The Apollo Continuum

Ok, maybe more like 6 designs and a baby.

I saw a few posts from people asking about how they managed to be game designers with a newborn infant, and a significant number of those posts simply said that they stopped designing for a period of time. Someone said four months, someone said a year, and at least one person said they just had to give up the hobby completely after their child was born.

I knew that wasn’t going to work for me. I made it back to a GDofNC meeting when Roo was 2 weeks old. I’ve had what feels like more ideas in the 3 months that she’s been in our lives than in the 9* months when my wife was pregnant.

Returning to Old Designs

The Library is Burning! (the game I signed with an agent after Spiel 2018) has been shown to a lot of publishers in the 8 months they’ve had it, but it hasn’t been picked up yet. A few weeks ago, they contacted me and asked what I thought about a heist re-theme. I a huge fan of Ocean’s 11, and a fan of heist movies in general, but I wasn’t sure how such a re-theme would work. The more I looked into it, though, the more it seemed to work. I’ll probably have to consider it a different game, but the core of the game is very very similar. Instead of each card having a topic and a location, it has an item that you are stealing, and a member of the crew.

When you draft an item, it goes on your track, and moves as many times as there are matching crew members left on the table at the end of the draft. When you get the item to the end of the track, it goes underneath your track as a new crew member. The items and the crew members overlap like topics and locations in the original design, so stealing a car might get you a new driver, or it might get you a new hacker for stealing sensitive data in a future round. There are a couple of other tropes that I was able to draw on – that of the heist mastermind and the new guy. These are essentially going to be wild cards that can act as any roles when you start the game. The mastermind gets more restricted as he fills the role you need the most, and the new guy gets less restrictive as you add more potential mentors to your crew. I’m excited to get it to the table this weekend.

I’m also taking another look at Small Town Rivalry, my two player city building game. I showed it to Lookout at Spiel 2018 and Kosmos after PAX Unplugged, and it was turned down by both of them. Feedback was similar in both cases – too tactical and difficult to plan ahead. So I’ll consider my 2-player design exercise complete, but I want to return to the game and see how to a) make it more strategic and b) expand it beyond 2 players. I’ll probably leave this one on the back burner until after BGG.con, and then make it a winter project.

Working on New Designs

Sleep has been sporadic since Roo was born, to put it mildly. The designs I’ve started since then have all been ideas that I can hold in my head on not much sleep. I actually think the original ideas were literally spoken into my phone while I was holding her after she finished a bottle.

Penned Station is a roll and write where you’re building a subway system from scratch, You’re also planning where to place buildings near subway stations to increase passenger count, as well as making sure your stations have the proper facilities by the time everything opens. I’ve been able to revise it super quickly since it’s a single page, and the rest of the game is 6 d12s and three colored pencils or markers. Once I get the rules written this week, I’ll laminate the sheets, since it’s pretty easy to make a mistake when you’re drawing, and I’d like people to be able to fix things more easily.

Ottoman Empire is a trick taking game about a furniture store with lots of puns and jokes on the cards. Another quick-to-iterate game, it has 54 cards in 4 suits with two “jokers”. The neat thing with this design is that one card of the suit that wins the trick must be put into the store window, so if you end up winning a trick because no one else can follow, you might end up putting your own card in the window. The goal for this week is to balance the suits, after seeing that interesting scoring conditions worked during testing last week. Then I have to make some graphic design decisions to see how to best convey those interesting relationships when you have all your collected tricks in front of you.

Working Through New Ideas

There are a couple of designs that are taking up some space in my head as well, but I haven’t put anything to paper yet. Well, at least not component wise.

The first is the genealogy game that I’ve been trying to write the design document for months. The Marvelous Origins of Dr. Covington started out as a really big design in my head, but the more I think about it, the more it doesn’t need to be that big. I’m at the point in the design where I’m wondering if I can remove the board entirely and just make it a card game. It may actually resemble Race for the Galaxy more than anything else right now, since you are racing to build a tableau of ancestors and their vital information before any of your competitors. The biggest issue for this is going to be card count, but I take some solace in the fact that RftG started out with only 109 cards in the main deck when it was released.

The second game is a much rougher idea without a name at the moment, but I want to make a game about aquariums. Something like Barenpark, but with fish tanks? Again, my heart tells me to make this enormous simulation game and my head tells me “dude, no, you’ll go crazy”. I love the aesthetics of a computer game called Megaquarium and would love to make a board game that looked like that.

We’re now in Unpub month, as most of the Game Designers of North Carolina have taken to calling it, with less than 3 weeks until Unpub 9 in Baltimore, Maryland. I wanted to take a look back at my previous Unpub experiences and take a look at what’s going to be different this year.

