Diary #40 – Debris

This photo shows the outcome of five years’ gaming and designing. It’s a bit of a mess: those chocolate boxes and biscuit tins contain prototypes, components and Lego, but I couldn’t tell you which is which. My various designs are in a similar state of disarray. Test of Time was rejected from the UK Games…

Diary #39 – The Giraffe, the Pelly and Me

The title of today’s diary entry comes from a book of the same name (publisher: Penguin, 1985) by Roald Dahl and Quentin Blake. It tells the story of a boy who moves to a new town and meets a giraffe, a pelican and a monkey who work as window cleaners. In this analogy I am…

Diary #38 – How’s My Island?

My recent adventures left me with a huge to-do list: everything from fundamental card design to promotional material needed tweaking. I despaired of ever knowing where to start, until a couple of Gweeples came to my rescue. David and Pushpendra were keen to playtest the game a second time; this necessitated updates to the cards…

Diary #37 – Pressure Point

It’s interesting how pressure can be motivating: virtual games lead us to download new software, conventions to refine prototypes and competitions to celebrate and share our work. I’ve just flirted with the third of these and the result has been some useful insights into the industry. Of the 124 entries into the Board Game Design Challenge…

Diary #36 – The Promised Land

In my last diary entry I hoped that the gaming community would migrate online. I didn’t realise that some were already there: they have led the rest of us to new lands, as Moses once did, and we owe them our thanks. One such person is Simon Milburn (Alley Cat Games, Dranda Games), who has…

Diary #35 – The Silver Lining

“We could do with a virus day,” I joked at work a few weeks ago, “We haven’t had any snow, and it’d be nice to have a day off.” Be careful what you wish for. The past week has been dominated by a gathering cloud of uncertainty. When it finally broke, it flooded us all…

Diary #34 – Into the Woods

Today we’re going to talk about playtesting: a process which, for designers, is like being lost in a dark and scary wood. You can only find the exit and finish your game with the guidance of your playtesters. Between them, your playtesters know of many different paths to many different exits, so a single project…

Diary #33 – Protospiel

A convention for designers and playtesters: it may sound like the work of the Birmingham Game Designers, but the UK’s first Protospiel was actually the brain child of Chris Kingsnorth. As dawn broke on a cold November morning I hopped in car with the Dranda Boys and sped off to Nottingham’s Hilton Hotel (interiors the image of…

The Mystery Box Game Jam

Diary #32 – Voices

A year ago I decided to temporarily shelve Master of Olympus and use its best bits to create Dawn of Gnome. This, I reasoned, would be a good business move: Gnome is more accessible and, therefore, more likely to sell. But a scary thing happened the other day: I realised I could shelve Gnome, extract its best bits and make something…