by Joseph Bugbee

Hey, everyone,

With TacTile blowing up on BGA, a lot of people have been asking about the creative process and where the idea for TacTile came from, so I’ve written this post to shed a little light on the game’s backstory and share a few tips for aspiring designers along the way.

Joe’s take on game design:

With TacTile and all my current designs, I start every process by asking myself the same question: How can I design the most fun game possible?

I think it’s important to ground yourself with this statement because I see too many designers (myself included) falling into the same trap of having a game idea and trying to “make it work”. You end up spending forever adding more and more junk to overcompensate for a core game that just isn’t that fun to begin with.

One thing I’ve learned from studying start-ups is that generally the best way to create a strong product is to start with something already popular, improve it, then test! test! test!

During testing, I try to uncover how players want to play the game, then I try to create game incentives that reinforce how my players already want to play, creating a positive feedback loop. A fun, unique, core mechanism with a solid positive feedback structure usually ends up being a fun game.

Designing TacTile

Step 1: Find a fun core mechanism

TacTile was actually my second project. I developed my first game, Widgets n’ Digit$, with Alex Cheng and like every first game design we tried a million mechanisms. One of the key learnings from WnD was how much everyone enjoyed card abilities and card combos. This inspired me to begin work on a game focused entirely on card abilities and card combos.

Step 2: Improve the mechanism

When it comes to how card combos are typically done in games, I think about games like Wingspan or Terraforming Mars. In these games, you have this huge stack of cards and tons of abilities, and the fun comes from finding the best cards and trying to set up combos.

My problem with this approach is that it disproportionally adds complexity over strategy. Each card adds to the rules complexity of the game, but you don’t use every card. This results in a player experience in which you’ve got to read a lot of cards, you’re always going to the rulebook for edge cases and weird situations, and ultimately you’ll end up using few of the cards in a game, so all that reading and figuring out rules time is wasted, or you’ll spend a lot of time setting up a combo that you can perform only a few times before game’s end.

Step 3: Bringing it all together

I decided that instead of a bunch of cards with a few possible combos I would create few cards but they would all combo. Instead of one big payoff at the end of the game, cards would be cheap and easy to acquire. Combos would happen early and often, leading to massive combos at game’s end.

The result is TacTile, which features the world’s simplest objective: Get to the other side. The design uses only three cards — move a tile, push an opponent one tile, gain a resource — yet it is by no means a simple game.

A few simple building blocks turn the game into a sandbox where the burden is on the player to visualize their path, anticipate their opponent’s actions, and devise the most efficient engine. Early and often combos create a powerful snowballing effect, leading to early tension that escalates rapidly.

I discovered that by removing fluff I had opened the door to deep emergent strategy. The barrier to players was no longer the rules, but their ability to adapt to new situations and out-vision their opponents. Strategy, not memorization, was king.

Final Thoughts

Personally, I don’t feel that I created TacTile as much as I defined the parameters for a fun game, then by iterative process TacTile came into existence. I feel this is the only way a highly emergent strategy game like TacTile can be made. It’s difficult to design for emergent strategy, but when you discover an elegant system emergent strategy arises naturally.

Joe Bugbee