Unpub 6

Unpub 6 was my first Unpub convention, since I missed out on the Kickstarter for Unpub 5. It was a weekend away in an otherwise dark time for me personally. My mom had been in the hospital for weeks and would pass away a month after the convention. This was basically my last bit of game design in 2016 – the rest of the year would be taken up by my duties as executor and selling/buying/moving houses in the fall.

I was still mainly a one game designer at that point, since I was working a crazy retail schedule. I took Valley of the Mammoths, which I’d been working on for a couple of years at that point. While I got some good plays, my main issue at the time was that I thought it was too close to done to get meaningful feedback. (Oh how that feeling changed once I was able to step back from working on just one game.)

I also took a very new design, which was called Superbrawl. It was basically a tabletop MOBA, although I didn’t even know the term at the time. I wanted to make City of Heroes into a simple PvP board game. I learned a hard lesson in player assumptions, because it was super simple to me in my head, and nearly impossible for my playtesters. After two tests, I put it away and brought back out Valley of the Mammoths, and Superbrawl now only exists as scattered components in drawers.

I was also a little bit of a victim of positioning, as I had a table on the far end of the hall from the entrance, and had a lot of downtime. Based on my emotional state at the time and the state of my prototypes, etc., it may have been my one and only Unpub, except I had already won a table for…

Unpub 7

Unpub 7 was lightning in a bottle. I had returned to actively designing at the beginning of the year. I took Valley of the Mammoths again, but the game that got table time was The Library is Burning!, which had started in late 2015 as a design called Serapeum. (Best name change ever, by the way…)

I ended up with a table near the center of the hall, and the crowds were crazy compared to the previous year. I ended up with 19 playtests in 16 hours of table time. I even managed to make some fairly manor revisions to the game between days of the convention, and I had early testers coming back to play again and giving me feedback on the changes.

This was really the convention that solidified that I could still design, and that I’d become an Unpub regular. There was a sizable GDofNC crew there to support each other, and it set the stage for my first trips to Origins and Gen Con later that year, where I finally started pitching my games to publishers. It was also where I met Tony Miller and a bunch of his crew, since we had very different games with basically the exact same theme. It’s a group I still hang out with to this day.

Unpub 8

By this point, I felt like a seasoned veteran, at least within the Unpub system. It was the third convention, and the first (for me) at a new location. The GdofNC contingent grew some more, and I hoped to bring some brand new prototypes. Well, that didn’t happen.

At the beginning of the year, I started working on an ambitious new design – an asymmetrical co-op about managing disasters across the United States. A month before Unpub, it landed with a thud in some early playtests, and I realized that I did not have the time or the experience with co-op games to get it ready for Unpub 8.

So for the second year in a row, The Library is Burning! Got the majority of the table time during the convention. It had gone through a year of pitching and publisher evaluation, and was vastly improved. This time, instead of making major changes, I was able to run playtest after playtest with the help of my wife (her first Unpub event), and gather data to make small tweaks. The crowd was good, and there was a family who remembered me from the year before, and was excited to play it again. A couple of publishers and a Gen Con exec were also at my table at various points during the weekend.

I also had Small Town Rivalry, which I had been working on since the previous September, and had recently run through the finals of the Ion Award. (It didn’t win, but I got some great feedback from the judges that ultimately led to a big simplification of the game.) A few early-rising couples were able to give me good feedback before the room got busy and I switched to the game with the larger player count.

Unpub 9

Now we’re up to this year. This will be my first Unpub convention with all new games. The GDofNC contingent has grown again, since we’ve added a Charlotte chapter and an Asheville chapter. I’m very likely going to be on a panel about starting and maintaining a design group, which should be fun. Here’s what’s making an appearance (player count permitting):

Airboat Bayou

I’ve been working on the swamp for almost a year now, since I started the design right after Unpub 8. It’s missing something, but I’m not sure what it is. I’ll probably bring this out only when a larger group comes to the table, and maybe with designers after hours. I need to find that spark that will make everything come together. It’s such a large game compared to most of my designs that it’s hard to take a 30,000 foot view and still see all the moving parts.

Dome Sweet Dome

This one has evolved rapidly in the last month, and I think a couple more weeks of testing is going to put it into a sweet spot for Unpub feedback. I expect it’ll get the majority of the table time at Unpub 9. It’s grown into a larger design than the concept that it came from, but it combines drafting, set collection, spatial arrangement and a little bit of a roll and write feel in a real satisfying decision space. I haven’t felt this good about an early design in a while, and I’m finally making a space game!

