Cobras in the Cockpit

Designer's Notes: Cobras in the Cockpit

The theme for Cobras in the Cockpit was conceived before all other parts of the game. Cobras in the Cockpit is a parody of creature action movies. Snakes are a fun movie creature, because they're not totally overpowering in the way that dinosaurs or giant killer rabbits would be, so there's a real struggle. They're creepy, with their slithering about, and anything poisonous is cool. And a passenger airplane is just such an excellent, fragile setting for an action movie.

My original plan for Cobras in the Cockpit was to draw up a playable version, mess around with it a bit at the local game day, have a good laugh, and that's all.

Accordingly, I wanted a game that fit well into that plan:

You can play it in about an hour.
It's easy to teach to other people.
It's funny.

I considered making it a snakes-versus-people game, but that would mean it would be a two-player-only game, which I didn't want. I thought it would be cool if the players controlled the snakes, and that's proven to be a good choice... people like that. I also considered making a cooperative game, so it would be players-versus-game. There are some really cool cooperative games available right now, but I've noticed that they need to be very fine-tuned to work well, and I wasn't looking to do that much work. And the tone of cooperative games tends to be one of tense camaraderie, and that wasn't what I was going for. I was hoping for light, fast, chaotic fun.

So, it became a pretty traditional competitive game. Players control the snakes, and they earn points by throwing different areas of the plane into chaos. Each player gets a different kind of snake, with different abilities. The role of the people on the plane is simulated in the mechanics of the game.

I decided it should be card-based. It seemed a sensible way to simulate the actions of creature movie snakes. They have to get lucky to find people in a vulnerable spot. They're snakes, after all, not monsters. So I knew I had to make various numbered cards to reflect the snakes getting lucky, or maybe not so lucky. Also, special cards would be available to keep things lively and unpredictable, and to provide some comic relief.

Because this model is somewhat dependent on card combinations and lucky draws, I decided to use discards to drive movement. Movement is important in the game, so players should never suffer a truly wasted turn, even if they draw a hand of lousy cards. This also discourages players from hanging on to cards for a long time and planning elaborate schemes, as hanging on to cards slows them down. I see this as a good thing. I like a lot of games that reward elaborate plans, but I didn't want this to be one of them.

I also chose to let players draw up to five cards at the end of every turn. This is really the only rule that governs hand management. It's a simple, easy-to-remember rule, and it rewards players who play as many cards as they can, to keep their snakes moving and to get fresh cards.

From there, the game pretty much designed itself. I invented cards, I made a board, and I gave some areas of the plane -- the cockpit and the engines -- special rules that made them more fun, but at the same time fit into the theme.

For my first playtest copy, I selected 72 numbered cards in four suits, Hiss, Rattle, Bite and Squeeze. I made up more number cards than I needed, in case I wanted to adjust the balance later, but the original 72, plus 27 special cards, turned out to be perfect. In playtest, I noticed out that the 99-card deck was used up half or two-thirds of the way through the game, so there was a good chance that any given card would be available more than once in the game. This was a good thing.

I assigned point values, and the number card values needed to throw them into chaos, somewhat arbitrarily. I wanted a good mix of values for both, so I just tried to make them balanced. In playtest, the values I chose worked pretty well, so they never changed.

The individual special cards were tweaked and clarified. Those that proved too powerful were adjusted for balance, and some of the cards I had originally flagged to be removed from the deck when used turned out not to be so overpowering as I first thought, so they were simply discarded instead. And, naturally, some cards needed to be re-written to clear up unforeseen confusion and conflicts with other cards. Cobras, originally able to play three Bite cards per turn (which was almost never an advantage), gained a new special ability that was more useful in practice, and more fun to play.

With the first playtests, I was surprised at how well the game worked. It had all of the features I was shooting for: it was easy to learn, it played in about an hour, and people enjoyed the theme and the cards. The board layout was just spread out enough. And I was surprised at how tactically interesting it was. In spite of the simplicity, there's some real meat to this game, and some unique features that aren't difficult to learn.

Best of all, it was fun.

My friends who played it liked it. They wanted me to publish it.

That was the scariest part. I've never done this before. But I've attended seminars, researched it, fantasized about it... I probably know as much about making a game as anybody outside the industry. And indie games are on the rise right now. So I decided to jump in.

Luckily, a friend of mine is a first-rate artist and graphic designer. When Trent started to work on the game, it transformed from an interesting game into a product. I was proud of the game design I had made, but Trent's contribution transformed it into something I just have to share. It made it something beyond me, something that already belonged to others.

In my mind, there's no question that you'll buy this game. All I have to do is deliver it to you.

So buy it!

--Mac

When Mac first showcased the game to a bunch of us at a Game Day (a hosted party where people get together to eat bad food and play board games all day), I was surprisingly impressed. He had a very simple board he'd drawn in Publisher and a bunch of cards with no art, so everything was dependant on the game-play. I've seen and played a lot of bad games before, so I wasn't expecting much, but this game was a lot of fun! And it was unique; no other game I've played had the same mechanics, yet it was easy enough to understand and get in to that a first-time player has no problem getting up to speed. Plus, it's funny!

After the first day of playing around with it, people were already talking about making it into a real, sellable product. I was so impressed by the game that I offered to do the art for it. As we worked on it over the next few weeks, we realized that we had something special; something worthy of appearing on store shelves. We play-tested it quite a bit and found that Mac's initial mechanics didn't require much adjustment to make the game balanced.

What started out as a silly idea quickly solidified into a brilliant and entertaining board game. I'm really proud of the work we've done on this game and I'm sure you'll be equally impressed.

So buy it!

--Trent

Buy your copy now!