Dan Manfredini

Game Rejection

Oct 302007

I found out yesterday that Travelogue has failed to move forward in the Lucca Best Unpublished Game contest. It stalled out in the top 10. It is my understanding, though, that it will be available for all to play at the Lucca Comics & Games convention. That is assuming they translated my rules into Italian or someone is willing to teach it. In any case, I look forward to reading any feedback I receive about the game from the contest judges. I’ll have to make a nice copy again for my own collection, but I think I’m going to wait until I get the official “death certificate” email from them.

You have to have a thick skin to take the rejection you get as a fledgling game designer. Once you make it past phase 1 (idea, design, playtest, development), you’ve got something that people tell you is a good game. Rest assured, they told you it sucked at some point along the way, but since then you’ve made your game into something they really like now. You’ve got the prototype and the rules as polished as you can. You’re happy with it, and you’re ready to push it out into the real world. Yay!

You then move on to phase 2, where you send it out to a contest or a publisher. Get ready, get set, wait! It is best to just forget about your game for this period because there is little you can do to move the process forward (besides nagging to the publisher). As the months progress, you may wonder about what kind of adventures your game is encountering, and if it is making friends. The big day will come when you’ll find out that your game doesn’t suit their needs. It is very anti-climactic. It just ends after all that wait. Your little game went out into the big world, only to be squashed like roadkill. Sometimes they’ll send it back in a box, most of the time they won’t. Maybe the game deserved it. Maybe it didn’t. Poor game.

On the bright side, a game is only an idea. You can make another copy! You can send it out again, but this time better prepared. Hopefully someday it will make it to the published world, where you can move on to phase 3, where you can feel a new type of rejection: apathy or even disdain from the gaming public. Every game has its lovers and its haters. Some games even fade into the background after its initial hype. It is to be expected.

Anyways, I don’t want this to be a depressing post because I’m feeling fine. It’s a repetitive process, and, if anything, I’m feeling a bit exhausted. Its a lot of work for little feedback. I’ve got all the time in the world to continue this process, and I intend to do so. So it looks like back to the drawing board.

Submitted for your Approval

Oct 092007

Good news everyone!

You may remember that I entered my prototype card game Travelogue into the Lucca Games competition. Well, I just found out that my game is one of the finalists. It is in the top ten, which turns out to be the top 25% because there were around 40 entries. The top three will be announced on November 1st along with the first place winner. The winner will be published and will receive free copies of his game. I am very excited about this! To me, what this means is that my game rules were read, understood, and taught to Italians. AND it was good enough to make it to the finals. It is really cool to have my game being played in another country by people I don’t even know.

In other game contest news, I plan on entering Hippodice this year again. I skipped out on it last year because I wasn’t fully prepared, but that won’t stop me this year!  I think I will enter my new war game. I haven’t written the rules down yet, or refined most of the cards, but I want to put something into the contest just so I don’t miss the opportunity this year. There’s nothing better than having a deadline to motivate you!

On Friday night I was able to play a six player game of Salvage. Now, originally, the game was only from two to four players (mostly due to the components I had on hand). Well, after reading the rules to the game, a publisher said he would only look at it if it handled up to six players since that it more marketable. I complied and made more cards, tokens, and card racks. The test went pretty well, and nothing totally fell apart. So with that, I’ll be sending out Salvage next month.

Speaking of sending out prototypes, Monkey Lab is currently en route to England where it will be played and hopefully considered for publication.  Go, Monkey Lab, Go!

One more thing, the Chains of Fenrir rules have finally been posted on boardgamegeek.com. Also, it is now available to purchase here.

Tonight is Design Night

Oct 022007

Every Tuesday we have design night at my place and I usually shoot out an email with some agenda details and a call for who is coming. From now on, I figured I’d post this here on the blog instead so everyone can see what we’ve been up to.

One of the things I’d like to discuss this week is the ad we’re placing on The Dice Tower podcast. We’ve all pitched in and written little blurbs for our games, and hopefully we will attract some interest. In addition to that, Marc has updated the gizmet site with pages for our new games. Exciting times! Speaking of Marc, I saw that he had a playtest of his prototype Rocket Yard on Friday night with some rules tweaks, and I’d like to hear how that went. Hopefully Ian will bring his latest version of his prototype for Galaxy in Flames, a real time space combat card game, and maybe he’ll update us about the production of his game, Taktitka. I’ve got my genericly titled game “War Game” ready again to playtest with some hybrid ideas from the first and second versions. I’m not sure what is on the docket for Drey, Mark, or our newest attendee.

