Prowl Design Diaries #1: The perfect warm-up game
Envisioning the Game
When we started on Prowl, we knew we wanted it to be a quick, portable experience. There are plenty of big, heavy games of intrigue and deduction, but we wanted something that captured those experiences without the weight. With schedules getting tighter — and shelves becoming fuller! — we saw Prowl as the chance to make our perfect small-box game: a slim, lightweight package that didn't skimp on experience.
From our earliest discussions, Prowl was designed as the warm-up game we always wanted. This meant a few things (not limited to):
it needs to be straightforward to explain, with ideally all its rules fitting on a single reference card per player
games need to consistently end in a short and consistent amount of time
games needs to be quick to set-up; since the game is going to be short, a slow set-up risks being felt as disproportionately long
there needs to be enough variance between games — since the game is short, we can expect players to play a few rounds before moving to another game.
game needs to accommodate varying amount of players, from 2 - 5
Keeping it Simple
For instance, one of the core design principles we stuck to was to ensure that each round, a player only "did one thing". The game draws distant inspiration from classics like Love Letter (and its more robust sibling, Lost Legacy), and one thing that makes them so easy to pick up is how straightforward a player's turn is.
On each of your turns in Prowl, you'll use exactly one card. You have a choice of what to do with that card (play it for its effect, use it to replace your clan, or discard it as fodder to make an accusation), but this one-card-per-round cadence forms the bedrock of the game's mechanics.
Beyond keeping player actions simple, it instils a "clock" into game: for each new player at the table, an extra 5 rounds are added to the game's total length. Because of this rhythm, games of Prowl tend to last a relatively predictable amount of time.
Accommodating for Groups
This regularity also ended up helping us solve another problem we initially faced: how to accommodate different group sizes, and their expectations.
During playtests, we found that larger groups tended to appreciate a slightly more casual, relaxed experience. Conversely, smaller groups (and especially pairs!) tended to favour a slightly tighter, sharper game. Prowl is playable as a boisterous "I can't believe you just did that to me!" game, or as a sharper, contemplative "I think I have a plan..." one: both experiences are valid, and most games we saw tended to sit comfortably between the two.
One main way the game achieves this is that, since each player adds a fixed number of cards to the game, the variance in each game session scales directly with the player count. 2 players use a very small set of exactly 12 cards - and crucially for each action you take, your opponent takes one as well. There's a reasonably tight back-and-forth that can emerge at that scale. Conversely, a 5-player game sees 30 cards hitting the table, and the ratio of your-plays to your opponents' rises to 1:4. While there's still quite a bit that a clever player can do to swing the advantage in their favour, the stakes are naturally more relaxed, and we've found groups tend to embrace the chaos more than the calculation.
The game hence naturally gets more or less relaxed as player counts change, which naturally fits the sorts of experiences we wanted to give the different player counts. And crucially, it does all this without changing anything about the game - the fundamental experience is the same, even if it becomes "flavoured" differently as numbers change.
Scheming on the Go
All this is in service of our main goal: to have a game you can throw in your bag, so that wherever you game, whoever is there (and however many are late!), you'll have a fun, quick bit of intrigue and deduction. While Prowl's various clans may be engaged in a life-and-death struggle for the throne, we hope you enjoy something a bit less stressful, and a whole lot more fun, than that!
Prowl is live on Kickstarter until 15 May 2024! Support us and get 25% off retail price by backing on Kickstarter here!
