Playing with Fire
Designing a pen and paper game of chance and strategy
I have fond memories playing pen and paper games as a child: tic-tac-toe, hangman, dots and boxes,… Even now I’m fascinated by how game mechanics and even narratives can be conveyed through such a simple medium.
There’s an unmistakable beauty within a well ordered system and getting to interact with that system — pursuing a goal subject to established laws within the confines of a microcosm — can be surprisingly immersive and satisfying. That sense of satisfaction inspired me to try my hand at designing a pen and paper game of my own.
I didn’t start with a specific concept in mind, but there were guiding principles I wanted to follow:
- Single-player: I wanted to be able to play the game on my own.
- Easy setup: The game needed to work with just pen and paper.
- Moderately complex: Somewhere between tic-tac-toe and checkers.
- Replayability: There should be variation between sessions.
- Strategic: Ultimately, I wanted it to be a thinking game.
With those key points in mind I gravitated toward a turn-based strategy game. Even though it would be single-player I liked the idea of competing against an adversary. A worthy opponent would need to be able to think and react though. I was wondering how to “program” an opponent on paper when I realized that randomness could be used to simulate decision-making, an element of chaos in an ordered system to introduce challenge and variation.
Fortunately, a solution for generating random already existed: dice. I briefly considered an alternative of tossing a coin, but I preferred the range of possibilities dice offered, especially when rolling two at once. Since I considered dice to be readily available the material demands of the game remained acceptably minimal.
Having chosen to use dice as an element of the game, other features soon fell into place. I decided to use a 6x6 grid for the gameplay, corresponding to the six sides on each of a pair of dice. (Considering that tic-tac-toe is on a 3x3 and checkers is on an 8x8, I figured I was going in the right direction in terms of complexity.) I also tried drawing some potential icons to use as game pieces. They needed to be quick and easy to draw on the grid, so I stuck with basic, geometric shapes.
Once the grid was established and I had some shapes to play with, I began experimenting with game mechanics. I quickly realized a limitation: the permanence of mark-making. It was difficult to make changes over time, so the gameplay was naturally limited to the filling up of the grid. This led to trying out different ways to fill the grid. The pattern that stood out to me the most was starting from a single point and spreading out from there. It inevitably filled the grid and mimicked the nature of a real-world phenomenon: fire. I had my adversary.
The narrative of the game felt like an obvious result of the mechanic I had chosen; the player would fight a spreading wildfire to protect the lands represented by the grid. Even the randomness of the dice seemed to match the chaotic nature of fire. All that remained was to define the rules of the game and to play test.
I filled pages of a notebook with many sessions, noting what did or didn’t work and testing incremental adjustments. Decisions like how quickly the fire would spread and what actions the player could take were made by trial and error, but I came to a finished set of rules that I thought provided the best amount of variation and difficulty. To make it official, I made a PDF rulebook complete with example diagrams.
At this point I had completed my quest to make a pen and paper game of my own, but there was one more challenge I wanted to face: making a digital version. The game only required paper, something to write with, and a pair of dice, but I knew it would be even more convenient if all the setup was handled by a computer. Plus, I wanted to see what it would look like to have the wildfire spread all on its own.
The design of the digital version was largely dictated by the grid of the paper version, but I also added an automatic score counter and a dark theme, just for fun. As a front-end developer I used my knowledge of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to build the game as a web app. With the rules of the game clearly defined it was trivial to program the game loop and before long I had a version I could play in a browser, even on my smartphone. You can try it for yourself here: https://wildfire.carsonford.info/
I had set out to make my own solo pen and paper game and wound up with a satisfying, albeit flawed creation; I’ll admit the game is not perfectly balanced — some scenarios are too easy while others are impossible to win — but to me that’s true to life. My process led me to discover a game mechanic that I found interesting and a narrative that fit. In the end it was a rewarding experience, getting to exercise creativity to design a system, my own simple, little game world.
