It's an expo, it's about games, it's in the UK

Another UK Games Expo has come and gone, and if you are paying attention to analogue games news, you may well have seen the numbers, which are significantly up from last year, and almost double the pre-Covid peak attendance. The event now occupies all five of the main halls (though with some unused space in some of them) around the NEC's central piazza space as well as a load of smaller rooms and a significant portion of the nearby Hilton hotel. It's not the biggest event of its type in the world, but it is flipping huge. I played only a handful of games (all on Friday night as it happens), but that isn't the point for me...

As has been the case for the last few years, my involvement in Expo has centred on the Playtest Zone, which was in the same spot as it was last year, which is a great little area at the side of hall 2, alongside a load of stalls related to university game design programmes and the Panda GM area that provides spaces for ad hoc meetings to anyone who needs them, which is a great facility to have.

The Playtest Zone in full flow.

There were over 200 game designers with us over the three days of the show, with a huge variety of games, the prototypes varying from shiny, professionally printed ones, all the way down to cards hand-drawn in pencil. I can tell you that I have a real soft spot for the games that are closer to the basic end of that continuum. Unfortunately I didn't get to play any of the games, but the buzz around the place was amazing.

For big chunks of time, we actually had a queue of players wanting to test something, and they stood incredibly patiently for spaces to become available. It's a wonderful thing to see how many people want to play unpublished games, and how many come over specifically for the experience. And hanging out with such a wide range of game designers and other folks (especially the other volunteers) is always a pleasure and a privilege.

Time for a little rant, though... Every year we have a few designers (or even publishers) booking playtesting slots, where it is clear that their objective is to promote their crowdfunding project. The most egregious one of these I spotted this time was a very nice crew who finished their spot and as they were packing up I asked (as I often do) how things went and whether they had useful feedback. Their answer was that it was great, but they weren't looking for feedback because the game was done. I stepped away at that point and did some breathing exercises.

So what? Well, the objective of the playtest zone is to enable designers of all levels of experience to get feedback from "normal" gamers, while also providing something fun and interesting for those gamers. We explicitly aren't there to provide a free demo table for publishers. We don't really have the ability to stop this sort of stuff happening, but if you are reading this and are someone who is looking to promote your game, please know that I understand how hard it is to build up a buzz around your game and you just want to take opportunities, but you are preventing another designer having an opportunity.

Note: I am just a regular volunteer and opinions expressed here are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of anyone who organises anything or is in any position of authority.

Magical Artifacts around the middle of the game.

Back on the main plotline, I had a playtesting slot, and this time it was Magical Artifacts, which was played by a group who had played some of my games in previous years (thanks folks!) and threw themselves right into the game. Unfortunately we didn't quite get to complete the game in the allotted time (an hour of play for four players and we had a couple of rounds left to go), but I got some useful notes. The key stuff is still to find ways to make some rules explanations clearer, and probably to tighten up cost and benefit balance a bit.

Something else I'd like to mention is the Indie Market, organised by the lovely folk who organise the Bastion convention that I have been to a few times in North Wales. This was a room with some 15 or 16 designers selling small print run games for a couple of hours, and this had a huge queue of those of us who wanted to buy stuff, which meant big delays to get into the room. It seemed to be a huge success overall, and I understand the Expo organisers are planning to allocate more space to this for next year. 

It has basically taken me a week to get myself into a state where I can think about or do anything much, but now I'm back, and I'm still buzzing about the amazing vibes from the event. I'm looking forward to next year already.

An ironic sign at the Hilton. To be fair, this was at the bar,
while they had a huge amount of other space for folk to play in.

Introducing The Artificers...

Oh good grief, it has been a long time since I wrote a blog post. I haven't stopped working on games, so let's catch up on one of the projects I have on the go...

So, The Artifact, the game I have been working on, mostly online, with Alex Cannon for quite a while now that has been through a good few iterations based around a core mechanism that is pretty much unchanged since the early days. Last year we had a really interesting playtest with someone who happened to be part of a game publisher. They gave some really interesting suggestions (being very careful to stress that this was not advice on how to get them to publish it) which we thought about, and then decided to run with to see where it would take us.

