Who delivered all the pies?

Following on from the "IDLEcon" game jam at the end of last year, Bez (of Yogi and Wibbell++ fame) organised another game jam, this time spread over a week, with more participants and a load of "live jamming" with various designers appearing on her Twitch stream to take part during that time.

If you are not familiar with game jams, they are events where game designers have a limited amount of time to create some sort of a game, typically with a set of constraints or requirements announced at the start of the period. I gather these are semi-regular occurrences in the videogame world, but seem to be becoming more popular in the tabletop sphere as well, especially with recent online collaboration capabilities getting so much more advanced and a lot of game designers being isolated due to Covid-19 measures.

The requirements this time were essentially for a game that could be played on a Twitch stream and include players interacting through the stream's chat channel, with regular players needing nothing more customised than a printed sheet (though it was OK for the stream host to need custom components) and games had to, at least, be suitable for 3 to 7 players. There was also a list of optional challenges that could be used to inspire designs, including pies, something nautical, dinosaurs, miming, and so on. 

The first board image Rory shared with me for discussion.
If we were working in the same room, this would probably
have been scribbled on a bit of paper, but this is so much nicer.

Collaboration in this game jam was entirely optional, but it is a major attraction for me, and I was able to team up with Rory Muldoon, probably best known at the moment as the designer, artist and graphic designer of Skora, a recent release from Inside The Box. I had been getting to know Rory a little bit through Twitch stream chats, Twitter, and IDLEcon, and we were both keen to do something together, so had a chat over Discord to see what we could come up with.

We quickly realised that neither of us would be able to put in a vast amount of work on creating a game over the week due to other life commitments, so we would work on something with modest scope. From the prompts, we fixated on pies and nautical elements, and were soon talking about having a ship delivering pies to a chain of islands. This then developed into the idea of players voting for the course of a shared ship, and then making pies and selling them according to the demands of islanders along the way, recording decisions on a piece of paper while the voyage of the ship is tracked on a central board that everyone can see.

Over the next week we put bits of work in on the project as we were able, and had a couple of chats over Discord to play the work-in-progress. I put together a project on Screentop.gg to provide a board and a boat token which could then either be screen shared, or players could visit Screentop to watch the game directly. Rory designed the board using his magical skills and software, while I used a Google document to create the playsheet and written rules. 

Over the week the main change that was brought in was to introduce special abilities that you could buy when the result of the vote went against your choice, meaning that there are some additional choices to be made, and planning your preferred route and voting strategy started getting a little more interestiing.

Eventually, on the Saturday, we were able to play our newly minted game live on Bez's stream, with me joining on camera and Rory taking part from the chat. It went well, I think, but it turns out that managing voting in this sort of situation can be tricky. Still, we were very happy with how things went.

Playing the Nautical Pie Delivery Co. Ltd. game on
Bez's stream with Rory playing from the chat.

As a little bonus, I took part in an online board game session with some old friends that evening, and they agreed to play. The game didn't fall apart and seemed to provide a reasonable experience for seven of us on a Zoom call, though again the voting was a bit awkward. We could set up an online tool to allow for votes to be tallied, but I think that is a minor issue. 

I'm not sure what we will do with this game next. It works well for something that was quickly thrown together and not yet extensively tested, but obviously there are issues, largely related to numbers, to be looked at. I think the game could work well around a table, collecting and exchanging tokens rather than writing things down, or just sticking with the something-and-write system could go well too. I think we will be discussing this again and seeing what we fancy doing before too much longer. It was certainly fun to work on so far.