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.

Bright-Eyed and Bushy-Tailed Invaders

If you have read some of my older posts, you may remember a game I have been working on, on-and-off, for several years now, with the working title, Invaded. It is based on being on the receiving end of a colonial invasion, where players are trying to respond to the overwhelming force of the non-player invaders. I had a game that showed a lot of potential, but had various things wrong with it. For instance, it was too fiddly for its depth of play, was uneven in its experience (some plays were compelling, while others were quite dull), and I think generally insufficiently focused. All of this is potentially fixable, but it has been on a back burner for a while now while I have done other things.

Recently, though, I had another wave of inspiration about the game, largely based on a few things that have been rattling around my mind...

• A publisher I was talking to a year or so back, who said I should commit to a setting for the game rather than the generic setting I had been working with.
• A discussion from all-round top chap Adam Porter in a YouTube video, suggesting that a useful exercise is to make a "junior..." or "my first..." version of a game you are working on to try to find the simplest version of a design that is true to it's core idea.
• Squirrels. Over the last few months of working from home and/or being in lockdown, my wife and I have been taking mostly-daily walks around the neighbourhood, where there is a decent population of squirrels, and we have had a running game of seeing how many we can spot. Our best so far has been seventeen.

"Squirrel Invasion" in Tabletopia.
I think that might be the new working title.

So, challenge accepted, I guess. After some monkeying about, I have a just-about-playable game for two players as an attempt to at least try out some concepts before I flesh things out some more.  It even has some features that seemed like a good idea, but I'm not yet quite sure what to do with.

The game is now set in a woodland, inhabited by assorted squirrels, which is being invaded by a population of nasty and aggressive grey squirrels. Instead of having the assorted resources that you could gather and spend in the old versions of the game, there is just one: acorns, and you are trying to gather enough acorns to feed your "clan" before winter comes or the greys take over entirely.

The old version had a series of rounds, during which you played through a hand of cards that activate the invading force in various ways (with a system that ramped up intensity as play progressed), while also taking actions for your tribe, selected from an action menu. What I have now are cards that each require you to take one action on behalf of your own clan and one for the greys, and the way to gain more cards is to trigger an event from a selection on display, and several of the events push the game towards an end.

Initial tests suggests that this works passably at the level I expect it to -- which is to work for a few turns for two players. The balance of actions isn't right, and there are some big holes in the gameplay, but I think it is worth extending the decks to allow for more play.  As with most of this year's game design work, I'm building the prototype online (in this case, in Tabletopia), which means that I don't need to be doing printing, cutting and sleeving, and also that I can get nicer pictures of the work in progress, but it is missing the immediacy of physical components. 

With several other projects also ticking along, this is a few down in priority, but it at least has some pretty straightforward tasks to do with it for now, so it might keep moving along for a while.