The first physical playtest of the new version, with hand-made cards because
muppet here had forgotten to bring the cards he printed and cut out the day before.

One of the biggest points was that all the way through our work, we had clung to a concept of the game being effectively a race to complete a certain number of objectives (though more recent iterations involved a sort of tic-tac-toe element on top); the advice was to try turning it into a more standard victory point game. This basically involved killing one of our darlings, but we thought, why not? If we couldn't make this work properly, we could always roll back to what we had before.

The other key suggestion was to move away from our initial setting, which was about exploiting alien technologies, and go with something more "boring". This may seem counter-intuitive, but I think the overall thrust was that the core mechanism (the way resources are accessed and exploited) seems reasonably novel, so fitting that into a more vanilla fiction and mechanical structure would be more comfortable to a lot of players - and, to be honest, it would probably work out being easier for us to actually finish.

And so, we now have a pretty generic fantasy setting, where players are building a series of artifacts, making use of magical resources that their assistants are collecting from around the land, with the artifacts being built providing various combinations of special abilities and victory points. The title, The Artifact, just doesn't seem right any more, so I've taken to calling the game The Artificers - though maybe better would be something like, Artificers of Ambivalencia...?

After some online development, Alex and I finally got a physical prototype built and met up to test it - we live a few hours apart, so this sadly doesn't happen often. A first play-through went OK, so we then concentrated on playing through the first few turns of the game a few times in a row, trying different setup options and seeing what would happen if all the random elements conspired to make things as frustrating as possible. It took a couple of rule tweaks until we were happy that things looked pretty solid, but obviously this was just with the two of us playing.

Another playtest: this time, four players, none of whom were me!

I've had a couple of playtests so far since then and it's looking promising so far. The previous major version of the game was usually taking something like half an hour to play in physical form, but we're now looking more like an hour, which actually seems appropriate for the weight and style of the game. 

So it seems we have a solid direction of travel here, and we have actually started talking about game balance, which is something that neither of us usually spend too much time on, and we think this might mean that the game is finally getting to a pretty mature state. Obviously a load more testing is required...

Ice Creams and Meet of Dragons

This weekend was Dragonmeet, the one-day tabletop games convention in London, which had moved from its previous home in Hammersmith to the ExCel exhibition centre in the docklands area. As a result, the event now has a very different feel, moving from various function rooms in a hotel to a big hall and some attached seminar rooms. I didn't get involved with seminars or roleplaying games that were taking place out of the main hall, so can't comment on those, but the trade hall felt like a smaller, more easygoing version of the UK Games Expo halls, with more smaller traders and a lot less difference between the large and small exhibitors, which felt good to me. There were also some good options for getting food and drinks in the main concourse of the venue, which beat the previous location, where you had a choice of the hotel catering or leaving the venue.

Anyway, as usual, I was helping with the Playtest UK area, which had four tables in the corner of the main hall, which was much better positioning than last year, and things went really well. The day was split into four two-hour time slots for each of the tables, so that allowed sixteen designers to get their games tested, all of which seemed to go pretty smoothly. I even got to run some tests of a game I'm working on.

Ice Cream Chaos with a lot of dice.

The game this time is a new project collaborating again with Mike Harrison-Wood, the co-designer of Grab Bag: Jungle (pre-Christmas plug here: great family fun game, available now!). This one has the working title of Ice Cream Chaos and involves dexterity (chucking dice at targets), a good wadge of luck, and a little tactical thinking. It's still in the early stages, but we have a working prototype (actually we each have one, with some differences between them) and have been starting to test around the place. Fortunately, it just takes about ten minutes to play (and not long to explain), so it's easy to get to the table, but unfortunately (maybe?) it's another game that relies very much on the physicality of the game, so we can't meaningfully test it online. 

