We recently went on a vacation in the West Virginia mountains for some white-water rafting, horseback riding, paintball, and a zip line canopy tour. (ACE Adventures, if you're interested.) In the absence of internet and video games, we anticipated the need for some quality family downtime in the cabin. So of course that means boardgames!
Last time we went, three years ago, we brought Uno and Guillotine, both of which were successful choices. This time we wanted more options without having to bring the entire game closet. So we put together a packing list of games that most of us like. Everybody got to pick at least one game. We wanted to have at least three options each for two, three, four, or five players. At least three of the games had to be accessible to the youngest of us (ten years old). We were mindful of space limitations, but we didn't necessarily cramp our style if there was something we really wanted to bring. Here's the list we came up with:
This turned out to be a great list for several reasons, not the least of which is nearly all the games fit in a small tote bag. (At one point I had 7 Wonders on the list, but the box is a bit bulky, and we already had plenty of options.) The nice thing about this selection of games is that it has variety, nobody has to play if they don't want to, but we can always find options for any subset of the five of us.
So what did we actually play? Well, Car-Go Othello got a lot of action during the six-hour drive to West Virginia. The brilliance in the design of this game is that there are no separate parts. The board (a six-by-six simplification of the eight-by-eight original Othello) has an integrated rotating piece for each space on the board. Each space can be rotated to show a green blank, a white piece, or a black piece. The game can be passed back and forth without risk of something falling on the floor of the car and getting lost under the seat (as happened with Travel Scrabble).
Whirlpool randomizer from
Uno H2O Splash
In the hot tub at our cabin, Uno H2O Splash got a lot of action. Here is another clever production idea to solve the problem of a challenging game-playing venue. The cards are clear plastic, printed in such a way that one side shows only the card face, the other only the card back. The game plays like the familiar Uno with a water-themed twist: Certain cards have a "splash" icon that, when played, require the next player to take a spin on the "whirlpool," a device rather like a small "Magic 8-ball" with an eight-sided die inside to yield a random outcome that the player must perform.
Sample page from Ace of Aces
Another brilliant game design that got some action was the old classic World War I dogfight game Ace of Aces. This game requires neither board nor cards but is played with just a pair of books through which players flip from one cockpit view to another as they try to outmaneuver one another and get into firing position to inflict damage on each other's aircraft. While I was in the Navy, I played this game many times with my chief engineer because it was so well suited to the tight confines of a submarine wardroom. My sons each successfully chased me out of the skies, but in both cases I was able to escape with my badly damaged plane before being shot down.
We did play a few conventional games during our down-time in the cabin. Incan Gold played out to an exciting finish, when our ten-year-old left the ruins with the artifact and the lead on the final mission, forcing the rest of us to play out the round until scared away by monsters and leaving him with the win. Our Pirateer session saw a crazy round in which every player touched the treasure at least once before our ten-year-old stole the treasure on a perfect snake-eyes die roll and brought it home to his harbor just a few turns later. My wife beat my 18-year-old son and me in Black Jack (using cards from Chicago Cribbage and money from Incan Gold) when she kept betting all her money to get out of the game but kept winning hand after hand. My wife just destroyed me in a two-player session of Citadels, which is nevertheless still my favorite game right now.
And, oh yes, we were in the mountains of West Virginia, so we did plenty of white-water rafting, horseback riding, paintball, and zip-line canopy touring during the gaps between boardgames.
Wednesday my publisher's shipment of Trains Planes and Automobiles arrived. I could not have been more happy to have a production version of my game design in my hands, complete with professional art by Sean Cooke.
Trains Planes and Automobiles is a family game for two to six players, age eight and up, who play as news correspondents attempting to race each other to cover the most stories. The game is set in mid-twentieth century North America, when airlines connected the largest cities, and newly built interstates allowed convenient long-distance travel by car, while trains still served as the workhorses of American transportation. The board renders a map of most of North America in an old-fashioned post-card style, with Alaska and Hawaii as insets. Faintly rendered hexagons divide the board into 100-mile-wide spaces for movement.
Assignment card
The map includes 56 Canadian, American, Mexican, and Carribean cities (including Havana, accessible to the American traveler in the years prior to the Cuban Revolution). Of the cities on the map, approximately a third have airports for travel by plane, about two-thirds are connected by railroads for travel by train, and the remainder can be reached only by automobile. A number of island cities can only be reached by plane.