On another subject, I guess I forgot to update my story on my last post about the game I’m publishing. Well, first let me say the game is called Chains of Fenrir (formerly called the bead game). Secondly, to wrap up my story on the bag cinch: it worked out just fine since the stones I bought were too big to fall out if closed properly. That was actually the easy problem to fix. The bigger issue came when my stones arrived in the mail. It turned out that the purple stones and the orange stones were near identical on the table and could only be distinguished if held up to a light. I compare it to how a glass of grape soda and cola are hard to tell apart unless they’re backlit. My solution to this problem was to shop locally for some white stones as a replacement. Unfortunately, it was very difficult to find plain white stones. As luck would have it, one of my friends recently bought a ton of stones, and he happened to have a surplus of white stones. He let me have them, and I have enough for a little over a dozen games. I’ll eventually have to buy more, but at least I have some to start off with. If you’d like to check out the game, the rules should be posted on BoardGameGeek shortly. I’ve got some pics of the components up there too. If you’d like to buy the game, we’ve got it all set up for you to do that here.

Bags under my Eyes

Sep 122007

On Monday, I got a package in the mail with an important component to my game: the bag. Each game will come with a nice soft brown leather bag (actually, I’m not really sure of the material) with a cool authentic texture. They look much better in person than they do in the picture on the seller’s website. I’ll post a picture of it when I get the other components. Everything about them seemed great, except…

Cinching the bag closed still left enough of an opening that contents could fall out! If there’s one thing you want your bag to do, it’s hold things inside securely. My first solution was to tie the drawstrings once, like I did for my prototype’s bag. Unfortunately, the drawstring on the bag was made of a thin silky material and would not stay tied. To be honest, I didn’t think this would be a problem. I am going to wait until I get the other components to check if they will actually fall out. If they still do, I have a solution where I’d replace the drawstrings with a more tie-able material. String is cheap, and I’d rather take the time to replace it than have players lose their components each time they put their game on the shelf.

Now we wait for the other components…

Piecing it Together

Sep 052007

I have decided to publish a game myself. After a couple years of going through the regular channels of submitting games to companies and getting nowhere, I felt that I wanted to change it up a bit. My goal for this project is firstly to get a game out there, and see how the general gaming public reacts to it. My second goal is to learn the process, the costs, and all the other things that publishers handle with as little risk as possible. Finally, and least of all, I’d like to make a small profit to turn around and pour into my next project. The game I am going to produce is small enough that I should be achieve all of these goals.

My first step in the process was to create a nice spreadsheet analyzing the costs. I used google docs for this because it has a handy feature to share file with other users, which is great when I want feedback on something that I’m constantly changing. After making the bare bones spreadsheet, I went shopping on the net for my components. To offset the fact that this is a home brew game, I wanted my components to be more interesting than the off-the-shelf variety. Another consideration I had was that I wanted the pieces to be color-blind friendly. I used this site to convert the images of the components to show me how well they could be distinguished from one another. Hopefully the real components will be similar to the color pictures on the web. I do believe that I found the best pieces for the price, and I am excited to see how they all look when brought together.

I have ordered the components and should be receiving them in a week or so. Until then, we wait.

Hybrid Pawns

Jul 312007

While looking around the net the other day, I came across this site. I’ve been there before, but they added something new. If you scroll down a bit, you can see that they now can make pawns with 40% wood. I wonder if this is catering to the euro game publishers who feel that wood is the proper gaming medium. I’d like to test one of these out to see how woody it actually feels. Somehow I imagine it to have the sturdiness of cheddar.

Italian Gambit

Jun 112007

This morning I went to the post office to mail away my entry to the Lucca Game Contest.

At the counter, the postal worker was pleasantly surprised that I was sending something to Italy. She had me fill out my customs form and proceeded to ask me some questions about the content of the box.

“What’s in the package?”

“A gift,” I panicked and lied.

“You need to be more specific”

“Two games”

“Do you have any playing cards in there?”

“No,” I lied again.

“Italian customs agents have the right to open and inspect your package. If they find any illegal imports, they will confiscate them.”

“Alright.”

Apparently heightened security precautions have limited the sending of playing cards for fear they may be charged with mutant energy and explode.  I wasn’t expecting that at all. I had to lie or else all the hard work I did would be wasted.

It makes me wonder about if the organizers knew about this when they opened up the contest to non-Italians this year. Somebody must have known the customs rules, especially if they are a publisher of games.