Anyway, the test was very useful, yielded some helpful feedback and criticism, and generally went down well with the testers, who were pretty positive about it. I was most pleased to talk to a twelve-year-old kid (with his dad, the closest thing to a target audience we have) who gave it a go and was really enthusiastic and had some helpful thoughts for us.

So, we have some momentum on this one. The core of the game works really well, but as is often the case, the devil is in the detail. Hopefully we'll get a good bit more testing over Christmas, trying out a few variations, and we'll see where that gets us.

On Mighty Monarchs and Glass Cannons

My work-in-progress, called The Castle War for now, is a 2-player card game that could be described as a "lane battler", where forces line up at 6 locations (castles, natch), vying for dominance. It's based on the 12th century war in England between King Stephen and the Empress Matilda and, while it isn't a historically faithful game, it does take a lot of cues from the history.

One point gives a little asymmetry between the sides. Matilda didn't take a direct part in most military operations, while Stephen did his kingly duty of personally leading troops, something that cost him his liberty at one point, though this game is not about that specifically. Matilda's player has a special ability which takes a little work to activate, when this has been done, she gets a little extra control over movement and activity restrictions. On the other side, Stephen is represented by a card that can provide big bonuses in combat, but if a conflict that he is directly involved in is lost, his player loses the game instantly due to his capture.

King Stephen is at a Devizes Castle, having been revealed in a previous turn.

This makes the Stephen card powerful but vulnerable, and there is a possible "fool's mate" type situation that can happen very early in the game - plausibly on turn 2. The situation is as follows:

The Matilda player goes first (they always do!) and play a couple of cards to a castle. Most turns involve playing one or two cards from hand, usually face-down to line up at castles.

The Stephen player plays the King Stephen card plus a military unit card.

The Matilda player chooses to trigger the conflict at that castle, so all cards there are revealed. Matilda has a unit and one of Stephen's loyal leaders on their side, which means that the leader is ransomed: Stephen takes the leader into hand and Matilda takes one of her foes cards from the castle; she is not permitted to take Stephen, so takes the unit, leaving King Stephen unprotected. Matilda wins the conflict and as Stephen was there at the time, wins the game outright.

Since it became part of the game, I have enjoyed the powerful-but-risky nature of the King Stephen card and have been resisting watering it down, feeling that it is a strong feature of the game. However, on a couple of occasions, playtest feedback has pushed for a change after an early disaster happened. I believe a lot of players of this sort of game enjoy the tightrope walk, but it is clear that some players who are tripped up early are certain to have bad feelings and never give the game a second chance.

I was discussing this with a game designer friend who has played the game quite a few times, and it felt like I might have to just give up on my preferred rules, when inspiration came, which I think was partly shaped by a rule in the friend's game that we had played earlier. The solution was that, while originally the King Stephen card started in his player's initial hand of cards, it could start on the table and out of play, and taken into hand on the first occasion the Stephen player has to draw cards. From then on, the game just proceeds as before.

The down side to this is that the Stephen player needs to remember to pick up the card at the appropriate time, but this can be reinforced on the player aid and on the card itself, and I think is acceptable in this style of game. The up side is that we still have the fragility I like, but players are likely to have seen 1 or 2 conflict resolutions (they happen whenever a player takes their turn to refill their hand) and a good number of different cards before King Stephen can be put at risk, meaning that even new players will have a better idea about how everything works.

It's still early days with this rule, but playtesting so far suggests it works OK. 

Meetups and Resurrections

I've not been going regularly to playtest meetups since before Covid - I've been to a handful, but that's in comparison to generally about one a month beforehand. But then the lovely Naomi and Callum, designers of Platypus, and friends and helpers at the UKGE Playtest Zone, decided to reestablish the Oxford meetup at a pub around the edge of the city, a location that is much easier to get to for an out-of-towner like me than the city centre would be. 

So we've had two meetings so far, taking place on the last Wednesday of each month. The meetups are a bit shorter than other ones I have been to, with the structure so far being two slots of an hour or so each. We have so far been fortunate to have several attendees each time who hadn't brought games and just wanted to play, which makes it far easier to make sure everyone who did bring a game can get it tested.

