An easy to learn game where you place and match “pips” and “lines” on the edges of tiles in a shared tableau of hexagonal tiles. As you match tiles to earn points, you are likely helping an opponent score points as well. You must balance your gains against those of your opponents.
Design Diary:
Reflections on “finding the fun” for seven years.
This is one of my first attempts at game design, that had a playable result. The inspiration came from the back of a newsletter put out by “Dollar Shave Club”, back when they printed such a thing and included it with your shipment of razor blades. It was a regular segment called “Rompecabezas” – and featured a puzzle. While not like the evolved form of this game, it inspired me to try to turn a simple spatial math problem into a tile-based abstract game. That was in 2018.
The initial rattle test showed that the game was playable. Later playtesting with a variety of folks demonstrated that the game was an engaging puzzle, however it was… too balanced? The scores tended to towards ties – two or three way ties. If there was a winner, multiple plays showed that there was strong bias toward having players in certain turn positions (mainly the last player in a given round) having an unfair advantage. The upside of this is that the goal of the game play was pretty clear to a wide range of players, everybody knew how to play to win. Good.
This also meant that players of a wide skill level couldn’t play in a way to give themselves a meaningful advantage. If everyone played well, everybody ended up with the same score. Winning the game was more about not making a mistake in any given round, rather than finding clever moves or delaying gratification for bigger plays later. It was very tactical, that is to say, each play was effected by the current tableau state and players had no path to develop a grand strategy to lead to victory.
I’m okay with a very tactical game. These tend to be very accessible, and I wanted the game to be accessible. (Think of the game checkers, moves tend to be driven by the current board state). However the problem of ties and no means for clever play meant that the game would stop being fun rather quickly. This was reflected in feedback from play testers.
I took an early version of the game to Protospiel Madison (a play test event) and the game caused quite a buzz. On reflection, it was a buzz created by a conference hall filled with play testers that were intrigued by the puzzle of making the game more entertaining. Maybe making the game was a game-makers game, but not a very good game for the broader public.
I still took this buzz as encouragement. Something was there, I just had to find it.
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