We’ve been thinking about how many upcoming board games there are and wondered if one of them could be ours. Obviously just trying to publish a YA fantasy novel isn’t enough for us!
Board games have been going through a bit of a revival over the last decade or so, if you hadn’t noticed. The last time I’d really played board games was as a child and that would often ended with someone in the family hurling the Monopoly board around the room (it’s that kind of game)
Pandemic was probably the first modern board game that I tried as an adult, and it opened my eyes to the world of indie board games. I fell in love with features like co-operative play, working together to beat the game, and the cool themes and characters. I’ve not looked back and we now own a reasonably sized heap of them: a few copies of Fluxx, a couple of editions of Pandemic, Carcassonne, Tiny Epic Galaxies, the Night Cage, the enormous Mechs vs Minions, and many more
One good game in you
Just as they say most people have one good book in them, I suspect that secretly most of us believe that we have one good Indie board game in us. We certainly did. We often end up dreaming up crazy schemes and plans – that’s how the Shadow of Phaedrus itself started – and board games are no exception to this. We must have planned and designed dozens of games, in our heads. Of course, translating a shared fantasy into a reality is a lot more complicated than dreaming it up. I believe the phrase is: reality bites?
A blank page
I wrote an article recently that mentioned ways of avoiding blank page syndrome. Of course, it isn’t always that easy and the process of designing a board game suffers from it as much as anything else: what style of game do you want? What theme? What mechanics? What artwork? and so on…
For some reason, this reminded me of finding the awesome computer game the Binding of Isaac after playing the board game of the same name. Equally, I remember feeling that Mechs vs Minions was really well rounded, only realizing later that it was based in the League of Legends world
This got us thinking, what about if we set a board game in our world? In the world of the Shadow of Phaedrus? This should not only help us to solve the blank page problem but may also help readers to understand our world better
Even more importantly it would mean that we get to have even more fun with the crazy world we’ve created
What should it be?
With one big problem solved, the next is what kind of game should it be? The co-operative nature of Pandemic is superb, the sheer scale and developing story lines of Mechs vs Minions (and its ilk) are inspired. However, I’d recently bought Sprawlopolis by Button Shy Games, which is a tiny 18 card wallet game, and we’ve loved the beautifully simple road building mechanism – I’d highly recommend buy a copy. We’d also been really enjoying Tiny Epic Galaxies – being a smaller, lighter weight game that’s simple to learn but punches well above its weight (again, I’d very recommended this). The more we played these simpler, physically smaller games the more it felt the right direction
Where we’ve got to
With much thought, deliberation, and many late nights laughing and joking, we have settled on the idea of a game where the players race each other, through mazes, to a common destination – needing to both co-operate and compete at the same time. It’s still in heavy development, so I don’t want to say too much more about our upcoming board game, for now, but we’ve been able to weave in lots of different aspects of our world – including, Magicians, Shadows, Earthlings, and Astronomers
Building a prototype game to beta test with has been interesting, and we’re only part way through the process. I’ll post more on that in the near future
We’ve started playing some games between ourselves now and it has been fairly awesome to apply the magic and character traits that we’ve been writing about for so long. We’re also going to start beta testing with trusted friends over the next couple of months, so it will be interesting to see how much sense our world makes to them, given they haven’t been able to read the first book yet
Sneak peak at our upcoming board game
Here’s a quick sneak peek at some of our progress. First up, trialing some game mechanics, using thin cardboard print outs
Finally, some thicker, printed versions of prototype tiles (using mock-up textures, borrowed from a quick web search)
Lots more excitement to come – keep watching the blog for the next installment!