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Well!! Looky, looky, here comes hooky. Finally Ben does all the writing and I can pipe in with witty repartee and insightful comments. Or balls jokes. We will see. I can either go high class or play this Louie style: "I'm gonna dip..." Oh, and a little foreshadowing since we are now two paragraphs in and haven't yet mentioned the games: This is the designer diary for Back to the Future: An Adventure Through Time and The Goonies: Adventure Card Game. Hence the "go to Hollywood" thing.
So if you actually have any clue who either Matt or I am, it's either because of Matt's admittedly solid run as W. Eric Martin's crowdfunding write-up nemesis or because you've played one of our previously published games, most likely Fleet. Fleet had a beautiful run into the BGG top 500 and has since slid a few spots outside, which actually isn't that bad because now we can appear on all of those "best games outside the top 500" lists.
It was almost certainly Fleet. While Ben and I are poised to have a very nice 2016, if there were a pie chart of "Games of ours people have played", it would look like Pac-Man with Fleet starring as Pac-Man and everything else the mouth.
We've had some other nice projects with Eagle-Gryphon Games such as Eggs and Empires, Floating Market, and Fleet Wharfside, but safe to say not a transcendent megahit yet. So how did these two relatively new designers from suburban Detroit end up with the keys to two of the absolute cornerstones of your childhood? And what is a Fleeple?
First thing's first: A Fleeple is an absolutely terrible name coined by Dan Patriss of The Geek All-Stars that somehow stuck because it's kind of funny. Fleet guys + fish meeples? Either way, Ridback is just as bad and Dan is the best, so we roll with it.
Ya, I suggested "Matt Riddle Games feat. Ben P" but was shot down. Honestly, Ridback Games sucks, but we honestly do not have any better ideas.
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Where was I? We're gonna do more together, too. Us and Gilmour. From Dead of Winter. So anyway, Nathan from Pandasaurus introduced us to Nate from IDW, who was looking for a card-based Back To The Future engine, so we started talking. They gave us a shot to show them an idea at Gen Con, and we enthusiastically accepted. Needless to say, the meeting went well and full-on development ensued.
Like most people in their 30s, I love Back to the Future and was SUPER excited to jump in on that one. Also, I HATE the stupid "break the internet" BS exaggeration that people use, but did you see the buzz WEDS has gotten? Crazy. Like the art. But Back to the Future, ya, super excited. Oh! Also, as Ben and I head down Eurotrash lane, we are working on a Sleepy Hollow game that will have minis and characters and co-op pumpkin dude, fighting dice stuff in it. That will be with Greater Than Games/Dice Hate Me Games later in 2016. As it turns out, we have fully embraced our mid-Atlantic designs.
With Albino Dragon, it was a very similar story through a mutual friend. Once again Fleet was the catalyst as Erik from Albino Dragon was looking to do a card-based Goonies game and his real-life friend Scott Morris (Tox) from Crits Happen and Firefly: Shiny Dice had become a friend of ours through Fleet, then through hanging out at conventions. (Free tip for designers: Go to every single convention you possibly can.) So Fleet opened the doors for us to work with these companies that were looking for card-driven experiences for Back To The Future and The Goonies, but how would Matt and I approach the designs?
Carefully but with gusto. You know what I loved more than BttF? The Goonies. I own a DVD of The Goonies and made my daughters watch it. I forgot how 1980s PG it was, but still totally worth it. I wanted to be a Goonie so hard when I was a kid.
The very first thing we had to talk about with each design was scope: the project scope vs. the scope of the game experience. It was obvious to us in both cases that card-based was not going to lend itself to a straight-up simulation. Neither of these games were going to be 45 lb. (20.4 kg) sprawling monsters with minis and scenario books. It wasn't our gut reaction then to try to walk players linearly through the storylines, and frankly I'm not sure I'd want to do that anyway. If I'm playing a Back To The Future game, I know I want to fly around in the DeLorean time-traveling; I don't want to play for hours and only actually fly the dang thing two or three times. People absolutely love the characters in the movie, and they love the DeLorean, so that was set for Back to the Future. The soul of the game was going to be using the characters in thematic ways and time-traveling in the DeLorean as much as possible.
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It is a not-so-secret secret that neither Ben nor I terribly enjoy co-op gaming. I like winning. I like defeating the other players, especially Ben. While we knew it had to be co-op, it was a mental hurdle to accept that. That said, I have recently begun to appreciate solo gaming and that community. I have been able to enjoy co-op gaming with my girls and parents. I was excited.
But Back to the Future is competitive. How does that work? For us, that was an easier abstraction to make gameplay-wise. With The Goonies, you have one of the most famous ragtag teams of all time on an epic adventure together. Goonies never say die, etc. In Back to the Future, the team is really Marty and Doc...and the other Doc. It didn't seem that natural to form a team-up like that and have players work cooperatively. The idea that you'd use these characters to progress the story and fix the timeline seemed more in tune with the movie to us because that's what Marty's doing the entire movie series: Trying to put people in the proper situations and fix the timelines to ultimately get his life back in order. This is exactly what we have players doing, and we loved it. Just like Marty is able to position George to stand up to Biff, players will do similar things with all of the main characters from the movie.
