Getting In The Zone

Volunteering at the Playtest Zone at UK Games Expo is always a privilege and a pleasure (if one that completely wipes me out, both physically and emotionally), and I get to meet so many game designers, from folk working on their first ever design to old hands with many published games.

I had several conversations with people saying something along the lines of, "I'm working on my first game design and would like to bring it in for testing next year, do you have advice on how I can get there?" Similar things came up in the conversations each time, so I thought I'd summarise some of the points in a blog post.

This is all just like, my opinion, man.

An experiment from 10 years ago that didn't
go anywhere: musical chairs, the board game.

Just get it played

How much effort you put into building a prototype is down to you and what you enjoy doing, but the sooner you get a game played, the sooner you can start finding the problems with it and focusing on the fun parts. You don't even need a "complete" game: even if you are planning to make a huge, multiplayer 4X game, setting up enough for 2 players to play a couple of turns can at least help get things on track. If you spend months - or years - theorycrafting or creating all the content you might need for a published game, you may find yourself doing immense amounts of work that is just wasted. You'll almost certainly learn more about your game from the first 10 minutes of playing a crappy first version of it than in any amount of thinking and planning.

Don't sweat the prototype

This is related to the previous point in that, early in the process especially, if you have put a lot of effort (or money) into building a prototype, you might be less willing to make changes that could involve modifying or even scrapping the components you made. But even when it comes to public playtesting somewhere like the Playtest Zone, don't worry about it. Looking around, you see some folk with prototypes that look professionally printed, but also there are people with components that might have been printed on a home printer onto regular paper, or maybe even hand drawn components. It's all good. Sure, put in some effort to make it so that the components are decently neat and don't get it the way of playing the game, but other than that, whatever you have is awesome.

There is a piece of advice that I have heard a bunch of times, and that I often repeat: your prototype shouldn't look more finished than it is. If it looks shiny and professional, it should probably be around the final iterations; if you are in the early stages, rough and ready helps your players understand that there are a lot of changes to come, and may encourage them to be more forthright with their feedback.

Go to designer meetups

Here in the UK we are fortunate to have the Playtest UK network that runs meetups all around the country separate from the presences at various conventions, and I'm certain there are other groups around. There are other groups elsewhere in the world too. I'd really recommend going along to one of these if you can, bring along a prototype in whatever state you can, and make sure play other designers' games while you are there. Just being with other designers, seeing how they playtest their own games, and generally talking shop can be really instructive and encouraging.

I often tell people about the first time I went to a playtest meetup in London. The first testing slot had me playing a game by a designer who had, at that point, had a couple of games published, and since then has gone on to become a very well-known part of hobby game design. We were just a couple of turns in and some parts of the game were clearly not working properly, so the designer just took out a pen and modified a load of the components so we could carry on. This isn't the most exciting anecdote, but the impact on me was huge: I saw for the first time that experienced designers (or at least some of them) are OK with their games not working and with changing things on the fly. If it's OK for them, it's surely fine for me. It's just one example of how you can absorb skills just by being with other designers if you have the eyes to see.

Oh, and many of us have impostor syndrome at these sort of events, especially when we are in a room with far more experienced (and better-known) folk. It's fine. If you have designed a game, even if it doesn't work well yet, you are a game designer, and everyone you meet at this sort of event (with very few exceptions) will treat you as a valued peer. 

Nobody makes their first jump

As with everything else in this post, this is not a hard and fast rule, but the first game you make is unlikely to be commercially publishable, let alone a success. If you think about people in other creative endeavours, they will all have been learning the craft for years - decades even - before getting anywhere. Think of your favourite writer; they will have been learning to write since their early school years (sometimes before) and practising regularly until they were finally published. While you might be able to revise your first game design into a great form, don't count on it. If you are in love with that concept, don't be afraid to step aside and work on some small, simpler designs that allow you to practice the craft before going back to your main project. 

