* A turn consisted of the movement of six sparks, followed by the movement of five orbs--ELEVEN pieces to move in ONE turn.
* The movement of the sparks, if powered by enough orbs, could move in multiple directions.
* Any time an orb "ran into" another orb, the moving one would stop, and the one at rest would finish the move.
* When your spark was captured, your opponent would place it in the "spark jail" (or whatever we called it at the time), whereafter you could land on a certain space to free it. There were no limits on these rescue missions.

As you can tell, we had a lot of great ideas about movement and strategy, but, simply put, we overdid it. We tried to cram everything into one game. So how did we fix it? Play testing! Okay, okay, you always hear about how you're supposed to play test your game, but they never say how you're supposed to go about it. Here are some things we did to improve Spark^TM that you may be able to apply to fixing your own games:

Turns - Evaluate what happens during a single turn. It it's too much, simplify.In Spark we tried moving just the sparks, or just the orbs, or one spark and one orb, but we eventually settled on going back to basics and moving only one piece at one time. When all was said and done, the change basically didn't affect the outcome of the game, but the outcome itself became much easier to reach.

Movement - The way a piece moves can be extremely important, and in a two player strategy game like Spark, it everything. Originally, a spark's movement was dependent on its power; the ore power it possessed, the farther it could move, and in more directions. In this case, the repair came by making the movement both unidirectional, and more limited in length. This gave a greater advantage to the player who moved more shrewdly--it became more difficult for the opposing side to simply reverse what had just happened.

Monotony - We killed the "spark jail" idea pretty early on. It only made the game longer and put off the inevitable. If it's going to happen anyway, it shouldn't have to be a long and drawn out process.

Board - The hardest thing for me was to give up the board, because that's what I thought set Spark apart from other games. I later realized that the mutual dependence of the pieces would be heralded as a brand new concept in strategy games. Even without knowing this, however, it was pretty clear that the board was more complicated than it needed to be when it came to this game, and I let it go. Spark can now be played on a standard Othello® or Go board. And it's still the coolest game I know.

If you're having a hard time with your game, take a look at it, and try to see what is truly captivating or unique about it. When you find that, you can pretty confidently throw out almost everything else. It will make your game better, and will make the rules shorter, easier to write, easier to understand, and easier to remember.

Nothing will sell your game better than word-of-mouth advertising of an excited player who can tell his friends how to play without looking at the rule book.

Matt Ryan is an experienced game designer and play tester and is as close to being the head of Envelope Games as one can be. Matt is also a musician, songwriter, radio narrator, graphic designer, word processor guru and even the manager of the local Software Etc. store. He lives in Iowa with his wife Lisa and their two daughters Shelby and Kaylee.


Thanks Matt for sharing your insights with us!