❖ Version History ❖

A Quick Note Before We Begin:

Hello my friends, and welcome back to the time machine that is the Librarium Games Design Journal! Today, we return once more to the pandemic times of 2020. By this point in time, work had officially begun on Gratuity (October 2019), and Calendra (March, 2020), but we had not yet been introduced to Mr. Matt Buchman, where we began The Great Chase project (September 2020).

At this moment, Ben and I had been very happy making the earlier versions of the cards for Calendra, and we had been foolishly thinking that the project was almost “done”. As a result, it had been a regular conversation of ours to brainstorm just about any good game idea that came to mind. We wanted to build up an arsenal of projects to work on whenever one of our games was feeling finished, or we were just getting bored and needed new prototype material. To this point in time, we were not yet established as a company, we had no products to sell, and we had no idea that the day we were going to become Librarium Games (July 2021) was swiftly approaching. This was a time where everything we worked on was purely for fun, and we were competing back and forth on who could come up with the best games.

Admittedly, this story begins our narrative on what I think might be one of the best games that Ben ever came up with in all of our brainstorms, and I am personally so excited to share with you the very adorable origin story of Phoenix Farm:

14th of August 2020
This morning as I get ready for work I hear the ping of my cell phone with an unexpected text message from Mr. Benjamin Seagrave. It reads: “I have concocted another game that I am particularly excited about. If you have time for a short phone call at some point I would like to tell you about it”.

This is now the sixth time I’ve received such a correspondence from Ben since we began our project on Calendra in March, and he has clearly been equally struck with the same itch & inspiration as I to continue this game designing fun. Though we had worked on so many different kinds of projects together before this, clearly the tabletop game making hobby was truly taking over our lives.

Of his previous five suggestions the first was the most inspiring to me in terms of pursuing a new idea, but at that moment in time I had still been in the early phases of designing Calendra and finishing up design edits on Gratuity. Since I was so busied with designing art, this left the window wide open for Ben to keep making attempts on better and better games until finally this day arrived.

I called Ben as I drove into the city for my shift and we discussed the flavor, theme, basic mechanics, and purpose of this new game he had in mind. He wanted to call it Pheonix Farm, and though the name was a bit silly, the idea really piqued my interest. We talked very excitedly for about 30-40 minutes, and before even seeing what the game might look like I was hooked on the concept. I told him to really start exploring the possibilities of how this game would play, and that I would be excited to see his first prototype. Throughout that entire afternoon while I was trapped at work, Ben hurriedly threw together some of his classic Seagrave prototype art, and by 4:00p.m. This image and the one at the top of this post started appearing on my phone:

As per usual, all of the prototype artwork I receive from Ben warms the very core of my heart. His style of drawing is always such a silly origin point for our collaborations, and I simply love trying to imagine what the final version of a game is going to play like when all I ever have for context is the look of an image like this and the short conversation of the idea over the phone.

Though it is still going to be at least a couple of days until my next available day off from work, I am very much looking forward to what the first prototype play test of this game is going to be like!