Designer Diary: Eselsbrücke – "So This Donkey Walked into a Bar on a Bridge..."

People have always been enchanted by mnemonics as they help us memorize things that might otherwise be forgotten. If you look closely at what mnemonics are, you realize that they are often nothing more than short stories – and the more outrageous, funny or bizarre these stores are, the better we can remember them. Some stories will never be forgotten and will be carried with us for a lifetime.

Game designers tend to monitor their environment for things that can be turned into board games, and sometime in 2007 the idea came to me to capture the essence of mnemonics – that is, mini-stories – in something exciting and fun for the game table. The aim was to have players invent in the first stage of the game their own mini-stories, preferably in an exciting way so that other players would be able to remember the stories in the second stage, with some time passing between the two stages. What could more challenging than to take everyday objects that at first have nothing to do with one another, then wrap them together in mini-stories!

And so I started drawing images that I then pasted onto small cardboard tiles. The resulting 120 image tiles would be placed face-down at the edge of the table. On a player's turn, he would reveal two image tiles, then tell a mini-story about the two objects that would ideally allow players to recall the two images as a cohesive unit later in the game. If, for example, the player revealed tiles showing "stool" and "beer bottle", he might invent the following mini-story:

Quote:

In my youth, we had an infamous dare in which we'd challenge someone to hold a beer bottle steady in one hand for ten minutes while standing on a stool balanced on only one leg. Few survived that dare as they'd drink the beer first, then could hardly stand on the stool using both legs.

The two tiles "stool" and "beer bottle" would then be placed face-down in separate stacks in the middle of the table. After 20-30 tiles were placed into each of these stacks, the first part of the game would end and no more stories would be added to the players' bulging memories. Now would begin the resolution stage of the game. On a turn, a player would reveal a tile from either of the two stacks, then would have to name the second matching tile still hidden in the other stack. So if you revealed "stool", you'd have to say "beer bottle", earning a victory point chip if you did and losing one if you goofed.

The basic concept of the game was already quite apparent, but somehow it felt too light and trivial. All the players who tested the game found the resolution stage incredibly easy as the previously told story had anchored "stool" and "beer bottle" firmly in their memories. It's hard for a player to forgot a mnemonic, and weeks or even months later we were able to recall mnemonics created during a game. For this reason, the game idea disappeared into the drawer.

More than a year later, now in 2009, I dug out the prototype and showed it to my friend Stefan Dorra, with whom I had once again begun to develop games. Stefan was as excited by the mnemonic/mini-story foundation as I was, so we decided to work on the game more. Stefan also quickly realized that the way players resolved the two stacks in the second half of the game was much too simple. While I had never considered anything other than players revealing two tiles at once, Stefan thought that players should instead reveal three tiles. I was skeptical of the idea and had doubts that players would be able to remember everything, but I learned a lesson. While the difficulty of the game did increase, players were still able to name the missing tiles in most cases – but not always, and that's the way it should be. The right mix of fun and challenge seemed to be in place.

But Stefan then realized another problem, namely the lack of interaction. This problem was solved in a major breakthrough due to one additional mechanism, namely the common resolution of the mnemonics. Now all players other than the one who created the mnemonic would have to resolve it!

To make this happen, the storyteller would distribute the three tiles to the other players in clockwise order, with each player receiving one tile and keeping it secret from others. The players, some of whom had a piece of information about the story, would have to name a tile held by another player. Thanks to this breakthrough, we shifted from one player resolving a story to everyone doing it. This new system was wonderfully interactive because the distribution of tiles across the table had the effect of creating partnerships among the players. Getting other players to work together in a joint effort to recreate a tale placed a lot of responsibility on the storyteller, so to reward the successful remembering of a story, we decided the storyteller would receive an additional victory point chip.

The last major problem to be solved on the way to a finished game involved the rigidity of play. The game still had a strict separation between the two halves of play, with mnemonics being created in the first half, then resolved in the second half. Then the game ended. Thus, it was imperative that the two halves merge with one another in some way. This cross-penetration was achieved by overlapping the two actions – creating and resolving – starting in the third round of play. Starting in this round, a player would do two things on his turn: 1) Build a new mnemonic and 2) Resolve the oldest mnemonic he had created. Using this structure, we determined that the playing time should be seven rounds, with rounds 1 and 2 being devoted to mnemonic creation (building the "three-stack" of tiles), rounds 3-5 involving both creation and resolution, and rounds 6 and 7 resolving the final two series of mnemonics. Since we kept noticing that players still resolved the mnemonics all too easily, we decided to raise the stakes. Thus, while the first two rounds would still involve the creation of three-tile mnemonics, in the next two rounds players had to create stories with four images and in the final round with five images.

