Complexcity is live on Kickstarter, July 9th through July 30th. This post has been made with the permission of Big Kid Games.

“An anomaly has been detected in Territory 1357! Galaxy-wide destruction is assured and you only have 3 cycles to relocate all of the sector’s inhabitants to an uninhabited planet outside of the range of the cataclysmic event! All of the Ambassadors are urging you, the scientists of the Allied Galactic Command, to ensure that the members of their species are being taken care of according to their special needs.

“Can you design the best possible city to meet the diverse needs of the Terramorphs, Neridians, Cephalons, and Replicons that will seek refuge on the inhospitable planet? If you do, you’ll be hailed as a saviour by the entire territory!”

Development Journal – Complexcity

Complexcity is a competitive and strategic tile-laying game for 1-4 players by seasoned designers Sen-Foong Lim and Jay Cormier. On your turn, you add one new tile to your city. Each tile features an arrangement of habitats and transport tubes, and enclosing sets of habitats within wider patterns of tubes allows you to create “Complexes,” hence the name of the game. Placing Complexes in your city is important for scoring objectives, but they can also give you special tokens that allow you to take a variety of extra actions on your turn.

I was invited to join in on the project after it was under contract with Big Kid Games, and just as the incredible Kwanchai Moriya was beginning to produce assets for the game.

I immediately felt the stress of working with such a tremendous team. While I hadn’t talked much with Jay or Kwanchai, I certainly knew them by reputation. The fact that I knew Sen a bit better was nice, but it was clear to me that I was working with fish who were much bigger fish than I. I just hoped I could contribute to the project in a meaningful way.

Complexcity vs Simplicity

Jay and Sen had originally named their game “Simplicity,” themed as a pleasant tile-laying game where you’re (earthbound) planners laying out neighborhoods and competing for City Hall’s approval. When Jason Moughon at Big Kid Games got his meaty paws on it, one of the first things he did was change the branding to “Complexcity,” where you’re relocating aliens to a new homeworld and using their weird powers.

My first impression upon playing the game was that it was pleasant and accessible. Almost all of the game’s major features carried over from the submitted version, and the unique thing that stood out to me is that I cared what other players were doing. In so many tile-laying games where I have my own disconnected tableau, I find that I’m zoomed in on my own little world, and this often upstages any other interaction present in the game.

With Complexcity, there’s an engaging puzzle in building your city out, but so much of my focus is drawn to the shared points of tension between players. The Ambassadors are one of my favorite structures in the game. A row of these cards are laid out during setup, and during each of the three scoring rounds, players will score the objective that currently has the most points invested into it. That means we’re all locked into this slow-burn auction for the rights to score the objectives that best benefit us. Not only that, but the objectives compare your tableau against each player seated beside you, so the number of layers in that struggle is fantastic.

In fact, there wasn’t much I saw that I felt I needed to poke at as a developer. There was a bit of polishing to do–the acquisition vector behind the complex minis was ultimately right to trim, and some of the token actions needed a bit of tweaking to make them more interesting–but overall, this game felt mostly done.

So, why did we keep poking at it if it felt done?

Developing for Kickstarter

As we trimmed a bit, we noticed that players weren’t missing any of the things that were gone….but two of the token actions needed to be replaced pronto.

According to the Quantic Foundry game motivation study, the Kickstarter audience stands out in several marked ways. Among those ways, Kickstarter consumers are much more receptive to larger rules sets and more complex games, they are much more interested in exploring new game systems and new strategies within that system, and they are somewhat more interested in component quality and tactile experience.

Given that this game was headed to Kickstarter (and due to the great amount of leeway I have in working with Big Kid Games), I felt like the right place to look was to a systems space that could add more alternate lines of play to the game, add up-gradable components, and introduce another layer that would help the game appeal to a more strategic audience. Simplicity was already strategic enough, but I wanted to use this extra space to introduce another layer of agency and crank up the tension.

Imperatives, and Using your Designer(s) as a Touchstone

I needed two token actions. One of them I feel like I nailed early on: the Repliplex tiles. Spend four green tokens, and you can get an extra tile from a reserve…but the habitats on those tiles have no colors, so they’re limited in a lot of weird ways. I don’t think I ever iterated these after the first test: they felt great, and the players and designers liked them.

