems like a good approach for me. Next, I raided the kids game chest for some dice, playing pieces and a few ideas.
To make a board, I took some 3×5 cards and cut them up and laid them out in a pattern that was inspired by Candy Land. I cut up a few cards and made myself a deck of impediment cards. So now, I had a board, some playing pieces, impediment cards, and a 6 sided dice.
Not a bad start really. It looked like this:
OK, sorry about the table cloth – I know it’s atrocious. So I tried playing out a simple scenario to see how it felt. I had two players, blue and green. Blue was going to take the strategy of always investing in resolving impediments, and red was going to try and plow along without paying the impediment tax. So we started with round one, with both players at the start:
Green goes first and rolls a 5. I moved him five spaces forward and then rolled the dice again to see if he encountered an impediment. That’s two rolls each turn for each player: the first roll determines how many spaces they may travel forward, the second roll determines whether or not the player encounters an impediment (a roll of 1-3 means you draw and impediment card, a roll of 4-6 means that you didn’t encounter an impediment). Green rolls a two, so he pulls an impediment card off the deck:
This impediment card had a value of 2. This means that from now on, when Green rolls the dice to see how many spaces forward he can go, he will have to subtract 2 from the value of each roll. For example, if he rolls a 4 he can only move forward 2 spaces (4-2=2). Now in this case Green is just going to suck it up and try to keep going forward without eliminating the impediment.
Blue’s turn is next. He also rolls a five right off the bat. For his impediment roll, he rolls a 1, so he also pulls an impediment card. His has a value of 4 (that’s a pretty steep impediment). So at this point in the game, after one turn each, our players are at the exact same place on the board, however we haven’t had a chance yet to play our strategies out.
Green has the next roll and gets a 6 so he moves forward 4 spaces, taking into account his unresolved impediment of 2. He then makes his impediment roll, and wouldn’t you know it? He gets a three, which means he just earned himself another impediment. This impediment is a 5. OUCH!
Blue takes his next turn and gets a 4. Instead of moving forward, he uses those 4 to pay off his impediment and resolve it. I arbitrarily set the price to resolve the impediment as equal to the impact of the impediment. So for this turn, blue doesn’t get to go anywhere, but at least he doesn’t have any impediments to deal with. Nice!
So then it’s Green’s turn again…but wait…Green has accumulated 7 points of impediments! There is no role of the dice that will overcome that (six sided dice anyway). So Green is completely blocked. He rolls a five, but because of his unresolved impediments he’s not going anywhere (5-7= no forward progress).
And so it goes, blue ends up racing to the finish line, resolving the occasional impediment along the way. Green remains trapped, completely impeded and unwilling to resolve the issues blocking forward progress.
At the end of the game I realized a couple of things. First, I had impediment values that ranged randomly from 1 to 5. For green, this meant that they accumulated pretty fast. Green only made it two rounds before he was stopped completely. You could argue that this makes sense. Any team completely unwilling to address their impediments at all is likely to have serious problems. On the other hand, I might argue that in reality, most of the impediments that I encounter on projects tend to slow it down rather than stop it completely. So I’m considering lowering the impediment values in the next iteration.
Perhaps more importantly, I’m not sure that this particular scenario offers a significant learning experience or not. It seems a bit too simplistic to me. Perhaps I need to add some additional elements that might better reflect the chaotic nature of the typical project? I’ve created a set of Risk cards that I’ll also try out in the next round. What else should I try? Next stop: iteration 2.