Designer Diary: Here Lies | BoardGameGeek News

by Jasper Beatrix

Particular feelings come with each game. There are those grinds when a game is built brick by brick into something sturdy and lasting, and others that come in a flash of lightning and thunder, striking the table with cautious surprise, the kind that comes with a worry: “Is this already it?” There are collaborations, reductions, misinterpretations, inspirations. Sometimes I feel like I find a game after a long and arduous journey through the wilderness, or smell its aroma only when the ingredients are finally just right.

Here Lies was like solving a murder.

The Setting

When our crew had started making games with Story Machine Games, we had an odd mentality around what we were drawn to. It was less a matter of desire than compulsion, that some mix of mechanism and theme would satisfy an empty space in our minds and on our tables. This wasn’t, perhaps, a coherent design approach, but it was fun.

We had played quite a lot of mystery games: Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective, Watson & Holmes, 3 Secrets: Crime Time, and video games like Return of the Obra Dinn and Her Story. We had a deep desire for single-play games and their well-curated results, but also wanted something more. The human element of natural storytelling is the backbone of RPG design, with players who can move toward the cool over the exact and enjoy exploring a narrative as a group.

We observed the same in our favorite television shows and stories; rare was it the audience got all the information at once, and instead received it piece-by-piece, like the detective protagonist, editing theories, molding answers, and having that eureka moment when it all clicks.

At the time we were also just releasing Rosetta: The Lost Language, which fit into the genre of one-vs-many, such as Mysterium, in which a game leader knows the answers and the remaining players must use some limited communication to discern them. While we at first argued over the experimentation of language learning — an idea that eventually became Signal) — we also loved the special ability cards in our language game that revealed elements like associated materials, categories, feelings, and even whether it had been said out loud so far. (How prescient!)

So we asked the question: Would there be value in a limited communication game in which every information request was completely unique? And would that be enough to feel like a mystery?

The Victim

The first prototype looked fairly nice. We had some free time during 2020’s lockdown to smash together some royalty-free graphics we had access to and make some things. The core idea was to give each player a random deck of cards, each with unique requests, while trying to discover five pieces of information that comprised a single narrative, oftentimes a who, a where, and the matters of the crime: a foe, a weapon, a cause.

This expanded quickly to include cards that could be drawn on and an answer board that listed the categories of answer for the players. It was even this early that we included another Rosetta mechanism: the “fragment”. While that was a somewhat fixed clue to a hieroglyph in that game, in this one a given “mystery” would include a few elements of “key evidence” that were pre-written, inspiring, and intriguing. Just somewhere to start the conversation.

We had to, in many ways, reduce what a mystery meant to us. This was, effectively, a word-guessing game except 1) you had to guess a certain number of words in total and 2) there was an invisible, imagined connection between them, with the veneer of death. Most games are highly reducible, and this helped us focus on what mattered the most. Playtesters liked conversation more than competition. They liked weirder clues that were not helpful just as much as the stronger, straightforward clues. Too bad we weren’t quite listening at first.

It may have also been a factor that we had a failed Sherlock Holmes game on the shelf we couldn’t progress on, so this project quickly took on the elements developed for that, like imagining a world in which every country had their own Sherlock Holmes, and we could get to invent them.

The game was christened “The Royal Detective Society”, and the Victorian-era graphics were left in place for future iterations, although we had cursed our game with some key weaknesses.

The Motive

Why even make this game? We had ping-ponged a list of hopes for its design, then pulled from success (Rosetta), failure (the deceased other prototype), and various feelings about what a mystery game could even include. What was the scope? The limits? We weren’t showing much in the way of discipline, and we did create unnecessary work for ourselves as designer-publishers.

The first was that the possibilities of the crimes themselves had to be wide. A set of cases all set in the same year was restrictive, especially in the same place. Plus our players wondered: If one player knows the answers, what are we doing? Resolving a case? We instead combined these issues into the resolving concept: This was a professional meeting of detectives, running their favorite cases in history past one another. It was a display of wit, more academic in function. The game was about mysterious deaths now, only sometimes including murder.

With history opened up, we perhaps needed to weaken our restriction on the game size. We tried, quite helplessly, to fit the game in a Rosetta-sized box — but then we figured we may target a Kickstarter campaign and make a bigger product, one with much more going on. This introduced a huge dry-erase board and large interchangeable tokens so that the answer categories could be switched each game. We plotted fifty cases and a legacy-light system of gaining cards into your decks as your characters “improved”. An online poll secured the new name of Here Lies, stealing it from a never-produced grave-robbing social deduction game. (RIP, I say with a grin.) We also found an artist and started character design. This was all, perhaps, a mistake.