The other one took us a while to get to, and I know I would have ended up in the totally wrong place without help and good communication from Jay and Sen.

My first attempt was to introduce a “wild” complex mini that provided no tokens, but counted towards all objectives. While these were very exciting to players, they quickly became the focus of action, and it actually hurt the game by dulling the tension. Suddenly, the ambassadors mattered less, because you could put yourself in a position to win any of them. Even making the wild minis more difficult to acquire didn’t seem to dampen this, and I eventually took it out. It felt interesting and clever, but it ultimately upstaged some of the good things about the game that I wanted to remain at the core of the experience.

After a couple more failed attempts, I came across the Imperatives track. On your turn, you could spend 1/3/6 blue tokens to advance 1/2/3 spaces on a track. At certain thresholds on the track, you would play an Imperative card from your hand into a public play area, which would feature a scaling objective based on how well you built your city. For example, one might award 2VP for every complex mini inside an enclosure that featured a Repliplex–just little doodad objectives like that, which would make players jump through hoops.

During scoring rounds, players would draft and score the objective cards from that public play area, in order of the position on their track. The farther on the track, the more objectives you could score, and the earlier you could pick them…but there was a risk someone else could draft the cards you added to the row, meaning it behooved you to be flexible and have backup plans. This was inspired by Stefan Feld’s objective model from Bora Bora.

In testing, I loved the Imperatives. They were meaty, challenging, and very tense. They also added a whole deck of cards and a track to the components, and that deck of cards was easily expandable for Kickstarter. Jason at Big Kid, who has always had a ton of faith in me and been very supportive, said he liked the way it sounded and wanted to run it by the designers.

Proud as a peacock, I emailed the model to Sen and Jay, and…they hated it! They were, of course, polite and professional…but the words that stood out to me were “this is a hill we would die on.”

Knowing your Blind Spots

A regular group of playtesters, and a supportive local group of designers and developers, can really help you learn a lot about yourself. One thing that my players have taught me over the years is that I have a blind spot when it comes to density. I oftentimes create systems that are too complex, and I have trouble seeing that they are too complex even when I sit down to play the game. This might be due to my background in competitive gaming, and the gross amount of time I spend analyzing game systems, but it’s a real thing.

After reading Jay and Sen’s response to my Imperatives model, I sat back and thought about what might have gone wrong. I quickly realized that the players I’d had testing the Imperatives model were mostly other game designers.

Playing prototypes with other designers can be great. They’re always willing to play a game, because they always want you to play something next. They’re also familiar with the work, and can offer great insights when it comes to breaking a game down. However, they also tend to have a greater appreciation for systems that are clever rather than good, and sometimes their feedback skews more towards function than fun.

In retrospect, that’s likely what happened with the Imperatives. The system added an incredible amount of processing bandwidth to a game where your turn is literally picking a tile up and playing it. While the scoring vector was clever and interesting, it ultimately didn’t belong in the game at all.

So, what to do with that last token action?

Hitting the Right Accents

We were coming up on the deadline, and Jay produced an alternative model while I was in the throes of my existential crisis. He knew that we wanted to fill the space of the missing token action with another explorable-but-nonessential scoring vector, and his answer was the Accent card system.

For two blue tokens, you can grab a colored card from a draft queue. During scoring rounds, if you have the most cards in a color, you may score 1vp for each mini of that color in your city.

Notice how that took me two sentences to explain, and requires no effects text or scaling math?

I was apprehensive at first. I was worried that the majorities would incentivize players to jump into lanes, and that it would make play less dynamic rather than more dynamic.

But, after a couple of plays, I have to admit that I really started falling in love with the Accent cards . I noticed that they were fitting in with the game’s tension, and appropriately accentuating it rather than upstaging it. Players were torn between remaining flexible for shifting objectives, or doubling down on pluralities, and that extra layer was feeling just right for the game.

The End Product

All in all, this project has been a pleasure to work on. I ended up feeling like I could contribute value to a project with a pair of designers that I deeply respect, and I managed to do it without wasting too much of their time and effort.

If you’re a fan of tile-laying games, and love deep interactions with tons of layers behind simple choices, Complexcity is a game I’d urge you to check out!