Used Planet Dealer

Or two! The 18 card game that was Silvermaster Spy Ring in the Buttonshy/GenCan’t contest works really well with the new theme and the new distribution of suits. It’s short enough that I was able to get it playtested multiple times at a recent meeting, and we came up with a better method of scoring that doesn’t require a lot of math, as well as a solid method of tie breakers for the RPS turn order issue. This will be my go-to game when couples want to play something, or when people only have a few minutes. I’m hoping that people like the puzzly aspect of it!

It’s been a long time since I sat down to write a blog post, and a lot has happened for me, both in the board game world and outside it.

Essen Spiel

The month after the last blog post was full of preparation for my first trip overseas since high school, ending with a five day trip to Germany to attend Spiel 2018. It was an amazing trip, and the two other GDofNC people that also attended recorded a podcast with me, so you can listen all about it here: https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/2094177/episode-48-csi-essen

I didn’t have as many meetings with publishers as I’d hoped in the planning process, mainly because my anxiety hit hard in the month leading up to the convention, but also because some of the designs I had been hoping to didn’t really come together in a satisfying way. Still, because of that I was able to spend part of my time pitching, part of my time playing new games, and some time just soaking in the convention atmosphere.

I took several prototypes, and came home with most of them, but did end up signing a contract with the one that was given out. Not a contact for publication, mind you, but one that will hopefully lead to publication in the near future. I also made a lot of great contacts and collected a lot of business cards for publishers you don’t see at North American conventions that often.

PAX Unplugged

I brought back con crud from Spiel, so between that and Thanksgiving, my time to prep for PAX Unplugged was limited to a couple of weeks. I again set up only a couple of meetings early in the convention, and spent all day Saturday in the expanded Unpub room.

It was really great to finally get some some public testing with Airboat Bayou. Between the feedback from a pitch and the day of testing, I came up with some ways to simplify the game  - the earlier prototypes just had way too many components. The component list looks much more reasonable now - no more need for 300+ tokens.

There was a comment on Twitter not too recently that made the point that the more you play your game, the better you get at it, and it’s easy to give into the feelings to add more to the game as it appears to get simpler to you. Public playtests are such a valuable way to reset your baseline. It doesn’t matter if you can play it 30 minutes if it takes a first timer 90 minutes.

Current Projects

From the meeting at Spiel and PAX Unplugged, I actually ended up sending two games to Europe in January, so I have two fewer games to work on day-to-day. Here’s the current rundown.

Airboat Bayou

This is a big project, and I’ve been working on it for about 9 months now, minus downtime for conventions and holidays. The rules are starting to settle down, and I’m finally getting them down on paper. Because the game is so spatial and there are so many moving parts, the complexity of the rulebook is way beyond anything I’ve written before. Not to mention the number of diagrams I have to create.

Used Planet Dealer

I had to sit on this one for a while after the Buttonshy contest to figure out how to simplify how I could make the game fair without playing multiple rounds and needing cards or pieces to track the progress of the game. The idea of Rock-Paper-Scissors was suggested, and that led me down a rabbit hole of again simplifying how the cards work to allow for that kind of system. Changing the how the suits were distributed from 4x4 to 3x6 should make RPS able to determine turn order.

Dome Sweet Dome

I spent a lot of January cleaning out my office, and that got me looking at an old prototype called Martians: First Landing, which was a drafting game that has been through a lot of iterations and themes, but never really stuck with me. I’m bring it back out yet again, and going back to the original drafting mechanism and close to the original theme, to see what I can come up with. I’d been turning over some scoring ideas in my mind to differentiate it from the original design, and I’ve landed on something (pun intended) that should be interesting.

Baby Girl

Conventions were fun, but this is the big news: We’re having a baby girl! My wife got a positive test the day before we left for Spiel, so my head was in two places all weekend. It’s been a long, tough road. She’s due in early July, so that obviously changed up my convention plans for the year. I’m going to Unpub 9 in March and ProtoATL in May, but Origins and Gen Con are out for sure. I have some late fall conventions penciled in - MegaMooseCon, BGG.con and PAX Unplugged - but we’ll have to play it by ear once the baby arrives.

This weekly blog post looks awfully “monthly”, doesn’t it? So much for that quiet September I was talking about last month.

I’ve been dealing with a lot of non-gaming stuff lately, including the culmination of something I’ve been working on for more than two years, a couple of annual events, and a tropical storm for good measure. That’s limited the amount of times I’ve been able to get games to the table since the last post. But let’s talk games anyway.

Airboat Bayou

Design and development continues on my big project. I’ve only had one chance to test the changes suggested at MegaMooseCon, and they work decently, but provide the space for a lot more interesting decisions. I have a couple of different ways for the “rewards” board to work, and I need to try them both with the same group of players to see which one works better as a reward system. The rewards are thematically tied to fulfilling the restaurant’s demands for ingredients, although I’m not entirely sure on the thematic timescale of the game. Is it a day’s catch? A week’s? A month’s?

