boardgaming in photos: working, playing and testing

I used a game I designed in one of my recent leadership training sessions - Tradition and Innovation. The game was not originally designed for training or learning purposes, but I realised it was fitting for the particular training programme I was doing, on leadership. The core idea I wanted to convey in Tradition and Innovation was that two competing factions have a common objective, but they pursue two very different ways to achieve it. The game was originally designed for 2 to 6 players. To turn it into a training activity, I made it playable for 12 participants. 

You have the tradition faction and the innovation faction. Both want prosperity for the world. However one wants to achieve this by honouring tradition, while the other believes innovation is the only way forward. In game terms, the tradition faction wins by pushing prosperity level and tradition level to 20 or more. The innovation faction wins by pushing prosperity level and innovation level to 20 or more. They have a common goal - prosperity. The game is played over at most 6 rounds. If neither faction achieves their winning condition, the game ends with both of them losing. 

The game was designed to explore human nature and human interaction in an organisation where people have both common goals and conflicting agendas. If an action would help the other party a lot, would you choose not to do it even if meant hurting yourself a little? Since there is a common goal, will you then focus your resources only on your own goal, and just let other people take care of the common goal? Because it's in their interest anyway? How willing are you to contribute to the common goal? 

This training activity I ran turned out to be very exciting. In Round 4, one of the factions already had a chance of winning. However the events had to be resolved first to see whether the two required levels could be maintained. Unfortunately one of them dropped below 20, so there was no victory yet. In Round 6, again one faction was poised to win. So now it came down to the last three event cards. Event cards were all bad. It was a matter of which stat was hit. At this point the innovation level and prosperity level were both above 20. The innovation faction would win if they both stayed at 20 or more. The first event card revealed affected the tradition level. No problem. The second event card affected the prosperity level. Thankfully it dropped from 23 to 20. That was still good enough. So it came down to the very last card in the very last round. And... innovation level dropped below 20. The innovation faction groaned in disappointment. The tradition faction cheered so happily it was as if they had won. In fact they were just happy the other team lost the game together with them. I teased them - you should be ashamed of yourselves. 

This was a boardgame gathering with my BNI friends. They are all non-gamers, so I mostly bring light games. I often bring my game design projects to get some playtesting done. This round I brought some prototypes too, but we were so engrossed with playing other games I forgot to bring them out. Blokus is very easy to teach, but as you play, you'll learn that it can be quite tricky and strategic. 

I was finally able to play Potato Tomato, which I brought back from the Thailand Board Game Show. I also managed to play Jinx-O from Indonesia. More and more games checked off from my to-play list. 

Ubongo is a game with a spatial element. It requires a different kind of brain power. Even if you are smart and strategic, you may not have that spatial reasoning ability. Alex is one of the smartest guys I've met, and he had difficulties with Ubongo, so Susie had to come to the rescue. Susie grasped the techniques quickly, and was often first to solve her puzzle. 

The gems of Ubongo

18 Jan 2025. TTGDMY playtest session. This is Jon's Dive for Gold, a push-your-luck game about diving for treasures. You keep revealing cards hoping to get valuable treasures. Each card comes with an oxygen cost. If you exhaust your oxygen supply, you will be forced to return without taking any treasure. So you need to decide when is good enough. If you decide by yourself to return, you don't necessarily claim all the revealed cards. You only get the most recent cards, up to a weight limit. You must take treasures beginning from the most recent, and you must take as many as you can, up to the weight limit, even if it means some are rubbish. 

You can take at most 10 treasures. Once anyone has 10, the game ends. The bikini is a treasure with no value. It just takes up a slot. 

This is Chee Kong's new game. He continues to develop new games using components from Zodiac Go. If you have a copy of the game, you will keep getting new games. You can download them from the Zodiac Go website. This particular new game in development has a bit of trick-taking. You win tricks to compete in five areas. 

I continue playtesting and developing Taking Sides. Number 7 is Liu Bei (from Three Kingdoms). I am now focusing on playtesting the 3 and 4 player variant rules. The game has 10 characters, each with a different strength value and special ability. Every round, you draw a random character, and then you have to decide which of two factions to join. For just that round, members of a faction fight as a team, but next round they may be on different teams. Now that I am using the Three Kingdoms theme, I name these two factions the loyalists (to the Han Dynasty) and the rebels. In the early days of playtesting, I mostly played with 6 to 8 players. At a high player count, many character powers came into play, and there was enough interaction between the powers to make the game interesting. However at a low player count, the game became less interesting. That is why I want to introduce variants for the 3 and 4 player games. The idea is I want to always have at least 5 characters in play. 

