Factions of Sol was Raised by a Village
Factions of Sol, Mark IV Games’ first game, has been in development for just about a year, and from beginning to end, the game has changed countless times. We’ve created and redrafted dozens of card decks, trashed tons of ideas, and spent endless hours playtesting to get the game to where it is now. And much like raising an infant, creating Factions of Sol has been a labor of love filled with late nights, bulk orders of plastic pieces, and all the nurturing patience a bunch of college students can muster. More so than most games however, Factions of Sol was raised by a village—with a three-dad design team (Adam, Elam, and I) and orbiting team members who constantly improved our work, the game is very much so the product of a community, and we’re proud to show off our nerd-baby to the world soon.
Elam's Original Idea for Factions of Sol
The original game was designed by Elam and consisted solely of hundreds of small white squares of printer paper attached to playing cards—our low budget mockups of game cards. Players stole, “called the law” down on other players, and bid on cards every round. And while this first version shared core ideas like building machines, exploring planets, and earning victory points, its gameplay was drastically different—but it gave us a wonderful foundation.
After Consulting the Team, a New Game Board
Shortly after Elam presented this game to the company, we decided to form a design team to take the game farther—which we playfully named “Jupiter Rats” (referring to a running joke that space rats were infesting Jupiter). I vividly remember the first meeting that the JR team had. In a preceding meeting with the whole company, we really wanted to structure Factions of Sol in a way that made it more physically and visually interesting. To solve this, we came up with the exciting idea that the game board would be the planets rotating in orbit around the sun, and that each planet would correspond to an action players could take.
The Math Behind the Game Board
Each planet in Earth’s solar system (which we call Sol) orbits at a different rate. Using these rates, we devised a system where each planet’s orbit had a number of steps corresponding to the length of its journey around the sun. Mercury’s orbit, closest to the sun, only has 2 steps, whereas Neptune, the farthest, has 24. This allowed us to mathematically standardize and manipulate the different planet speeds while still keeping the dynamic gameplay we liked so much. But, with a new board came a need for new game mechanics.
The Fundamental Game Mechanics of Factions of Sol
But in order for those cool orbits to be useful, we needed a movement system that would make the changing locations of the planets relevant strategically—so in the same meeting, we created a system where players use limited batteries of energy to move between the orbits (in spaces called sectors), leaving energy pieces in their wake that make travel more difficult. This made longer distances harder to travel, and forced players to keep track of each other’s movements, which, when combined with our moving planets, created wonderfully dynamic gameplay.
Quarantine and Playtesting
With these more fundamental mechanics solidified, the next couple months took us into quarantine, and, while hunkered in our childhood homes, the Jupiter Rats team really got into the meat of the game. We had our dynamic base for gameplay, but in order to make Factions of Sol a game that had nuanced, fair strategy and high replayability, we had to examine and optimize every aspect of the game—which meant tireless rounds of play testing. We continually drafted and redrafted each planet’s mechanics, re-balanced orbits & energy costs, and got yelled at by our online professors for not paying attention.
We Eliminate Attack-Based Mechanics
Around this time we also took out any attack-based mechanics because of how they sucked the fun out of playing—which left us with no real sources of player interaction in the game, which led us to instituting my personal favorite mechanic, called “Stellar Events”. Stellar Events are game-changing events (planets switching places, wormholes opening, etc.) that players vote on each round. This system proved to be really effective and engaging in our playtests, as not only did Stellar Events incentivize interaction & in-game politics, but they also inherently competitive without being aggressive, and added a wonderful new dimension of replayability to the game.
After the first couple hundred hours on Tabletop Simulator (the gaming software we used to test the game), we started to build the world around our game so we could welcome new players into our stellar madness. We developed the unique 1950’s retro-dystopian style of our game, wrote original lore about the people who inhabited it, and created rulebooks specifically tailored to first-time players to make learning the game easier.
The Introduction of Factions (How Factions of Sol Got its Name)
The next big step in our process was the introduction of player factions, which we did for three reasons. First, by adding faction abilities and machines players got a unique and customizable playing experience different from anyone else at the table, which helped to make the game more personal to each player. Second, as we added lore for each faction players also got an in-world lens through which to play the game—someone playing the Zealots of Sol can now use the Zealots’ unique history, hopes, and grudges to justify screwing over other players. Third, adding new faction abilities threw off our delicately-built game balance, and the next couple weeks led us into another round of deck revisions and experimentation.
Next, We Made Factions of Sol Intuitive and Understandable
Once we rebalanced the game with factions and revamped our planet mechanics, we found ourselves with a fun, dynamic, and very complicated game—which made it inaccessible to new players. After some great research on the difference between game depth and complexity, we refocused our efforts around building a game that was intuitive and understandable. We added a first-player mode of the game, revisited our rulebook (again), simplified our mechanics, and worked with our wonderful graphic designer to create a system of symbol-based instructions, all of which really helped to make our game more accessible without losing its nuance.
The Next Step for Factions of Sol? Manufacturing.
Now finally, at this later stage of the process, the Jupiter Rats team is working on fitting manufacturing concerns into our game design (what pieces are easy or hard to get? Is there anything we don’t need? Why can’t we make pieces out of lead?) so we can make a game that’s as efficient and smart as it is fun. We hope you’ll enjoy the end result of this journey! Follow us at Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, or contact us if you would like to hear more about our work!