What came before?
When I retired from playing club cricket at the end of the 2017 season I made the decision to expand my involvement in my other hobby, board games. I started volunteering for playtesting and it turned out I was reasonably good at it. A few months later I managed to tie some mechanical ideas into a prototype design, it all came together by finding a theme that worked. That game was The Seven Dwarves, which I used as an example in my previous blog about playtesting.
As I became more and more involved in testing and designing I made two significant friendships and working relationships. FIrstly with Caezar Al-Jassar who is the boss at Alley Cat Games and secondly with Paul Grogan from Gaming Rules!. Through working with those two companies my voluntary work has evolved into paid work, I guess that makes me a professional? Working on my own games, or for Alley Cat or Gaming Rules, or helping out other people was a great way to fill a few extra hours a week.
At the end of March, life changed. My full time profession is as Technical Manager for Chelmsford Theatres. On the 23rd March we closed our doors to staff and public, suddenly I had a lot more time on my hands!
Throwing myself into board game work
I’m a workaholic. There are various reasons for this, but this isn’t the place to go over them. Between my proper job, board game design, development, and rulebook work, and running cricket coaching I work 70-90 hours a week. The sudden stop in my full time job (average 40 hours a week plus 7 hours a week commuting) and cricket coaching left me with only board games to do, all day, every day.
At the time that this happened I was already working on 2 solo mode designs (Eternal Palace for ACG and Scrumpy for Paul Frohnsdorff-Harris), developing the Rome and Roll expansion with David Turczi and Nick Shaw, editing or proofreading a handful of rulebooks for GR, and working on a couple of designs of my own. Already sounds like a lot right? Well it wasn’t enough.
Tabletop Simulator
Those that know me know I’m not that smart with computers, and yet one of my first challenges was to take on learning Tabletop Simulator (TTS). With some help, online how to guides, and plenty of swearing I managed to learn how to get my designs uploaded. I started with Space Council, it’s a card drafting game with a central board so it was pretty simple to do. Then I moved onto Magical Deep Sea Octopuses vs Toxic Ocean Plastic; this brought the challenge of polyomino tiles, I got there in the end. The Seven Dwarves is on the back burner and I don’t have updated files for Theatre Land yet so it was time to move onto new designs. Rock Band, as a real time game, is not best suited to online platforms so I shelved that for the time being. Focus shifted to the mysteriously titled Project S.
Project S is a reimplementation of Curse of the 7th Fairy, a tile laying game, but done as a sequel to an existing game, hence shrouding it in a bit of mystery. It’s a great design exercise to try and make a sequel to something, which I strongly recommend trying.
Turns out TTS is an excellent tool for prototyping, you can make changes quite quickly and easily without having to print stuff and make components. Although I am still reliant on my very basic computer skills, I’ve been able to try loads of changes and working alongside David Ellis (who is my co-designer on Project S) it feels like we are making some real progress with this design.
I also came up with a new design, Dreamcatchers, which I hope will do for bag building what Octopuses did for rondels. This game 100% exists on TTS, the first of perhaps a brave new world of online only prototypes.
Playtesting
Designing new games of my own is great, but to this date I have not signed one with a publisher. Perhaps the work I am better at, and becoming more known for, is testing and developing for other people. I’ve done some more work on Rome and Roll, putting the finishing touches to that, but that’s all been solo and in physical form, so no real change from the norm.
A whole new community of online playtesting seemed to spring up overnight. Designers I knew already or people I hadn’t met were keen to test games or get their games tested. ‘Meeting’ people online to test games was a great relief, to focus the mind and actually talk to real people when we were in full lockdown. When other designers are keen to playtest games, take advantage of it! The quality of testing on TTS has been excellent, makes a massive difference to developing a game, with a few hours I was getting more useful feedback than a whole cons worth of demoing.
I’ve also been able to test for some other designers, trying out Daniele Tascini’s latest design with the man himself was not only an honour but also a great learning experience. Of all the things that have changed I hope this is a permanent one, as it changes the way we design and test for the better.
The Unicorn Collective
I’d met Chris Winterburn at Essen. Chris runs Clever Unicorn Games, a small publisher based on the Isle of Man and The Unicorn Collective, a facebook group about games. Somehow I agreed to do a series of playtests with him and another designer, Patrick Wall. The test would be recorded and published for others to watch and learn from. I had to nominate Octopuses, which as a finished design didn’t make much of video.
What we had created however was way more interesting and we thought would be a really good idea to run with. Ian Brocklebank joined the panel and we opened it up to all designers to bring us games to test, record and broadcast.
All the games I’ve played have been pretty light and have ranged from ok to terrible (my personal opinion). I think the videos themselves have been really interesting and provide a great resource to learn from. A few big takeaways for me; there will always be people who just use something like this for publicity, the Kickstarter culture is leading to a lot of self-published, visually pretty, rubbish games to be made, a lot of designers do not listen to advice, I get really grumpy playing crap games.
Chris has also launched an interview series and these have been really interesting to watch. Recording my own was a really difficult thing to do, but I got through it and I guess if people have watched it or have read my blogs there might be some merit in what I bang on about. Do check out all the content; lots to learn from I hope.
Alley Cat Games
My work with ACG has been steadily increasing for the last 18 months, from just helping out at cons and doing some testing, I’m now very proud to be a member of the development team. I’ve been working on Eternal Palace for a while, testing the game in general as well as designing the solo mode. I’ve also started testing Dice Theme Park, an exciting new design from Daryl Andrews, Adrian Adamescu, and Mike Nudd. We have also started a very exciting project, which I can’t go into any details about!
One fascinating part of helping out has been sitting in on pitches to ACG from other designers. It’s a great insight into what publishers want and how pitches come across. Advice for designers from this: focus on what makes your game special, be open to advice and criticism, know your publisher, don’t bullshit. It’s great to get to work with such a good team and sit on both sides of the pitching table, maybe it’ll give me an edge when I next pitch.
Downsides
Few things in life come without downsides. Pushing yourself to work harder and harder takes its toll. I got to a point that I had offered to do so much work I couldn’t cope, I felt like I was failing. Luckily I was able to reset. I made time to exercise every day. I organised my diary to the nth degree to make sure things were getting done when they needed to. I blocked out times to not be working on the computer. I bought a new chair so I can work in the garden. I made sure I spoke to people every day, either over a game or just on the phone. These corrective steps have led me to an incredible period of productivity.
What I’ve achieved
I’ve done some good work on rulebook editing. I’ve made some new contacts and made some new friends. I’ve agreed my first professional contract as a developer. I’ve been offered work on some really exciting projects in the future. I’ve found new ways to work and made the most of them.
Perhaps most importantly I’ve reset my outlook, I’ve got my self-belief back and am motivated and excited to see what’s next. Who knows how long this will go on for and how much I continue to get involved with, but it’s really exciting.
I may only be playing at being a board game professional but its a good game once you get your head around how to play!