Bits of three prototypes: Boogie Knights, Reign of Terror, and My Name Is...

I've been on a bit of a run of trying out old, shelved projects, as I was musing back in my post in April. I have tried out two of the games mentioned in that post and one other, so I think I'm doing OK on that front. The aim of the tests was what one of the other designers described as a "vibe check", it was kinda like throwing part-cooked spaghetti at a window to see what sticks. 

Reign of Terror is a game that I threw together long ago as a possible party favour at a French Revolution themed event, and is a hidden role game where multiple players can win or lose according to their individual role. I playtested and revised it a couple of times, but I didn't persist long enough to get to a place I was happy with. The game worked OK in this test; the players enjoyed it overall, but some elements were unclear or inconsistent, and it was a bit frustrating in places. The concept was a hit and the flow of the game was good, so maybe if I can tidy up the messy bits, it could become something to take further. It does have the disadvantage of four players being the minimum count for a decent game, so that's a limitation for testing and potential pitching.

My Name Is... is about memory and mental agility and I am truly terrible at playing it. The game is great at inducing both pain and laughter, sometimes simultaneously, but has a potential issue with timid players - if nobody is brave enough to challenge other players over their mistakes, nothing happens in the game. In its current state, tracking what cards people have in their stacks can be a big issue too - though with more players (we had only three, which I think is the minimum) that is likely to be less, though there would be other challenges coming into play. All in all, this feels like it is one or two small rule changes away from being "done", but I don't really have inspiration. Maybe this is one I should talk to one of my game designer friends about possibly turning it into a co-design.

This week I got Boogie Knights out. This is the first game I ever took to a specific playtesting event, and I have a real soft spot for it, though that may be a problem, preventing me from either letting go of it or making a dramatic change. Shockingly, it has been seven years since the last revision I made to the game, so this fresh look was long overdue. The game has, practically from the start, been enjoyed by players in general, but has just been a bit hollow, with actions being frustratingly unavailable, periods of play being repetitive, an unexciting endgame, or any number of other flaws at different stages of development. My players this time played the game in the spirit that is intended (it's pretty much a family game with gentler conflict than you might imagine), found that the game is basically OK (as usual - engagement was good) but the discussion afterwards came up with a whole lot of potential avenues to explore.

All in all, I think I will be spending some time on Boogie Knights and seeing if I can address its current flaws. I mean, I'm seven years older, and a load more experienced, so maybe the game has a chance...

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.

Jams and Playtesting

A couple of weekends back, I was lucky to be invited to a board game designers' weekend. It was just a small event, held in a private house, with a dozen or so designers attending, with varying levels of experience, design styles and interests. I had been to one of these previously and had a great time, and this one, with a different mix of people, was just as enjoyable and useful, but with a different feel to it.

Most of the time was spent playtesting each other's games, with the aim being to ensure that everyone had reasonably even opportunities to test the games that they had brought. I was able to get tests of both The Artifact and Squirrelled Away, with really helpful feedback and observations from both, meaning I had a fair bit to talk about with the respective co-designers afterwards.

Apart from the playtesting, there was an hour or two spent on lightning game jam exercises after lunch each day. The objective was to team up with someone and create or develop game ideas according to the rules being used that day.

A game from the Sunday jam. When working
this quickly, rough and ready is the thing.

The first day had us splitting into teams of two and then going through a series of short (about 10 to 15 minutes) spells of development. The first period involved setting some constraints for a game design. Then these constraints were passed to the next team, who had to begin a game design based on these restrictions. After this period, the projects were passed on to the next team to continue the development and so on. Having gone through a few iterations of this, we had a little "show and tell" session where each team discussed the game that they had ended up with.

On the Sunday, things ran a bit differently. There was a table of components available, and everyone chose a batch of those components (maybe a handful of dice, some plastic rods, or a bag of feathers), and then find a partner who has some other components, and then create a game using the combination of components in 15 minutes. We went through four iterations of this, and I was delighted to have created four actually playable games (mostly terrible, obviously, but one was quite a lot of fun) with four different design partners. The debrief session from this was just a general group chat about anything we felt was interesting.

