One of the bold claims we’ve made about Foursies is that “games are quick and fun”. It must be true. Nick says so in the voiceover for our video!
The actual numbers I’d been telling people were that games take, on average, ten to fifteen turns to complete. This is roughly half what you’d expect from a game of Connect 4, for instance.
If I wasn’t so modest, I’d say we’d reinvented a genre.
Now the game’s been going a few days, I have a graph to prove it that claim. Or very nearly.
The number along the bottom is the number of turns taken to complete a game. The height of the bar is its frequency.
There’s quite a few games lasting up to 19 turns, but after that it really does drop off. Between 10 and 15 really wasn’t a bad guess at the typical length of a game. Thank you players – you’re doing it right!
Well, mostly. Look at the number of people who are completing a game in either 3 or 5 moves. That’s really messing up the nice smooth distribution on my lovely graph!
I had an instant hypotheses about the 3-move spike. Certain starting positions stack two of your counters up and two of your opponents up. Like this:
The simplest strategy for this game is to make lines of three. It’s not really the best strategy because it’s easy to block a single line of three and it should be fairly obvious what you’re up to; but people do it. I have to admit that occasionally I fall for it too, especially when I’m playing a dozen games at once. Lots of the people I’m playing against build straight upwards to try to make an easy line and hope to get away with it.
So when you’re presented with the 2+2 pattern above, an awful lot of people instinctively stack their counters on top and hope for the best.
Either that, or they think they’re playing a match-three game.
Let’s hope that’s not it and assume the game plays out like this:
- I’ve got three in a row!
- Ner ner, so do I.
- But look, now I have four!
Thus, a game ends in three moves. After digging a little bit into this, I found that’s not the only way it happens, sometimes people just don’t see lines of three and lose quickly.
Clearly they should be buying the “Show 3s” hint. It only costs 40 coins, and it helps to avoid an awful lot of mistakes!
For the other spike on the graph at 5 turns, I really don’t have much to go on. It seem sometimes games just end that way. But why would they end in 5 so much more often than in 4 or 6 – or even 7? I’ll wait for more data to arrive and try to aggregate it, but meantime I’d welcome any reasoned explanations – or even wild guesses – in the comments!
EDIT: The refund has been processed, and the CEO has been in touch to make sure everything is OK. Seems like we got there, it’s just a shame we can’t turn back time and try again…
Unfortunately long post. Quick version: Chartboost’s systems are broken and our ad campaigns are out of control. We’re haemorrhaging thousands of dollars through this, and it’s stopped us being able to promote our new game the way we intended. They’ve yet to respond.
Foursies came out on Thursday and I decided we’d invest some money in promoting it. Not a lot, by “big” app standards, but a lot for our little studio. I set aside a few thousand dollars for pay-per-install marketing.
What I wanted to achieve was twofold.
1. Getting liquidity into the game in the early stages, so that new users were not waiting an excessive amount of time to meet an opponent. While Katherine and I are jumping into games when we can, we can’t do this all the time – and our game lists are now huge!
2. To give the game a big push during the first weekend so it stands a chance of getting noticed. To give it a helping hand up the chart rankings for better visibility, to put it into the hands of more users who will tell their friends and to stand a better chance of getting seen by reviewers. We’ve sent review requests off the normal way, but for those that didn’t bite first time around, perhaps they’d notice our adverts in other games they’re playing and it would ring a bell. Who knows. The point was I wanted to burn this marketing budget quickly over a weekend, not drip-feed it over days or weeks.
Chartboost seemed perfect for that. We’ve been using their network to generate revenue for several months. It would have been longer if the terminology used in the dashboard was easier to understand. It’s a mess of language that took us a long time to get to grips with so it was a while before I was actually happy using the service to make money (never mind spending money with them). As it happens, I’ve recently discovered we’d still set up our adverts wrong – there’s a big learning curve.
Slowly, I tried out advertising in their network. It’s performance-based, so you only pay when someone installs the app. There’s also clever targeting by country and iOS versions that means you can pinpoint the users you want, and only pay as much as you can afford.
At least, that’s the theory.
We tried this out last month with Worcle, having seen that its revenue per user was the highest of all our games. We picked a bid, lower than the expected revenue per download, and let it run a while. The system lets you set a daily budget as well as a price per install, so we were basically going for the minimum $0.50 per install up to $100 per day.
