Twenty-one Today (and Beyond)

Frankly, I have no idea what 2021 has in store for us. The Covid-19 situation has an end in sight now that vaccination programmes are in progress, but it's going to be months -- maybe the rest of the year -- before life can begin to return to normal and even then, it's going to take a long time for a lot of people's lives to recover. Add to that the fact that Brexit is beginning to affect us and who know how that will pan out in the longer term; already it is difficult to send post in and out of the UK and some peoples' livelihoods are coming under threat from international trade and travel problems. Basically, it feels like we are in a holding pattern, waiting until we find out what is going to happen.

On the positive side, so far our little family has stayed healthy and our main incomes have not been threatened, so we are in a very privileged position on the balance of it.

Early work on a game with squirrels, co-designed with Dave Mortimer.

In a discussion on plans for this year a week or two back, I said that for my part I wasn't intending to make any specific plans or objectives, but will be thinking more in terms of a direction of travel. One friend suggested that I should probably nevertheless come up with some SMART* objectives. He was probably right, but right now I'm sticking with my looser thinking.

So what is this direction of travel then?

Well, I have been talking about getting involved in collaborations for years, and 2020 was the year that this actually started to happen, with Grab Bag Zoo and Snails and Grails getting going early in the year, and Squirreled Away and The Village on the River at the end. I'm now in the early, brainstorming stages of another collaboration too, which looks promising. So, one of the major strands is to lean into that, work with those co-designers to make the best games we can, but also learn more about the process and figure out what I contribute to a collaboration. I know I can and do add to these endeavours, but I've not got to the point where I can really describe my strengths and weaknesses.

Other than that, I have signed up as a mentor for the Tabletop Mentorship Program (at the time of writing, applications for both mentor and mentee positions are open -- check it out), having talked to a few people about their experience in it. I'm not sure if I will even be allocated a mentee, or how things will go, but I will give it my best shot and hopefully be of some help. If all goes well, it seems like something that would be good for me to keep doing after the initial 3-month run.

Pitching games... I'm not worrying about it too much at the moment. I have a feeling that a game or two should get to a solid, pitchable state over the coming months, and if so, we'll give it a go. As a result of the lack of conventions last year, it seems that a lot of publishers are receiving pitches via some sort of online meetup, with game demonstrations via the likes of Tabletop Simulator or Tabletopia, which means there are potentially more opportunities which may in some ways actually be better than a physical pitch (for a start, nobody is trying to keep awake and hydrated in a noisy and crowded hall), so maybe we can roll with that if am appropriate game gets to the right point.

And while I am thinking of conventions, I'm not at all confidant that there will be any this year, and if there are any, they are likely to be shades of their normal selves. I have a room booked for UK Games Expo, which would normally be the highlight of my year from a gaming point of view, and where I would catch up with a lot of friends who I don't often see elsewhere. I have, however, made sure I have a room booking that can be cancelled, so while part of me really hopes to go, the greater part of me recognises that, even if the event takes place, it may not be appropriate or possible to go. The same goes for other events I might otherwise be going to. I really miss catching up with friends, doing face-to-face playtesting, chatting with publishers, designers, and gamers, and all of that. All of this stuff will just have to be a "wait and see".

In other, adjacent areas... I have been enjoying reading history books over the last couple of years (mostly early medieval Britain/Europe) and these books have been generating occasional game ideas, which is cool, and I'll continue this reading. I'm currently reading about Eleanor of Aquitaine (wife first of Louis VII of France, then Henry II of England), who was clearly a formidable character in her own right, and have a book lined up about Isabella of France, wife of Edward II of England, and who also had a rather colourful life. 

Also, maybe I'll do a bit more proofreading training. We'll see... I've continued to do the occasional proofread or rule review, and will keep doing this as and when.

So, that's as much of a plan as I have for 2021 other than I'll try to blog a little more often. Let's say I'll aim to do at least two per month. See, that's pretty SMART!

* SMART is a way that management consultants and trainers tell you to organise your objectives and has been expanded in a load of different ways, usually something along the lines of Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely.

That Was The Year That Was

I toyed with doing a "2020 hindsight" joke, but this way I can maintain the moral high-ground by telling you how restrained I have been, right?

So, 2020, yeah, that was an interesting experience. I started off the year by kicking off with one collaboration on Grab Bag Zoo, a game that absolutely needed face-to-face, physical prototyping, but which we managed to make a little progress on at various times during the year, including getting some really helpful feedback from a publisher. 

A Grab Bag Zoo player board in March

Another project started earlier in the year was Snails and Grails, with Dave Mortimer and Alan Paull, which started up at the last convention I went to, HandyCon. We managed to get a bit of face-to-face work done on this before the lockdown, and then shifted development online, mostly using Tabletopia. This actually allowed us to do maybe a bit more testing together than we might have managed otherwise, but we found some weirdness in the system, largely due to the fact that the game uses slightly weird shaped tiles, which never quite worked right in Tabletopia. I've been meaning to try setting it up in Tabletop Simulator to see if we get similar problems or different ones, but never quite got around to it.

