Dream of the Red Chamber - first prototype

The game I am publishing this year under Cili Padi Games is Pilgrim Poker, and it uses the theme of Journey to the West (西游记). I also have another game which will be published by Specky Studio - Rebels of the Three Kingdoms, which, of course, is based on Romance of the Three Kingdoms (三国演义). The advantage of using a topic or theme which many people are already familiar with is the game can be more attractive, and it can be a bit easier for people to learn to play. I have covered two of the four major Chinese works of literature, so naturally I start to consider the other two. Origame from Singapore has recently released 108 Outlaws, a game based on Water Margin (水浒传), so I probably shouldn't publish a game with this theme so soon. So I set my eyes on Dream of the Red Chamber (红楼梦). 

I have never read Dream of the Red Chamber before. I only know a little about it. During the Chinese New Year holidays I started doing some research on the book. I discovered many things I hadn't known before, some of which surprised me. I hadn't known that the author Cao Xueqin (曹雪芹) didn't write the whole book. He wrote the first 80 chapters, and the last 40 were written by someone else. I had always thought of the character Xue Baochai (薛宝钗) as the villain, which is completely untrue. I learned that the novel has another name - The Story of the Stone (石头记) and in fact when first translated to English, it was called this name. One thing is a little embarrassing. Due to the subject matter, I kept thinking the author Cao Xueqin is female. I only recently checked and learned he's a guy. 

I had difficulties thinking of a game mechanism. I wasn't constantly working on this, I just occasionally thought about it. Eventually an idea for the game mechanism came to me when I was sleeping. I'm not 100% sure whether I was sleeping / dreaming then, or I was half awake. I was certainly in bed. In the next few days after I had that idea, I did more research and then created my first prototype. AI helped a lot in my research. I asked it to give me summaries, e.g. who are the most important 10 characters in the book, in which chapters do certain characters appear together. My game is a set collection game, and you make sets based on specific scenes in the story, involving specific combinations of characters. 

Elder daughter Shee Yun was first to playtest the game with me. The two-player game seems to work well. I will need to test the game a lot more to see whether it is feasible for publication. I expect I will need to make adjustments. At the moment I think it will be just a 2 to 4 player game. 

I later playtested it with both my wife Michelle and Shee Yun, trying the 3-player version. That seems to work okay too. The game is a rummy variant. In some ways it's even simpler, because you can't do layoffs. In other ways it is a little more complicated, because the melds you can make are not runs or cards of the same value. The melds are scenes in the story. There are 11 different scenes in the game, translated to 11 possible melds. Every meld requires a specific combination of characters. It can consist of as few as two characters and as many as six. The two-character melds are mostly worth only 1 point, while the six-character meld is worth 11 points. There are ten different characters in the game. The lead characters like Jia Baoyu (贾宝玉) and Lin Daiyu (林黛玉) have more cards - seven, while the secondary characters have fewer. There are only three cards for Granny Liu (刘姥姥). 

Gameplay is simple. On your turn you must draw a card. You may play at most one meld on your turn. At the end of your turn, you may discard a card. You have a hand limit of six, which is the same as the number of cards of the largest meld. If you have too many cards, you must discard a card at the end of your turn. A round doesn't end when a player plays all cards. It only ends when the deck runs out. You want to play as many melds as you can, so most of the time you won't want to discard cards. However, there is a penalty for each card left in hand when a round ends. If you have three cards or fewer, it is 1 point per card, but if you have four or more, it is 2 points each. As the draw deck gets thinner, you will become more anxious and you will probably settle for the lower value melds so that you don't get stuck with too many cards when the round ends. 

My initial idea for the game was a bit more complicated. In addition to draw - meld - discard, I had a pass card step. The active player must pass a card around the table. Every other player has the opportunity to take the card being passed then pass on a different card. Otherwise they just pass on the same card. This is all done with the card face-up. This is meant to make making melds easier. I wanted to create difficult decisions. When you pass a card, you try not to pass cards which will help others. I also wanted this mechanism to give information to players. If an opponent takes a card then passes on a different card, it gives you information about which meld he might be attempting to make. When I playtested this, Michelle and Shee Yun felt it was confusing. They didn't like it at all and found it frustrating. Okay, I guess I should keep things simple. 

I still need to playtest this with four players. I'm a little uneasy that for the moment this game seems to be just a simple rummy variant. I don't know whether that's a good thing or a bad thing. It's good to make this a game anyone can learn to play easily, if my goal is to promote boardgames and card games. I'm just a little uneasy about whether I can justify the existence of a game if it doesn't offer something different enough.