The last test also produced some great ideas for adding variety to the game, specifically in the player boards. I’ve always intended to make variable player powers for the various player boards once the rest of the game was sorted out, but Daniel Solis had the brilliant idea of splitting the boards in half and having players mix and match the halves to create their boats. That would allow for greater variety and pull off the same trick that Custom Heroes did with their character names, with an adjective and a noun to have a name their boat. Boaty McBoatFace, anyone?

Mole

The first playtest of this went about as well as you’d expect any first playtest to go. Well, maybe better. Everything worked mechanically, but the pacing of the game and the decisions was all off. Because of how the board works, the first move is the most dramatic and rewarding, and everything after that feels mediocre. So that’s a thing I have to fix. Right now, you can move as far as possible on your turn, which means that your first action on any turn is to fix the thing that caused you to stop. This doesn’t happen on the first turn because you can choose your entrance point into the field.

Despite all of this, the main mechanism of rotate tiles, pick up resources and buy cards was a solid combination, so this is only going on the shelf temporarily while I get several other games ready for Essen Spiel and PAX Unplugged. When I come back to it, I want to introduce limits to some of the actions, and then let the cards you purchase increase those limits. I think it’ll end up being like Splendor with spatial movement, and hopefully different enough from Splendor to interest publishers.

Caveman Canyon

This one finally got repaired and tested over the weekend, and is certainly better with modular goals than the static goal cards it had at Gen Con. I still need to play with the values on the cards and the rules for how you’re allowed to launch your pieces into the play area, but it’s making progress.

“Where’s the content?” If you’ve been asking yourself where this supposedly weekly blog post has gone, or why I’m not tweeting as often, or possibly when the next GDofNC podcast is being released, here’s your answer! If you count July 31st as the first day of August (which gives August 32 days), then I’ve been on the road for exactly half of August.

Fortunately, a lot of that time on the road was dedicated to game design and development, including Gen Con at the beginning of the month and MegaMooseCon just last weekend. Let’s talk about it!

Airboat Bayou

Design work on one of my bigger projects continues at a fantastic pace. I played this at Gen Con with a publisher, which both exposed some flaws and also proved that a two and three player game is going to need to be on a smaller map. During that play, we tried out a new market system that offered both a variable market for the colors of crawfish, and provided reward incentives to take the upgrades for your boat. Unfortunately, the upgrade system was still a little clunky, and it was too easy to get stuck with an upgrade you didn’t want. The number of deliveries you made was also too few to develop any kind of differentiation in the upgrade system between players before the end of the game.

Once I got back home, I did another test on the same map with 5 or 6 players, which proved the broken-ness of the small market system and the upgrades, but that the map is probably an OK size for the higher player counts. I may need to shrink one row of hexes off each tile, but it wasn’t bad. After coming up with a new market system, I tried it out at the Unpub Mini at MegaMooseCon this past weekend, and it worked surprisingly well for a brand new system. Unfortunately, it motivated players to focus on delivering to one restaurant once it hit a certain point threshold, ignoring the other restaurants that weren’t worth as many points.

Then Matt Wolfe came over to take a look at it, and may have finally forced me to realize that as much as I want separate restaurants, there really does need to be a single market, and also manages to speed up the upgrade system without breaking the game. We played a four player game, and it worked really well. That’ll be my focus for the moment.

Caveman Canyon

I took Caveman Canyon to the Gamecrafter night at Gen Con, only because I couldn’t carry it with me every day, and got in a couple of playtests, which is easy because it’s only about 15 minutes long. I got some good feedback from some guys who said they would currently play it a few times in an evening and then forget about it, and what would take it to a game they could keep coming back to. Unfortunately, the physical game broke on the way back from Gen Con, and it’s been low enough on my priority list that I haven’t repaired it yet.

The Library is Burning!

This was the only game I took to Gen Con to do traditional pitch meetings, since I scheduled a more casual and social Gen Con than I did last year. (Also because the big pitch convention for me this year is going to be Essen.) I’ll be following up with a couple of publishers once the major rules reworking is completed. One publisher I talked to saw it during the Cardboard Edison finals, which made it the easiest pitch ever. I think there’s a lot of interest in this one, and it’s going to be pitched to a lot of European companies come October.

Silvermaster Spy Ring/Used Planet Dealer

I took a brand new deck with a new theme to MegaMooseCon, and it didn’t work at all. It didn’t help that I was trying to explain the game after two nights of absolutely terrible sleep, but even from that test I could tell that I had stripped out too much of the game and removed all the interesting decisions. Later in the weekend, we played the original version at the playtester’s request, and I’m still convinced that it’s just a little bit too thinky for a game of that size. At least now I know the two extremes of complexity, and I can search for that happy medium in between. It should be a solid 36 card game with a few tokens by Spiel.

