There have been a few moments throughout the development of Here Be Monsters that have really stuck with us. Our first play-test. When we finished the 100th piece of art. When we got our first physical cards in our hands. And I’ll find time to talk about all of those in other articles. But the moment that is sticking out for me at present is the creation of Sponge Barbarian.
He’s the poster-child of the Starter Half-Crew and for most players he’s their introduction into the game. That fact makes me super happy and not just because I’m quite proud of how the art turned out (which I am), but because of what he means to the game.
To fully understand his importance, let me take you back to the early days of play-testing. Before anyone else had played the game, Phil and I had hypothesized how we were going to present the game to new players and immediately we started devising starter decks (as is the norm in the TCG space). We broke it up by Pirate Code (the colors of the cards), making two decks: Red/Silver and Blue/Orange (and we kept Purple out of it for the time-being). We thought the decks were brilliant and couldn’t wait to play-test with them. And honestly, they were pretty good decks. They could handle most things we threw at them, with just the right blend of cards. But Phil and I were new to game design and something we hadn’t even considered in our wildest dreams was whether they were good decks to learn the game.
And they weren’t.
If you understood the rules of the game and the nuances and the strategy, these were great decks to use. But if you knew nothing about Here Be Monsters, then you’d find yourself in a bad time. I might be over-exaggerating it here, they really weren’t horrible decks, we just continued to see players make the same stumbles right out of the gate each time. So that’s where we started thinking not about what are good cards for a deck, but what are good cards to teach the game!
HBM inherently has some deceptive rules, that if you’re familiar with most TCGs you might be surprised by. And so we wanted to make sure that players picked up on those nuances as fast as we could. One such example was that we found early games would get stalled out when trying to get the treasure. This is understandable, as the requirement for ‘Searching for the Treasure’ is to spend basically your whole turn doing so. As game designers, we had implemented Hidden Shanties as a way to circumvent that, allowing you to save up actions for later and reveal them when you were 'Searching for the Treasure'. But players simply didn’t have any motivation to play Hidden Shanties and thus the stall continued. So we devised Mr. Manty and his Magical Hat (back then his temp title was the Seaweed Acolyte, until he got artwork). This card lets you play a Hidden Shanty for free when he’s played. Now players were playing Hidden Shanties because why not? It’s free. And quickly discovering, in game, how helpful and effective they are.
And so, feeling this game design synergy and excitement, Phil and I turned our attention to the other elephant in the room with new players learning the game, a dreaded phrase we never wanted to hear: “I don’t know what I should do”.
No game designer wants to hear that. It’s not that the players don’t have options, it’s that they have too many options and they all feel like they're the same level of 'useful'. After analyzing this phenomena again and again, we synthesized this down into the fact that players were having trouble recognizing turn-by-turn goals.
This was something that neither of us was familiar with at all. We figured, ‘here’s the point of the game and how to win, now go do that!’ But that’s not how players think. If the game is simple, like Candyland, each turn you move closer to the goal. Cool. Simple. Clean. But what if you know you need to get to the Candy Palace, but you are not told if left or right will get you there faster? We were having that same problem with early play-tests of HBM. Players would know they needed to Search for the Treasure, but they weren’t always sure the best thing to do to get there.
From our experience, we knew, especially for new players, putting a Pirate on a Ship was almost always a good bet to getting closer to Searching for the Treasure. But we obviously didn’t have a card that said ‘just play more Pirates’. For most TCGs, and similar games, there is the concept of the ‘Boss Monster’. This is a card that is the mascot of your deck. It’s the biggest dragon. The most brutal Planeswalker. The most scary abomination. And because of those cards, most other games didn’t struggle with the challenges we were facing. You’d draw your 'Boss Monster' and go ‘I want to play that, but I can’t yet. I need 10 more mana. Well, I better get some more mana’. And now you had a game within a game. You had to get more mana. That’s a very tangible goal. It’s like saying ‘you want to get to the Candy Palace? Every blue square will get you closer’.
But HBM doesn’t have a mana system or a cost structure the way most TCGs do. We couldn’t put super powerful cards behind some kind of restriction.
Or could we?
We had already made a few cards, like Apoc.K01.lypse who was a massive +20, but gave your opponent a free Order on their next turn. That’s kind of like a 'Boss Monster'. What if we took that philosophy and turned it towards our challenge of getting people to play more Pirates.
And like that Sponge Barbarian was born.
Our theory was that every new player would immediately see that +11 is way better than the +6s they were given elsewhere in the Starter Half-Crew. And they knew Firepower was important. So +11 would help a ton! But they would need more Pirates to get it out. And so they would start playing more Pirates. A new, fun and simple game within a game. And before they knew it, they'd have enough Firepower to Search for the Treasure and win.
And the best part of all of this is… that’s what happened. We were worried that maybe this was all game theory and would’t work in practice, but time and time again we would see new players not make the same mistake as our early play-testers. There were fewer turns where people said, “I don’t know what to do”. And on top of that Sponge Barbarian pushed the tide more and more, leading to fewer stalls.
So that’s why I love Sponge Barbarian. He’s the first card where I really felt like all of this research, game theory and play-testing had paid off. We saw a problem and we fixed it in a unique way, exclusive to our game!
Not to mention if you say 'Sponge Barbarian' jusssssssst right it kind of sounds like Sponge Bob-arian and I think that's really funny.
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