As I remember it …
It was about five years ago, 2013 or so, maybe 2012, that my wife and I first entertained the idea of designing games for a living – or at least as a hobby. Work was slow and money was getting tight, again. The way it always did and always has and always will for anyone who follows a construction boom and stays a little too long after the party has ended and the tide has shifted and the movers and shakers have moved on and begun building elsewhere. Without you.
Age was creeping in (not that I like to admit it) and the sun and wind and rain and years of heavy labor as a carpenter and builder were upon me. (Oh, boo-hoo.) But I really was getting tired deep down where your heart aches to do more but your body just won’t let you do the things you’ve always done. Not anymore. Not like you used to.
As for my wife, she was making good money and working in an air-conditioned office. Gently aging and just starting to believe that one day, she too would retire. What would that be like? Where would we live? What would we do? … But that day was still many years in the future.
So why not start planning ahead instead of being pushed by the tide? Why not try our hand at writing? Or publishing a magazine? Or developing a board game? Or a dice game? Or what about cards? Couldn’t we at least look into it? So we did.
We took a few college courses (mostly about writing), read dozens of books (again, the majority were about writing and publishing but also about crossword puzzles and games), browsed the internet (looking for who knows what, but we’d know it we when we found it – which we never did), and began tinkering with games.
Suddenly, a handful of change became a plaything, points to be won and counted and redistributed. A list of words became a puzzle (which, by the way, lead to a LOT of research into semantics and linguistics and word frequency and phonemes and lexemes and … if you know what I’m talking about here, maybe you’ve been caught in the same haze and hopefully you too came out ahead for the effort).
Then word dice followed. Combination after combination. Only to be followed (no kidding) by 150 – 200 codes that someday might serve as the basis for a children’s or young adult’s book on codes and ciphers.
Next came a hiatus from games and a concentration on fiction. We set the goal to each write and submit to the other, a series of chapters that would become a World War II novel – but that project never really jelled. One of us (I won’t say which) was writing an adventure novel with little or no need for characterization, while the other was writing a book strong on relationships and light on action. Someday … someday, we’ll get back to that one.
I think a baseball simulation came along somewhere in through here, and horse racing, and again, custom dice. This time, for the horses. With the idea of moving the horses the distance you rolled, with favorites and long shots pretty much predetermined by the dice – unless they ran against their probability, which was the whole point of the game as I remember it. Again, someday, someday.
Then along through the winter of 2016 and again in the cold snowy days of 2017, we prototyped a number of games using cut-open cereal boxes taped together as game boards (using the unprinted side of the cardboard, of course). And for the first time, we had a lot of fun. Both with the inventing and with the prototyping, as well as near endless hours of playtesting. Game after game. Filling notebook after notebook (and the back of every scrap of paper or receipt or library-book due-date slip that was anywhere near the table) with strategies and revisions and new ideas for further games and adaptations of ones we’d come up with in the past. Oh! And scores, of course. Usually with my wife winning almost every game.
Were we really on to something? Or just having fun? Maybe we’d hit the saturation point and were over the hump of the learning curve and making headway in our newly chosen field of endeavor. Maybe, maybe. Just keep hoping.
Then we sat down and talked it over and decided to commit. Rent an office. Set it up. Share what we’d learned with others. So, we did commit. And do all those other things. And started giving “Build Your Own Board Game” workshops. Then we went to the mall when a local game store invited us to come set up and playtest a few of our games. And we got some good feedback. Positive reinforcement. And then, well, we’ve just kept going and growing from there.
And for that, we’d like to thank everyone that’s had a share in helping us along the way. Thank you, thank you. We couldn’t have gotten here without you. Thanks again.