MOLE

The basis of this idea has been rolling around inside my head since Unpub 6, when I drew some colored lines on the edges of some tiles and made another GDofNC member think a little bit too hard. The basic idea was that you could teleport from tile to tile as long as you traveled through matching portals and kept your direction consistent. You could also rotate the tiles to change your path and do.. whatever you were trying to do back in that first prototype.

Flash forward two and a half years, and I grabbed those tiles to layout the basic idea for MOLE. You are a mole digging tunnels through the farmer’s garden, pulling down vegetables. But James, you say, mole are carnivorous - they eat earthworms and bugs, not vegetables. That’s true! They are acting on behalf of the local gophers, going underground AND undercover to collect vegetables without being detected and selling them to the gophers in exchange for earthworms. It’s still a really early design, but I’m very excited about where it might go.

Are you ready for Gen Con? I’m certainly not. But I do have one week of preparation left, and three nights of play-testing before I start the drive up.

Airboat Bayou

Testing continues on Airboat Bayou, and while the systems work well, the overall game is too slow to be exciting. Part of that is the new modular map, which is a little bit slower than the previous board, and the other part of that is the new delivery system, which requires a set of three crawfish traps instead of being able to drop off everything of a certain color. Fortunately, there are some easy ways to speed things up. I’ll be redesigning the map modules and changing how you get crawfish pots this week to test this weekend before leaving for Gen Con.

The first test of the upgrade system went well, although there wasn’t enough collecting of resources to be able to pay for many of the upgrades. Still, players told me they were gunning for the upgrades and the pace of the game was the only thing that stopped them. Had a great suggestion for incorporating a change to the rewards and a change to the upgrades in one system.

Silvermaster Spy Ring

Somehow I managed to go through the entire testing process with the new cards and new theme without getting a good picture of the cards or the game being played. This was submitted to the Gen Can’t/Button Shy contest on July 12th. It was a really good design experience, but I’ll be super surprised if I win, or even place. The rules probably leave a lot to be desired, since I’m not good at writing compact rules, and that was part of the requirement. We will see on Friday!

[Redacted]

Can you believe there are only three weeks until Gen Con? That’s crazy talk. I just got done recovering from my birthday week!

Ruthcon III

A local friend is holding their annual birthday convention this weekend, and it’s always one of the best weekends of the year. I’m sure I’ll have lots of fun stuff to talk about next week!

Highway Revolt

Andrew and I have been exchanging emails about our new co-design, and I’m realizing how much of my design ideas never get put into words. It’s a bigger game, so I know it’s going to take a while to get to the first prototype, but I’m still excited about the project and seeing what we can do together!

Silvermaster Spy Ring

If you’re a judge for the Gencan’t/Button Shy contest, stop reading now!

Most of my design time over the last two weeks has been working on my Button Shy contest entry, which has changed themes from flags to spies, and is now called “Silvermaster Spy Ring” after the Cold War spy group of the same name. It makes so much more sense, and plays pretty well. I’m making some final tweaks to the card layout today, and finally writing the rules, and we’ll be filming the video for the submission tomorrow. I don’t have any pictures to share at the moment but next week’s entry will be full of pictures.

Progress on all fronts!

Ribbons of Concrete Highway Revolt

The first of many calls with Andrew Stackhouse happened on Wednesday, not long after I wrote the previous WM&PP, and we talked for about an hour and a half about the new idea for the game and what we want to get out of it. The original idea for Ribbons of Concrete is completely gone, and while I’m a little sad that I’m not going to explore the most economic-oriented game I’d started designing, I am very excited to work on a game that more closely explores the culture and friction surrounding inner city highway construction in the mid-20th century.

We’re starting out with a worker placement system where each player controls a neighborhood threatened by highway construction, trying to maximize the quality of life while preventing demolition of their homes and the building of the highway. I’m in the process of mapping out the different actors in the game and the places they can take actions. Once I do a lot of the mapping, I’ll pass it off to Andrew and he’s going to do some magic and add math to it. It should be a good partnership - I design from the gut and he’s all about spreadsheets.

Airboat Bayou

This one got a two player playtest in this week, and it still felt good, although the size of the map wasn’t right for the minimum player count. I’m laying out all the post-Origins changes for the GDofNC meeting on Thursday. The biggest issue right now is getting the appropriate number of hexes on a different shaped board without making any of the dimensions unusually large. If nothing else, I’ll have to make the hexes on the board slightly smaller, but for now I’m trying to minimize the amount of prototype reconstruction I have to do before I know the system works. Expect to see a lot more pictures of this one in the next week or two.

