Zoo In A Bag

I think that one of the most promising designs I have in the works is the one that I am working on with Mike Harrison-Wood, Grab Bag Zoo. We have already pitched it to publishers (no luck so far) but it still needs a load of work, and we have basically spent the last year with the game on the shelf as we took a break from it.

When you are working on a project that hits a point where forward movement becomes really slow, taking a break and getting some distance can be a helpful approach. If you don't get back to the game, then maybe it wasn't so great after all.

This is most of the components from the most-recently tested Grab Bag Zoo version.

As I mentioned in my opening sentence, I actually think that this game has a lot of potential to it. A conversation with a publisher who took a look at it helped us figure out what the game has going for it. To start with, the combination of a cooperative game (you all win or lose together), which is played in "real time", and involves feeling in a bag for things is an unusual combination. 

The essence of the game is to complete collections of different types of animal by pulling shaped animal tokens from a bag without looking. Players take it in turn to have the bag, but have to work quickly as there is a sand timer running. If you complete all the collections before time runs out, everyone wins!

There are a few real time cooperative games out there; Magic Maze and Escape the Curse of the Temple are two that immediately come to mind. Grab Bag Zoo has a different kind of vibe to it due to the communication that the game affords. In Magic Maze, verbal communication is banned apart from at specific times, and in Escape everyone is so focused on their own dice that it is often hard to get much information across to your co-players other than "help, I need an unlock!" In Grab Bag Zoo, only one player is properly active (with the bag) at any time, and watching groups playing, there is often urgent encouragement and advice thrown across the table. ("Just pull anything out, dad!")

For bonus points, the fact that it is based on animal shaped pieces feels like a win for a lot of people. I get the impression (but no supporting data) that most folk get a warm, fuzzy feeling from handling animal toys. Additionally, you don't need to explain to people that this piece is an elephant and this one is a giraffe, you just need a picture and everyone gets it.

That said, the game might work better thematically if players were trying to pull parts to fix a spaceship, or service a formula 1 racing car. The whole "collect this set of animals for some reason" thing feels a little weak at the moment, but I can't help but feel that the response of most potential players to that would be, "OK," rather than, "Why? That doesn't make thematic sense." I'm happy to be proven wrong.

So if the game has so much going for it, then what is the problem? Why isn't it already on shelves in my local game shop?

(Deep breath...)

OK, so fundamentally there is the trilemma of the cost to produce, what the game delivers, and the complexity of the rules. I will explain...

The game as we originally built it had 45 wooden animals, 5 each of 9 different designs, plus some cards, a bag, a sand timer, and maybe some other tokens. Working out an approximation of production costs, it turns out that the game would be likely to retail for something like £30 to £40, unless a publisher could do a huge print run in order to bring the costs down. That price is pretty fine  for hobby games, but the game play was a lot more like a family game, and most families feel that £20 is quite a lot for a board game. 

If we make the game more interesting for hobby gamers, we probably don't bring the price down, and we risk making it more inaccessible for families, who we would really like to be able to enjoy it. Having more to think about is likely to make the game harder to teach - unless we can come up with some really clever angle. In essence, we need to square the triangle of:

1. Reduce the cost of production as much as possible
2. Make the game really easy to pick up and start playing, even for very casual gamers
3. Make the game interesting enough for folk to keep wanting to play it

I think that right now a good starting point would be to deal with those first two points on the basis that if the game can be picked up, played, and enjoyed really quickly, then there can be optional additional challenges and wrinkles that can be added in later. Let's try to make the core as slick as we can.

First off, the number of components... We started with 9 different animals because it felt like a good selection, but then we ended up trimming this back for a starter game, introducing more types of animals over the course of a few plays. This wasn't terrible, but it did mean we still had a lot of wooden components and there was more sorting out of stuff in order to get playing, which pushes against point 2, which is to make it easy to get started.

So I have decided to try simply reducing the number of types of animal in the play set to 6, with 4 of each, and created a set of collection cards featuring only those animals; the set isn't well thought out at the moment, but it's a start.

Aside from that I have a slightly expanded set of "helper" and "challenge" cards; the previous iteration also had these, with mixed results, and I want to explore that space a bit. Again, I have gone for a "throw it at the wall" selection that will allow me to try out various combinations of options and see what grabs people's interest.

Finally, I have changed the time track to be a small pile of cards which can be combined to provide the same effect, and I have done away with other tokens for the time being.

This all means that the game components are down to 24 "animeeples", 1 bag, 1 sand timer, 20 tarot-sized cards, and 25 poker-sized cards, which feels a bit more manageable, though, and actually gets the wooden components to fewer than classic kid's game Tier auf Tier, so that feels like a bit of a win.

I think I should have a couple of playtesting opportunities over the next couple of weeks where a game like this would be suitable, so I wanted to be ready as I have been very lax at this sort of thing over the last few years. But now, I'm ready... I think...