❖ Version History ❖

14th of September 2020
Throughout the course of the next two weeks, I began thinking about Phoenix farm in a new light: manufacturing / production numbers. This means that I am beginning to consider the cost and number of components that will appear in the game.

It is obviously far too soon to be thinking of this in terms of “Final Production” costs, but it is absolutely critical to consider in the sense of “Is this going to be a reasonable cost later on down the line”. If at this stage of design the game is going to be cost ineffective, this will determine almost every decision that gets made from here on out on “how many components can we really afford, and what sorts of mechanics do we need to cut?” This can have an impact all the way down toward concepts like “player count” in the final game, because less components can mean less player availability too.

To be honest, I have learned this lesson several times over the hard way. I let my imagination get way ahead of the realities, and by the time we are brainstorming Phoenix Farm I have concretely decided this is a necessary early step in the design process.

So… what is our starting position on this conversation, and what are we looking at? Let’s take a bit to analyze the first iteration of the game, and talk about what it is missing in terms of its original pieces:

~:: Game Components Layout ::~

In the Original Iteration, Phoenix Farm Contains:
x21 “Coin” Cards
x60 “Feather” Cards
x72 “Phoenix” Cards (12 x 6 types)
x60 “Tool” Cards (12 x 5 types)
x5 “Player Mats” (Giant Cards)
x6 D6 Dice (6-sided)

Though I am not aware of how to balance all of the economics of this game right away, I can tell a few things right off the bat. The first and most important detail to me is that the game components feel very… bland. Everything is cards, and there are a lot of them in the box, which likely won’t be easy to sort. While I am having this thought and scrolling through The Game Crafter catalogue (which I always use to prototype pieces / initial card designs), I find a category of “parts” that instantly draws me in: Gold.

Now, in Phoenix Farm, one of the very first things that hooked my love of the game was the fact that it was an economy-based game. I love juggling a good inventory of money, and trying to make wise decisions about that money in the gameplay, it always feels good to do this well and get better at it. When I first laid my eyes on the “Gold” pieces that were available in the product catalogue though, my imagination went crazy.

My first task here was to buy a full set of 21 Gold coins in each of the possible combinations that I could find, to see which I was going to like the most. Within a week or so, the new set of dice that I had selected & three different sets of gold coins arrived in the mail. Heres what we were looking at:

As soon as the package arrived, I realized one of the very most important things that was going to be a part of the Phoenix Farm appeal from this point forever forward:

Holding actually metal pieces of “Gold” is unbelievably satisfying.

I cannot exaggerate this enough.
As soon as you touch one, you don’t want to put it down.
As soon as you have two, you are playing with them constantly.
You will want more of them.
You will do anything to get them before your opponents.

From the top of the image above moving downward, we have one full set of metal pieces and two sets of plastic. Even though the cost of the plastic is arguably less than half that of the metal pieces, it doesn’t matter. I now demand that this game contain the metal parts later on, no matter how difficult this task will be.

While this is a difficult decision to consider, it also brings us to another interesting aspect of this moment in the thought process: The Player Count.

Right from the start, Phoenix Farm had been considered a game that could contain up to six players. We really loved the idea of making a game that could satisfy a larger party of people, because we regularly meet as a group of at least 4-8 people when we get together, and we know fully well that there are not many games that can satisfy this large of a table. But, this does alter the outcomes of the cost.

Though the numbers are all very different nowadays (the economy shifts in the last few years have been nothing less than severe), here were our notes on the cost of the game:

1. Phoenix Farm as a 6-player game with all of the above components (including metal coins) was looking like a $18-20 game retail, with as low as $11 in wholesale for us to purchase from an American Manufacturer. This was a very good and happy place.

2. Phoenix Farm as a 4-player game under the same parameters though was looking more like a $14-18 game retail, with as low as: $10 in wholesale, which was “perfect” at the time, because, at this point in time we had never made anything outside of America, and these seemed like very achievable costs (almost $5-6 less then our American made prototypes of Calendra at the time).

So, needless to say, (though this isn’t a huge step forward) it is looking like we can absolutely consider Phoenix Farm a “go” for being a project we could realistically consider, and that was only after making this one simple change to the component layout:

~:: Game Components Layout ::~

In the Original Iteration, Phoenix Farm Contains:
x21 “Coin” Cards GOLD COINS
x60 “Feather” Cards
x72 “Phoenix” Cards (12 x 6 types)
x60 “Tool” Cards (12 x 5 types)
x5 “Player Mats” (Giant Cards)
x6 D6 Dice (6-sided)

Though I haven’t actually finished this thought process yet (I am convinced there are ways to reduce the cost even further, I just don’t know how), this was the very first step to concretely feeling confident on moving forward with the design process of this game. Stay tuned for later discussions of the component layout, where we tackle reducing the overall footprint even further in the months to come!