With 4 players, during round setup, one of the unused face-up cards becomes the Han Emperor, an NPC (non-player character). This character is already in the loyalist faction. After knowing who is already in the loyalist faction, the (human) players take turns deciding which faction they want to join. Knowing which character is already in the loyalist faction affects players' decisions. If my character works well with the Han Emperor, I probably want to join him. If my character's power can neutralise the Han Emperor, I will not be afraid to join the rebel faction. 

With 3 players, in addition to the Han Emperor NPC, there is another NPC - the Yellow Turban Rebel. In the Three Kingdoms story, the downfall of the Han Dynasty usually starts with the Yellow Turban Rebellion, which is a religious movement. When playing Taking Sides with 3 players, the identity of the Han Emperor is known. There will also be four characters face-up at the centre of the table. When players take turns choosing a faction, whoever is first to pick the rebel faction gets to claim one of those four face-up characters. This will be the Yellow Turban Rebel, who of course joins the rebel faction. Being able to choose an NPC teammate is attractive, especially when one of those four combos very well with your character. When you see an opponent pick a character to be the Yellow Turban Rebel, that gives you some clue too as to who that opponent's character might be. 

This was a smaller playtesting session with just the five of us. Erin left slightly earlier. Darryl was camera-shy. Thus only the three of us (me, Chee Kong, Jon) in this photo. 

Chatting Rivers and Lakes with Tao

 

Brian Bankler from Tao of Gaming, a blog I have been following for many years, read my recent post on Rivers and Lakes, a business simulation activity I designed for my leadership training work. He was intrigued and contacted me to chat more. We did an interview through email exchanges. We went into more details about the activity itself, my experiences running it, and also the thinking processes behind the design. Here's our conversation. 

If you are interested in my leadership training, contact me. 

Email: cs@simplifypeople.com

Website: simplifypeople.com 

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hiewchoksien/ 

Rivers and Lakes

 

My full-time work is leadership training. I am a corporate trainer and I specialise in the topic of leadership. Leadership is about leading and managing people. It is about understanding people, being able to communicate well with people, and being able to influence and motivate people. There are techniques and methods that can be applied. I have been a boardgame hobbyist longer than I have been a leadership trainer. Attending training can sometimes be dull. For learning to be effective, the lesson needs to be engaging. As a learner I want to know how I can apply theory to practice. I designed a business simulation activity for my training courses called Rivers and Lakes. It uses many concepts from boardgames and it plays like a giant boardgame. 

The Activity

Rivers and Lakes is a weird name. It is a literal translation of the Chinese word "jiang1 hu2" (江湖), which refers to underground societies. The setting is Hong Kong gangster movies of the 1990's. Imagine The Godfather in Asia. In the activity there are many Hong Kong movie and TV celebrities, and also scenes from gangster movies. You play gangsters from two powerful clans, the Kong family and the Woo family. If the number of students is high, I add a third clan, the Lee family. There is a hierarchy within each clan - the bosses, the seniors and the juniors. Each clan has a reputation level. That's your victory points. At the end of the game, a clan wins by having the highest reputation. Individuals in the game have three personal stats - money, skill and relationship. Every player has a secret personal goal, and usually it is to gather as much as possible one of the three stats. So the team has a goal, and the individual has one too. 

The game is played on a giant map of Hong Kong. Part of the game is area control, like Risk. At the start of the game, each clan chooses a base. You get that territory for free. For the rest of the game, you need to commit resources to capture any new territory. Every territory has four stats. There is a reputation value. Capture the territory and your clan reputation goes up. There is a personal stat, i.e. money, skill or relationship. Capture the territory and everyone in your clan increases this particular stat. However, if you lose this territory, everyone decreases the stat too. The last two stats of a territory are resistance and defence. Resistance represents how hard the territory is to capture when not yet controlled by any gang. Defence refers to the defensive bonus when a gang controlling the territory defends it against an invading gang. 

Before the activity starts I ask my students to select a character to play. Every clipboard is a different character. The profile photos are all Hong Kong celebrities from the 90's. So Jackie Chan's photo is from that era - you get to see the young Jackie Chan. The characters have various starting stats - money, skill and relationship. Picking a character is pretty random. People just choose based on the celebrities they like, because at that point I have not explained the stats yet. 