Depending on the competition, this resulted in anywhere from 10 to 200 installs per day. On the busy days, things happened quickly and the budget was soon exhausted. You get an email as a warning when 75% of the budget is used, and it looks like they slow things down at that point so you don’t go over. Except you do – because you’re still charged for the stragglers who clicked an adverts a few hours ago but only just got as far as opening the app. That’s fair enough, but I started to gain confidence that we basically had control over the spending, give or take a few dollars.
So, when we came to launch Foursies, using Chartboost was high priority. I’d uploaded the artwork ahead of time, but it wasn’t possible to set up the advertising campaign until the app was live. A bit of an annoyance as they only ever seem to do this on California time. But I figured once the artwork was approved, we could run with that campaign with whatever targeting we wanted.
I transferred the first $1000 into our advertiser account. I’ve always played this cautiously – a few hundred dollars at a time at most – so this was a big commitment. As Foursies is not localised, I set up a campaign to target a few English-speaking countries.
The first day went pretty smoothly. I started by setting an $800 budget on this campaign, figuring that would make sure we don’t overspend on the first $1000 and then I’d be able to re-evaluate. Did we want to focus on one country in particular? Or focus on iPad rather than iPhone? Or did we need to tweak our bid to get better value?
There’s an interesting quirk of the Chartboost system that means that you are restricted in the changes you make once a campaign is in progress. For logical reasons, you can’t set a daily budget that’s higher than your account balance. But because it validates the budget figure every time you make a change, you have to reset the budget if you want to adjust your parameters.
So, after $400 had been spent and I wanted to increase the bid, I had to reset the budget at $600 – because that’s all that was left in my balance. That meant I’d only be getting another $200 or so of installs, not the $400 I was planning on.
So, given that it only took a few hours to use up all the money I’d allocated to this campaign so far, and to increase the budget to get things moving again would require moving twice as much as I needed into the advertising account each time (*) I decided to set up a number of different campaigns so I could have some finer-grained control over our advertising. One campaign for each country, each with its own bid and budget.
(* To increase the budget from the previous $800, which had been expired, to $1600, would require me to make the balance up to $1600 in order to be able to spend the difference of $800; the additional $800 would not be used. Follow?!)
Here’s where it started getting messy. The Chartboost dashboard – flaky at best – started timing out while I was adding those campaigns. I ended up with five copies of one of them, and there’s no “delete” option, only “archive”. So I archived off all the superfluous campaigns and double-checked the others.
Yes, the UK campaign is targeted to the UK. And it’s turned off. Yes, the Australia campaign is targeted to Australia. And it’s turned off.
That “turned off” part was very important. What I really didn’t want was all those new campaigns going live immediately when someone in California finally got round to approving them. I wanted to pick and choose which were live when, and for how much.
Turns out that when Chartboost approve a campaign, they automatically flick that switch to on. Which is extremely unhelpful. This happened at about 5am our time, so, I woke up this morning to find my balance gone and all those campaigns running at the same time.
Remember how I’m cautious about the amount in my account balance? It’s because I want to have complete control over my spending. Apparently it doesn’t work. What’s horrible about this is that the system didn’t stop delivering adverts once I’d run out of money. It seems to have slowed down a bit, but it’s still going. At breakfast, I was about $800 in the red! A few hours later it’s now over $1200.
How does a campaign with a $200 daily budget (because that’s what I started all the new ones off with) go more than $1000 over budget?
There was no “75% used” email and no “you’ve run out of money” email like I’ve seen in the past. The campaigns are running away and spending money they don’t have. It’s terrifying.
Oh, and remember all that country targeting I carefully set up. That seemed to get lost in the process too. That UK campaign that’s spent all the money had no country targetting. This all started at about 5am, which is completely the wrong time for English-speaking countries. We got some traffic – but from Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong… later, Eastern Europe… people who likely wouldn’t be able to follow the game’s tutorial, nor understand which of the text-labelled buttons to press to start a game.
So not only was I spending way more than I’d specified, their system decided to throw all this money away on users who were generally no good for my game.
Here’s another dumb quirk with Chartboost’s dashboard. Because I have a negative balance now, there is no daily budget figure I can set that allows me to make any changes to my campaigns!
This is blocking me from making any changes on those runaway campaigns. I can’t change the country targeting, or the bid, or even flick the switch to turn it off. That’s right – I can’t even disable these ad campaign!
I’m basically at their mercy now. I have an ever-increasing negative balance which, of course, I will be contesting with every ounce of my being, because it’s clearly a software screw up that’s honouring neither our daily budget values, nor the account balance.
But that’s not the point. I should be using today to give our game a push during this time-sensitive launch window; advertising it effectively to the countries I wanted at the times I wanted, and staying in control of that spend.
