24 hours of fairies

As I stated a couple of posts back, one of my objectives this year was to enter at least one game design competition.  Well, I have now done just that.  It was a very small competition, but it counts for all that.

Prototype 3 in play.  The mug of tea is not an essential component but it was helpful.

So, since the summer of 2012, a guy called Kai, who goes by the handle of schattentanz (I love that name!) on Board Game Geek, has been organising a monthly 24-hour game design contest.  The idea is that he gives a word or phrase that is intended to inform theme or give some sort of restriction, and then at some time in the month, participants spend a single 24 hour period working on a game, at the end of which a game must be made available for judging.  A winner is decided by interested parties "thumbing" the respective submissions, and the whole thing is run on an honour basis, and is intended as just a bit of fun.  It is also a really interesting challenge.  If you want to find out more, you can look at this BGG thread.

I have just completed my attempt.  This month's theme is "Fairy", which can be interpreted however you like.  After some pondering (you are allowed to think about it as much as you like, but no creating anything at all tangible until your window starts) I decided to work on something about tooth fairies paying children for their teeth and presenting sets of teeth to the king and queen of the fairies in exchange for rewards.

On Friday, just after lunch, I got started on the project and made an announcement in this month's thread, and started off by writing up my initial thoughts on rules and scribbling out a small selection of cards (it was going to be a card game) on a pile of blank cards I keep around for just this purpose.

I had to pick up my daughter, Miss B, from school that afternoon, but she helped me out by playtesting the cards and rules I had come up with so far, and this showed that the basic game seemed OK, but flagged up plenty of improvements that were needed.

That evening I worked on an expanded set of cards and tweaked rules, working my design into some nanDECK code and data, printing out a set, mucking around with it a bit and then scrapping it in favour of another set of cards.

This third set of cards got playtested on Saturday morning (this time with both wife and daughter), which threw up a few more tweaks which I managed to implement before bundling up a couple of PDF files (one for the rules and one for the cards) and submitting my entry with half an hour of time to spare.

So now it's a matter of waiting; voting will happen in early March.  I'm pleased with how Tooth Fairies has turned out so far, but there are still a lot of changes that need to be made before I consider it "done", but in the meantime we have a new game that the family enjoys and I have gained some valuable experience.  All good.  I think I'll try doing more of these 24 hour challenges.

If you want to take a look at the game, you can download the rules file and the cards file.  If you play the game (or even if you don't), please let me know how it went and if you spot any problems with it.