I only hope the customs agents have better things to do than confiscate my prototype. The box has the word game three times on the front, so if they have a vendetta against American card game designers they’ll know which box to open.

My Quick Recap of Travelogue

Jun 052007

Things I learned from last week’s meeting, specifically about my new card game Travelogue, which I’ll be sending away to Italy for a game competition:

  • It ran a little long at 45 minutes.
  • It doesn’t scale well in regards to time to play.
  • There is a slow build up of cards in your hand, so a few turns are spent drawing.
  • The Destination card acquiring system is a bit fiddly.
  • The Destination card, while balanced, were a bit too similar.

What I did to fix those problems:

  • I cut the game down to 30 minutes no matter the number of players. Since it is a card game, I changed the end game conditions to this: “If there are no cards in the deck, this is your last turn.” This way the game has more or less the same number of turns which are divided amongst all the players.
  • Mischa suggested that the player be able to draw two cards (instead of one) as a card-obtaining option. At first I didn’t like the idea, but then I thought about it and tried it out. It turns out that if a player just keeps drawing two cards each turn, eventually they will lose them to the hand limit rule and won’t get to score them. So the options are “slow and steady” or “fast and furious” or a bit of both.
  • Drey (our new attendee) suggested something that sparked an idea about the Destination cards. I no longer have a draw pile and discard pile for them. Instead I have three face up piles. The player can discard beneath any pile to draw the top card from that pile. It saves a ton on table real estate and give the players a chance to see what’s coming up without having to physically draw any cards.
  • I spiced up the Destination cards, though not too much. Basically, one group of 6 allows the player to score a set of 5 for 11 points, while the others only allow the player to score a set of 4 for 8 points. However, the ones with 4 are more flexible in other areas. Also, on each card I added on more icon to allow for a bit more flexibility.

Strange Design Space

Apr 042007

Last night’s game design meeting was just Ian and me again. I showed off my early prototype for the Lucca games contest, and Ian showed a galactic empire / abstract tile game. Those both had good starts and need more development.

At the end of the evening, we decided to do some collaborative design. The method for this collaboration was simple. We started with a blank slate. Then I’d declare a rule, and then Ian would declare a rule. We continued until we though we had a game. I started with an easy rule:

  • The winner of the game is the player with the most points.

Then Ian followed with the two part rule:

  • On your turn, you may play a tile or add a glass stone onto a tile.

That gave us a lot of direction. A few more rules went into the rule-set including:

  • Each player had a set of five tiles of their color.
  • At the beginning of the game, pile up four colors of glass stones in the center of the table.

That was all well and good, but the center of the table was also where we were supposed to place our tiles. It was my turn to add a rule, so I declared that we would indeed be placing our tiles amongst randomly arranged beads on the table. At that point both Ian and I knew we were venturing into strange design space. Some other interesting rules were:

  • You can use your turn to move any one stone in a straight line such that it eventually hits another stone and stops. (Although not an official rule, we both made magnetic swooshing and locking noises when the stones were moved and stopped)
  • Tiles must be placed so they are touching two matching colored stones.
  • Scoring occurs three times per game, each when you place your fifth tile.
  • When scoring occurs all beads and tiles used to score are discarded from play.
  • Plus many more…

We went ahead and played this freak of a game. Surprisingly it actually worked pretty well. We both agreed that this was something that we would have never come up with on our own. Even though we didn’t add a theme to it, it felt like some otherworldly planet mining game with processing plants (tiles) and ore (stones). The game was even close at the end. Of course the end never actually officially happened. We forgot to add a rule to determine the end of the game!

Challenge Results

Mar 282007

Well, it looks like I won this challenge by default, even though my game wasn’t really good. The thing was that I had a playable prototype, and Ian only had a partially drawn out concept.

My game is a simulation of stop and go traffic through a series of traffic lights. Ian commented that it looked like an abstract game because I was using colored tiles as cars and a deck of cards with colors and numbers. The basic gameplay is that you choose a color car and then try to position them closest to the next traffic light through card play. It still has rough edges, but it played through to completion with little rule complications.

Ian’s game is about getting passengers in cars to where they need to go throughout the city. The problem is that the cars are controlled by all players and wrecks happen frequently.

This week’s challenge is more of a preparation for a real game competition put on by Lucca Games and Comics. Basically, we’re trying to get a playable prototype card game that is language independent, has less than 110 cards, and contains no other components. Preferably, it would also fit the theme of the contest: Round Trip. This gives me the motivation to get a game finished, polished, and hopefully published!

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