The next game

Hexteria has been a rousing success thus far… people who have played it have generally enjoyed it. (Granted, those people are my family and friends, so maybe they’re just being nice.) Although there’s still a lot of work to be done to market and sell it, that’s a process that’s going to take months. In the meantime, I feel like it’s time to start designing my next game.

One of the challenges Hexteria continues to face is a lack of a theme. Although I throw around some medieval terms, at its heart the game is very abstract. Several people have commented on that, but at this point in the development it’s going to be tricky to layer a theme atop it without changing some of the fundamental mechanics. So, as I consider the next game, I feel like a good starting point will be a theme, rather than mechanics. Also, I’d like to make a card game this time. They’re (generally) simpler, and far easier to build, playtest, and publish.

I sat down with Kyra and Pepper today and asked them what theme they’d like to see in a card game. “If you were at a game store looking at a bunch of unknown games on the shelf, what would catch your eye?” They both agreed that dinosaurs would be the bomb. We spent a few minutes brainstorming what a dinosaur card game might look like. Fortunately Kyra just finished a paleontology class at BYU, so she actually knows quite a bit about the subject.

We chatted about mechanics and agreed this will need to be a “simple” game… one that takes a few minutes to explain, and maybe 20 minutes to play. It won’t have nearly the complexity of Hexteria, but that’s intentional.

As for the artwork, I decided to see how well I can draw dinosaurs. Here’s my first effort.

Yes, I know triceratops wasn’t blue. But hey, not bad for five minutes of sketching, right? (Kyra insisted on the smile… otherwise “she looks all grumpy”).

Stay tuned for updates on whatever the heck this turns out to be…