Lure

About Lure

Lure, designed by Satoru Nakamura and published by Allplay, is a casual yet tense and emotional dice game. The more dice you roll, the better your chance to catch the fish, but the players rolling the fewest dice fish first!

Project Overview:

Our work focused on developing the base game by adding more strategy and content, improving pacing, balancing, and streamlining rules. Lead developer Velgus also designed a new expansion: Lure: Deep Waters.

We focused on making the special powers intuitive and memorable, while focusing on the tense bidding gameplay that made the original game we were adapting (Dice Fishing) great.

Services Provided:

Case Study: Refining a Light Game

Early development and playtesting proved that people like catching fish cards (as you can imagine, it being a fishing game and all). The biggest immediate problem was players were not catching enough fish.

The original game had 10 Fish cards per game, with 1 revealed each round, regardless of player count. This was really rough, especially at higher player counts. A 5-player game had each player catching only an average of 2 Fish! Scores were very swingy and engagement was not where it could be. We increased the fish card count to 20 cards for 2-3 player games, and 30 cards for 4-5 player games. By default, each round would reveal and add 2 or 3 more cards based on player count to the pool of fish that can be caught.

Having more fish cards in general and having more per round was definitely the right solution, and helped in a lot more ways than may be apparent. Each fish card was still valuable, yet making a bad read on an opponent or an unlucky roll wouldn't cause someone to just lose the game. More fish cards allowed us to make a larger variety of interesting catch requirements and scoring variations.

Having multiple fish revealed each round made the game more dynamic and was a more satisfying puzzle and decision for players on which fish to go for. Do you risk rolling a low number of dice to try to scoop all of them, or focus on the one worth the most points?

Adding Lure Tokens

The additional fish cards made the game much better, though players often felt the game needed a bit more. What's another thing that could make it different from game to game? How can the game be more dynamic and strategic? We needed another decision point for players.

The original game actually had some rules where the special sided dice could be used as a special power instead of the dice value. However, the way and types of powers used were often clunky and confusing to players. We liked the idea of these powers, just not quite the form they were in. After lots of exploration and testing, our eventual solution was to use a pool of tokens instead of the dice.

There is a pool of Lure tokens that are shuffled face down at game start. Each player starts with a secret Lure token, and more can be gained during the game. Each Lure token had a special one-time power, such as counts as a specific number, adjust a rolled die value, or gamble to earn extra points.

Lure tokens allowed players to make more interesting decisions and balance out some of the luck of the game. They added a layer of strategy, risk, and surprise as multiple tokens could be used at once, and unused tokens are saved round to round. Lure tokens also work great as a small catch up mechanic, with players that don't catch a fish gaining one instead.

Conclusion

Even games that are relatively simple have a lot of thought, work, and play testing to get them just right. Just because a game is fairly casual doesn't mean it can't benefit from some extra decision space and depth.

Brieger Creative Team