On Designing Bouquet
When I begin to design a board game I usually have one of two things in mind: a mechanic that could live in multiple themes or a theme that is conducive to multiple mechanics.
Unfamiliar terms? Well, a mechanic is essentially “the way something works” in a game. The mechanic for movement in Monopoly is rolling two dice, adding them together, and then traveling that many spaces— triggering your opportunity to buy the property you land on or pay the property owner. The theme of Monopoly is, classically, a real estate tycoon’s game on the New Jersey boardwalk.
[Regardless of Monopoly’s timeless quality, the reason it is “not fun” has to do with the disconnect of the theme and the mechanic.] For the record, I love monopoly— but I like dice, many gamers do not.
As I design games, I actually like to start somewhere in the middle— an idea about a mechanic that feels like “the thing you are doing” in some way. Rolling two dice can feel like a lot of different things: strolling around the boardwalk, harvesting crops, sending soldiers into battle, casting your fishing line into a pond, or maybe just searching for the perfect flower in your garden. Again, I like dice. I like the randomness they create, the mystery, the unknown.
I feel that a game without a random element, such as chess, is simultaneously finite and infinite. You are bounded by the confines of the movement rules and the 8x8 grid -- there are so many ways for the game to play out -- but there is no mystery or surprise. There is no magic. Just pure brain versus brain strategy that can feel quite adversarial in the wrong setting or with the wrong opponent.
Dice allow the best laid plans to go awry, and to me, that reflects reality a lot more. You cannot control everything, sometimes you just have to get lucky.
Choice is very important in game design. When you feel like you have no choice – nothing “to do” - on your turn the game becomes monotonous and unfun. In Monopoly you roll the dice and the only choice you get is whether to buy a property or not. After a while, when all the properties are purchased, you have the choice to build if you are lucky— but sometimes you have no choice at all— you are just rolling and moving and paying money.
The first seed for Bouquet was planted after I went to a vintage shop and found a box of old and odd dice.
Among the variously-sided numeric dice, I also purchased some with operator symbols on them. These two strange dice were not even identical. One of the math dice was just addition and subtraction and had a blank side, and the other had addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division.
The goal of the game my friend Niko and I made up was to roll a 20-sided die as your “goal” and then roll your other pool of numeric and wonky math dice and see if you could hit that target with whatever numbers you rolled. Each player took a turn, either succeeding or failing. The first one of us to successfully hit three “goals” was the winner.
We played it a couple of times. The problem with that game was that it was flavorless, had no theme at all, and was wildly inconsistent (which is only fun if it goes in your favor).
Niko and I, having made up this silly “dice activity,” thought that there might be something to it, something familiar about manipulating numbers to achieve a greater numeric goal. Later we remembered that there is a competitive math game, sometimes called 21. The same idea has been used in game shows and scholastic competitions: you are given a set of numbers that you must use and manipulate with operators to reach the goal number of 21. Sometimes you are given these numbers on cards, sometimes they happen in a specific order, sometimes you can pick them from a list— regardless, there are certain elements of that game lingering inside Bouquet. However, having smaller “goals” (flower cards from 0-13) allowed the players more autonomy of choice on each of their turns.
In Bouquet, you roll a dice pool and can choose how to use those numbers and operators. You can pick anywhere from 1 to 3 flowers depending on the flowers in the garden, the results of the numeric dice, and the operators you have available to you (and the web of choices you make given those options).
The cool part about Bouquet is that it might be in your best interest to use more of your dice to make a longer equation to pick the precise flower you need to complete your Bouquet, instead of trying to just pick the most flowers on your turn.
The five point Bouquets reflect this strategic fork, as they require very specific ingredients. It is very difficult to have three flowers that add up to a specific number and also have a flower of a specific color or kind. Choice and strategy should go hand in hand and persist at an exponentially increasing rate throughout the game, instead of dropping off as the game continues. In other words, the game should get more fun the longer you play it until it finally ends.
I suppose my education as a filmmaker has honed my appreciation for the “arc” you feel while playing a game. It should take you on a little adventure, and you should feel a catharsis at the end whether you win or lose.
