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...

Semi-Technical discussion ahead. A few people that have seen the game have suggested I try to simulate lots of play tests to make sure nothing breaks in the game. I'd heard about Monte Carlo simulations, but did not know how to make one. Searching online for examples didn't show me much in the way of examples either. So, I decided to brute force it using Excel and macros. I think it turned out pretty well, and wanted to share it with everyone in case others can use it too. Below is a description of how the tool works: 1st, a quick description of the game I'm modeling. Abstractly, it's a card shedding game, like Crazy 8's, or Uno. A game ends when one player plays the last card in their hand.  Cards can be identified by a color (Coded SF, R, H, M as the first character(s) in the description) or a suite (Coded S, C, M, A as the next characters in the description), and finally a number. An example of one of my cards is coded SFC3, or RM2. There are also starting cards ...

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...

I had my first meeting with my mentor Aaron (from Boards Alive ) and as I mentioned in my last blog post, I really wanted to focus on three things: Improving the sound and content of my podcast, improving my reach, and reducing my editing time.  With Aaron's help, I've already started to work on all three of these!   Let's start with reducing my editing time, which has become my #1 priority.  This was taking up much of my free time, as I was averaging between 8-12 hours to do as single hour long episode.  With a full time job, this was cutting into my time to do other things (not to mention playing games to generate content for the channel).  Aaron gave me the advice to "let it go".  I was deleting every single "um", "but yeah", and other crutch words that I frequently use.  Part of the process is trying to not say them so much, but the other part is to let a couple slide occasionally, which actually helps the podcast sound more organic and not...

 When I signed up for this mentorship, I was surprised that they included content creators. It's daunting sometimes to see the level of work, creativity, and iterative process that goes into designing and creating a game. What's become more and more apparent over the last couple of months, however, is that good good content creators have a really big role to play in the development cycle. Really? You think so? When you take the bigger players out of the picture, the massive studios and publishers, there's a real dogfight going on for the space that's left, and all those smaller voices can easily drown one another out. Through groups and channels that I'm now a member of, I see how many requests for coverage go out to reviewers and content creators. A good review on a channel with thousands, or even just hundreds of viewers gives these folks a voice. It's made me realise there are two really important jobs that any reviewer or content creator (like me) should be ...

I mentioned in a previous post that I had largely left The Queen Must Die untouched for the better part of a year. In that time I did push some imaginary cardboard around in my head as I lay in bed on a great number of nights, but both the IRL version and the TTS version remained untouched. This was all due to my early Covid crisis responsibilities and then, essentially, momentum. It was actually really useful time. I was – and kinda knew it at the time – overly connected to too much of the game. I desperately needed to trim. “Kill your darlings” they say. This is also a well-worn philosophy in film. It seems however that the psychology between taking a beloved scene out of a screenplay or an edit is very different from taking a favourite mechanic or phase out of a game. A lot of this difference is simply practical. Hit ‘delete’ and read or play the screenplay or film over and see what damage you’ve done and what has benefitted – apply fixes as necessary (which may actually be ‘just...

I will never forget my first, and only, GenCon experience. After years of playing the modern 'classics' with a small group of friends, refining my Kickstarter preferences, and working through the overwhelming regret of missing out on the 50th anniversary, to simply say I was excited for GenCon 2018 would be an egregious understatement. Even the anxiety of traveling with new friends to a new city, to attended the largest board game convention in the country, was not enough the dissuade me. But despite all the incredible experiences I had during those four days, there was one, specific instance that challenged me to try my hand at game design and ultimately lead me here. I was wandering the main hall with my best friend, demoing games, when we came across a cooperative, ninja-themed board game that peaked our interest. The woman at the booth was very friendly and walked us through a scenario where we attempted to assassinate a crime boss (you know, as ninja's do). Then at the...