To regain control of the Chartboost dashboard right now, I’d have to deposit $1500 to have $300 of advertising to use. That doesn’t make sense to me. That would be saying the out-of-control spending so far is all OK, and it’s absolutely not.
So I don’t think there’s any other way to put this than they’ve killed our launch. Gee thanks, Chartboost. Now, reply to my damn emails and tweets, would you please?
We’ve known it for some time, of course, but Foursies is awesomely fun and addictive.
Obviously we’d say that about our own game. We love it to pieces. But it’s not taken long for others to catch on, with more than 3,000 players signing up in the first couple of days.
No, it’s not Draw Something. But that’s a pretty good start for our humble little studio. It’s making us bounce around the office while we work on the next update on a Saturday morning anyway.
I wanted to take the opportunity on this lovely sunny day to share with you some of the glowing comments we’ve already started to receive.
I am really enjoying the graphics in this game. It’s cute, colorful, and looks great on Retina iDevices. The game boards look nice, and the wide variety of counters available for players to use are shiny and pretty. The music is also quite soothing, which is nice to have around as you strategize your plan against the other player.
The players themselves appear to be hooked, having much the same reaction as many of our beta testers. They didn’t think they’d like the game much, but it turns out they can’t get enough of it!
Deltahorse left this five-star review in the US App Store:
Didn’t think I’d get hooked on this game the way I did, but I find myself starting a new game as soon as the last one is finished!
Back in the UK, we had this great review from S&AT:
I didn’t think there was anything new that could be done with Connect 4, but Lightwood Games proved me wrong. The constraint that you have to play in a different column in every game takes it to the next level and really makes you think.
On Twitter, @PaperTitans – the team behind the awesome “rain-em-up” game Kumo Lumo – said we “kick all kinds of ass”. We agree.
Would use again/recommend? Definitely! I have always loved Connect 4, and the quick and easy way you can connect and play a round makes it a no-brainer.
Have you played Foursies yet? What do you think? We love to hear your comments.
Saturday was the first ever International TableTop Day, thanks to Wil Wheaton, Felicia Day and others coming up with the bright idea just a couple of months ago. Despite being in the middle of the Easter weekend, the response was amazing! There were games played all over the world, by people of all ages, and #TableTopDay was trending on Twitter pretty much all day!
Here at Lightwood Games we challenged ourselves to spend the day away from our computers, playing real physical board games with other people! That’s why we had to make a physical copy of Foursies in time for it, so that we could still talk about our new game without needing to get out any iPhones
We started the day with a trip to our newly discovered local game shop as we all wanted to buy some of the games we’ve been seeing on the TableTop YouTube series. Chris and I bought Gloom, Pirate Fluxx, Munchkin Zombie and Rock Band Manager, with Colette purchasing Ticket to Ride and Tsuro. Turned out they were actually having an event there and they have so many games we could have lost our day there quite easily, but as we had guests arriving we had to get back home!
Our first game of the day was Gloom. I’ve seen this played a couple of times but never been brave enough to join in as the story telling part seemed a little daunting. Turns out, I love it! Sometimes the “story” degenerates into “and then suddenly they were in prison, and I’m not sure how that happened!” but mostly we could keep some sense to the tales and it had us giggling at the poor old dam being perturbed by pudding and Alice who was already in prison, eating a jam sandwich which attracted the wasps and was hence wounded by wasps It was great! We played it a few times over the weekend and now I’m eager to get the expansion packs to add more families and more story telling possibilities
Next up was a game of Tsuro. This is a beautiful game with very simple game play to start and then a little more challenging as it continues. Simple enough for everyone to play quickly Even Jack joined in…
We had a quick game of Pirate Fluxx before lunch. We’d never played any of the Fluxx games before – the constantly changing rules are a little hard to keep up with, but it’s a fun little game which could make a nice starter for an evening of games Both times we played I won pretty quickly and all of a sudden which felt odd. Perhaps the other versions play a bit differently?
Whilst we were having a late lunch Dave and Gill turned up to join us for some games We had a quick round of Zombie Dice, using tasty brain sweeties for counters whilst we waited for Nick to join us too. Zombie Dice is a very quick game and simple to explain – you roll dice hoping for brains to eat rather than getting shot!
Once Nick arrived we had another game of Tsuro with lots of dragons on the board – the complexity jumped up faster this time with so many tiles being placed each round, but everyone enjoyed it
Then we had a bit of a dilemma – with 6 of us suddenly a lot of the new games couldn’t be played, and we didn’t really want to split up into 2 groups of 3. So we put aside all the shiny new games and instead played a couple of word games First up was “Get a Letter” which is played in 2 teams and once a category is announced you have to shout out words, one for each letter of the alphabet, flipping that letter towards your team. There’s a timer, but we mostly completed the alphabet before it was even close to finished! Lots of shouting and giggling with this one!