Coincidentally, while I was first trying to write this post up and attempting to find the right words, Matthew Dunstan posted a video on YouTube on developing your craft as a game designer, which covered a lot of what I have tried to say here. I'd really recommend giving that a watch - as well as all his other videos, if you have the time. His final point put me in mind of a TV show from my childhood called Why Don't You...? The show had a very catchy slogan: "Why don’t you just switch off your television set and go and do something less boring instead?" Still applies.

Of course, there is so much that could be said, but I feel that this stuff is probably a reasonable starting point. Please do feel free to comment if there is something you would say to someone working on their first board game design.

So, That Was Expo

A couple of weekends ago was the biggest event of my personal gaming year, UK Games Expo - if you don't know about it, it's held at the Birmingham NEC venue plus a big chunk of the nearby Hilton Metropole hotel at the end of May and beginning of June each year and is one of the biggest (mostly analogue) gaming events in the world. It's not the time or place where I play the most games (I usually play very few), but it's when I see so many gamers, game designers, publishers, and general nerds. 

The Playtest Zone in full flow, tables loaded and buzzing.

This time, the halls at the NEC were differently set up to in previous years, meaning that the main event areas were all on the same floor level, which was nice. I haven't checked this, but it also felt like the aisles between stalls were wider than before. This, plus the arrangement of entrances to the halls, accessible from all around the central NEC concourse, and the lack of choke points in the direct connections between halls (which were just open) seemed to contribute to a more relaxed and open feel than I am used to, despite attendance being higher than ever. Sure, it was busy and crowded, and at times it was pretty stressful to get around some areas, but overall it seemed a happier place to be for me.

I spent most of my weekend at the Playtest Zone, which was off in a corner of hall 1, but had good levels of footfall pretty much all weekend. The arrangement is that there are a load of tables (we had 24!) which game designers could book for a period to test one of their prototypes, then regular convention-goers come, play the game, and give feedback. As volunteers in this area, we are basically there to facilitate this, to help things move smoothly, make sure (as far as we can) that designers are matched up with players, and so on. As part of this, I found myself talking a lot, often with people who just wanted to know what was going on and how to get involved, but also, significantly, with new designers who wanted to know how they could get to a state where they were testing their games at Expo next year. I'm planning to write up a summary of some of the advice from those discussions shortly after this post.

One of our volunteers with the special sign she had specially made.

Apart from the volunteering and talking, I did get to run a playtest of The Artifact and got some very useful feedback. A major part of that was comments about the theming of the game not being strong, which I partially agree with; I think, though, that I taught the game largely as an abstract game and things could be improved a lot by changing that as well as some graphical upgrades. We have some good comments to be thinking about though.

I did get to play a few games, of which only two were recently released: Fighting Fantasy Adventures, which was a fun way to spend an evening making some new friends, and Grab Bag Jungle, just because. The rest were a couple of very lightweight, silly games and a prototype a friend had with him.

Which reminds me that I do work on light and quick games occasionally, so I should get some of them out for those situations. Hanging out with game designers at these events does seem to mostly involve playing silly stuff or small prototypes. Also there is often beer. When in those situations and someone says, "So, do you have something?" the answer should always be "Yes!"

A playtest of The Artifact drawing close to its end.

I'm not someone who is particularly good in social situations at the best of times, and spending a lot of time in loud, busy situations, and doing a lot of talking, can wipe me out mentally and emotionally. This can be a problem when the whole point of the event is to meet and interact with people. I've got into the habit of having a quiet hour or so back at the hotel, just having a lie down and a mug of tea, at the end of each day, before attempting to socialise in the evening, and this seems to help a lot.

Oh, and this was my first Expo as an officially published game designer, and it was great to see Gibsons demoing and selling Grab Bag Jungle - as well as giving out lovely Jenny The Jaguar enamel badges.

Overall, this was another amazing event, but it took me most of a week to get my head back into a state where I can be productive again. I am still riding high on the sense of community and the love for playing and designing games shown by the folk I was hanging out with. Now I need to turn that into progress...

Grab Bag Expo

Just a quick one this month. As you may be aware, UK Games Expo is almost upon us. This is the UK's biggest games convention, and takes place in the National Exhibition Centre, near Birmingham, and occupies several of the NEC halls, plus a big chunk of the nearby Hilton hotel as well as some outdoor areas. It's a big event, and runs over the coming weekend, the 30th of May to the 1st of June.