You get to choose your own name for the activity

There is no fixed number of rounds for the game. I normally play around 6 rounds. I adjust this based on the situation during training day, i.e. how fast the students are in making decisions and completing rounds of play. Every round, the clans simultaneously decide a territory to attack. They can invade uncontrolled territories or another clan's territory. Sometimes they end up attacking one another's territories. I announce a crisis at the start of a round. There are many types of crises. For example there is one called pirated VCD's. If a certain number of members of a clan participate in resolving this crisis, the whole clan gains some benefit (e.g. more money). Otherwise, they get nothing, or they may even be penalised. 

Every round, the most important procedure is the circle. This is a voting mechanism. Here's how it works. 

Every student gets three pebbles - red, white and brown. When performing the circle, all members of the same clan stand in a circle, hold one stone in their fists, and extend their fists towards the centre. They then open their hands at the same time. Now you can discuss all this and coordinate who to hold which colour beforehand, but you still have to go through the procedure. From a gamer's perspective, this seems weird and unnecessary. In practice, I do see students making mistakes due to miscommunication or misunderstanding. It takes conscious effort to coordinate the actions of these big groups. 

The stone colour in your hand means different things. If you have a brown stone, you participate in resolving the crisis. The outcome will be different for your clan depending on how many commit to this. If your stone is black, you participate in offense. If your clan is attacking an unoccupied territory, you need to have enough attackers to overcome the resistance. If your clan is attacking an opponent clan's territory, only members holding black stones may join the fight. If your stone is white, you are a defender. When being attacked, only defenders may participate in defence. There is a fourth option - holding out an empty hand. No stone means you are going for training (self improvement). You may increase (not by much) any one of your three personal stats. When your clan attacks a territory or resolves a crisis, the stat you gain may not be the one which is your personal goal. Only when you go for training you can choose which stat to increase. 

There are several different crises. There is one about internal strife. Some members get promoted while others get demoted. There is one about betrayal. Some members are forced to join another clan. Crises are my way of creating different scenarios and presenting tough decisions. 

Normally in the first few rounds the clans expand peacefully, because there are still many unoccupied territories. But the map is not that big. Sooner or later they will clash. They will try to capture one another's territories, and they will fight. Fighting is simple. For each battle, a die is first rolled to determine which personal stat will be compared - money, skill or relationship. Attacker and defender simultaneously assign three fighters (who have the corresponding stone colours), and their personal stats are compared in a series of three one-on-one fights. You need to win 2 out of 3 to win the battle. If the attacker is victorious, they capture the territory. They gain reputation and the personal stat of that territory, and the defender loses these. This is often a huge swing. However if the attacker fails, they have just wasted one round achieving nothing. That is painful. 

The white vans are attack markers

When the time is about right, I declare that the next round is the final one. I have designed quite a number of rounds. If I were to play every round I have designed, the activity may take 6 hours. Normally I will play the first 5 rounds or so, and then I skip to the final round. The final round is specifically designed to create a climax. Unoccupied territories have their resistance lowered to zero, and clans get to make three attacks instead of just one. This change can result in a major shake-up. 

At the completion of the last round, the reputation levels of the clans are not yet final. There are still some bonus points to be awarded. All students are grouped according to their personal goals and then ranked. For example students whose goal is to be as rich as possible line up from richest to poorest. Those in the top 30% earn bonus reputation for their respective clans. After these bonuses are awarded, the eventual winning clan is declared. Only at this time I explain who the true winners are. The true winner needs to be in the winning clan, and also need to be in the top 30% in their category. If you fulfil only one of the two conditions, you are only a partial winner. 

If you think of Rivers and Lakes as a boardgame, it's not very complicated, at least from a gamer's perspective. It's just a little unusual because it is designed to accommodate a big group. I have played it with around 15 players at the lowest, and around 90 at the highest. Based on the many sessions I have run, the ideal count is 20 to 50. With too few, the game is not challenging enough. I designed it to simulate difficulties in communication and coordination in large organisations when people have different agendas. With a low player count, the activity is not as challenging as it is intended to be. At a high player count, the activity becomes difficult to manage. To non-gamers, this is not an easy activity to learn. With a large group, some will fail to keep up, and they give up. They let their teammates handle the activity, and they go sit at the back of the room to chit chat. This is the bystander effect. People feel that there is someone else who will handle the problem, so they don't need to contribute. This problem is often too much for the students to handle. The activity itself is hard enough for them to need to also manage this behaviour which emerges in large groups. However there were groups which managed to keep this in check. I salute them when they can do that. 

