Putting My Neurons to Use – A three part story of board game design and sleepless nights.
A board-gaming bio by Martin Daine
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Part 2: Lonely….I’m So Lonely
I always worked long hours, not because I needed to but because I wanted to. I would be in the gym at 6 then straight to work from there, but I would always try to get home for my evening meal (food comes before everything else). Then I’d be on the laptop again working. My wife would say, “It’s gone 9 o’clock, time to put the computer away,” but in truth I didn’t want to. There were things I wanted to get done and I was impatient to see them to the end.
At work I was making improvements in processes, speeding things up, increasing accuracy and visibility and just making life easier. Ultimately I’d get to the point where further improvement wasn’t worth the energy and at this point, rather than reap the benefits and relax, instead I’d move on. Then a few year ago I took a job where change was neither expected nor welcome. At this time it suited me, we had two kids and my wife was rightly complaining about the amount of time that I was absent. I spent more time at home but I wasn’t one for watching a lot of TV so I started writing a novel. It was a (mostly) enjoyable experience but when finished it was clear that the novel wasn’t good. I was fine with this, honestly I was, as I’d always thought of it as a learning experience for my second, much better novel, But the second novel never came. Between the start and the end of the first novel I had discovered board games and so the second novel was to be replaced with board game design. This would be my occupation outside of work and it consumed me whole.
Playing board games had become an obsession. I was playing solo games at home (the family weren’t won over at this point) and I’d joined 4 board game groups (though I had to reduce it to 2 or get a divorce). I joined Board Game Arena, signed up to several podcasts and followed all the facebook pages I could find. Best of all was the social side, I was meeting new people at clubs and conventions and was engaged daily in the varios FB groups.
Despite all this I found it very hard to engage people when it came to board game development. I struggled to share my designs with others. It wasn’t that I was protective of the designs or that I didn’t want to feel disappointment as games fell short of my aims, it was more that I couldn’t get people to be interested. At first I thought that the board game clubs would be a good way of sharing but I was always conscious that people weren’t there for my purposes and always had newly bought games of their own that they were keen to play. I felt awkward asking. I tried arranging playtests in advance but still felt awkward pushing it if on the night they didn’t mention it or didn’t seem as keen as they had on-line. I tried handing out copies of the games for people to play in their own time but mostly they didn’t get played and I ended up having to ask for them back untested. I wasn’t pushy enough.
I joined playtest UK. This was a great success. I met great people, got some great feedback on my games and shared so many ideas. It felt great to be contributing to others peoples games as well, I’m never short of ideas and this was another creating outlet for me. But it only took place once a month and I would only get to try one iteration of one game. This process was way too slow. I went to Protospeil, another massively valuable experience but at once per year it wasn’t going to be enough. I looked for another Playtest group but the nearest one was mid week and over an hour away. I needed something better.
Whilst waiting between playtests I made more games. I now had several games but no way that I knew of to get them regularly tested. I’d read so much about how important playtesting was, “Playtest, Playtest and then Playtest more,” and I can’t disagree. I wanted my games to be the best they could be but I didn’t know how to move forward.
But more than this I felt alone. My family didn’t understand my obsession, my board game friends wanted to play their own games, not my half baked ideas, though to be fair they were more accommodating than they needed to be, and whilst there was great advice from people on-line they weren’t people I knew. When I became part of the board game community it was the interaction that was the most enjoyable part. Playing games had opened me up to a whole new set of friends but designing games had done the opposite. Okay, lonely may be a little over-dramatic but I certainly felt distanced.
Fortunately I had met Marcos.
Marcos attended the same board game group as me and he too was a board game designer. In fact he’d been designing games for years and the games, well they were good. But not published. I mulled it over for a while, would it be good to join forces, what were the pros and the cons. I could think of some cons for sure but there were so many pros. The main things for me were that I liked Marcos and I felt that we had a very similar outlook and ambition. So I approached him with the idea of working together.
To be continued…
Part 3 is coming next week.
