Five Things I Learned at Origins

I made the first real solo road trip of my life last month. Naturally, it was to a board game convention, since most of the people in my life tolerate my interest in tabletop games more than they share it. I made many rookie mistakes, including but not limited to: driving to the wrong hotel, trying to check in to the wrong hotel four hours early, neglecting to charge my phone the night before the drive, and forgetting where my car was parked on several occasions (though, in my defense, Vine Street has the most confusing parking garage on the planet).

So I learned not to do those things. But I also learned five more things (in no particular order) about the gaming industry, the design process, and building something from nothing that I'd like to share.

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Games are great icebreakers.

Entering a room with thousands of people while not knowing a soul is an intimidating feeling, even when they’re all there for the same reason you are. So I appreciated the random guy in the gaming hall who detected my deer-in-the-headlights expression and invited me to play a simple dice game. Though the game itself wasn’t great, the massive gaming hall felt much less intimidating after that.

I also appreciated the Cat Games team inviting me to a meet-and-greet the first night of the con. Games of Fuji Flush and Maskmen lowered the bar to converse with a whole table of people I’d never met.

There’s something about the shared experience of a card game that lowers the expectations of communication between strangers: I didn’t learn the names of several of the people in those games, but since we had agreed to follow a set of rules together, that didn’t matter. It’s not a situation I’m in very often, but I could feel the magic circle protecting me from several sources of awkwardness.

Conventions are a great time for epic game experiences.

There’s only one game in my collection that consistently takes longer than two hours to play. I’d love to have more of them, but it doesn’t make sense to purchase any unless I intend to play them solo¹.

At a convention like Origins, you can find eight people who are willing to play a game which simulates the war in Afghanistan for an entire afternoon. I think that’s a beautiful thing.

A Distant Plain is designed for four players, but in this playthrough the political and military roles for each of the game’s factions (Taliban, Coalition, Government, and Warlords) were split between two teammates and two boards. This simulated the fog of war remarkably well. As the political side of the Afghan government I had to give orders to my commander without seeing their effects on the ground, and negotiate with the Coalition, who needed our resources to take military action on our behalf.

This was as close as I’ve ever come to role-playing in a board game, and I see the appeal. I left myself at the door and inhabited this new role full of opportunities, confusion and challenges, and again was able to interact with complete strangers comfortably.

Lying is hard, but also fun.

Another hole in my collection is a game where you get to lie to people’s faces (at one point I owned The Resistance, but could rarely get a group together for it). So when I saw the chance to play Blood on the Clocktower, another more intricate game of social deception, I jumped at the chance.

Thankfully I was on the good team in my first game, so I wasn’t immediately forced to bluff to strangers, but in the second game I was on the evil team. For the first several minutes of the game, my legs shook. My heart pounded. I had a sort of adrenaline I’d never felt in a game before.

Since nobody had played the game more than a couple of times in the group, no one pressed me about not coming forward about my role for the first several rounds of the game. My ability revealed everyone else’s roles to me, which allowed me to come up with an elaborate lie which protected my evil friends, framed the good team, and won us the game.

Life has never granted me such thrilling success for prevaricating. That’s probably a good thing.

Start small.

I got into game design to challenge myself, to express myself, and to build friendships. As it turns out, getting games into the world is a business challenge as well as a creative one, so I went to a couple of talks by Zack Applewhite about getting started in the self-publishing business.

His simplest and most applicable piece of advice for my situation was to get used to the act of, say, publishing a blog post or Kickstarting a print-and-play game before worrying about a large physical product, which comes with a whole other set of complications. Doing it on a small scale makes the inevitable mistakes, delays and unexpected surprises more manageable, and shows customers that you’re capable of delivering them a fun game.

Decide on an audience and make something for them, whoever they are.

I brought a prototype of a game I’ve been working on for several months to play test at Origins — thankfully, seven people were gracious enough to let me show it off to them. I had developed it to a point where I was happy with the core of the game, and was ready to start focusing on balancing and graphics.

Even though I got generally positive feedback on the game, my play testers made me realize that I had made the game to my own liking, and that the game would not appeal as strongly to my intended audience as I hoped it would.

So I now have two choices: simplify the game to reach a wider audience, or keep it niche. Since I’m designing more for its own sake than for my products’ eventual marketability, both of these are interesting and viable options. I’m sure I’ll have much more to say on this point in the coming months.

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After Origins, I decided that I’d like to publish this newsletter more regularly going forward. I’ve learned a lot about putting games into the world in the past few years, and I’d like to share that information as widely as possible. I also want to document the transformation of Finbar Games from a pipe-dream idea to a company that makes cool games.

1. The game I’m referring to here is Brian Train’s Colonial Twilight, which was a central point of inspiration for my first game, Insurgent: Algeria.