I use slides showing movie scenes

The Learning Topics

Having fun is good and all, but this is a training activity, so the objective is learning and not just having fun. This activity explores leadership by putting the students into a difficult situation. Learning the game is not easy. Organising themselves is not easy. Managing communication is not easy. All this while they also need to compete against the other teams. All this simulates real-life situations, when we need to work under stress and uncertainty. We need to keep learning and stay flexible. When people come together to solve a complex problem, they learn something about themselves. They learn what they are capable of. They also learn what their weaknesses are. Whether they succeed of fail in the game, they gain insights that can be applied to real work. 

In the activity you have organisational goals and individual goals. The message I want to convey is the importance of aligning them. As a leader, if you want your team to be motivated to work towards the organisational goals, the organisation too much help the individuals achieve their personal goals. When these two goals align, the individuals will help the organisation succeed. Some individuals pursue wealth. Some pursue personal growth. Some want to belong. When a leader is observant and supports their people in achieving their personal goals, they will earn the respect and support of their people. They build strong teams. 

When I run this activity, I always pose this question at the end: Do you know the personal goal of your teammate? Very quickly someone will object: But you said our personal goals are secret! I then say: I said you must never show your personal goal card to anyone else, but I never said you cannot tell your friends your personal goal. At the start of the activity, I intentionally mislead my students. At this point, there will always be a few who tell the group that they do know the personal goals of their teammates. They know not because their teammates have told them. They know because they have been observant about the choices and suggestions their teammates made. When there is mutual understanding in an organisation, people are able to collaborate more meaningfully and effectively. Everybody wins. 

Rivers and Lakes can be used to explore many other leadership related concepts. For example the different roles which top executives, middle management and frontline workers play. Why is it that in the activity when the bosses decide on which territory to attack, there is still the need for a certain percentage of clan members to show a black pebble for the attack to be successful? In the real world, if most people in a company do not believe in the direction the CEO sets, the company probably won't be successful in pursuing this direction. 

The Design Considerations

Designing an educational game or a training activity is very different from designing an entertainment-only game. The objectives are different. A training activity is meant to teach concepts and foster learning. When people learn through a game, it is much more engaging and memorable. The experience is immersive. You get hands-on experience. Doing is always more effective than passively listening. You understand better, and you learn to apply. The design for Rivers and Lakes started with the learning objectives. The game mechanisms were all built around that. I chose the gangster movie setting simply because it was entertaining. Also I do believe running a criminal organisation takes just as much leadership skill as running a business organisation. 

One challenge in designing this activity is how to keep everyone engaged. How to make everyone feel they play a significant enough role. The circle mechanism is one way to try to achieve this. Doing the circle properly requires everyone to understand the mechanism. The clans need to work out a way to coordinate. Everyone must pay attention. Even just one person messing up can completely ruin the clan's plan. Everyone having their own clipboard to manage and their own personal stats to update is another way of creating ownership and engagement. The personal goal is something you have to be responsible for, and no one else can do it for you. It is also a core part of the learning objective. 

Many training activities out there are boardgames, supporting about five players at most. If there are 30 attendees, you need six sets, and the attendees will be playing separately at six different tables. When designing Rivers and Lakes I deliberately wanted to create something which everyone played together. Not at separate tables. I want my students to face the challenge of managing complex organisations and conflicting agendas. There are difficulties that come with this design direction. There is less individual contribution compared to if students play at tables of five. If there are only five people at your table, you will have more opportunities to speak up. If there are fifty, it's more challenging. And that's part of the point. 

I use a giant map for the sake of visual impact and presence. The photos I take at the training sessions look great! You feel like some general or tactician poring over the map of a battlefield. I bought two chopping knives for the sake of immersion. Sometimes I flash a knife when running the activity. That always invokes wows and laughter. The background music I play are Cantopop songs mostly from the 90's. That's the era of Alan Tam, Anita Mui, Leslie Cheung, George Lam and Aaron Kwok. 

When I got into the boardgame hobby in 2003, I would not have imagined that boardgames would become part of my work. For many years boardgames have been just entertainment. Now, they are also a teaching tool and a communication strategy. They are part of my livelihood. This is great fun and highly satisfying for me. I look forward to creating more such games. 

If you are interested in my leadership training, contact me. 

Email: cs@simplifypeople.com

Website: simplifypeople.com 

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hiewchoksien/ 

Addendum 29 Jan 2025: Brian Bankler from Tao of Gaming read this article and contacted me to chat more. Here's our conversation which discusses more details about the training activity.