This is a huge part of my year and I'll once again be spending pretty much the whole time (at least the part when the trade halls are open) at the Playtest Zone, which will have more than 20 tables of prototype games looking for players, and those games will be changing regularly through the event, so if you fancy helping test an unpublished game, please do come along any time. We're in Hall 2 (the easy to find Stand 2-108) and it would be great to see you there.

Last year's playtest zone getting pretty busy.

I'm not planning on pitching any games this time, but will have some prototypes with me anyway. I have a playtesting slot booked for 16:30 on the Saturday (the last slot of the day), and am planning on testing The Artifact.

Other than that, I will use the free time I do have to potter about and see what (and who) I can find. I'll mostly be looking for interesting indie games, both board and roleplaying types, and I'll probably also treat myself to a new mug from Haus of Banshee (2-294). Oh, and this will be my first event as a "properly" published game designer, so I'm excited to see Gibsons (2-460) showing Grab Bag Jungle.

I'll let you know how things go.

Up to Eleven

Looking back I see that my first post in this blog was in April 2014, so I've been blogging - albeit sporadically - about tabletop game design for eleven years. As this is a nice, round number, I figure it's probably worth a look back - and also a bit forward. 

I have a spreadsheet, on which I record all the games I developed as far as having a playable prototype and note its status, etc., and the earliest entry on there is from 2013, so pre-dating this blog. At present there are 58 entries on there. It misses a few entries, like some speed-design exercises done at an event last year, but it covers most of what I have done. Plenty of these games have had a test or two and been buried, never to be seen again. There were a good number of these games, however, that went through at least a few iterations of playtesting and improvement before being shelved, and I'll have a think about some of those in a bit.

I make it that eleven of these projects have got as far as being pitched to publishers. Some of these were a bit speculative rather than in any real expectation of getting anywhere, but four of them actually ended up being signed. Three of these fell through for various reasons - one of which did have a 30-copy limited edition made first though - leaving the one that is now out on shelves and available to buy.

5 prototypes. Clockwise from top left: Corlea, Invaded, Explore & Settle,
Boogie Knights, and in the middle, My Name is...

Thinking back over the past projects, there are plenty that I would like to go back for another look at. I went through something like this a couple of years ago, but I'm a bit more positive about game design in general than I was back then, so here are some of the ones that come to mind...

Boogie Knights is the first game that I took to a public playtest event, in 2015, and helped introduce me to the Playtest UK community. It was a game that I got to a state where it pretty much always went down well with players, but it felt like something was missing. I think there were some unnecessary complexities in it and a fresh look might find how to straighten it out.

Explore and Settle is a terrible working title for possibly the heaviest game I have designed yet. I think there was some interesting stuff in the game with resource management and map building that could have potential. It might actually be that a new title is the main thing needed here!

My Name is... is pretty much the polar opposite of the last game, and is a mind tangling party game with just a deck of cards and very few rules. For some people, this game just worked amazingly, producing laughter and agonised groans in equal amounts. There was never a satisfying end or win condition for the game though - in this sort of game, scoring and winning is rarely that important for most groups, but that aspect does need to be there for it to be sellable.

Corlea is a midweight Euro-ish game based on a real example of iron age people in Ireland building a wooden road through a peat bog. 

And finally for now, Invaded, my long-running white whale of a game with an interesting concept of being a competitive game with a players being residents of a land under attack from a powerful, non-player colonial force. I never really got this one firing properly, and have had thoughts about remaking it with squirrels, but I dunno... should I get back to it and take advantage of years of more experience, or just consign it to the archives?

That question applies to all of the games really, but I think I left Invaded in a state that is most in need of work before being worthy of a playtest. The others, though, maybe I can get them out and onto the table to see what can be done with them. 

To be fair, though, the last time I did a review of games I could get back to work on, it didn't go anywhere, so let's say that by UK Games Expo (which is just a month away), I'll have at least one of these games in a playable state and will see if I can get it to the table there, if not before.

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.