As the first post of my blog, I’d dive right into the thick of it and talk about my first game and the process of its creation!
- Knowing what main mechanics we want to feature (e.g., worker placement, dice rolling, auction, etc.) [quasi complete list: link]
- Knowing the theme/world/genre of the game (e.g., adventure, zombie, party game, etc.)
- Knowing our goal with it, what we want to achieve with the players (casual entertainment, serious strategy game, conversation starter game, developmental game, etc.)
In the case of my game, I started with the first approach. In December 2023, when I was already deep into the board game development course I had enrolled in (mentioned in the About section of the website), inspiration struck during a brainstorming session. As homework, we were assigned to play as many board games as possible to get acquainted with various mechanics and find inspiration. This led me to play Azul, a popular tile placement abstract game with an open drafting mechanic, online on BGA. I had encountered games with similar mechanics before, but Azul provided the main inspiration. I like that all information is openly available to players and that if we plan more cleverly and more in advance than our opponent, we can win. The random distribution of tiles adds a sufficient amount of luck, which I believe is necessary because otherwise, it would become a “pure skill” game, which is usually only enjoyable when players have very similar skill levels. Another main mechanism this great game uses is set collection. The order in which we fill our rows with tiles, and striving to collect them in adjacent columns or rows, allows us to score more points.
Thus, the first inspiration for my game came from playing Azul: I also wanted to create an open drafting game where set collection is a main mechanic. However, it was very important to me that my game should not be a cheap copy of other games, which is a serious challenge nowadays: According to boardgamegeek.com, there are currently 125,000 different published board games circulating worldwide. So, if someone decides to design a board game today, it’s inevitable that they create a game similar to others’. During that brainstorming course session, the idea came to me that the set collection could also work by vertically stacking the elements we drafted, and we score victory points depending on the order in which the components appear in our built columns. Additionally, once we place an element, that order shouldn’t be allowed to be changed. Almost the moment this idea occurred to me, the inspiration struck that this game could work very well with a Native American theme, where tribes compete each other while building totem poles. It was also important to me not to make a too complicated, long-duration game for my first attempt, as I didn’t want to bite off more than I could chew right from the start, and my goal was to make the game enjoyable for the average person (non-gamer) since it’s fast-paced and easy to learn. Obviously, it’s quite optimistic and ambitious to approach game making in this way (target audience: average person/mass market) and somewhat contradicts the mentioned “biting off more than you can chew” thing, but I mostly meant about the game designer aspect there.
In the following weeks, I started developing the idea further and tried to produce a working prototype as soon as possible so that we could test it with the family during the holidays. During one of the course workshops, I was given the advice to forget about miniature totem animal figures because of cost-efficiency; the game could work just as well as a card game, additionally prototyping is much easier if you only need to print cards. My old common cards from my “Hatalom Kártyái” (a Hungarian TCG, similar to Magic) collection, which were essentially worthless, came in handy, as well as my leftover card sleeves . I calculated how many HKK card-sized cards could fit on an A4 sheet, and with the help of my fantastic Paint skills acquired over 20 years, I designed and printed out the 115 cards needed for the totem game(10 types of cards, different rarities). I wouldn’t delve too deep into the details about the totem game, maybe in a later blog post, but the 3 test matches played with my wife during the Christmas season revealed that the game was okay, but not quite right. The main problem was that although the vertical, stackable set collection could fit the totem theme, yet somehow it didn’t quite match. Even during the research phase before prototyping, I realized that these columns were not created for the purpose of competition by the tribes, but instead mostly out of respect for their ancestors, and for the spiritual powers attributed to certain animals. The order and size (which my game also operated with) of the animals depicted were often not relevant; what mattered basically was that the carving of the animal appeared on the pole. Additionally, my goal of creating an entertaining game with humor for casual (non-gamer) players was not fulfilled. My wife also observed that this theme did not reflect who I am, my personality, and indeed, the Native American theme was too serious and not particularly entertaining. I mulled over these issues multiple times and concluded that the only option was to re-theme the entire project, although I did not want to let go of the mechanics, as they still seemed interesting during the tests.
Then, my wife and I started a joint brainstorming process: In which worlds is vertical construction customary, and among these, which ones can incorporate a bit of humor? I also involved ChatGPT in this creative process. Let me share a few themes that came up:
- Skyscraper construction
- Wizard tower building
- Decorating the horns of party-ready unicorns (no joke)
- Constructing underground mining systems
- Building on Mars/futuristic city planning
- Making hamburgers/cakes
Out of the listed worlds, the culinary themes are closest to me, as cooking has been one of my favorite hobbies for about 15 years, although I tried to imagine and adapt the game to the other themes as well. Eventually, it was clear that this was the path to continue on. Moreover, I believe that most people like to eat and can easily relate to this world. I quickly dismissed the idea of cake-making because baking is not really my thing, and my problem with making hamburgers was the lack of variation in ingredients, as 80% of hamburgers start with bun-beef-cheese. Then, the divine spark came: we could also make SANDWICHES in the game, which are also built vertically and have a thousand different variations, with a huge selection of ingredients, and the theme itself is sufficiently light, entertaining, and not too difficult to inject with humorous elements.