Travel card
The game includes a deck of 57 "Assignment" cards, one for each city on the map. The winner of the game is the first player to complete seven Assignments by traveling to assigned cities and claiming the corresponding Assignment Cards. The game also includes a deck of "Travel" cards that govern movement on the board - by plane (the fastest means, but only between cities that have airports), by train (only along rail lines), or by automobile (anywhere on the mainland, but the slowest method). The Travel deck also includes ways to slow opponents down (Bad Weather, Train Delays, and Car Breakdowns) as well as bonus abilities for faster travel.
I have to say that I am really pleased with the feel of the game that Sean Cooke created in the art for this game. It has a nostalgic atmosphere, with Travel cards showing paper plane tickets and folded road maps. Assignment cards depict push-pins on destination cities (a subtle nod to a certain well-known earth map computer application).
That evening my family sat around the dining room table and played my game with a real production copy for the first time. They had participated in a number of playtests with early home-made prototypes, but it became a whole new experience to enjoy the game as a professionally made, artistically finished product. My wife jumped to an early head start as she completed three assignments in her first three turns. The kids of course ganged up on Mom to keep her from running away with the lead, but in the end it was Dad the Designer that won the maiden session of Trains Planes and Automobiles.
Both my sons (ten and 15 years old) said several times that they really had fun playing the game. I think the gameplay is a nice balance of hand management, racing for goals while disrupting your opponent, and a little card luck as well. There's no run-away leader, as there are some balancing mechanisms for trailing players to take action to stay in the game. All in all, I have to say that I am pleased at how much fun TPA turned out to be, and the kids think so to. I think this can be a real "family game night" hit.
Worthington Games has published TPA under their new Blue Square label. The marketing campaign is in work, so the game is not yet available online as the outlets for purchase are still being developed. They offered TPA for sale for the first time at Origins Game Fair and will be selling it at the Boardgame Players Association's World Boardgaming Championships the first weekend in August.
I plan to demonstrate Trains Planes and Automobiles in the Juniors Room at WBC starting Thursday 4 August.
Well, it sneaked into the marketplace with little fanfare, but Worthington Games released my game Trains Planes and Automobiles under their new Blue Square label at Origins Game Fair last weekend. It is not yet available from them online as they work out their marketing strategy. More to follow.
My publisher tells me that they are awaiting delivery of the mapboards, the last component to assemble my Eagerly Awaited Game. I haven't heard a peep about marketing other than the intent to release the game at the Origins Game Fair if they get the boards in time. They don't want to kick off the website until they know they're ready to deliver, so we'll see what the actual release date is. Once it's out, I intend to make sure everybody knows about it!
While at PrezCon, I had the opportunity to meet with my publisher and hammer out the final details of the rules to my game. We nailed down some of the final wording, and in so doing I caught a mistake I had made in handling a case where a player's piece lands on another player. We were able to resolve that at the eleventh hour, so I believe the rules should be ready to go to press.
The only outstanding decision they have at this point is to choose between two manufacturing options for the board. They are very interested in making the right quality decision consistent with the target price point. The intent is to go to the printers in time for an April release.
Hey, I just got a note from my publisher with a first cut on the box art for the "eagerly anticipated game." They've got a good artist, and he's done a great job capturing the flavor of the game. The company has also created a new trademark, apparently for their family game line, to distinguish those titles from their traditional wargaming base. So it's all very exciting to see come together.
It's a little intimidating to think about how important box art is to the sales of a game, but I guess that's a fact of the marketplace. For my part, I'd like to think the outside of a game box doesn't drive my purchase decision. To me, the most important factor in deciding whether to buy a game is whether I've played it before. Second is whether someone has recommended it. Third is seeing it demonstrated, as at a convention, for example. Fourth is whether I recognize the designer or publisher and trust that I can buy something "untried" just because of their reputation. Seldom will I buy a game based entirely on the box, but I have done it before, and with some success (as Can't Stop) as well as with some disappointment (as Clue: Secrets and Spies). Conversely, I've seen some games I would never put money down for, just because the outside was so poorly done.
I'm curious to know how many people there are who will buy a game just based on what's on the outside of the box, and what they look for. I also wonder how big a company has to be to spend time, money, and effort on real research to analyze customer reactions to box art and appearances.