This is the part where I would admit we lost the thread of the game itself in what I would call “development daydreaming”.

We should have focused on whether we had, well, made the game we wanted to make just yet. It was really about guessing six words, with no two similar ways of learning information. We still had a competitive mode as the primary play approach, with submission boards to tell the game leader answers, as well as an arcane system of scoring and feedback.

Playtesting even showed that players got really frustrated in two ways: First, if they had the right answer and convinced themselves out of it, or second, they submitted an answer but in the wrong category. Complex rules began to abound to try to resolve these things. Oftentimes they didn’t know what even could be an answer.

The feeling of playing a mystery can be quite incomparable. The “Eureka!” moment is the gold standard, the rush, the cheer. We kept putting roadblocks in front of it with our design choices, and rather than confront those roadblocks, we added more content, more grandeur, more wow in everything else.

If I could look back magically, we were stuck in three key areas:

1) Competitive play meant no conversation. No listening and realizing, contributing and cheering. No reason to want to help anyone, and suspicion behind any comment. Players would focus more on being right than the information, trying to subvert each other.

2) Submitting written answers dulled the creative mind and brought out the neurotic one. Players would double and triple-guess themselves.

3) Anything simple or reasonable was tossed aside by a desire to not “miss something”, and players escalated their narratives rather than focus on the simple truth that the answers were usually one or two words that we thought they would guess. Players would forget that the game wanted to be solved.

The cards, even though wacky, were very limiting to the lead player. We tried to write in-depth narratives that forced more reading comprehension and fewer choices, in some way trying to force how it would play, even though we wanted the human element all along. Players were trapped by the limitations of untrusting design.

In some ways, no wonder the game died.

The Murder

Three things ended the project, which nearly all designers would understand as a lament:

First, the pandemic had led to the company having to close. It was no longer feasible to keep going.

Second, we learned of the game Paranormal Detectives, which had skipped our radar until that point. My goodness! The similarities! It was crushing to feel your game was already made after you did so much work. Six categories, six words, weird clues, submitting written answers, and a game leader — we couldn’t shake how it felt the same…and worse, we played it and critiqued the exact same issues we had faced, but rather than address them, we felt bad.

Third, playtesters generally didn’t like the game. It was a mess and frustrating. It took hours to play through a case. How could anyone care to play fifty of them? What a slog! We had made something interesting but not fun, something with depth but not efficiency. The game tended to make players expand their thoughts endlessly rather than circle around to a clear answer.

In fact, we had an inside joke whenever we got the game out and played it again in the intervening years — that players tended to say the right answers out loud in the first ten minutes of the game, then spent another seventy minutes convincing themselves they were wrong.

There was a silver lining to this death, perhaps a successful autopsy of sorts. We made a print-and-play version to maybe find a home for the game or keep working on the problems. We pared down the mysteries to just six sentences, fewer characters, and a smaller board space. Categories were limited to a set of possible choices, but each had a helpful list of example answers, massively helping to define them. Ability cards gave massive freedom to the lead player to give clues in more creative ways. We “un-bloated” the game to fit in a PDF.

I cannot recommend enough trying to fit a game in a small space. One could argue the game was the most fun when we tried to fit it in the Rosetta box, and giving it “space” to become huge and unwieldy lost its soul. Now, without strings or giant boards or tons of tokens, it became intimate and digestible and closer to what it wanted to be.

The Solution

The game sat quietly for years.

Bobby West toured it around for feedback and got a lot of the same notes. One or two folks remembered it and wondered about it, but quickly remembered how tedious it could be. We didn’t feel motivated. When our dear friend Phil Gross checked it out, he noted that the conclusions were not satisfying, that the players landed on answers that felt random or disappointing. The time it took to submit written answers was dreary. There was no energy.

But, for fun, we kept tweaking the game in the background. It was nice to return to, and Kimberlyn Porter had finished all the art for it. It wanted to be solved.

The first solution was to eliminate all competitive play options. Rosetta never had that, and the prototypes of Signal were also truly co-operative. Players liked talking and theorizing, they liked working together and “performing” for each other. We even observed that players tended, in their own way, to want to be Sherlock — running through the current theory of the crime as a way to refocus and line up the information at hand. It would be a moment before we saw the true beauty in that.

The next part was a shot at, maybe, the cards not doing enough. With full co-operation, the lead player was incentivized to be totally helpful, and while not directly giving the mystery answers, they could play as much as anyone. We veered away from Paranormal Detectives and back toward Mysterium. We did a pass at redesigning the four favorite characters (Sherlock, Katherine, Sahle, and Emine) and swapped in cards from other characters to make them really sing. We also balanced the card types so that each got at least one word puzzle, one drawing card, one “wacky” card — if you play sometime, consider how strange “The Masterpiece” or “I’ll Guess You’ll Do” are — and so on. Now each card was a communicated micro-puzzle, a drip of information from the lead investigator. What did it mean? Where did it fit? Each piece was eager to be understood.

