My games are finished.
In the past few years, I’ve designed (and now produced) six different board games. That doesn’t count several aborted attempts– I have four or five games that didn’t make it past the prototype phase, and a handful of others that didn’t really get past the idea phase. It’s been an interesting and creative journey, and it’s stretched me a bit since I’m not naturally a creative person.
My first game was Indio.
Although I made an effort to sell it publicly via Kickstarter, I found that the time and money to do that just wasn’t worth it to me. I don’t design games for commercial success; I do it as a creative outlet. It was a good learning experience, but one I likely won’t repeat. Since that failed attempt to market my game to the world, I’ve just focused on creating the games themselves, and then publishing a single copy of each.
Interestingly, I found my original notes and prototype cards from what became Hexteria and then Indio.
It was a card game based on using the three classic elements (earth, fire, and water) to combine them into materials (metal, clay, and power), and using those materials to build structures (village, city, and factory). I remember it being fairly drab, but the seed of that idea eventually blossomed into the “forging” concept that’s part of Indio. At the time, designing a game felt pretty overwhelming. Yet now, I find myself designing entire games on a single airplane trip!
Anyway, after Indio I created a “spin-off” game that I called Indio: New World. Yeah, I’m not terribly original with titles, although it was originally going to be Terra Hexia. It’s fairly simple but hasn’t proven to be very popular with my game-playing friends.
Following that, I designed Chronium which is a lighthearted time-travel game. Everyone who’s played it says it’s quite good, which is gratifying.
I struck on an interesting scoring idea, and it evolved into Onward, a card game where you work cooperatively as well as competitively. I find it to be really fun, but the reception’s been sort of lukewarm.
At the same time I was designing and testing Onward, I was also working on a completely different game. That one was based on exploring and building a map as a core part of the game, and although the initial theme of expanding into the galaxy was a failure, I pivoted to make a game about exploring the Pacific Ocean. It became Utu.
This one is by far my favorite. I find it to have an exciting mix of “push your luck” as you explore, resource management (which I love), player interaction, and vast replayability. Plus, it was my first foray into AI art, which has been a tremendous boost to my game design efforts.
Finally, there’s Dicee.
Pepper claims this is her favorite game of mine. Another fun facet of this one is the fact that Zack is my co-designer; we worked on it together during Christmas and it didn’t take much to turn those scribbled index cards into a nice printed game.
As I leave for a mission, I’m going to be taking a year-long break from playing deep board games, and a break from the creative endeavor of designing them. It’s satisfying to “wrap up” all these games just before heading out, and I’m excited to return to my hobby sometime next summer.