Do You Think This is a Game?!
MackinTrioInk has recently branched out in two ways: Books and a Comic. However, behind the scenes, we’ve been working toward releasing our first board game, “Talent Show,” and our first card game, “Ready, Set, Grow!” I never really thought about all the work it would take to create a fully functional board game before this project. I think that the last time I “created a board game” it was for a class project in high school. Even then, I think that my board had a suspicious resemblance to Candy Land and the only way to move forward was to correctly answer a flash card. However, even a game that involved no imagination whatsoever took a few hours to create.
When it comes to board games, Josh, Christina and I have one rule: Never follow the instructions. Sure, we’ll give them a quick glance to learn what all the pieces do, but once we’ve got the gist we’ll start making up our own rules and never look back. We’re not playing the game wrong, we’re just improving it. I’m sure that many of you didn’t know that there you get one free stuck roll in Yahtzee. Or that during Monopoly all money you pay from card directions or the tax space go into a pile called “The Kitty” and that if you land on Free Parking you get to take the pile as your own. Or Old Maid is a full contact card game. Sure, everybody has house rules, but as we set out to build a board game, we quickly realized we were going to have a hard time committing to any one set of rules. Stephen quickly became the Game Czar because as it turns out, he’s very good at making functioning board games.
Talent Show has been our longest running board game project. When we first began the project, we had to decide what kind of game we would like to make. Stephen’s passions lie in intricate games involving skill, strategy and practice. It was through this discussion that my brother, sister and I realized that we don’t play complicated games. In fact, our favorite board games are the exact opposite of complex. Besides the obvious like chess or checkers, we don’t really enjoy highly elaborate board games. Thus, as Game Czar Stephen was put to the test: Create a game so stupidly simple we could understand it, but also have a little skill and decision making involved so the game isn’t the same every time.
We decided on a battle game, the goal of which was to became famous across the land of Cornucopia. We created character cards for the players to pick from, Non-Playable Characer (NPC) cards to battle against, town cards to visit, items, events and a point system. The center of the game of course, was the battle system. Stephen’s original idea consisted of a dice battle system, slightly akin to Risk, but simpler for our sake. We had everything about finished, but then we realized something through a friend who helped us play test: The game was boring. Rolling a die is fun, but after a time it gets a little tedious. There were too many points necessary to win, it could be difficult to get started and it was a little tedious after a while. With no single board in our “board game” the points were tallied individually.
Recently, Talent Show 2.0 has been in the works. Since we didn’t want to change the items, the NPCs, the town cards or much of anything else involving the hours of artwork Christina poured into this game, we changed the heart of the game: the battle system. Currently, Stephen’s looking into a sort of card based battle system rather than one controlled by dice. As for “Ready, Set, Grow!” I’ll save that for another time. It hasn’t been easy, but I think that we’ll soon have this long and arduous project reach an end!
