❖ Version History ❖

The 1st of March, 2020 (part: 2 – 8:00pm)
With a hot new game idea on the mind after an eight hour brainstorm & flurry of note taking, it is time to crank out a prototype.

For about an hour and a half I cut up 120 pieces of index card into tiny playing cards, I give them each a dash from a colored marker for suit recognition, then attribute the rune names we came up with over dinner to the cards. For the time being, I am just adding the name rather than drawing a rune on each card to save time.

Once this step is finally complete, we sit back down and make up some numbers for each card based on a 1-10 system, and try to balance them as we go by compensating for diversity across front row & back row strength (assuming that a rune would behave differently based on where it was placed on the board). To create this diversity, we basically invert the values across front and back for lesser strength runes, and keep it identical for stronger runes. Fully expecting the numbers to not quite work yet we are scared it won’t work at all, but, as soon as this process is complete, we can hardly resist to test the game.

Though it takes a bit of refining, we conclusively decide how turns and rune placements will work and the game quickly turns into something quite fun to play.

The trickiness of achieving victory is quickly realized, for chasing after victory aggressively will more often than not get you put into a position of disadvantage. But not doing something to win fast enough will also lead to your demise. This then reveals to the best course to victory:  to play with guile and steal from your opponents as much as possible, making the game a constant struggle of strategically faking your plays in the hope of finding a gap in the mechanics where you can achieve the win.

Conclusively, the game seems like it is working really well after three rounds of giving it a test. It has been now 13 hours of us collaboratively talking, notating, and testing the game and we are absolutely exhausted. Ben goes home, I return to my kitchen, lay out the cards as a 4-player game, and test onward as all four players for several more hours into the witching hours of the evening. By the time I go to sleep, it is nearly 3am, our new game prototype exists and has now been tested at least 6 times…

There is a guttural feeling in the back of my mind as I lay my head to rest:
I love game design. I love the entire process of it. I can hardly wait to test again, and I can wait even less to build upon this prototype for a new and improved version of the play.