Putting My Neurons to Use: A three part story of board game design, of sleepless nights and how Paper Boat Games came to be.
A board-gaming bio by Martin Daine
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Part 1: Curing my Insomnia
Like many in the board game community, I am a converted videogamer. A couple of years ago I played Carcassonne, before that I thought that board games were Monopoly (sorry for bringing that up) and Game Of Life. Once I knew better, I quickly followed this up wth Escape from Atlantis, Zombicide and Takenoko and just like that my life had changed. I tried to play a video game and it left me cold, I needed cardboard and I needed more of it. The board game clubs followed, 7 Wonders and Terraforming Mars blew my mind and everything was great with the world.
I had no plans to be a designer and the thought, the possibility, hadn’t even entered my mind. In fact, when I designed my first game, Doozie, I still hadn’t considered it. My first design was to satisfy a personal need to help my daughter with her maths and not to appeal to a board game market. Happily, she was doing well at school in all subjects and was more than capable with maths (after all she is a descendant of Sir Issac Newton) but she lacked confidence with numbers and so homework had become a battleground. I decided to create a game to encourage her to do simple maths in her head without realising the hidden purpose of practice.
I considered what had put her off board games in the past and I put it down to some good but misplaced intentions. Relatives had bought board games for her that were described as “educational and fun.” In reality they delivered on the first promise but were severely lacking in the latter. I couldn’t make that mistake. I considered that she would occasionally play Uno, Top Trumps and Pokemon so I decided that a card based game with a focus on fun was the only way.
And it was a hit.
She understood the simple rules, she was engaged and competitive and she was learning. To make it fun I borrowed from the board game world and introduced interesting decision making and a feeling of controlling your destiny. The game appealed to adults too, not as a target market but just because I was going to be playing the game with her and I also wanted to be engaged. I’d played too many games for kids where I was there to facilitate the game rather than have fun and that wasn’t going to be my game. I wanted fun too.
So my first game was complete but at this point I’m not a game designer. This was a one off and I had no intention of publishing. It would be a while before I would make another game, but this was to be the start of the process of my conversion.
I couldn’t sleep.
I’d always slept well. My wife often struggled to go to sleep at night but I never had this problem. In fact she would joke about me being asleep before my head had hit the pillow. She was jealous of this but now things had changed.
It would start with a small idea of a game, a one-liner: how about a game where you train an athlete and then enter the Olympic Decathlon. Then the idea would spread: you could train in different skills to earn dice and then use these dice differently in the ten events. Or what about this, or what about that. Always these thoughts came to me in my bed and they would go on and on for what felt like hours. The more thoughts I had, the more thoughts they generated and instead of drifting off to the land of nod I was instead firing off so many neurons that I could have powered the national grid. This went on for weeks, the weeks turning into months.
I needed sleep and the only answer was to put the ideas to use. So for the good of my health, I started making games. Thing is, I was enjoying it. I mean really enjoying it. It consumed my every thought. Every lunch time I was on Excel calculating odds of various outcomes (finally I was using my maths degree) or on Publisher designing tokens, pieces and boards. Toilet breaks were thinking time, evenings were opportunities to playtest (with myself as the opponent), I’d stopped exercising, I’d stopped watching TV – I was a Board Game Designer.
Now at night I slept. Well, most of the time.
To be continued…
Part 2 is coming next week.
