Inside the Mind of Design ... The Activator Die

When designing games, most designers look for a "signature" that lets you know it's their design.  Keith Avallone uses the attribute system to great effect in all of his games; you know when you see a card with words like "Star", "Slugger", "Tough", etc., you know you're looking at a PLAAY.com design.

And so it is with what I call the "Activator Die".  I came up with the idea when designing On The Green Golf, and it's not so much a new idea as it is an idea of convenience.  Lots of games have you roll a handful of dice, using them in various capacities.  In Lambourne Games' International Cricket, you roll five, six-sided dice.  The yellow die determines whether the ball is in play or a dot ball, the red total references the bowler's card, the green total references the batsman's card.

With the Activator Die, you roll it at the same time as the "regular" dice, but you only refer to it when circumstances dictate.  In On The Green Golf, you only consult the Activator Die when you roll Trouble with the regular dice; the Activator Die result is then checked against the results from the Hole Card to determine what type of trouble you're in.  This allows us to have an "extra die/dice roll" without having to scoop the dice and roll them again.  Simply roll all three, every time, and ignore the Activator if you don't need it.

When I did W2W, I tried something different, because I wanted to avoid "hard-coding" unusual results on the play cards.  Hard-coding means that those results would *always* bring a problem, but it also means that other results are *never* affected.  But the way I went about it in W2W also, in some ways, "hard-coded" the results.

Without getting into all the details, the third die in W2W was compared to both the tens digit and the ones digit.  Depending on which of the digit dice matched, you might get a sack, fumble, penalty, or interception.  But the method by which this was done is "complex" enough that it throws off new gamers because it goes way outside their transition zone I spoke about in a previous post.

So, for the new game, certain results on each Play Card will be hard-coded in yellow, and the Activator Die will be checked against a certain range on the Play Card to determine what type of play (penalty, fumble) will occur.  Sacks, penalties, and fumbles on passing plays will be done in a similar manner.

More on the Activator Die to come ...