Welcome to the Jungle, We've Got Games...

I'm not going to bury the lede, so here's an announcement that I am incredibly pleased to be making... A game that I started working on as a co-design with Mike Harrison-Wood over five years ago, which I have discussed here a under the title Grab Bag Zoo got signed with Gibsons Games last year, and after a lightning fast period of development is, as they say, On Shelves Now (or at least imminently),  published under the title Grab Bag Jungle.

The box is pretty full with all this stuff that comes in it.

So, how did we get here, and where is here?

Just to sum up the history, the game started as Mike and I were chatting in the Playtest Zone at the Dragonmeet convention in December 2019. The idea was to look into possible uses of tactility in a game. We had a few vague ideas between us, and we agreed to think about possibilities and then compare notes in the new year. One of the things I remember about this period was filling a cloth bag with toy farm animals and having a group of friends, who were visiting us at Christmas, feeling in the bag for an animal and trying to guess what they had grabbed.

Anyway, come the new year we put our heads together and soon had something playable. Each player had a bag of wooden animals that we had acquired a stock of, then everyone was pulling animals out of their bag to place on a personal board, and every now and then everyone had to pass their bag to the next player for a bit of additional chaos. A sand timer was also introduced pretty early on in the development. It was fun but faffy. 

We started to iterate and refine, got down to sharing one bag between everyone, were experimenting with housing animals in areas on a board representing a map of a zoo, and then... Covid got out of hand and the lockdowns started.

While a lot of game designers (including me) started moving to using online virtual prototypes in order to keep working on games, that just wasn't an option for this game, so it just got put on hold for a couple of years. 

Gradually we got back up and running, spent a lot of time mostly simplifying things, and started getting really positive experiences (with the occasional hiccup) with playtesters of all types, including kids. Eventually we (with a huge amount of help from game designer friend David Mortimer) pitched the game to Gibsons a little under a year ago, they said "yes" while we were all at last year's UK Games Expo, and we signed contracts not long afterwards to be published this spring. If you are not aware of the way board game publishing works, this is ridiculously fast and not something we would normally expect, but it turned out that the game was a perfect fit for a set of games they wanted to release this year.

The game has turned from a vague zoo theme to a nicer "return animals to their habitat" framing, and the animals are now a selection of South American species, illustrated in an adorable style by Gibsons' own Lauren Heywood-Law, who frankly did a stunning job. What is more, the animal pieces are now huge and chonky, and so satisfying to handle. Other than the art and high quality components, there have been a few very minor changes, but otherwise, the game is pretty much as we pitched it, which is gratifying. 

The new set of animals are so much bigger and fancier than the
ones we used in the prototype.

Grab Bag Jungle is part of a set of four new games that Gibsons are releasing this spring, all pretty small, but with a variety of different hooks and play styles. The one that really appeals to me is called Swapple, covered with beautiful flower and insect artwork, and I'm looking forward to getting hold of a copy.

Anyway, I received my sample copies of the game over the weekend and was able to play a few rounds with the family, which felt amazing. And I am now the proud owner of a load of sloth meeples!  So now I get to tick off another item on the list: I actually have a game published that people can buy in a shop - at the time of writing, the game has been spotted at a couple of online retailers, and brick-and-mortar places should follow soon. Thank you to everyone who helped to get us to this point. If you get to try the game, I hope you enjoy it.

A Few More Books

It has been quite a while since I've written anything about game design books, but I have been reading a few recently, so figured now would be as good a time as any. There seems to have been a bit of a shift in the last couple of years. While most of the books I had seen previously about board game design were pretty high-level, general stuff (starting with "what is a game") and many of them are aimed at a readership who are primarily interested in video games, I'm seeing many more books that are more tightly focused on areas within the field and more explicitly about board games, and the three books I'm talking about here fit that bill. A lot of the credit for that can probably go to Geoff Engelstein, who is working with CRC Press to build a line of tabletop game design texts, two of which I'm discussing here. These books are pricey, but good stuff. My third book here is from Adam in Wales, whose releases also zoom in on aspects of game design and are far more affordable, but no less valuable.

Three good books, all for different reasons.

Thematic Integration in Board Game Design by Sarah Shipp takes us from some basic definitions and discussions relating to themes, settings, game mechanisms, etc., and then gets into how game structures and mechanisms can be used to get players to engage more with the theme of a game, offering various tools to achieve these ends with plenty of examples and exercises, before finishing off with some good practical game design advice. Of these three books, this is the one that felt to me the most like a study text for a course on board game design, and I hope it is used that way. I found it an interesting and engaging read, and had me thinking more about player avatars within games, amongst other things.