A funny thing just occurred to me: All else being equal, I think I'd be willing to pay more for a game if it felt heavy when I picked it up. That sounds dumb, but it's important to recognize one's own human foibles, and that's one of mine. I specifically recall a conversation at HistoriCon with the president of one wargame company in particular. They have some excellent naval wargames, but as we discussed the latest release and why it was priced the way it was, I casually reached down and flicked the corner of the mapsheet with my thumb. The map was essentially a glossy poster paper mapsheet, not hard-mounted. Mind you, the graphics were terrific, and the reputation for the series of games is excellent, but to me, if I'm going to pay a lot, it has to weigh a lot. That's dumb, but it's true.
Something to think about if I ever get into the production end of the business.
My developer says they have everything they need from me, for now at least. They're working on a rules re-write based on some changes we discussed, so I look forward to seeing how they turn out.
So now it's time to work on another design in earnest. I have two ideas on opposite ends of the complexity spectrum - a relatively simple card game based on submarine combat in the Cold War, and an idea for interplanetary commodities trading that gets more complex every time I think about it. I'll probably knock out the card game first while I ruminate on the commodities game in the back of my mind.
I just heard from my developers, who are working on "PDO's Eagerly Awaited Game." They really like the overall design. There are a few changes they want to make to some rules to clean it up a little and simplify some things. Sure enough, they'd pretty much zeroed in on the one or two weak areas that I wasn't altogether crazy about myself.
I had invented a pretty convoluted rule for what to do when your piece lands on another player's piece, and writing it all out ended up taking up maybe a quarter or a third of the whole rulebook. Well, that just doesn't make sense for a rule that's supposed to handle a contingency case. So we're going to fix that.
I also have a few immunity cards in the original prototype that we think might just be too powerful. I'd really hate to put out a game, only to have it end up that "whoever gets card x usually ends up winning." Who would want to play that twice? So we're kicking around some ideas to mitigate the power of those cards while keeping the intended effect of having them in the deck.
I've been thinking a lot lately about what makes a game a success. I have a few thoughts for tomorrow on what makes a game a failure.
Meanwhile, may your game closet be full of successes, and your game room full of friends to play them...
Yesterday my publisher sent me the game board currently under development, and I have to say, I really like the artwork. It's a great-looking map. We had agreed on a vague mid-20th-century setting for the time period of the game, and the board captures that essence very nicely. They made a few adjustments and added a few features that enhance but don't substantively modify the structure of the game, and I think the result is going to be fun to play.
There is something exciting about the introduction of someone else's creativity into one's own original design. I had originally some pre-conceived ideas on how things would look and feel, but once I'd turned over the prototype drawings to the developer, I really didn't know what to expect (and I was a little afraid to find out). But when I looked at this new map, I found that this game had taken on a new character, a whole new dimension in its style and flavor - all the product of someone else's talent, someone who perhaps had never imagined the game I'd conceived until they'd seen my draft. It's a lesson, I suppose, in collaborative creativity.
My friends are good sports. They're the kind of people who are willing to spend an afternoon playing a game that nobody else has ever played before, a game that may or may not be any fun. A game made of marker-scrawled butcher paper, cheap pawns, and misaligned printed cards with obscure, tiny instructions on them. A game where the rules change over the course of the afternoon depending on how well I remember the instructions I re-wrote several times the night before.
I have really good friends. They're the kind of people who can spend a couple of hours stumbling around my hand-drawn map in a confused effort to make sense of how to win a game whose fundamental flaws became evident only thirty minutes after the first card draw. The kind of people who don't say, "will this game ever end?" Friends who can make constructive criticism sound excited, supportive, and ready to buy, while I'm ready to go back to the drawing board.
Although I've designed many games in the privacy of my own little world, only two have seen the light of day outside my own family. One of those quietly sits on a shelf, politely declined by one publisher, a game that just doesn't seem ready for prime time yet, a game that I like to think is in hibernation.
My second game is my pleasant surprise. Demonstrated to the owners of a game company during PrezCon in Charlottesville, Virginia earlier this year, it drew the perfect comment during a play-through: "Hey, this game is fun!" Before the afternoon was out, we had a handshake agreement to produce the game. The last of the updates went out to them over Labor Day, and they expressed their intent to get it to the printers by October. I'll pass along the details once the company formally announces the release. For now, call it "Paul D. Owen's Eagerly Awaited Game."
