The first ever game that I designed was thirtysix. I made it with a handful of dice and a grid drawn on the back of the paper bag the dice came in. Now, I have a game called Bloc and this is the story of how one became the other.
thirtysix
You may have read my previous post on how I made thirtysix. If not, have a read and then come back. I started playtesting thirtysix regularly at the start of this year. What I found was that players had trouble with some aspects of the game, particularly in terms of tracking flips. I also got some feedback:
"Since you're only using two sides of the dice, why not change them to counters?"
And so, Flip Flop Numbers was born.
Flip Flop Numbers
Flip Flop Numbers was the same as thirtysix with some cosmetic differences. Now, there were tokens instead of dice and they were colour coordinated, so you knew that when you placed two tokens of the same colour next to each other, that you'd need to flip the tokens. Yay, two steps forward!
But, one step back; players still had trouble tracking flips. It seemed that it was too difficult to do physically, but might work digitally. But, more importantly, I got another piece of feedback:
But, one step back; players still had trouble tracking flips. It seemed that it was too difficult to do physically, but might work digitally. But, more importantly, I got another piece of feedback:
"You're really just playing one game here three times. Why don't you pare it back and add a bit of theme to it?"
And now we have Bloc.
Bloc
Bloc sees you as a contender for the mayoral election seeking win the hearts and minds of the citizens of Bloc City to score on key political issues before your opponent!
Now we have an agent, that restricts your ability to place campaign tokens anywhere on the board, but also provides the ability to dick with the other player by flipping their campaign tokens to you colour.
The game has gone through a number of revisions and is getting close to the stage where I can actually create nice components for it (like an actual prototype)! You can actually see the differences between the photo at the top of the page and the one above. You can try it out for yourself if you want by downloading the
print 'n' play here.
The game has come really far in a really short time and I really have Game Foundry to thank for that. I'm also thinking of having bigger (like this one) and smaller posts, so for my next "big" post, I'll be talking about the benefits of weekly playtesting!
Now we have an agent, that restricts your ability to place campaign tokens anywhere on the board, but also provides the ability to dick with the other player by flipping their campaign tokens to you colour.
The game has gone through a number of revisions and is getting close to the stage where I can actually create nice components for it (like an actual prototype)! You can actually see the differences between the photo at the top of the page and the one above. You can try it out for yourself if you want by downloading the
print 'n' play here.
The game has come really far in a really short time and I really have Game Foundry to thank for that. I'm also thinking of having bigger (like this one) and smaller posts, so for my next "big" post, I'll be talking about the benefits of weekly playtesting!
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