Cardboard Ghosts: Using Physical Games to Model and Critique Systems by Amabel Holland comes from the same range as the first book, but could hardly be more different. It reads more like a very personal essay, full of examples taken from Amabel's own life as a trans woman alongside plenty of examples from her own work as well as plenty of other designers and from other creative forms. The subject matter is also a really interesting contrast to Thematic Integration. Where Sarah spent a lot of time looking at ways to get players to identify with and immerse themselves in the theme and setting of a game, Amabel spends time exploring the opposite: detaching players from the theme in order to explore actions and systems (often systems of oppression) that might be deplorable to us. Amabel's approach to game design is different to what most texts encourage, so this is a great place to look if you want a fresh perspective.

Adam in Wales: Playtesting by Adam Porter is a spin-off from Adam's YouTube channel, and is very much of the tone adopted by his videos: no-nonsense, detailed, and friendly. This book starts off with some general advice about the playtesting process, before settling in to the main part of the book, which is a list of a hundred questions you might ask players after they have tested your game prototype. Each question comes with discussion about why and when you might ask it, what you might hope to learn from the answers, and what some answers might tell you, as well as some alternate questions that are looking for similar information. Of the three books here, this is probably the one that is likely to be most immediately useful, and it's structured in such a way that you can just flick to a page and get some actionable advice - or at least food for thought. I know I am not great at grilling playtesters for information, so I'm sure I'll be going back to this for inspiration.

So I'd recommend all of these, but you'll have to figure out if they are for you. Give them a look though.

The State of Play

So, it's another new year and I guess that's as good a time as any to reflect a bit and think a bit about where I am from a game design point of view. How did the last year go, and how am I planning to move forward?

Well, I'll start with the biggest point from last year: I signed a game with a publisher. I haven't been given the nod to start shouting about this yet, but will give you the lowdown as soon as I can. The publisher has been showing some early copies of the game at trade shows this month, so it should be imminent. This is exciting stuff, and I can't wait to tell everyone, but patience is important as part of building a good working relationship.

The Castle War as it was around August last year.

Other than that, I worked with another designer on a game based on one of their past (unpublished) design that developed into something significantly different, and we have already pitched that to a publisher, who has taken a prototype for evaluation, and we are hoping to hear back in the next month or two.

Ongoing project, The Artifact, about which I have posted here a number of times, is chugging along. I've been working with co-designer Alex Cannon mostly online, though we have met up a couple of times and played the game, plus have both managed some physical tests with other folk. The game is feeling like mechanically it is pretty much sorted, but one aspect, a "project board" that effectively handles the scoring and victory conditions, is proving tricky to get right. I think we are close though, and we are hoping to be able to pitch it for publication some time this year.

My card game, The Castle War, has also made some significant progress, in partnership with a publisher. The game is not officially signed, but I am content with how we are moving along with this one, and the game is finally feeling pretty solid. 

The other game I have done significant work on in 2024 was Sympolis, my card and dice cooperative game. In a similar way to The Artifact, the core mechanisms of the game are working well, but I've been struggling to get the finishing details locked down; in this case it is how to balance the challenge so the game feels like it builds to a tense culmination. Unfortunately, here I don't have the luxury of a co-designer to work with on these issues. I have some ideas that I am experimenting with though, so I'm sure I will get there.

Reflecting on this for a moment, I think that I am learning that I am stronger at working on a core engagement than I am at delivering a punchline. I have had playtests of Sympolis, for example, where the players have really been chewing on the challenge and engaging strongly, only to be disappointed when that tension dissipates into an unsatisfying endgame. I think this is partly because I am inclined to just sketch out a rough endgame and leave it like that while I do everything else. This can work fine when it's a straightforward duelling game, or a classic "play ends, then count up points" Eurogame, but not so much in most of the games I have worked on lately. I should watch out for that.

More generally, how was the year? Well, aside from the obvious high points, I have picked things up a fair bit from the lows I reached a year or two back when the get up and go had thoroughly got up and gone. I'm still not good at organising playtesting sessions, but I have been to some good events (a couple of invite-only playtesting weekends, for instance), and have got back into the swing of regular meetups with a couple of other game designer friends. I still have a long way to go in really getting back in the proverbial saddle, but the direction of travel is correct, I think.

So for this year, I think it should be more of the same, and probably more more of the same. I'll be meeting up with designers, attending a small number of conventions and games days, volunteering at the playtest zone at UK Games Expo, and hopefully actually sorting out more regular playtesting locally. Maybe even pitching a game or two. I've been really feeling good about collaborations with other designers - some have worked well so far, and some not so much, but that's to be expected - so I'll keep looking for opportunities to work with others.

I'm also tinkering around with roleplaying games a bit more again, which is a hobby that used to take up most of my time before I switched priorities into board games. Hopefully I'll get to play and run RPGs a bit more than I have been. The "random table per day" challenge I set myself last year was roleplaying-adjacent, and I'm thinking about working with some of that material to see if I can turn it into something more.

Other than that... I'm not really one for new year resolutions, so I think keep on going, be kind to myself, and try to help others... that'll have to do for now.