Game Preview: Uptown

By W. Eric Martin
July 31, 2007

Publisher: Funagain Games
Designer: Kory Heath
Players: 2-5
Ages: 8+
Playing Time: 30-40 minutes
Release Date: Summer 2007

Before I start looking at the game itself, I want to spend a moment on part of the box copy for Uptown. Here’s the opening paragraph in all its fevered glory:

It was a hot August night in ‘23—the “Roarin’ 20’s”! Enzo and Alex were headed UPTOWN for a night of blues, blackjack, bubbly, and fun again at FRED’s. They donned top hats and canes, grabbed their limo, and picked up YuYu, lookin’ flapper-fine, dressed to the nines and flashing that 4k diamond ring. Suddenly, out of nowhere, THIS BOX appeared. They opened it and heard: “Your mission is to create a unified group tonight. It is as easy as 1-2-3; minding your ABCs; and melding into familiar territory. Achieve this witout capturing your companions and your name will like in UPTOWN fame forever!” They were told that if they failed, this mission would pass on to others in distant cities and countries. Given that you now hold THIS BOX in your hands, it looks like that UPTOWN mission is now yours!

What a trippy, beat game description! Charlie Kaufman seems to have landed a job at a certain game publisher, or perhaps he’s writing sales copy only on a freelance basis. In any case, I’d like nothing better than to make unified groups this evening, so let’s look more closely at how the game is played.

The Way to Play
Uptown is an abstract strategy game in which 2-5 players take turns placing tiles on a grid while trying to create the fewest groups of tiles possible. Each player has an identical set of 28 tiles: nine with the letters A-I, nine with the numbers 1-9, nine with one of nine symbols, and a final tile with a $. The characters on the tiles correspond to the layout of the gameboard, which features nine rows labeled A-I, nine columns labeled 1-9, and nine boxes in a tic-tac-toe grid with a different symbol in each of the nine sub-boxes. The $ is a wild tile that can represent any of the other 27 characters.

Players start the game by randomizing their tiles, then drawing a hand of tiles, which they keep secret from the other players. On a turn, a player places one tile from his hand onto any empty space on the board that matches the character on the tile; if he plays the A, for example, he places the tile in any empty spot in the top row. He then draws another tile from his set, and the next player takes her turn.

In case you forgot the dada description above, your goal in the game is to create a unified group. Each cluster of horizontally adjacent tiles of the same color form a group, and your score is equal to the number of groups you have on the board at game’s end, with the low score winning.

Since your tiles range from A to I and 1 to 9, you’ll have a tough time connecting all of them and creating only one group. Fortunately, you may choose during your turn to place a tile on an occupied space, thus dislodging an opponent’s tile and possibly linking separate groups of your own. You may remove an opponent’s tile, however, only if doing so won’t split an opponent’s group. (Removing a group consisting of a single tile is okay, although it might help an opponent far more than it helps you.) While linking separate groups is good, collecting opponent’s tiles is not; if players are tied for the number of groups at the end of the game, the player who has removed fewer tiles from opponents wins.

The rules for Uptown are incredibly simple, something designer Kory Heath aims for in his game designs. “I want to create a game that has roughly the same level of simplicity and elegance as Cartagena or TransAmerica, but also has that extra level of juiciness that makes it truly great,” he says in a BGN profile.

Up Through History
Creating simplicity takes time, though. I played a prototype of Uptown back in 2004 and again in 2005, and while I enjoyed the game greatly both times, Heath was focused more on this beauty’s defects. “I believe that my unflinching perfectionism is by far my strongest trait as a designer,” he says. “I don’t have any magical ability to come up with great ideas and mechanisms—but I do eventually come up with them because I’m so ruthless about rejecting the ones that are ‘just ok.’ My perfectionism actually functions as an engine of creativity because it forces me to more fully explore the design-space around the ruleset I’m working on. And it makes creativity easier because I have a direction. I’m not just sitting around trying to come up with brilliant mechanisms out of nowhere. I’m trying to solve specific design problems and that helps me sniff out promising trails in design-space. Without problems driving me, that design-space just seems overwhelmingly vast.”