Caveman Canyon

Also got in a two player test of this one, which plays two although it’s definitely targeted at a full player count of four with a family. Found some interesting issues in the math that will need to be addressed in development, although nothing that will be very difficult. It’s a simple game that definitely leans towards the toy end of the game/toy spectrum.

Flags - Buttonshy Contest Entry

Constructed, reconstructed and had my first playtests for the currently unnamed game that I’m just calling Flags. While the first playtest worked despite my terrible iconography, there’’s a disconnect with the theme, since a lot of what you’re doing is taking cards from other players and changing the scoring conditions out from underneath them.

Origins is over! Onwards to Gen Con!

Airboat Bayou

Saturday in the Unpub room was good to me, and to Airboat Bayou! Being able to put this in front of a dozen people who had never played it before brought out some fantastic ideas! I think I’ve solved the first player problem with the bag drawing system, and introduced a fun thematic element.

The playtesters also had some amazing ideas for introducing a little bit of an arc into the game, which is just long enough to need one. I did two 3-player tests, a 4-player test and a 5-player test, and both the 4 player test (with slower players) and the 5 player test (with other designers) ended in just under an hour. An average 6-player game would probably be about 75 minutes, although there’s now also a great system for timing the end game.

All in all, I’m excited to keep working on this one for Gen Con and beyond!

Ribbons of Concrete

As I was sharing this with publishers at the speed dating event, I realized that there’s no hook in Ribbons of Concrete. I’ve been jokingly describing it as the Euro-iest Euro, but it really is. There’s no reason to play the game unless you like doing math.

However, there is an important part of US history that can be addressed in the game. As governments attempted to drive new highways through inner cities, citizens revolted, and often slowed construction, forced rerouting of the freeways, or caused cancellation of planned progress.

I met another designer at Origins and was talking about these topics, and he mentioned that both he and his wife had connections to the issue, and that he was very interested in working together. So, it looks like this is going to become a co-design. I’m looking forward to learning a lot!

Caveman Canyon

This was the surprise hit of the con. During speed dating on Thursday, I had it set out, and a lot of the publishers who sat down at the table couldn’t resist playing with it. I had a couple of bites that I’m following up with. The best was showing it to someone who immediately pointed out another publisher that needed to see the prototype before the end of the convention. I did manage to get a few minutes with them, and we’ll see what happens!

What’s in a Name?

It’s the week of Origins Game Fair! This past week has been a great mix of getting ready for the first big convention of the summer, and relaxing before what is going to be a very busy week!

Airboat Bayou

This was the only game that actually made it to the table this week, and the changes I made to the scoring system including a more obvious pick up and deliver system and a smaller capacity boat lead to some very interesting gameplay, since players clumped up near the drop off points on a few turns in the game, but overall, the idea didn’t fix the issue with players who get behind early being stuck behind for the rest of the game, which is still the feel-bad time of the game.

After some brainstorming over the weekend, I have a new idea for scoring to test out at Origins during my time in the Unpub room. It solves the biggest issue of being second to a pickup point and getting nothing, while also creating interesting decisions when you’re choosing which crawfish pot to keep. It also lets you draw things out of a bag, which feels incredibly thematic - you’re literally fishing in a bag, keeping something, and throwing things back. I’m excited to test it out.

Contest Entries

I had an idea for an 18 card game earlier last week, so I was super pleased with the Gen Can’t/Buttonshy contest announced on Wednesday. I’m not going to be able to prototype it before leaving for Origins, because there’s a surprising amount of math involved for 18 cards, but with a deadline of July 12th, I’ll be putting ink to paper as soon as I get back from the convention!

I’m also working on a game for the HABA design contest, with a deadline of July 20th. I have a title and a few mechanical ideas, but again, nothing on paper yet. There are going to be a lot of irons in the fire post-Origins!

Origins Game Fair

This is going to be my first Origins where I’m flying solo, after attending last year for the first time and working for Mayday. I’ve purposefully kept my schedule pretty open so that I can explore the convention, although I have a few meetings with publishers and I’m planning on attending a couple of talks about board game design.

I was fortunate enough to get into Publisher/Designer Speed Dating this year, so I’m doing that Thursday night. I still haven’t decided what game to have as my main game, since that info wasn’t required and I don’t know what publishers are going to be there. I’m also planning to be at the Punchboard Media meetup on Friday night.

A two week recap this week, since I was out of town for Memorial Day and my father-in-law’s birthday last weekend. Last week was also one of those rare weeks where there’s no GDofNC meeting, thanks to the way the calendar lined up.

