Fast Break - A Basketball Tabletop Game

Fast Break started as a simple Chess-like 3-on-3 tabletop game based on pickup Basketball. The entire first prototype fit nicely on a coffee table. Over time though, this game grew into a larger, greater form enjoyed by many students at DigiPen.

The board is a 7x10 rectangle with a hoop space on either side, starting positions for tokens, a 3-point arc, a center line, and marked corner spaces.

The first set of rules was designed to be simple. However, there were definitely plenty of things to fix.

PROBLEM 1: Defense was way too challenging.

Being able to move and shoot in the same turn was nearly impossible to defend against.

Also, being able to pass the ball twice in the same turn made it difficult for the defense to “read” an offense, and this also contributed to the offense/defense imbalance.

PROBLEM 2: Shooting/Probability of Success.

First of all, the way I described how to calculate the probability of a shot going in was confusing. I was going to have players use d20s to see if their shots go in, so describing the probabilities as actual percentages that have to be converted to dice rolls was unnecessary.

Also, a careful reading of the success probability rules will tell you that a shot from just beyond the half-court line has a 50% chance of going in. This was a huge mistake on my part, and this needed immediate fixing. This is why we playtest.

I addressed these problems quickly with some revised rules. The first major change was this:

At first, the offense would;

Move Phase
Throw Phase (Pass OR Shoot)

In the revised rules, the offense would;

Move Phase
Pass Phase

OR

Spend this whole turn shooting

Unfortunately, this swung the pendulum too far the other way, and now it was suddenly much too easy to defend. Regardless of where and how the offense moved, they wouldn’t be able to get a token into a spot where no defender was adjacent to make a shot more challenging. The only way to reliably score was to move all the way to the hoop for an automatic “dunk”. I didn’t even playtest this revision with other people, I quickly figured this out by testing it alone.

Knowing this, the correct balance of offense and defense would be somewhere in the middle of these two rules;

1) Letting the offense move and shoot in the same turn (too easy to score)

2) Forcing the offense to spend one whole turn on just shooting with no moving beforehand (too hard to score)

Gameplay photograph. Light team scores on their 4th of 6 turns on offense after a roll of 17, hence the green tokens and d20 dice. Two marked Dark team defenders weren’t able to make a stop.

Note the use of d20s for both shooting and for counting score. The Light team’s d20 is set at “2” as they just scored 2 points. The d20 for the Dark team is on “20” because the game is played to 15, so “20” indicates they haven’t scored yet.

At first, certain cards could only be used to SHIFT tokens;

1) STRICTLY BEFORE a MOVE or

2) STRICTLY AFTER a MOVE.

This meant there was a clear procedure of “Before-Shift”, “Move”, “After-Shift”. I figured this would allow me to make a larger variety of card types. But that was unnecessary.

Old version (top) and new version (bottom) of player aid card. The marked up areas of the old version are where I made changes in the newer version. There are still things I forgot to change in the new version that I need to go back and fix.

Improved version with scoring track. First to 11 wins.

There were more issues to address from the first round of playtesting. Using d20 dice for both shooting and keeping track of score was confusing, and led to players often rolling their score die for a shot.

To fix this, I needed to make it very easy to keep track of score, so I made a scoring track to move tokens along. Each circle is numbered from 0 to 11 (I lowered the winning score from 15) so players can simply move a token along the track when they score.

I had finally entered “there’s a game in there somewhere” territory. The main issue now was with how the game was designed. The primary inspiration for this game is Chess. That’s cool, but the simple movement of the pieces makes it so the game can be “solved” somewhat easily, and it wouldn’t be fun for very long.

Chess works well because of the complex and variable movement options each piece has. I wasn’t planning on having that in this game though. How would I make this game more interesting? By adding cards and turning this whole thing into somewhat of a TCG.

Players now each have an Energy Meter and an identical deck of cards that allow them to SHIFT their tokens on their turn. Players have a hand of 5 cards, and draw up to 5 at the beginning of their turn.

In the game’s rules, I made it clear that a SHIFT action is different from a MOVE action. A player may take a shot on the same turn as a SHIFT, but they cannot shoot after a MOVE action. This was an attempt at finding that balance between offense and defense that I was having trouble locking down earlier. SHIFT actions require energy, which regenerated each turn but was limited for each player.

Here’s a look at some of the cards. I gave this new version of the game with the Energy System and Card System a round of playtesting. I was met with some interesting feedback:

Too much text on the cards.

Players involved in the playtest completely ignored the cards, never engaged with the energy system, and simply played the game as it was before, only engaging with the basic movement system. So, I remade a majority of the cards with less text and more symbols (hence the multiple versions of cards) and left some of them behind. Remember the whole concept of a SHIFT action?

So now, SHIFT cards can be flexibly used;

1) BEFORE a MOVE or

2) AFTER a MOVE

…as the player wishes. There was still plenty of room to think of creative card types that engage with, and slightly bend, other game rules. For example, a “Catch And Shoot” card that lets a player PASS and SHOOT in the same turn, which isn’t normally allowed.

Some other feedback came out of that same playtest:

It took a long time to explain the rules.

This is true; I took time making sure both players understood the rules and also moved pieces around on the board to demonstrate examples of player actions being taken. But even as I tried to keep the explanation simple, I realized there were quite a few things players had to memorize.

To keep the flow of the game going, I decided to make player aid cards (which are a part of most tabletop games) for players to reference.

By this point, I had also gotten rid of “marked” defensive tokens because I didn’t like how random the rules I designed for it felt. Similar to shooting, the defender would roll a d20, and would either steal the ball, poke it free from the offense, or miss. I redesigned this so the defense had a more meaningful choice to make each turn in their attempt to get the ball back.