Next up was a game of “Last Word” another word shouting game, but this time you each have a category and then a letter is announced and the first person to think of words announces their category. A random timer is started and all the players shout out words. The player who gets the last word in before the time advances one space round the board. More giggles, arguments over whether places were countries or cities, and the some disturbing suggestions for “liquids” coming up! Gill was particularly good at this game and came first so quickly that we played for second place to give the rest of us a chance to play!
Nick had to run off at this point but that put us down to 5 players, which is the correct number for Ticket to Ride! So it was time to play that for the first time! None of us had played it before, yet Chris’ “hoard all the cards” strategy had us wondering what he was up to
In the end he managed to beat me by just a couple of points, despite my impressively long train track! I enjoyed this more than I expected and I’m looking forward to playing it again sometime
We finished the night off with another game of Gloom. Gill was very good with the story telling aspect, and most of the families suffered terrible fates… except ours (Chris and I were playing as a team) as everyone ganged up on us! Our family were rather cheerful at the end of the game!
That was the end of the official TableTop Day event – lots of games played, lots of fun and giggles
However, we were having too much fun and hadn’t yet managed to play everything! So there were more games on Sunday! Starting with us learning how to play Munchkin Zombies. We’d never played any Munchkin games and the roleplaying theme of the original didn’t really appeal to Chris or I, but Zombies are always appealing The game has a lot of rules to get your head around, and there was some amount of arguing as to what it all meant… but eventually fun was had During the first game we were all being very nice and helpful to one another. The second game, we all turned nasty and there was no help at hand, only increasingly crazy amounts of monsters and modifiers!
In the end, we were all level 9 and I hadn’t seen a monster for a few hands. Then Chris turned over the pathetic little level 1 zombie chihuahua and we just didn’t have enough cards left between us to stop him winning! Gah!
After that, David returned with Settlers of Catan in his hand and so we all sat down to play that – another new game for me! I was a little sceptical as I’m not a fan of “resource management” style games, but it had sheep… amusing myself building a sheep army kept me from finding it dull, and amazingly I even won!
A whole weekend of board games, and the discovery of a shop with weekly gaming nights! Hooray!
Did you play any board games over the Easter weekend? What games should we play next?
Exciting news! The version of Foursies we submitted to Apple has been approved. We have a bit of server-side work to do before the game can go live, so we’re sticking with the originally planned launch date of 4/4 – however, this means we’re definitely ready to release the game next week!
If any reviewers or celebrities happen to be reading this and would like an advance copy, we will send you a promo code
We’re also on track to finish making our real life Foursies set in time for TableTop Day on Saturday. Just a couple of coats of paint to go – all the 3D printing is done. Here’s how it looks right now!
In case you missed it, here’s a recap of the journey we took to get here:
So, if you happen to be taking part in a TableTop Day event this weekend, and want a new game to play, and have access to a 3D printer, why not go ahead and make yourself a foursies set?
I know that’s a pretty unlikely combination of things, but stranger things have happened… and please do let us know if you print this. We’d love to see how your copy comes out.
Even if you’re not interested in printing it, you might be interested in the interactive 3D view of the models that Thingiverse provides.
We can’t wait to be able to play this on an actual table with actual people!
After playing with playdough the other day we had decided to have boards standing on hills, but to print them as one solid piece for stability. It didn’t take Chris long to add a hill to our board and we soon had something printing!
Unfortunately with such large models it was a good 7 hours before we could see the result…
It worked! We have a Foursies board embedded in a hill! Confident it was going to work we set about making the tallest hill. This took a few attempts to get the model correct as we didn’t want to risk printing above the height of the printer, but we needed it as tall as possible! After a few extra checks we set the model printing
We left it printing overnight. These long prints are best left alone so we’re not tempted to interfere Come the morning we had another board on a hill and some beautiful support structure to admire (and then remove!)
We made two more models with different heights and set about printing them… this afternoon the final model was complete with mere inches of filament left on the spool!
Finally we have 4 complete Foursies boards! I bet you’d like to see them all together now wouldn’t you?
You can comfortably see all four boards at the same time if you lay them out like this Mission complete!
