Kurt R.A. Giambastiani

The holidays are over and my brain is filled with rants—how to mount a meaningful boycott, and the ramifications of foreign policy when performed by amateurs, to name two—but each time I started a post on one of them I stopped myself. I’m pretty sure regular readers don’t want to hear about that—not from me, anyway—so I’m moving on to something completely different.

Over the holiday break, my neighbor and I did a thing.

We made a game.

To be fair, we’ve been talking about this game for nearly a year. Back in February, I broached the idea of making a game, and we sketched out the basics—an amalgam of mechanisms using cards, dice, chits, and other paraphernalia—but over the summer we stalled out as the thing just failed to gel. Then, a couple of weeks ago, my neighbor (who also runs the FlatbreadGarden blog) had a brainwave: a complete overhaul of the project. He flagged me down and, in the middle of the cul-de-sac, we discussed the new idea. It was cleaner and simpler in mechanics, blending old methods with new, and employing only cards. No dice, no meeples, no boards, no chits, no tokens.

For the past two weeks, we’ve been writing the rules, rewriting the rules, and re–rewriting the rules. We’ve mocked up the cards and have been playtesting every second or third day. On my side of the street, I’ve been working on the graphics, while on his side, he’s been working on thematic elements and balancing the power between players and objectives. 

I think it’s fair to say that we’ve been a bit obsessed with the whole thing, but it’s been a blast, and for reasons I would never have guessed.

I’ve played tabletop games all my life, from Parcheesi and Monopoly as a kid, to AD&D as a youth/young adult, to the many titles stacked in our game closets today, but this is the first time I’ve actually tried to create a game from scratch. And, as with many things in life, from the outside it seems a rather simple task: generate a theme, cobble together some rules, and voila. Game.

That’s not how you make a game, though. That’s how you make a bad game, and in the same way that reading bad books taught me what makes good writing, so has playing bad games given me a primer on what works and what doesn’t in game design.

Game design—from my admittedly n00b-ish viewpoint—is a marvelous mashup of creativity, problem solving, logic, and compromise, and the combination of all that has had my brain screaming at Mach two as we balance strategy vs luck, player capacity vs victory conditions, all while thinking of how to imbue every aspect with the theme and end up with a game that you can learn quickly and play in about an hour. Most fascinating (to my standoffish, dispassionate-observer mind) has been how playtesting brought to light aspects of the game we didn’t foresee, like how strategies evolve and how, even though there’s a cooperative aspect to the game, the competitive streak is stronger, which forced us to recognize and adapt to that reality (read as “more rewrites”).

I can’t say where we’re going with this. It may end up as something we make only for friends and family, like a lasagna. We may take it to Kickstarter, or try to market it to an established studio. We may discover, as we roll it out to beta testers, that while it’s definitely functional, it’s not much fun for those who have not been involved in its creation. Many possibilities exist, none of which concern us at this point.

For the time being, we’re just enjoying the creative process, and for me, that’s critical. As I participate in my many avocations—from writing to gardening to cooking to watch repair, and now to game design—if I’m not enjoying the process, what’s the point?

On the other hand, if I make this my retirement career, I don’t think I’ll complain too loudly.

Onward.

k