The start of the Covid-19 lockdown in March put an end to playtesting as we knew it, as I rely heavily on people outside of my family for even initial tests. I leaned into this a little by taking part in the BGG 24 Hour Design Contest  for the first time in ages, and making a game designed to be a roll-and-write game with a 2-player, head-to-head aspect to it, which could be played over a voice or video call, and while this had many flaws it worked OK and gave me some practice at a style of game I hadn't worked on before. 

I also had an experiment with a "multiplayer solitaire" game that was literally that: a patience/solitaire card game that folk could play simultaneously, but which allowed cooperation between players to clear their tableaux by matching cards by other players. I didn't get far with this one, but initial tests suggested it was plausible. I might go back and have another look at that some time, as it could be interesting.

Early on there was a UK-centred group who had an online playtesting session on Fridays, which I attended a couple of times, but this ended up stopping after a while, and I never got around to joining with any of the other online playtest groups, and over the summer months my motivation and drive steadily declined, particularly when it came to getting people to playtest my games -- or even in playing other people's games. 

That said, I did build up a decent amount of experience in Tabletopia, and with the help of nanDECK, I can now implement a playable prototype on that platform pretty quickly. In fact, I have also done some work with Tabletop Simulator, and am building some more confidence on that as well, and have the necessary incantations coded into nanDECK so that I can output card images suitable for importing to either system now.

"Role World" in June. Using Tabletopia (or similar)
is a boon for getting nice pictures of prototypes.

Through all this time, I did continue to work with Braincrack Games on Scurvy Crew (which is now almost certainly getting a new name). There is still a lot in flux on this at the moment, but Lewis at Braincrack is now leading the development on this and the game is undergoing some pretty major changes, though most of them are actually not cutting as deep as they look at first. One of the most exciting parts of this is now pretty much set: crew cards have personal objectives, and during play you may exchange them for more experienced versions of the character, so you will see the available crew in the game growing and developing over the course of a number of plays.

On the subject of continuing projects, I also made some progress on The Castle War with some guidance from Alan Paull, making the game somewhat more complex and, we think, deeper, but leaving a few rough edges that now need further attention.

Continuing the random wander through the year, obviously physical conventions were off the menu after March, but most organisers came up with some form of online alternative, and I went to a few of them for at least part of the time. UK Games Expo, moved to August and then virtualised, was the one I spent most of my time with. Most of what I did was just watching streams of talks and panel discussions, something that I rarely get to see at real conventions, and this was fun, even though I didn't get much out of the event. It did introduce me to Twitch streams though, and since then I have watched a few streams by various people and have enjoyed the way some of them are a sort of interactive, punk rock TV show, with communities emerging in the chat channels. When it came to Essen Spiel time in October, I even made my Twitch debut as a guest on a stream with Alan Paull of Surprised Stare Games, discussing the Snails and Grails game we are working on.

There were other games, too, including two that involve squirrels: one a new collaboration with Dave Mortimer on a game aimed at families with kids, and another being a reworking of my long-standing white whale game, Invaded. Also a couple of attempts at a game with puffins in, a weird, world building game, a take-that game about a medieval throne war and the roll-and-write game that appeared from nowhere last week at IDLEcon.

Another thing that happened is that my game, Giftmas with the Grimms, which had a very limited (30 copy) print run back in autumn 2017 under the name Giftmas at Dungeon Abbey, has returned to my hands after the publisher decided to not move on with it. I could have reclaimed the rights rather sooner (there was a time-out clause in the contract, as is always a good idea), but decided not to worry about it and see how things went. We decided to call it a day though and the rights are back with me. I've been tinkering with a few revisions (and playing with fresh art, just for fun), and we'll see if anything happens with it.

Updated Giftmas character cards.

I'll also just add a note that in the last couple of months or so of the year I made a bunch of new friends and contacts largely through the streams hosted by Bez Shahriari, Michael Fox, and Matthew Dunstan, all of whom are lovely people who are really supportive and encouraging, and I very much recommend you check out their Twitch streams if that sort of thing appeals to you.

So how did I do against what I was planning back in January?

Well, I did say that I wasn't expecting to do much pitching, if any, and that turned out to be the case. In the absence of physical conventions, a lot of publishers did become more amenable to online pitching (particularly using Tabletop Simulator or Tabletopia to demonstrate the games) but I wasn't in a position where I felt comfortable doing this. I wouldn't be surprised if this became more normal for pitch meetings going forward though.

The collaboration side of things definitely moved forward pretty well, with a few more on the go now, and I'm really enjoying this and am totally open to discuss more team-ups for the future.

Playtesting was pretty terrible for the year: a few online sessions here and there, but only a few face-to-face over the first couple of months (and one in the late summer). That's the way of things though.

And finally, I said I would make a puffin game. Well, I did build something over a couple of iterations, and got some playtesting done with others, but didn't get anywhere I was even slightly happy with.

So, that was most of 2020 from my game design point of view: very much a curate's egg of a year. It sucked in a whole bunch of ways, but there were some definite positives, and I'm trying to focus on them for the year to come.