Overall this was a great weekend that completely wiped me out, but left me with so many ideas buzzing around and a great feeling from working with a whole bunch of other people, who all brought their own skills and personality to the process. The high intensity game jams were excellent practice in both working with other designers and in quickly sketching ideas. During the second jam in particular, it felt great to get an idea to the table and start the testing process so quickly. One of the games actually went through some iteration as we got the initial game to the table within about 2 minutes of sitting down.

So, if you are a game designer, and you get the chance to attend an event like this where you can just spend time engaging with and sharing ideas with other designers, I would highly recommend it. If I am invited again, I'll certainly do my best to go along.

This is probably my final post of this year, so I'll just sign off by wishing you a happy Christmas, Yule, or whatever else you might celebrate, even if it is just a day or two off work. I'll see you in 2025, all being well. Have a good one!

Desparately seeking squirrels

Here's a little story about how things change, and how long things sometimes take. 

Almost exactly four years ago, I was chatting with friend and fellow game designer (with quite a lot of published titles), Dave Mortimer, and we decided to design a game together. We wanted to do something lightweight and aimed at families with kids, and liked the idea of it being about squirrels looking for nuts. Not a bad starting point.

Our first pass made a game with the working title of Squirrelled Away, that played in two phases. In the first phase, players place tiles to form a map of a wooded parkland. The tiles were double sided, with the same terrain features on each side, but on one side of many of the tiles there was an icon indicating a nut or a hazard (like a dog or a cat). During the second phase, you would move a squirrel token around, flipping tiles, tying to find the nuts but avoid the hazards. It was this a mixture of press-your-luck and memory. 

As this was 2020 and collaborating in person was difficult, if not impossible, we worked on this online, with virtual prototypes built in Tabletop Simulator and then the then-new-to-us Screentop. 

An early Squirrelled Away version on Tabletop Simulator.

We iterated over this design a bit and included a couple of other people in tests, but the game just came over a bit flat. There just wasn't the excitement that you would want from a press-your-luck game, and it was too chaotic and unpredictable to make a good memory game. One tester suggested something along the lines that we should choose one of the aspects of the game and just lean into that.

At this point, we kinda ran out of steam, and the game got put on a back burner while we both did different things. 

For ages.

Then earlier this year, I pulled the project out again, had a chat with Dave about it, we bounced some ideas around, and I committed to trying something new.

It took me a while to get around it, but I eventually got rid of the tiles, created a game board and some counters (all of this was just paper, for speed of prototyping - and difficulty of play), and tried it out.

Moving from tiles to a board with many tokens on it.

Some solo plays showed that it was definitely better, but still lacking significantly. It was, however, a base that we could start working on. I had a meetup with Dave, we played this version, agreed it was rubbish, and got to re-engineering. 

Over the next couple of hours, what we came up with bore little resemblance to what I had brought along, but was actually fun to play. Shonky, but fun. The discussion was basically... How about just losing the board element and, maybe, just pulling stuff out of a bag? How about introducing different types of nuts, so we can make it a set collection game? How about we take inspiration from roll & write games and give everyone a player mat to use for organising sets?

Some scribbling on bits of paper and scrounging around for components we could use to try it out, and we were up and running.

Trying something new: stock components and paper with scribbles on FTW!

We managed to rope in a passing family member to sanity check what we had, and then started discussing potential improvements. Over the next week or so we put together components for a virtual prototype, Dave did some modelling to check the probabilities for various scenarios, and a round of online testing and revision got us to something more solid.

That scrappy version worked pretty well, so we put it onto Screentop.

And so we get to today, and I now have a physical copy of the game. It would be lovely to have icons printed on the tokens to match icons on the playsheet, but I'm planning to have a reference sheet on which I can put one of each type of component as a key. Just using colours is potentially problematic with some colourblind people, but as the game is played openly with one player active at a time, other players will be able to help and I will apologise profusely for the inconvenience.