That's where the role selection came in. Turn to turn, players can use Biff for their nefarious plans to try to hose other players. Lorraine can be selected for a clever time shift at just the right moment. Need some help flying the time machine? Doc is your Guy. Every character we used felt to us exactly how they feel in the movie. Being the best at getting everyone right where (and when) they needed to be at just the right time felt good. It feels like Doc just crashed into your trash cans shouting "Marty! We gotta go NOW!" Side note: Doc, you have a time machine. You could slow down just a tic. Maybe come back five minutes earlier and calmly explain what's going on vs. Lightning! POW! Crash! "Marty! NOW! Get in the #@%#ing car!!" I totally stole that joke from Chris Leder btw. (Roll For It. Fun game. Kind of a bossy title, though. No, you roll for it. Fool.)
Chris Leder is the best! Great dude, playtester, and designer. Character usage in both games was very important to us. We wanted to curate the player's game experience to feel like they WERE the characters. With The Goonies, that meant picking a character and being that character throughout the game. You ARE Data. With BttF, that wouldn't really work. No one wants to be anyone other than Marty. MAYBE Doc. No one WANTS to be George, though, or Jennifer. Well, maybe furries want to be Einstein. Either way, everyone wants to be Marty.
Back to The Goonies: It's a co-op. How are we going to separate this from all the other co-ops? The answer is the team turn. We wanted to give players a sense of working as the Goonies, so the team gets four actions every round. Those actions are used to navigate around the locations, clear obstacles, search for treasure, avoid the Fratellis, discover the ship, etc. How the team chooses to spend these four actions is entirely up to them: One player may contribute multiple cards for multiple actions in a round, one player might hang back and save cards, two players may team up for one action. It's entirely on the team to figure out how best to manage four actions a turn amongst themselves, given that every player also has both a special gamelong ability and a one-shot power to use at the optimal time.
When we started testing this system, the coolest thing started to happen. We noticed that the alpha player syndrome — the table general, if you will — was very much reduced, if not eliminated altogether, because in a team turn every player has enough options of their own to process that you don't have time or mental capacity to micromanage everyone else.
Here's an example of this in a standard co-op: When it's Matt's turn, we all sit there and stare at Matt analyzing his hand of cards and urging him not to mess it all up for us. We hold Matt's hand for him because we have time to babysit him and make sure he doesn't end the world accidentally. In The Goonies, with the team all taking four actions together, I'm looking at my own hand of cards, my power, my ability, and I'm lobbying for how I best think I can help the situation. Okay, there's a problem over there, I can help with this. Oh, you can do that? Great. You think I should use this power? Etc. The problem-solving immediately becomes a team engagement and everyone feels like they're helping. Even Matt. I love that after a game of The Goonies, win or lose, you and the other members of the team really feel like you went on that adventure together.
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Sigh. High Road.
So the DeLorean is flown around a ton, but how did we actually handle time travel in Back to the Future? The first thing we did was take a page from Fleet and give the cards in the main draw deck a few different stats. One of these stats you can use a card for is the listed power (think watts, not ability). Of course it takes 1.21 gigawatts to time travel, so each card has some portion of that or maybe the entire amount to spend. Cards are discarded as needed to reach 1.21 gigawatts, after which the time machine may be moved to any of the three time periods: 1955, 1985, or 2015. Once there, cards can be played to place characters in the different time periods to try to recreate the major events from the movies with which players will be familiar.
In this game, time is money, so each character played has a time cost that must be paid for with other cards using their listed time. What's more, because of the ripple effect that comes with altering the past, characters played in the past cost greater amounts of time than those in the future. This extra ripple effect takes more time to pull off, but the effects will come back to benefit players at game's end once the effects are totaled.
The real key to all of this, though, is that players are using the familiar characters to thematically help them on this journey. Doc is your key to moving the time machine efficiently. Jennifer does appear at first to be under-utilized and just dragged around the entire time...until she comes up huge for you in a pinch! Biff. Man, I hate when you choose Biff! But of course. Should you be happy when another player is using Biff? No way! He's a pain!
Lorraine is great. You will not use her every turn, but when you do, she is important. Some people are going to not like the way Biff works, but that was the point! Biff is a jerk. He is totally the kind of guy that pushes you down and takes your lunch money. Like Ben said, we wanted to make the character powers feel like the characters. Each power gives you sense of the character.
Of course Ben likes Biff. I mean, I know he puts on nice face to all of you, but the jerk store called and they're running out of Ben.
Winding this thing down, I want to say that each of these games has been an absolute honor to work on, so thank you very much for checking them out. I hope you're able to give them some plays and enjoy the adventures we've designed for you using these two wonderful stories that mean so much to us all. In addition, I'd be remiss not to especially thank Chris Leder for his work on Back to the Future and Jon Schultz for his work on The Goonies. The games wouldn't be what they are without these two major assets. Oh, and make sure to look for Matt sometime soon on a red carpet near you. —Ben
I will be the fat dude with the beard rocking the velvet skinny-fit tux with high peak satin cuffs...or sweat pants. Thanks to everyone who read this, and please consider checking out both games. The Goonies will be out later in 2016, and BttF was released in April 2016. —Matt
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