The Mines of Mi Otal

Topic suggested by CM Perry (@BHFuturist).

The Mines of Mi Otal is a worker placement game that I started designing for The Game Crafter Worker Placement Challenge which was due the end of May 2016. So I probably started it a month or two earlier.

Thinking back on it, this design and contest were responsible for me meeting a few designers. I started talking to the judge for the contest once my game made it to the finals. Since then he has been on my podcast a few times. And months after the contest I met the contest winner at a local convention. It turned out we lived pretty close to each other and he was looking to start up a play test group. So I’ve met a great group of people through that who I may not have met if I didn’t design this game.

As for the game. This was my first attempt at designing a worker placement game and at the time I hadn’t actually played many. So I wasn’t so familiar with the variety of ways it has been done.

The initial idea was inspired by the game Ryu. I’ve never played Ryu,but I heard a review of it on a podcast. If I remember correctly a mechanic in Ryu was drawing cubes from a bag and hoping to get the right color for what you wanted to do. That’s what I took away from the description anyway. I thought that this mechanic would fit well with a building theme where you would try to gather a resource, say stone, and would get to pull some number of cubes from the bag and keep all the stones. The rest would be treated as nothing for that pull and go back in the bag. This first version was focused on using the resources to build new buildings and locations that let you pull more cubes or trade cubes and generally mitigate the randomness of the bag pulls. Another important aspect was the rarity of different resources in the bag. You could easily pull wood and stone, but gold was much harder to get.

The first version made it to prototype, but it wasn’t ever played. This was before I had joined any play test groups. So it sat around unfinished. Then the worker placement contest came along. I hit on the idea of mining as a theme and crafting items with the different resources.

So the version of the game I submitted to the contest had a bag of chits that were iron, silver, gold, and diamond. Each had a different rarity. Players would place a worker on a specific mine space, for instance the silver mine, and pull 6 chits from the bag. They would keep all of the silver and put the rest back. So players could go to the iron mine and have a good chance of getting some iron or try for the diamond mine and often get nothing. In addition to these mines were some mine spaces that had a random assortment of resources that you could see. Placing a worker there let you take any two resources, but once they were empty they stayed empty.

After collecting enough resources a player could put a worker on the forge and trade resources in to forge an item. Each item required a unique combination of 3 resources and could be sold for double the value of the original resources. Resources could also be sold at the market to get some quick money if you needed it.

Money was important for the other main mechanic in the game. Every round you had to hire your workers. Each player had one worker they kept to prevent them from being totally locked out but, any additional workers had to be hired from a worker pool at the start of the round. The pool only had 8 workers available, so if the players before you hired all 8 you were out of luck. So going first could be important. However, the more workers you hired the more money it cost per worker. So you could hire a single worker for 2 coins. Or, you could hire all 8 workers for 44 coins. This would give you a huge advantage of actions in the round but at that cost you were almost certainly throwing away the game. The more tense situations came from the middle ground where the last player could be blocked out of getting any workers if earlier players spent enough. But money could be very tight, especially in the early game.

The game played pretty well and got some interest from various people I tested with. But I abandoned the design not too long after the contest to start working on other contest submissions. But I eventually started thinking about the game again and ways to improve it. I reworked the hiring mechanic into an auction for my game Vanilla. So the basic concept of having to pay more to hire more workers was there but as an auction players could more freely choose how much they were willing to pay but the highest bidder could still take all of the workers for a round.

I plan on focusing on The Mines of Mi Otal once I finish up Plutocracy. The original design was very limited by the contest’s price constraint. So without that I’m thinking it can be a larger game with each player being able to upgrade their forge and workshop. One of the complaints with the last version was how random the available items to craft could be. Sometimes players just got lucky having the right resources. I’m thinking private contracts, similar to tickets in Ticket to Ride, would be better than a public row of items that players raced for. The changes to hiring workers I used in Vanilla have been further refined and I think it will work really well in this new version.

These new ideas have me really excited to get back to work on this design after such a long break. Only the fast approaching deadline for Plutocracy getting into the Cardboard Edison Award is holding me back. So once that’s done you’ll probably see a lot of posts from me about The Mines of Mi Otal.

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