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But just picking flowers from a garden, does not a board game make. On my first prototype I used colored notecards to represent the flower colors and then made up some Bouquets with random specifications to playtest. The concept was all there, the flower deck is nearly identical to the day I created it. But the game didn’t feel right. It was the Bouquets that I knew would need work.
The first Bouquets were either way too easy or far too difficult, with very little variety in between. In the original prototype there were Bouquets that asked for up to five flowers, as well as ones that had up to three specific flowers required, which we quickly realized were both insanely hard to accomplish and their point values did not represent the effort required to actually build them in the game.
I needed to use some advanced math to solve this problem. Math I did not know how to even start doing. So I turned to my niece Emily who is a wizard with computers. She created an algorithm to calculate the probability of each flower in the garden and then generated thousands of possible Bouquet arrangements with a gradient of difficulty based on the assortment of flowers in the garden.
We narrowed down the curve and selected samples from three different tiers of difficulty from within the center of that curve to create the bouquets worth 3, 4, and 5 points. We also had to unify the number of flowers required for each completed bouquet to 3 for the sake of simplicity.
After we sorted that out, it was just a matter of play testing and fine tuning the rules to make it seem fair and fun. Does the 1st player have an advantage? Yes. Let’s give the other players something to even those odds: a magic charm! We originally wanted to give the first player a token and then let all players take the same number of turns. But without going into all the gritty details, that created a series of tiebreakers that eventually seemed unnecessary. It is simpler to have the game end when one player reaches 13 points. But it is unfair to have a race where one player gets an undeniable head start.
The magic charms also solved an additional problem: what if all your operators were minus signs? This would happen occasionally and make it actually impossible to pick high-numbered flowers on that turn. By allowing all the players who do not have the first turn advantage to re-roll their operator dice once per game, it should bail them out of “that one turn where you really need to pick a flower but the dice don’t allow you to.”
This goes back to the principle of “choice” while playing and its effect on the strategy players use when trying to win a game. In Bouquet, when you discard the magic charm, you may choose to re-roll your operator dice, but you will only do this if there is a flower on the table you must have, but cannot pick. That is a strategic choice a player can make only after grasping the core concept of the game. Bouquet engages the brain in both grasping what is possible in front of the player at that moment, and/or looking into the future at the possible permutations those dice would provide if the operators rolled happened to be different.
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In the classroom, Bouquet is a great way of bridging the gap between concepts on a worksheet and practicing them casually in a fun way. Wouldn’t you rather “pick flowers” and “make a Bouquet” than “add two numbers together” or solve for “X”?!
Really, when you get down to it, many board games are heavily math-based and require fast arithmetic to help the game move quickly. I don’t bring a calculator with me when I go play Magic: The Gathering with my friends, but on more than one occasion we have needed one. Usually someone at the table just crunches the numbers in their head and spits out the answer. And sometimes that person is me.
I always felt like I was bad at math: the best grade I ever got in a math class was in middle school and it was an A- and I only received that grade in one of the four quarters that year. I did not consider myself good at math. But today, after playing board games for 30 years, I have confidence in my ability to do math. I don’t even think about it as a chore anymore. It can actually be fun!
Math is everywhere all the time. Everything can be expressed mathematically. And when you first are asked to dip your toes into the ocean of numbers and “learn math,” that vastness can be quite daunting and a bad environment to learn or retain information. A mind must be open, and essentially happy, to learn properly. If you are busy worrying about what’s going to happen if you get the answer wrong in front of the class, how can you even concentrate on the problem at hand?
Math anxiety is the fundamental plague that paralyzes the brain when asked to “do math.” By taking each individual equation off a pedestal of “right or wrong” and providing both visual and logical aides, Bouquet allows its players to, essentially, complete a worksheet’s worth of math problems that are rooted in a purpose, as opposed to being disconnected numbers on a page.
Orson Ossman, Creator/ Lead Designer of Bouquet, is an actor, writer, and filmmaker from Whidbey Island, Washington. He currently lives with his wife and two cats in Los Angeles. Stay tuned for more math game collaborations with Otherworld Media.