A physical version, ready for some more rigorous testing.

So, an entirely different game to the one that we started all that time ago, but it still fits the initial inspiration of a family game where squirrels are hunting for nuts. 

The plan now is to get this in front of some more people who aren't directly connected to Dave and me. I'm planning to be at Dragonmeet in London next weekend (November 30th) and testing the game at the Playtest Zone, where I will be for pretty much the whole day. If you're around, please do come and say hello.

Nothing spooky, but some progress...

Just another quick update on what I've been up to lately...

The puzzle game I mentioned last time did make more progress and my co-designer and I actually managed to pitch the game to a publisher, who was generally positive, so took a copy to evaluate. Sorry I can't say anything much about this one at the moment for what I think are good reasons, but hopefully a bit further down the line.

Other good news is that I saw a pre-production copy of a game that I have signed for publication, and it looked amazing. This is another thing I can't say any more about right now - and I will neither confirm nor deny anything for the time being - but I should be able to make an announcement and give some details within the next few weeks. Looking forward to that - I think it's exciting stuff!

The Artifact on Screentop, with the project grid on the side
which seems to be working fairly well overall.

Aside from the games mentioned above, The Artifact is chugging along, with a few recent changes bedding in. I'm intending to write up a bit more on this in its own post soonish.

I have another new(ish) project on the go too. This is another co-design that got started quite a while back, but both of us have not got around to working on until very recently. This one also probably deserves a post of its own, but just to whet the appetite, it's a press-your-luck game involving squirrels. At the moment I feel it's a little flat as a game, but there's definitely a spark in there that we'll be working on.

The other two projects I have got close to the top of the list are Sympolis, the dice allocation cooperative game, and The Castle War, the card game set in a 12th century English conflict. Both of these have had a little attention, but are just cycling back to the top of my projects list. 

Anyway, nothing very substantive to report this time, but at least I'm just about keeping my intention of blogging monthly at the very least. I should be able to pick that up a bit next month.

Updates and Artifacts

Just a quick update... 

I've been slowly chugging along over the last month, keeping things moving along with The Artifact, and also reestablishing a monthly meetup with another semi-local designer who I used to see a lot of before Covid. A big part of things is building up a routine again. 

Interestingly, the semi-local meetups have already resulted in a new design, a light, cooperative puzzle game which we think is close to pitchable already. Obviously we'll be continuing to work on it, but it's looking pretty good so far. 

I've also had a tinker with something very new that didn't work, but I want to play with a little more. I'll probably write up something about that soon.

The end of a recent 2-player test of The Artifact. 

The Artifact has stayed in roughly the same state for a couple of months now, with Alex and I both having tests independently, trying out different variations of the game in relatively minor details and comparing notes. This seems to be working well and making progress a lot better than we have managed for a good long time. It helps that we have found a core of the game that we are both pretty comfortable with and can iterate on at a relatively fine level.

I'm also at an interesting point with my approach to the game where I am actually starting to think about balance between elements of the game. This is something I tend to resist for a long time when working on games for a lot of reasons, so the fact I am allowing myself to even start thinking about it makes me think that things are really moving.

Return to anarchy

It seems that it has been pretty much four years since I last wrote anything here about The Castle War. This is a two player game inspired by the period of 12th century English history often referred to as The Anarchy, where the anointed king, Stephen, was fighting to keep his crown from the Empress Matilda, the daughter of his predecessor, who many believed to be the rightful monarch. Game play is built around playing cards to develop military forces at a row of six castles, control of which is the aim of the game. There is a little asymmetry in the game, so there are slightly different aims and capabilities on each side. 

Before Covid I did quite a lot of work on it and got it pretty solid, but since then I did a little work via virtual tabletops, but as with many projects, this one fell out of my schedule and nothing has really been done on it for a couple of years.

The latest version of The Castle War implemented on Screentop.
Note hackiness to allow you to peek at face-down cards. 
It's better than nothing.

