The long and short of it
As I alluded to in my inaugural post, the first few blogs I’m likely to write are going to be summaries of where I’ve gotten to so far on the various project topics. So, as it’s been what I’ve been mostly doing this week, my first progress info-dump is going to be on board game ideas.
Gaming credentials
I have been an avid board gamer since I was young, playing the likes of Key To The Kingdom, Talisman and Squatter before being introduced to and falling in love with, euro-style games at university. My shelves hold well over a hundred board games and, as well as having a weekly gaming group, I organise a couple of board game ‘retreats’ a year for my friends, where we meet up at a rental property for a weekend of socialising and gaming.
I enjoy nearly all card and board game genres, and in particular I love exploring games with unusual or well-implemented mechanics. The growth of euro-style games means getting to see new mechanics getting innovated and then adopted and further adapted by other designers, which fascinates me.
Notes to self…
I don’t feel it’s surprising that I find myself dreaming up interesting games that I want to make and play, and mechanics I want to tinker with myself. When inspiration hit or I found myself with spare time I’d sketch down ideas on notepads or whatever scrap paper came to hand, and over time they formed large piles on my desk. Eventually I stuffed them into a folder and there they have stayed.
So my first priority, ideally, is to type up all of those notes so that I can keep track of them all. I’m enjoying using Obsidian vaults to keep notes on the table-top game I’m running and various other design notes, so for now that’s my go-to digital medium.
Obsidian has the advantage of allowing me to add hyperlinked words, a bit like a wiki, and then display all the entries that contain that link. I’m hoping this will help me figure out which of these reams of game notes contain similar enough themes and mechanics that I can potentially merge a few.
Shooting for the stars
The board game idea that I most frequently return to is heavily inspired by a 1994 Sierra Entertainment game called Outpost that used hard science from NASA to provide the experience of provisioning, launching and then building a colony in a distant star system. The release was buggy and incomplete and so tanked (although it has an avid fan community), but had some amazing ideas and entirely captured the imagination of this 14yr old geek at the time.
So, my actual first priority is to sift through all the scrappy notes scribbled on A5 notepads over the last decade and transfer them to a dedicated A4 pad. Once I’ve done that I can work through and consolidate all the mechanical variations I’ve written down over the years and make some actual hard decisions about which design choices I actually want to concentrate on developing into a workable prototype.
The first of many
There’s plenty to be getting on with, and even if board games were my only focus it could quite easily keep me occupied full-time for quite a while. Alas, once my notes are written up they may have to be put back on the shelf for a while so I can deal with other things.
In any case, this concludes my first of my ‘where I am with my projects’ posts. Hopefully the next game design post I get around to will be some more detail on the Outpost game and maybe some discussion of my thought processes as I go through the various mechanics I could use.
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