Knowing we would have the boards complete today, and also knowing that the model shop is closed tomorrow, we paid Affinity Models another visit today to get the rest of the colour palette required and a finer paint brush for detail work Obviously I couldn’t resist giving the boards their first bit of colour
Plenty more to do, but it’s starting to really look like a game now!
The one thing our models are currently lacking is colour! As lovely as they are, this natural white look just isn’t really cutting it. So today, we decided to make our first colour prints!
We removed the boring white plastic, grabbed our pretty pink spool, and spotted a problem… the spool was a completely different size Some panicking and googling later we discovered an adapter we could print to make it work! A touch frustrating to have to refit the white plastic and then wait a number of hours whilst we printed the parts, but seriously, how cool is it that we can upgrade the printer ourselves?!
We finally got the pink filament loaded and set off printing the first set of counters for the game We can happily print 23 at a time, although on all the nicest settings this takes over 2 hours! 3D printing certainly isn’t fast, but it is fun!
We can’t wait to play with colourful counters in our boards Not that we’ve finished printing all of those yet, or you’d have seen them!
There was also a little trip to our local model shop today to get a bit of expert advice about how to tidy up our models. The friendly guy inside helped us choose some files to smooth out the few rough areas, and also some primer and paint So I’ve got a little testing to do this evening to see if his suggested paint was a good choice and then we’ll probably be going back tomorrow to get more colours!
We’ve worked out how to print a four-in-a-row board using our 3D printer, so making four of them is no problem!
What happens next is figuring out how to make this into one complete set that holds together for a game of Foursies!
Given we’ve been 3D printing for less than a week, the plan we came up with is somewhat ambitious: to model the actual landscape used in the Foursies app – in other words, using a hilly landscape to support the boards at different heights.
With such limited experience of 3D modelling, it felt impossible to prototype this in a CAD program straight away. Instead, we began with playdough!
If you want to follow along at home, here’s the recipe for playdough hills that we used:
Combine 250g plain flour, 50g salt, 140ml water, 1 tbsp cooking oil in a bowl. Add some green food colouring – because we’re making hills of course! Mix and knead. You’re done.
Here’s what happened:
And what did we learn from this little experiment?
Firstly, this playdough recipe is incredibly salty – and bright green – and yet our cats still want to eat it! Silly creatures!
Mostly though, this was about gauging the relative height required between the front and back boards. My first instinct was that the boards at the back would need to be elevated clear above the front ones (so their bottom edge at the back was above the top edge at the front). In fact, that’s not the case. Putting this setup on a table at the typical height you’d play it, you’re looking down on all the boards at an angle of somewhere between 30 and 60 degrees. With the separation I envisaged, you can comfortably see the entire game, even if the boards at the back are raised by less than half the height of the ones at the front.
There’s some maths in there somewhere, but it doesn’t seem necessary now I have measurements that work for our models
And sure, we could have worked that out by stacking the boards on books or something, but then there’d be no playdough!
One thing we felt important was that one board could still function on its own as a standalone four-in-a-row game, as well as being part of this set. After some pondering it became clear that the hills would become part of the same model as the boards – rather than being a separate stand. The biggest issue now is the maximum height our printer can make; theoretically 135mm, but given we have to set a calibration height of 134.4mm, probably a little less than that to be safe! We need to find a combination of hill and board sizes that fits this restriction.
Finally, the other thing that getting hands-on with gloopy home-made modelling material helped with was visualising what shape a hill actually is, and how I might go about constructing it from primitive shapes in the simple CAD tool I’m using. Hopefully we’ll have some actual models to share tomorrow and you can see how it turned out!
An important part of Foursies is the counters. For the game we’ve made lots of different counters which a player can choose from to make the game their own For the real life version the first decision is how big should the counters be?
We have some size limitations because our printer can only print in a 14cm cube which limits us to a more “travel size” version. However, there’s still room for variation. We printed a whole selection of sizes to see how they felt in hand.
Based on the first board we printed, which *just* fit, we know that 16mm is about as large as we can go, and we printed down to 12mm. After a bit of playing we reckon that 14mm is probably the best compromise between a holdable size and keeping things small.
The other interesting decision to make with the counters is how to print them. They could be printed flat or standing up, which gives 2 very different textures.
Chris prefers the feel of the ones printed flat, but as you can see from above, removing the raft can be a touch problematic and leaves a nasty mess which would need tidying up. I actually like the way the ones printed vertical feel, so I imagine there’ll be more testing once we have a counter design, rather than just a cylinder
The easy decision to make was what colours to print our counters We ordered some more filament over the weekend which arrived today.
Look out for pretty purple & pink models coming soon!
It was great! 
Recent Comments