I recently had an in-person test with a designer friend who had played the game before, and we played the last version I had in a physical form, which missed out on a few changes that I had implemented virtually, but was a useful reminder of the game after a long gap. We actually had a pretty tight play and it felt like there were interesting decisions most turns, with some twists delivered by cards and dice along the way.

There were, of course, a few issues that we found, which were mostly user interface issues, where the presentation of certain elements on the cards made things harder to understand than would be ideal. We also identified a few areas where there were opportunities to increase what I could describe as "thematic interest".

I'll elaborate on that with an example. There are three cards that are always in play that represent three "power bases" (the Church, the Treasury, and London) that either player can play cards to take control of. The castles are the main objective, but these power bases are used to break ties at the end of the game, so can be important, but for most of the time I've been working on the game, that was all they did. I recently introduced a couple of card effects that key into the power bases (e.g. an event that triggers for the player that controls the Church), and these seem interesting and fun, but have only drawn attention to the fact that there is not much of this in the game.

The newly printed card set with a few already cut.
For single-sided cards I load these into sturdy, opaque-backed
card sleeves, which is easy, forgiving of bad cuts, and 
not bad to shuffle and play with.

So now I have rolled fixes for some of the issues we came up against into the prototype and updated both physical and virtual versions of the game. I have had a solo play through, with myself playing both sides, and it looked OK so far. To be clear, this game is not set up for solo play, especially as a lot of the actual play involves hidden plays, so there is room for uncertainty, bluffing and misdirection, which is hard to simulate. Still, the exercise is a passable test that the core of the game still works OK.

Of course, there is no substitute for actual, human playtesting.

New types of artifice

If you've been here a while, you might remember about The Artifact, a project I have been working on since... ages ago with co-designer Alex Cannon. We've been working on this mostly in a virtual form (implemented on Screentop.gg), and have had a core to the game, about which we have tried a heap of different approaches to make a full game. Some of the iterations have been quick and light, and some have been crunchy brain-burners, but none have really felt right to us.

We got into another fresh approach a couple of months or so back, which felt good. Alex managed to arrange some in-person playtesting which helped develop the idea into something that worked pretty well, and I was able to get some further tests that have added some additional shape to the project. After a period of slow progress, we have got into something of a rhythm with one of us doing some independent testing and development, then working together to consolidate, then the other doing something, and so on...

A recent 2-player test of the game on Screentop.
Note the very basic "it'll do for now" grid on the right -
enough to test with and no more.

It feels to me that we have reached a shape to the game that we enjoy playing and shows promise. It still has plenty of flaws, some of which we have identified already, and some we are sure exist but will need testing to find, but we seem to have a workable direction of travel for now.

The core of the game has always been built around placing domino-like tiles to a central play area, placing "researcher" tokens onto these, and using those researchers to access "knowledge resources" on the tiles to gain... something, generally including "projects" that progress towards victory, but in some iterations there have been other things involved.

Right now, added to the spatial game of building the array of tiles and having researchers in the right place to achieve objectives, we have a secondary board representing the projects and developments that can be achieved using the researchers and the resources they access. This board provides a second spacial element as victory comes from connecting up a group of completed spaces on its grid, and as you complete projects you get actions which can manipulate the state of the tiles, so there is a circular dependency.

A 3-player test that got really bogged down and ground to a stop.

This all works pretty well for two players, but for three, it seems a lot more patchy and the current setup can get bogged down quite badly, with some turns involving some serious puzzling out, and active blocking moves making it very difficult for someone to win. That latter point can certainly be addressed, and we'll have to see if the former is a problem for players. We haven't yet tried more than three players. I think that there are ways around this though, with plenty of elements we can adjust, including costs of projects, layout of the project board, effects that take place with completed projects, and so on. We'll be exploring this over the coming weeks.

We're likely to continue to test primarily with two players for the time being, there being the two of us working on the game, but we'll increasingly have to look at higher player counts. It might be that we can get it to work great for two but struggle with more, and that's fine, but would frankly be a little disappointing. There may need to be variations in setup for different player counts, and this is something we already have some ideas about.

All in all though, progress is good.