Caveman Canyon

After finally getting my hands on the pieces I was imagining, the prototype for Caveman Canyon (an offshoot of the Valley of the Mammoths design) came together really nicely. Since I was submitting it to the Korea Boardgames Game Design Contest, I went for the kid-friendly angle, and stripped almost all of the heavier mechanisms from it. (Also why it was renamed, since it’s SO different.) 

It’s now a 15-30 minute game where everyone uses a spring-loaded launcher to send their family members into the center of the board, which is now tiered like a skeeball target. Once everything is launched into the center, majorities are resolved and points are awarded. Players who get the less valuable majorities get a temporary bonus piece for the next round, and players who get no bonus at all get another family member that joins them for the rest of the game. The scoring escalates each round, so there’s a chance for a dramatic comeback in the last round.

I’m pretty pleased with how it turned out, and can’t wait to show it off at Origins.

Ribbons of Concrete

This got to the table at the GDofNC meeting before Memorial Day, and I tried out another method of turning the trucking investment into points, but it was just as unsatisfying as the method tried out the week before. This is going to be the main focus of development this week. One thing that definitely is an improvement over the previous test is having a limited number of managers, so you have to physically split your efforts between investing

It’s still such an odd design for me, because I don’t play a lot of heavier economic games. I don’t know if that’s a blessing or a curse, because while I have less knowledge of what’s been done before, I also don’t have “the way it’s always been done” holding me back.

Airboat Bayou

This one hasn’t had any table time since the last Weekly Meeples, but this is definitely going to be the game getting the most time at my Unpub table with some new scoring ideas. Thankfully, I have both a Thursday GDofNC meeting and a Proto Day on Saturday, so I’ll be getting in lots of playtesting this week.

HABA Design Contest

I finally got my HABA design kit in the mail, and it has a LOT of discs. Also a couple of lions, a couple of ghosts, and a few zookeepers.

From seeing pictures online, it seems like almost everyone got zookeepers, and a lot of people got tons of animals. I’m one of the few that didn’t get a little baggie of kangaroos, so at least I won’t be designing a game with those like everyone else! Because of all the discs, someone suggested “My First Bag Builder”, but I might also try out something I’m calling “Spooky Zoo”...

Origins 2018

It’s almost here! This will be the first Origins where I’m on my own for the entire weekend. As mentioned before, I’ll be in the Unpub room all day Saturday showing off Airboat Bayou, Caveman Canyon, and whatever else seems like a good fit for the groups in the room. I’m also signed up for Publisher Speed Dating on Thursday night.

This was the week of a monthly Saturday GDofNC meeting, so I had all week to work on game design before the meeting.

Unfortunately, this past week also marked the two year anniversary of my mom’s passing, so there were a lot of listless days and nights of poor sleep. After dealing with all of that, I did still get a good chunk of progress made.

Valley of the Mammoths

This eternal design is getting a rework and going back to what it was at it’s core - a flicking game for kids. I’ve stripped out a lot of the more “adult” mechanisms and leaned hard into the “special physical devices” of the Korea Boardgames Design Contest. They are the publishers of games like Click Clack Lumberjack and Coconuts, so things like springs and molded plastic components are no problem for them. The biggest issue so far has been simply figuring out how to prototype the new idea for the game, since it involves a multi level insert and and a spring loaded launcher for your tribe members. I’ve been making a lot of trips to hardware stores and craft store and using a lot of hot glue...

The deadline for that contest is June 1st, so this week is make or break.

Airboat Bayou

I made 6 tiles to create a larger, modular board for this week’s test of Airboat Bayou, and the dramatically different board brought out some positives and negatives in the game. Overall, there is still the issue of the player who gets behind early on, either through lack of understanding of the steering mechanism, or through early slow travel to grab crawfish pots, or through collisions with other players right off the boat launches, having the rest of the board/path stripped of crawfish pots in front of them, and ending up in last place both spatially and in collection numbers.

Based on that observation, and some feedback, I’m going to go back to the static board of previous tests, but lean into the pickup and deliver a bit more, with players competing to grab certain colors of crawfish pots (traditionally pots have flags on them to identify their owners as many people will set traps in the same area) and deliver them to their owners on the docks. Crawfish subcontractors, you might say. Based on the board layout, I think I can keep the speed high, which was a big plus from the test of the modular board, and I think I can incorporate some of the fun elements from the individual boards into spaces of the static board, once I figure out the hard elements like scoring and a runaway leader problem.

This is most likely going to be the game that hits the table during my time in the Unpub room at Origins, since it has a fantastic table presence, and it plays up to six players.

