Creating individual player goals

In this post I go through my process of designing Ragusa Trade 'Em, explaining why I made certain decisions.

When I started I didn't know anything about bluffing games, having played only a couple. I started researching them and came away with what I have written in How to make a bluffing game. After that I looked at what the constraints implied.

• It's a bluffing so the players are in conflict.
• It's played in a casino so it's for money.
• Casinos usually use cards, dice, or other things that rely on chance.

There are probably many more implications, but these were enough to get me started.

Though Ragusa Trade 'Em takes its name from Texas Hold 'Em, it is much closer to Cockroach Poker. The reason being that regular poker is not a bluffing game. It has a bluffing mechanic, certainly, but you can win without ever bluffing. In Cockroach Poker, on the other hand, bluffing is all you do. The core mechanic needed to use bluffing as its foundation, after all, that was the constraint for this challenge. However, I also added a couple more. Since it was to be played in a casino, and as I was already inspired by Cockroach Poker, I limited myself to a standard playing deck. Secondly, I decided to use the poker hand rankings as a way to determine the winner of a round. I felt there wasn't really a need for me to create a whole set of novel rankings when there are perfectly good and well-known(!) rankings for me to take advantage of. Put simply, I wanted it to be easy to learn. Finally--crucially--I decided the game had to have a way for players to get random goals. Of course, they are playing for money, so in a general sense, the goal is obviously to get the money, but I needed different win-conditions. Why? 

Fundamentally, bluffing games are about trust manipulation. Sometimes you want to deceive the other players, but sometimes it pays to be honest! Imagine playing with the regular poker hand rankings. If everybody knows everyone is aiming for the highest cards, no one will ever give one up. That is, there is too much information out in the open already. There is no guessing what anyone else is trying to achieve, hence there is no bluffing. You will never trust that another player is willing to give you a King card. They would also be a fool if they were honest and actually gave you the King. What were the challenges in coming up with a mechanic for the individual conditions?

It boils down to two things: how obvious your goal is and how close your individual goals are. Let's call them transparency and similarity. The more transparent your goal is, the less bluffing is involved because they already know what you're trying to get. The higher the similarity, the more conflict you will have between players. If they're not close at all, it doesn't matter if you give up a card you don't need. Alternatively, if you all have the same goal, you'll never give up cards. Ideally, you want players competing for some, but not all, of the same cards. And you want them to know some, but not all of the information for another player's goal.

Let's look at a few options for goals for standard playing decks that came to mind:

• The suits determine the goal.
• The number determines the goal.
• The other players determine your goal.
• The dealer determines your goal.
• Both the suit and the number determine the goal.

This was my thought process.

Using the suit to determine goals is better than nothing. High similarity since there will probably be players which have the same suit. But there's high transparency as well. You could make the scales reversed (so that 2 becomes Ace) for certain suits to decrease transparency. For example hearts and clubs now treat 2 as the highest number, but it isn't opaque enough. If somebody starts asking for 3s or 4s you know what they're after, and you can deny them easily. You could also make them collect that suit, but again it's very obvious.
If the number determines the goal, there's really low transparency and low similarity. Say you get one of the 4s, what is your goal? Either you shift the scales so that the 4 is now your highest/lowest number (like I did in the final version), or collecting that number becomes your goal. You could make it so that it's similar to Cockroach Poker where you only need to avoid a certain card or gain a certain card. Problems:  again, it becomes obvious soon, and probably, it would lead to ties often because of low similarity. For example, both players achieved to have four of a kind for their goal. And since there 14  goals, the players will rarely come to compete for the same cards, and bluffing becomes trivial.
It did cross my mind to have the other players determine the goals, and it seemed exciting at first. After thinking three seconds about it, I concluded that everybody would know what you would try to get and we'd be back at the beginning. Perhaps there is a way to make it so that only one other player knows your goal. It could add another layer of complexity and interaction, but I didn't really have time to think about it in depth for this challenge. If you have any ideas, though, please leave a comment!
The dealer might be biased, so I dismissed that out of hand, like a dirty 2 of spades.
In the end, I chose basically the most complicated route. I felt it gave enough similarity to put players into conflict for the same cards, but also enough transparency to be able to figure it out. Foundation Cards that determine the player's starting point for a scale, and all cards they get are played on that scale. Basically, you have medium transparency and medium to high similarity. But Mark Rosewater says: "Don't confuse interesting with fun." I might have done that here. It is really a mental effort to switch from what you see to some arbitrary, constantly changing standard. That is, calculating a value of a card based on some random Foundation Card, even though K is printed on it. It's probably some sort of Stroop test, and I'm sure that there would be many miscalculations during the average round. But I reasoned that everybody is going to aim for the royal flush, or the highest straight. And that is easy to keep in mind because you see, for example the 5 of clubs as a Foundation Card, and you just count down: 4 3 2 A K, which is your royal flush. However, I limited flushes to your suit because it is easy to collect any five cards that have the same suit.  Though it's not quite mental gymnastics on the level of Olympia, it still rivals your regional competitions.

For the time being, I'll say it's a feature not a bug, and if you can't count cards, don't come to the Ragusa Trade 'Em table. All jokes aside, though. what this game sorely needs is playtesting, so if you feel like this could be something you're into, play it and let me know what you found. Also, you can just play it with your own rules, just ping me what you changed and how it worked out.

Again, a long post, but instead of cutting it to make another salami-slice-post, I'll just leave you with a few design considerations that weren't major.

• Having a Common Goods pile where you could trade on neutral grounds. It also acts as information for other players. (You can use that to fake em out! Or to gain some card you need ofc).
• Selling all your cards as a way to fold a hand. Voluntary participation and all...
• Failing to bluff and wrongfully calling someone out costs money, instead of betting on whether a person is lying (that could be fun, though).
• If a player is left with no money, they can still bluff, but they're losing cards. It wouldn't be prudent to have a forced end of round like in poker, where if one player is out of money, the other players match their input and the remaining cards are revealed. (I might be wrong on that one, so correct me please.) In poker it makes sense because you can't change what you have in hand and what's going to appear. I think in RTE that would be bad because a player who gets dealt a really strong hand could force the end and prevent other players from reaching a better hand.

Anyway, thank you so much for reading if you made it this far! You can  support me by leaving a nice comment, even a simple ( ˘ ³˘)♥ will make my day.