“So let’s talk about Uptown in this context,” Heath continues. “When we first played it at PowWow [a conference for game designers] in 2004, it was hardly more than a week old. I was already sure that it would turn out to be a good game. I felt a deep sense of ‘rightness’ about the basic mechanism. However, it was also clear to me that the game wasn’t quite working yet. There were several problems, but to me the biggest one was that, as the board began to fill up, players’ hands became more and more clogged with unplayable tiles. We did a lot of brainstorming that weekend, and of course we tried many of the ‘obvious’ solutions, like discarding and replacing unplayable tiles from your hand, and so on. But—and here comes my perfectionism!—those solutions felt like they were attacking the symptoms of the problem rather than the root cause.”

As Heath suggests, many games of the Uptown prototype were played at PowWow, and everyone who played it threw out all sorts of suggestions for how to score, how to handle discards, how many tiles to start with, and so on. The basic elements of the game in terms of tiles that match rows, columns and blocks were in place, as was the concept of scoring groups, but the details weren’t yet set. All of the suggestions offered were possible solutions, and I think we all played Kory’s prototype far more often than any other design at PowWow that year. We all saw something and wanted to help him set it in concrete, but after each play with a rules alteration, Kory would screw up his face and say, “Yeah, well, I don’t know...” before launching into what he did know: the offered solution didn’t work or pushed down the problem only to cause a new one to spring up elsewhere.

Heath continues the story: “After thinking about it for many weeks, I finally decided that the root cause was the static nature of the tile-play. Once a tile was placed, that space was locked up forever, which caused other tiles to eventually become unplayable. Therefore, we began experimenting with different ways to allow pieces to be removed from the board. Again, we did a lot of brainstorming and tried a bunch of different ideas. The one we finally hit on was that you could replace an opponent’s tile with your own, as long as you didn’t split a group into multiple groups. That fixed the ‘hand clogging’ problem—but as an unforeseen bonus, it also made the game itself much more dynamic and interesting. I’ve found that this almost always happens when you attack problems at their root rather than patching the symptoms.”

“Anyway, this should give you a general idea of what I mean by ‘aiming for perfection’ in game design,” he says. “It entails ruthlessly acknowledging anything that’s not quite right about a ruleset, stubbornly rejecting inelegant solutions that don’t strike at the root of the problem, and continuing that process until there’s nothing left to fix.”

And The Result Is...
I’ve played Uptown twice in 2007 in its finished form, and although the changes to the published game are few compared to its first incarnation, they’re immediately evident once you start playing. Instead of having your hand of tiles shrink in terms of what’s playable, you have more options and can work towards setting up future plays in which an opponent will need to remove a tile of yours (thus worsening his tie-break score) or will be forced to play around you (thus increasing his risk of having more groups).

After only a couple of plays, I find the choices in Uptown aren’t strenuous, but they are engaging in the same way that choices in Qwirkle or Ingenious / Einfach Genial are engaging. As in the these other abstract games, the luck of the tile draw in Uptown can affect your success or failure, yet you accept the risk going into the game—as does everyone else—and ideally you take those odds into account throughout the game, never creating a situation where only one tile can save you. And yet you will of course be placed in that situation. Your opponents will force it upon you, just as you’re trying to entrap them.

“Is Uptown a perfect game?” asks Heath. “I don’t know. That question is probably too vague or subjective to be useful—but I do know that I’m completely happy with the ruleset. The rules all seem to click together like the pieces of a perfect little wood-block puzzle. And I love that feeling so much. That’s what drives me in design.”

Pictures - Click the picture for a larger version
	The cover, evoking a forgotten past
	Where your groups hang out
	Colors, numbers, letters, symbols—the stuff of humanity

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Comments:

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Great summary Eric, I’m looking forward to being able to get this one in a final copy.  Other than my own designs it is easily the game I have played the most times in prototype form.  As your summary indicates, the earlier versions may not yet have been ‘perfect’ but every one was fun in its own way. Posted by Brian Leet on Jul 31, 2007 at 09:56 PM | #

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