I recently stumbled upon a set of writing rules Robert Heinlein published in 1947. They seem to apply equally well to board game design, so I thought it would be worth making note of them.

1. You must write.
2. You must finish what you write.
3. You must refrain from rewriting, except to editorial order.
4. You must put the work on the market.
5. You must keep the work on the market until it is sold.

While I have not had a game published, the above list makes perfect sense, and shines a light on areas where I feel particularly weak. I feel like I do items 1, 2, and 3 well enough. I constantly have ideas I jot down, some of which make it to the prototype stage, with a subset of those feeling “complete.”

Items 4 and 5 are where I feel like I really fall down. I have sent off three or four games to publishers, but I haven’t given it my all. The prototypes have gone out, feedback has been received, but I haven’t done a very good job of following through, nor have I sent the games off to multiple publishers.

I especially haven’t taken advantage of BGG.CON. I’ve shown my designs to a couple of publishers, but not used the larger CON as a whole. Having just returned from BGG.CON 2011, I should have used my time to meet with other designers, introduce myself to publishers, and had my games played by as many people as possible. That didn’t happen, and I can only attribute it to my fear of having my games rejected.

My 2012 goal is to push myself, and by extension, my designs, and not to take one rejection as confirmation that the game isn’t publishable.

* I found the Heinlein list here.

*sigh* So is game design. The idea is easy. The first pass at a game is just a little bit harder. The initial rules outline and prototype are just a little bit harder than that. A balanced, playable, and fun game is crazy hard.

I realize this every time I have a game that feels about 80% done.

(* Thomas Edison. According to Wikipedia, Spoken statement (c. 1903); published in Harper’s Monthly (September 1932).)

Much like a two year old, lack of boundaries is a problem for me.

Naive me used to think that it would be much easier to design a game if I could do anything I wanted to. I’ve proven this wrong time and time again. Most notably, my design of 18 Brumaire, a Napoleonic coup game. The game suffers from a huge amount of scope creep… I can do anything with the game, so I am. I keep adding and adding to it, often with mechanics that just don’t work together. Now when I try to start over, I can’t get my old ideas for the game out of my head (plus new ones keep popping in). The game has gone no where.

Contrast this with a recent cold war era two-player card game I’ve been working on. I gave myself the restraint of two players, short play time, and only 40 cards. In my mind, I knew exactly how I wanted this game to play, and I’ve been working toward it. IMHO, the design process for this this game has gone great. I know what I’m trying to do and each playtest allows me to refine until I get there.

Moral of the story? You can’t fight the system.

/me throws it on the ground.

I didn’t hear anything on my Ticket to Ride submission by yesterday’s deadline. I’m guessing that means I didn’t win big…

I managed about an hour of game design over a 3 day weekend… *sigh*

Or most likely blues and browns, really. I also think I’ve used that post title somewhere before. Anyhoo…

Time to get the game design rolling again. I recently spent quite a lot of hours working on an entry for the Days of Wonder design contest for Ticket To Ride and it really got me into that mindset again. We’re looking to start meeting regularly again (at least monthly) and also possibly expand our group to include a few more people. One thing I’ve noticed about the great success stories coming from the Board Game Designers Guild of Utah and Game Artisans of Canada is how large their groups are, which makes perfect sense from a standpoint of brainstorming, feedback, playtesting, and other human resource factors.

I think since we started taking this design thing seriously (what, 8 or 9 years now? wow, time flies) we’ve been pretty much just meeting as friends. I don’t think we’re worried about idea theft or anything like that (that’s pretty much considered a myth by “experienced” hobbyists), but I think it’s more that we enjoy our meetings as a social get together among friends, which happens to have as its topic or purpose — game design. This possible growth in our group is probably as much to do with having a couple viable candidates (people we like AND that are interested in game design) as it is with the desire to improve the quality of our meetings, heh.

In other news, I sort of suddenly came up with a new idea for Biomedica that I want to try out, so I’m pretty stoked to revisit that design after such a long hiatus from it. I also have an idea for a deckbuilding game that I want to work on, both for fun and as something to specifically pitch to AEG. I plan to work it up for AEG but with a retheme in the back of my mind if they aren’t interested. I like DBGs quite a bit, so naturally my designer’s eye keeps turning to them. I think there is still more room for them in the “deckbuilding is still the primary mechanic” space, but I also believe that there is a lot of untapped potential in the “deckbuilding is just a mechanic” space. Martin Wallace’s upcoming A Few Acres of Snow is in the latter camp. Set during the French & Indian War in the New World, when a player buys a card (requests reinforcements from Europe, for example) it goes into his discard pile and isn’t played until it makes its way into the player’s hand — which Wallace uses to represent the lengthy delays between when the forces in the colonies requested something and when it actually arrived. Meanwhile, the rest of the game is a Wallacian (is that such a word? heh) wargame between British and French forces.

Let’s see if we actually get a meeting done in the next month!

We playtested my TTR map entry last week. It was playable, but had a few shortcomings. The biggest of which was that there were too many chokepoints. SiddGames was effectively cut off from the top part of the map due to Vampyre and I quickly seizing key nodes in the middle of the board. SiddGames then had trouble selecting new route cards because they all had to traverse the north/south line we’d created.

I’m looking at the map now to try and alleviate this. I’ve noticed that I have too many nodes with only two route connections to them (basically an in and and out). These are all in the middle of the map, so this is making the problem worse. There is room to add new routes, so my next map iteration will take those into account.

My new mechanic seemed to work out quite well. It didn’t directly impact any of us, but it definitely affected some of the decisions we made as to where to place trains. It came up four times in our game which seems OK. I was a little afraid it would never trigger.

Next step is playtesting the revised map sometime soon. I’ll be sending off my entry form by the end of this week.

I’ve decided to enter the TTR map design contest after playing SiddGames’ map last week. I originally didn’t have much interest in the contest, since I didn’t want to just design a map. But after thinking about it and finding a pretty interesting theme, I’m jumping in. I’m adding a few simple new rules which match the theme, and I’m now pretty excited.

I have to say, designing the map is much tougher than I originally thought. I spent approx. 7 hours on Sunday building the first pass at a map, with most of that time being spent researching the real world locations of the map nodes. Very time consuming but it’s neat to see the routes begin to take shape.

All I need to do now is to add the double routes to the map, and finalize the coloring of the routes. I also need to come up with the tickets before playtesting sometime this week. Hopefully what I see in my head will jive with what I put on paper.

It’s been six+ months since our last posts. Mostly general malaise on my part. I’ve worked on a few projects, sent off a few prototypes, and have been writing notes on a variety of game idea subjects. Unfortunately, it hasn’t been very focused. I’ve been jumping between games and mechanics without really progressing on any.

Well, it’s a new year and I’m declaring my intention to start moving the ball forward. I’m going to focus on polishing up the five or six active designs I have, as well as moving a few ideas into a state that will allow them to be the next generation.

I’m also going to update the blog more often, and devote one lunch a week to playtesting with SiddGames. Those two alone have kept me on track in the past.