Tabletop Mentorship Stories

 As I find myself doing more and more playtesting, making smaller and smaller changes, and feeling just about ready to cross the pitch-ready finish line, I wanted to take reflect on the design process that has taken place over the past three years in hopes that someone finds something about it useful/relatable. Here we go! *Quick note: This is a continuation of my first post, "Homophobia Brought Me Here". You can read that first if you want some more context around my the design choices. -Design Pillars- When I decided I wanted to design a new game, I went in with some parameters to help guide my choices. Mechanical • Gameplay and rules should be relatively simple and accessible to a wide audience, while still providing a level of decision making that is engaging and challenging.  • Setup and play time should be relatively short (~30min), where several playthroughs are possible without inducing player exhaustion. • Gameplay should utilizing mechanics that eliminate individual...

Shiny things. They’re the bane of my creativity. Those new ideas that seem like precious unique flakes of snow that you must give your attention to before they melt away. This week I had an ambitious goal – to tear apart a key aspect of The Queen Must Die that had its’ carefully engineered mechanics throughout other systems of the game and would refuse to be extricated without a critical breakdown. And then to come up with a leaner version that held on to as much richness as possible while being fast (hopefully play could be much more rapid) and less prone to analysis paralysis. It was going to be a lot of manual overhead, and apart from a few parameters and sub-goals I had basically no idea where to embark. And then things ran away on me. Badly. I try to leave a few evenings a week to hanging out with my wife. More often than not we just watch TV, and that is good. It shuts down my mind for a few hours and I focus on other things than “What is the expectation value of these custo...