To track the seven rounds and the actions in each of them, we used a round marker set on a game board in the center of the table. Then we realized that the scoring system we had been using, one that tracked the successes and failures of players during mnemonic resolution, could be incorporated into this round tracker as the victory point chips were of little practical use. Now every player was represented by a pawn on a linear scoring track, a track that was an ugly scrawl to begin with but quickly beautified. Whoever was able to resolve a mnemonic would move his pawn ahead two spaces, while the one who had told the story would advance one space. Whoever got the story wrong would fall back one space.

It was now Autumn 2009, and after numerous tests we were extremely pleased with our game, so we brought Eselsbrücke – that being the German word for "mnemonics", the literal translation of which is "donkey bridge" – to Spiel 2009 in Essen, Germany to show to Thorsten Gimmler from Schmidt Spiele. Thorsten liked the basic idea of the game, and we were delighted when a few weeks later he offered a licensing agreement for the game.

Nevertheless, the game at that time had not reached its final form. Many other tests had shown that all too often players forgot to advance and move back their pawns on the scoring track. This was due to the enormous amount of emotion coming from players due to wacky stories and the thrilling moments when a mnemonic was resolved. It was clear that the scoring had to braided into the game play so that it would happen without players even noticing.

So we did further editorial work on the game and devised a new and much more practical scoring system. As a result, the game board and pawns disappeared and the image tiles themselves become the score indicator. This new scoring mechanism is far more clever: When a player names an image tile held by an opponent, that opponent hands over the tile and the player adds that tile to his stack of VPs on the table. Anyone who messes up a story resolution has to discard one or more tiles. To reward the storyteller, a newly introduced image tile is placed on his stack whenever a story is resolved correctly by the other players.

This additional tile represents a victory point for the storyteller, but it also serves a second function. If a player has to give up chips due to an incorrect guess – with the penalty for mistakes rising from one tile to seven as the game progresses – he can now stop handing in chips after discarding a Stop Tile from his stack. (If he must lose five tiles, for example, and a Stop Tile is the third tile down in his stack, then he loses only three tiles.) Thanks to this bonus, Stop Tiles are extremely popular in the final game, and they inspire players to create really inventive mnemonics so that others can remember them with ease. To make it easy for players to stack their tiles between rounds and help them recall which stack is for which mnemonic and how many tiles must be paid for a false memory, we introduced a new player board to track all this information.

The final version of the player board, showing stacks of tiles from completed stories to be distributed on future turns

In the many other tests that followed, the only changes to the rules came from special cases that occasionally occur, such as a player needing to name the last tile in a mnemonic while holding that tile in hand. Thus, our main focus for the final phase in 2010 was the graphical implementation for the game, and thankfully Schmidt was able to get Michael Menzel to handle the design and artwork. Schmidt had also decided to include 180 tiles in the game – 50% more than were in the prototype – so there was much to do, but eventually we did have 180 images with no duplication.

Over the summer of 2010, we received about a half-dozen new images each week for review, and once again we realized how excellent Michael is, for not only are the pictures clear and meaningful, but they also play a part in the creation of a mini-story. The tile for "Autumn", for example, shows not only the brown leaves you'd expect, but also a walker whose leashed dog is being carried away by the wind; the tile for "gap-toothed" shows a victorious boxer who would be better off wearing a mouth guard in future fights. These "primed" illustrations help players to create mnemonics more spontaneously.

In closing, I'd like to offer special thanks not only to Thorsten Gimmler for his outstanding editorial work, but also to Michael Menzel for the particularly accomplished drawings.

Ralf zur Linde

(This diary was translated from the German by BGG News editor W. Eric Martin, with assistance from my conveniently German exchange student, Bahar Mahzari. I take responsibility for any mistakes added to the diary. Any improvements, too. —WEM)