The final part came out of a sudden “Eureka!” of our own, like the clues had been there the entire time: the ability card from Rosetta, the joke about players “saying the right answer out loud”, the lamentation of written submissions after you listened to the players discuss the right answer, and discard it. In fact, that card from Rosetta had already been made into a clue card in the game, under the unused character Yuliya Yakovlevna:

Choose a category. The Lead Investigator tells you whether you have said the right answer out loud so far, or not at all, or if you have come close.

We implemented it within twenty-four hours. Letting a prototype languish is a regretful loss of pure joy. It was alive again! Let’s get to it!

We eliminated written answers. Instead, players would get all categories rated with green, yellow, or red tokens. These meant, in turn, “Said the right answer at some point”, “Said something in the right direction”, and “Never said anything close”. After three rounds of playing cards and three chances to update these tokens, a player would stand up and “pitch” the final theory on behalf of the team.

This completely turned everything on its head. A game that previously could be about debate and quarterbacking became one of mutual co-operation and active listening. Not only did everyone want to hear other ideas, but there was no need to defend a specific idea for most of the game; simply saying it was submitting it. This let a lot of “alpha” players get their energy out and let quieter ones contribute equally. Even more so, the lead player had to be able to understand what was going on. Players would be far more careful about talking over each other and directing clear thoughts into the space, with no more side conversations and all focus forward.

There was still that let-down thanks to a final submission that required some debate, but the game stripped down to under 45 minutes. It made all the cards expressive, and focused less on how grand the game looked on the table. The game was now its most beautiful in the words of the players.

The “hot-and-cold” system introduced a wild and enormous logic puzzle to the game. Consider it: If you get a red token, everything you have said is wrong. What a massive reduction in options! Similarly, if you get a green token, everything you said is now an option in a multiple-choice question. One of those things was right. We also added the allowance to have players ask the lead player if they said something or not. This smoothed out worries about memory. Astute players took the time to keep notes on what was discussed.

The design felt a million times closer to being finished. The old SMG band was brought together, we examined the size of the now-standard DVC Games box, and we found ourselves fitting it in almost the same space as the original Rosetta. Funny how it goes; we put a lot of the old Kickstarter complexity into the earnable “allies” that give new cards over time, and sent the rest of the content/art to a file labelled “expansions?” We also had enough room for one more character, so Xiuying was pulled from the list.

Justice

With the game underway, it was back on the table, and it had most of what we wanted: the joy of solving, the conversation, the attention. The tokens made players spiral inward, and each new clue threw in a wrench or a confirmation like watching a TV show. The cases could be weird and a bit outlandish and that was okay; the system allowed for a lot of strategies for players. Their win rate (getting nearly everything right) was over 60%. It feels good to win!

But the last piece was not there — that perfect Sherlock moment. Was it impossible? It was a bit of a moment ourselves and a great rarity of playtester design.

During a game, the players pretty securely felt they knew the answers with a lot of time left. They even repeated the answers out loud multiple times and already had green tokens on everything. They asked whether there was a reward for ending early and submitting the answers. To paraphrase them, “I think we nailed it.” So I shrugged and said, “Okay, you won!”

The players cheered after previously seeming a bit tired and bothered by the coming tedium of “having to finish properly”. Instead, they were excited to almost buy their time back. It reminded me of designing escape rooms, which is a day job for a bunch of us Jaspers: Players love to get record times and won’t consider that they did so at the cost of playing. Being amazing and reflecting on that as a memory somewhat outperformed actual play, so we made it a rule: If the players at any point say all the right answers in a row, the game ends in instant, perfect victory.

Really, how often could this happen? It seemed unlikely, but it immediately became prevalent. Not only did the win rate edge closer to 80% of games, but over 60% ended in this eureka moment. The players loved it and chased it every play after they felt it. They took more time to carefully lay out their theories, in case they would trigger it. They tried to pin the narrative tightly and simply together. They would be excited to play the game exactly as long as they needed to. Even the rare first-round win, while cutting the gameplay down to an astounding ten minutes, became a badge of honor that was bragged about.

Justice was served, in a sense. After all that, the game had to die to find out that we could fit in the most challenging and wonderful moments that we craved so much, the feeling of not just victory, but of understanding, as Sherlock Holmes would.

Thank you for reading.

Jasper Beatrix