After the holidays, I immediately delved into designing the project. Although I wasn’t under time pressure, I had to move relatively quickly because we “needed” to arrive at the end of January course workshop with a relatively complete, presentable game concept and I wanted to fulfill these expectations. Based on my limited experience so far, the best method for initial planning was creating an Excel spreadsheet. I opened my spreadsheet for the Native American project and looked at which elements/mechanics/components I could transfer from there. The totem game essentially looked like this: from a large deck of 115 cards, we laid out face-up, player number*5 cards in the center each round, and the players had to choose 5 cards each from these, taking turns, from which they had to create 5 columns, each 5 cards high over the course of 5 rounds. Players could build more than one column at a time, so after the first round, a player might have 1-1-1-1-1 cards in front of them: the lowest element of each column placed thereby. The second round was always started by the player who had built the highest so far, and since there was a significant advantage to being the starting player of a round, it was worth building high in the previous round, though this was not always optimal, because a column with insufficient synergy among its cards (set collection) was worth fewer points. Thus, a column’s height was often depended on how well we could combine the cards we took out during the round. The card taken from the center had to be placed in front of us immediately, not saved for later, thereby making optimal set collection a bit more challenging.
From these elements, what I wanted, and was able to transfer to the sandwich game, was the 5 rounds, the turn-taking drafting, the rule for starting player of a round, the immediate card placement, and naturally, the synergies among the cards. I quickly realized that I had to let go of the idea of drawing the draft-pile cards from one large deck because, in real life, we always have to start a sandwich with some form of bread, and if all the ingredient cards are shuffled into one big deck, we might end up with no bread card in the center, thereby not being able to start building our “columns”, concidering we stick to the immediate card placement rule. We could also end up in a situation where no cheese, meat, or other necessary sandwich ingredients come up, so the obvious solution was to lay out different types of ingredients from separate decks in the center, a specified number from each, thus allowing us the opportunity to create a complete sandwich every round. After some thought and research, I realized that in real life, there are generally 5 main categories of ingredients that go into sandwiches: bread, protein source (meat, eggs, etc.), cheese, vegetables, and sauces/dressings.
After dreaming this up, I needed to figure out how the ingredients in the sandwiches could be interconnected and create synergies. Based on 1.5 decade of cooking experience and some research, I concluded that one of the most important aspects when serving/preparing a dish is the order of preparation and the order in which ingredients are added. Let me give an example from real life: if onion is the last ingredient added to a stew and only cooked for a few minutes, the whole dish will be terrible. The relative position of ingredients to each other is also quite important in sandwiches. Sauces and butter are usually spread directly on the bread so that there’s some in every bite; and to prevent the sandwich from falling apart and to avoid the bread from getting soggy: it’s also relevant where the meat, cheese, and vegetables go. Another thing I consider important when making a great sandwich is that it shouldn’t be too dry, otherwise, it feels like eating sawdust, or so juicy that we can’t even hold it in our hands (e.g., Francesinha). So, I decided that cards should score more points if placed in the correct/optimal position, and there should be deductions if a sandwich’s moisture content isn’t perfect (too dry/too juicy). This solved some of the synergies, but I still felt it wasn’t just enough.
I also had to figure out how many ingredients should be in each ingredient category since there’s a huge variety in sandwiches in this regard. But how to decide which ingredients to include and which not? After some research and using my previous knowledge, I realized that the game should feature some of the “classic,” popular, famous sandwiches, and subsequently, the ingredients found in those would decide which ones will make it into the game. This could also work well from another perspective: new synergies could be created among the cards. If a player makes one of these “famous” sandwiches, they could get extra points. I aimed to list some of the most popular ones, thus choosing sandwiches like the Reuben, Cubano, BLT, Hot Dog, or even buttered toast. It’s no secret that my goal was also to perhaps inspire those not very familiar with this world to delve a bit into the secrets of sandwich making after playing the game. As I wrote down the ingredients in my Excel spreadsheet, I thought that the game would be best if the classic sandwiches shared some ingredients, so that conflicts could arise among players during the game: for example, who takes the cheese needed by every player first? Or, if due to the rarity of some ingredients, so-called “hate drafting” could prevent an opponent from making their high-scoring “famous” sandwich. I spent days on this part in front of Excel and Google before I could dream up the ingredients/combinations to be included in the game. (And these have been changed at least 4 times since then)
What changed from the totem game was that in a round, players don’t take every card flipped in the center because if I had left it that way, the much-desired, high-scoring combination sandwiches would have been too rare, but I didn’t want them to be too easy to make either, so I had to play a lot in Excel regarding the quantity of cards. However, what I liked about the original game was that we never dealt the entire deck in the 5 rounds, so players had to apply some probability calculation and chance evaluation, further adding to the game’s replayability, as it’s rare to have two identical games. So, I applied this here as well. I haven’t mentioned yet, but I definitely wanted the game to be playable by up to 4 people at once, so this number was the main determinant in how many cards would be included eventually. In the end, I calculated that there would be 40 cards in each ingredient category, making the first version of the game consist of 200 cards.
…To be continued… The second part of the post will talk about the first prototype and the lessons learned from the first test games.