Ribbons of Concrete

This also hit the table during Saturday’s meeting, and I confirmed the biggest issue with the game at the moment, where the puzzle of the game ends a couple of turns before the game actually ends, and the game is uninteresting from then on. I had some fantastic feedback from guild members regarding how exactly the investment system could work, so that’s definitely on the agenda for testing out this week.

This one is actually going to be the majority of my work this week, I think, since I want to change the board to incorporate more of the map of the US and make it a little easier to see what’s going on on the board. The new way that the investment system works means that the investment tracks are going to be much smaller, which means more board real estate for the map portion of the board.

This is one I’m planning on pitching at Origins.

“The Net Game”

This is one of those crazy ideas that originated from the van ride back from ProtoATL a couple of weeks ago. The basic premise of the game was throwing a physical net into an area with a bunch of components and seeing what you physically caught.

After the guild meeting on Saturday, another guild member and I brainstormed on this for a few hours. The initial idea was a physically thrown net that you’d reel back in and see what you caught. He prototyped a hairnet and some beads. I got some craft netting and some magnets. Neither of them really did what we were looking for, at least on dry land. He brought up the possibility of using real water, and I initially thought that was crazy, but it turns out that one of the Kinderspiel nominees used real water in their game. It’s commercially viable, or at least it was ten years ago. Could we make a game where you drop a physical net into real water and see what you drag up?

I’m going to start doing a weekly recap of the previous week and my plans for the week ahead in game design. It’ll also be a way to look back on my progress.

This has been a rough week, and not just in game design. After getting back from ProtoATL, my head was full of design ideas, including some crazy ideas developed in the car ride both there and back. We’ll see what comes of them.

The ramp up to Origins is going full speed now, with 4 weeks until the show. I’m going to have to decide what to pitch and what to hold onto for Gen Con in the next week or two. Here’s what’s in the pipeline:

- The Library is Burning

This one has the most pitches already under it’s belt, and I’m only making minor tweaks to it. It’s in a good place, and because it’s probably the smallest game I have to pitch, I could potentially pitch a ton of different companies. Probably holding off for a little bit to let the buzz about Fire in the Library fade a little bit to avoid confusion with publishers.

- Small Town Rivalry

After some changes between SaltCON and Unpub 8, this is also in a good place. I’m still tweaking a few values, and the potential exists for a dramatic change to pitch it to a certain publisher. Still, I think this one is going to be in my back pocket until Essen, or at least Gen Con, to pitch to European publishers.

- Airboat Bayou

This design has most of my imagination and interest right now. It got a couple of really good playtests at ProtoATL, and identified some major issues that have to be fixed to make sure rises above just being “fun” to make it a little more competitive and ensure that the winner isn’t predictable well before the end. This is a big game to prototype, though, so the turnaround on iterations is going to slow down. This is probably going to be the game I bring to the Origins Unpub room, because it has great table presence and plays up to six players.

- Ribbons of Concrete

I’m honestly surprised that this game has been working as well as it has from the beginning. It got one playtest at ProtoATL and another at Thursday’s GDofNC meeting. The choice between road construction and trucking investment is interesting, and choosing which roads get built when certain goods are ready to be delivered is a really good decision point. Towards the end of the game, things got a little telegraphed and only investment was a good decision, but I’m still trying to figure out the best way to cash in on investment as you move down the investment track. It’ll get there, but maybe not in time to pitch at Origins.

I also have a couple of designs for lighter games, and a crazy co-design. There’s certainly work to keep me busy between now and the middle of June!

My first board game design, way back in 2013, was about constructing the interstate highway system in the northeast quarter of the US. You bid on on highway contracts, and had the option to build freeways to get the government to pay you back, or to build turnpikes, where you did not get paid by the government but were allowed to collect tolls from deliveries that traveled along your route.

Players also got influence in companies that were making deliveries - more if you had fewer construction contracts and less if you had more construction contracts.

The goal, of course, was to make money. Make heavily traveled roads into your turnpikes and collect tolls on them, while making lightly traveled roads into freeways and get the government to cover the cost of construction. Deliver the goods you controlled via freeways and force your opponents to deliver goods via your turnpikes.

Some complicated? Yeah. Even now it sounds like a mid to heavy weight Euro, which is definitely not in my design wheelhouse. I just enjoyed Ticket to Ride and wanted to make a little bit more complex game about the Interstate system.

I remember I spent probably two or three weeks making the first prototype with a ton of cards printed out and taped to 3x5 index cards. I made a big board that you could fill with cubes. I took it to one of the first meetings of the Game Designer of North Carolina.

It was obviously terrible. The most recent document in the folder for the game named Turnpike was last modified April 22, 2013, 5 years ago next week. I stripped out most of the mechanisms, turned the idea into simple set collection, rethemed it, and took it to a convention in October 2013. It was still bad, but at least it was playable then.