Map Time

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.

I can't wait to see the cards.   

I can't wait to show off this game.

Don't get me started...

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."

My good friends await eagerly with me.