❖ Version History ❖

28th of January, 2021:
As covered in our last few visits to the Design Journal, it has been a flurry of re-configuring game numbers, rebuilding our play testing data, and redefining the rules of the game. With so many alterations happening to the individual interactive experiences of the gameplay, our priority is to solidify a document for the rules text. As akin to every other developing part of the project, even if this is a document that needs to be edited into the future, it is important to start writing down how things work as they happen. So, without further ado, this series of images that follows is my first rendition of the rule book for The Great Chase:

As you may have noticed between the featured image of this post and the background art of these initial pages, our goal here was to recreate our rule book in the likeness of an actual passport. This is inspired of course by the fact that you are role playing as a cast of characters that are traveling internationally to solve investigations into aircraft disasters… what better imagery to use than the official passport!

This is one of my earliest attempts at writing the rule book for a game. I have done this a few times in the past, as this is not the first board game that I have designed, but the process is no walk through the park. What I always personally find intriguing is how complex the rules end up being for interactions that otherwise seem simple in my mind until written on paper.

As I get to the point of completing the sixth page of this rule book prototype, I admittedly find myself exhausted. I write & rewrite these rules a dozen times a day, every day, for at least a week… and every time I do it I walk away feeling very satisfied only to return later and find that I hate the way that it is worded all over again. It is a grueling process, but I finally get it to a point that I am happy with,
so I ship it over to Matt for his review.

Much to my dismay…

I get a message back from Matt the next morning. He tells me that he attempted to read through the rules and understand what was going on with the game before going to bed and got confused. He then dwelt on it all evening, woke up again in the middle of the night, and still found more and more that he did not like or understand about what was going on in the rules. at 4a.m. he sends me a message that suggests that we are going to need to start this process over from scratch and that the way the game ends is completely not satisfactory to how he wants it to be.

I of course, find this email while I am waking up the next morning, and I am horrified. We have been designing this game for three months and now, for the very first time in the entire process, I find out that the author does not like how the game is supposed to end. This is a disaster. This is possibly the kind of conversation that could kill the whole organization of the project. How much are we going to need to change to accommodate for these changes that he wants? What is going to have to happen to alter the way that the game ends? Of course, my first thought here is to call Ben… I need to phone a friend.

I tell Ben what we have going on in this email, I describe the individual parts of the gameplay that Matt seems to dislike, and I begin brainstorming like crazy for how we are going to deal with this. I jot down notes ferociously, as, it is currently 8a.m. and I have a video call scheduled with Matt for 9a.m. We get a good series of notes down on paper and then the video call begins.

I spend three and a half hours talking to Matt about the game.

After we are done, a great deal of things have happened. We had discussed step-by-step how every interaction of the game works, what it would look like to play this game from start to finish, and how/why each of interactions happen (between characters, cards, rules, and players). When we are done, we walk away feeling accomplished and successful in finding a happy medium for solving everyone’s problems:

1. Rule Changes :: Up until this point in time, the game could end if you were not keeping up with the challenges (i.e. too many unsolved missions or flight cards = you lose). We decided to change this, because the ending was not climactic enough. Though this is an enormous change, new arrangement for the rules became: You can no longer lose the game before the end of the last turn. If you have any unsolved missions left by the end of the tenth turn, then you lose. Should you complete all ten missions by the end of turn ten, we’ve added a scoring system to calculate how well you did in the game, further inspiring replay value.

2. Card Design Changes :: Up until this conversation the flight cards had three numbers with three names (Move, Solve, and Crew). Matt found this too confusing to keep because the Move number has two roles in the game (it is both how far a player can move their character, and it is how hard to ‘skirmish solve’ that aircraft). Instead, he wants the frame design of the flight cards to have new terminology & appearance to support having four words, which become: Attack, Crash, Move & Crew.

3. Rule Book :: As someone who had not played the game, Matt found the rule book to be extremely confusing and requested to be the author of the rules document from here forward. His desire is to find a way to rewrite the rules so that anyone could read through & understand clearly what is going on, even if they don’t regularly play games. From the sound of that request, I give him the go ahead with that project and stop pursuing it further myself for the time being.

With this conversation done, I find myself a bit overwhelmed. Yet again, I must return to the flight deck and alter all 39 of the aircraft card designs, I need to rework all of my play testing data sheets to account for this new concept of winning/losing the game, and I need to reconfigure how all of the mission cards are written in order to keep consistent terminology across all the card types now that the flight deck is changing its wording. There is absolutely no time to waste. It is almost February. I have at least a week or two worth of unexpected new work, and I had been hoping to have this entire phase of editing done with by now.