Shuffle – Game Mode as Experiment Engine
Cofounder of Colonist here, an online Catan-style game on mobile and desktop. Over time the player base and community have grown into the millions, which still feels pretty wild.
We’re constantly building new events, maps, and modes, but that takes a lot of time and effort.
The point is Shuffle.
Shuffle is a simple matchmaking queue that rotates a set of maps, modes, and rule sets every week. We use it to: - Find out which maps/modes players actually like - Serve different configurations week by week - Test brand-new modes before they go into the main casual or ranked queues
We want to use Shuffle to test things like: - Non-standard resource distributions / trade ratios - Robber / dev-card variants - Alternative win conditions - Completely new game modes
Under the hood, it’s basically a tiny experiment engine on top of matchmaking: - Each Shuffle option is modeled as a sub-config (map, rules, player-count) and stored in a DB - A periodic job picks the next config using recency-biased weighted random + cooldowns - Matches log metrics keyed by that config so we can compare variants afterwards
I like this idea of a test harness doubling as an “experiment engine” and thought it might be interesting to share from the inside.
I’m also curious: - What other out-of-the-box uses do you see for a system like this? - What are some mechanics you’d want tested in a system like this?
Happy to answer technical or product questions and to share more details.