:strip_icc()/pic2767137.jpg)
:strip_icc()/pic2884287.jpg)
A long time ago, I had the thought that a fun game theme would be players acting cooperatively as a bomb squad to try to defuse bombs. "That's a cool idea", I said to myself — and then I put the idea aside as I was already working on several other designs.
In May 2014 I got a picture in my head of a group playing a game. I remember that I was driving on the highway after work, heading to my son's soccer practice. The picture was basically this: Players were sitting around a table, and several dice were rolled onto the table. They then discussed who got which dice. That was it. But for some reason it triggered an immediate recollection of the bomb squad theme: "What if they are using those dice to defuse bombs?!" This got me excited, and it became more than just another idea that I would write down or forget about. I needed to make this work.
My initial thought was that each player would have a player board with a combination that would defuse the bomb. There were five columns on the board, and each was a different color with a number at the bottom.
Players would roll dice, then take one to place on their board; a green die would go in the green column, etc. The object was to get the total on the dice pips in the column to have their last digit match the number in the combination, so if the number in the column was a 3, you could have a 3 or dice that totaled 13, 23, etc. This would "unlock" that part of the combination.
The idea was easy enough to scribble together a couple of boards and give it a shot — and within two minutes I knew it didn't work. I still liked the idea of players working out who took which dice from a single die roll, but the way I had the "bomb boards" set up didn't work.
One thing I always think about when working on a game is what I want the players to feel. With this game, I wanted tension between taking what you need versus giving it up for another player with a common goal. With the dice, I was going for the idea that some dice would work for more than one player, so it wasn't always clear who should take which dice. Sometimes you would really need something, sometimes you could take anything and give your teammates what they need, and sometimes you would be stuck and not be able to take anything. The combination boards didn't work because it was either obvious what you should take or, more likely, you couldn't take anything. The boards needed work.
The other issue I could see right away was that I had no idea what the overall flow of the game was. How do you win? Do you just need to get these few dice on your board to defuse the bomb and then you're done? What if the other players aren't done? I try to think about production costs when I work on a game, so I knew that I didn't want a bunch of these boards in the game.
That first two-minute test was done on my lunch break at work, and on the drive home I thought about how to fix the problems. By the time I got home, I had an idea that I thought would work. Instead of each column needing a specific number in a specific color, they would instead need different combinations of dice that were more open ended. So instead of needing a green 3, you would instead need a green die, any color 3, and something else. To keep the board from getting cluttered, I decided to split each column off into its own card. This also solved the other problem of game flow. If each combination was its own card, then these could be individual bombs and once you defused it, you would simply draw another one. I knew this was the answer, so I spent the next two days making bomb cards with different dice combinations needed to defuse them.
The first test with this revised idea was with my wife and kids. I knew I wanted the players to be up against a timer, and that I wanted the game to be short, but I didn't know exactly how short. I figured I'd go with five minutes for our first game. I also didn't know how many cards we would be able to complete in a game, so I made thirty or forty and put them all in the first game just to see how many we could clear. The timer started and we began playing — and it worked! As soon as the five-minute timer beeped, I knew that was too short, so I reset it and said to keep playing. When it beeped again, the game length felt right. Ten minutes. It gave me the quick game that I wanted, but also gave enough time to feel like we had progressed and accomplished something, and it wasn't over too soon.
Okay, so the core of the game was set. Now I needed to figure out the rest of it, namely how you win, what happens if someone doesn't take a die, how the game is set up on the table, and whether I wanted to add anything else to the core mechanisms.
:strip_icc()/pic2806509.jpg)
The first playtest of FUSE
In the first couple of tests we finished around fifteen cards, and that was with us having no idea what we were doing. It also involved me thinking through the design as we played, so I figured somewhere around twenty cards was probably about right. That would be the goal: Defuse twenty bombs in ten minutes. Easy to explain and exciting. I knew I had something, so I put aside all other designs to focus on this one exclusively.
Now, what to do about dice that the players don't take? My initial idea was terrible. Any dice that weren't taken were placed onto a track that would lock those dice up. The idea was that if you ran out of dice in the bag, then you would lose the game. As the track filled up, you could return the dice to the bag, but you would be penalized by drawing a certain number of time tokens that would cost the team from 0 to 15 seconds. If players defused all twenty bombs, they would stop the timer, then subtract their "time token" time to see whether they still won. For example, if we defused all the bombs with 33 seconds still on the clock, and we had drawn 30 seconds worth of time tokens, then we would have won the game with 3 seconds to spare. I liked the idea of the tension this might create — with you running low on dice, but not wanting to risk returning them and drawing time tokens — but the execution was convoluted and clunky. I wanted this game to be streamlined and easy to learn. I needed a new idea.
I decided to simplify and lose the whole idea of the extra track. If a die wasn't taken, then it should just be rolled and something happens. The next idea, which I stuck with for a little while, was that the die was rolled and on a 1 or 2 nothing happened and the die was returned to the bag; on a 3 or 4, it was returned to the bag, but you had to draw a FUSE Token (more on those later); and on a 5 or 6, the die was removed from the game and you had to draw a FUSE token. This was much more streamlined than the old idea, but the more I played it, the more I felt like it was still too clunky. It needed to be stripped down one more time.
The final rule for the game is that any dice that are not taken are rolled, then players must return a die from their bomb cards that matches the color or number rolled. Simple, easy to remember, tension-adding — just what I was looking for.
:strip_icc()/pic2887100.jpg)
Okay, FUSE tokens. While I wanted to keep this game simple and not move beyond the core mechanism too much, I had always pictured tokens that would be activated throughout the game. The initial idea was that some tokens were good and some were bad; sometimes you were lucky in what you flipped, and sometimes you weren't. But I'm designing a cooperative game here, so why would I want to be nice to you?! Thus, all of the tokens are bad. If you need me to help you out by giving you aid tokens, then maybe you shouldn't be defusing bombs in your spare time.
The final issue was how all of this would be displayed on the table and how the game would flow. After the first couple of tests, I made a super fancy board by taking an old manila folder and marking twenty spaces around the outside of it. Some of them had spaces for FUSE tokens, and when you defused a bomb card, you would place it on one of these spaces (numbered 1-20), then activate any FUSE token there. If you filled the board, then you won. I liked this because it kept everything contained nicely and gave players a sense of accomplishment as they filled the board.
The game stayed like this for some time, but while thinking about the theme one day I decided to reverse it, filling the board with cards during set-up and having players take the next card in order from the board as soon as they defused a bomb. This still gave players the same sense of accomplishment as they emptied the board, but it seemed to fit the theme better since you were "finding" these bombs and defusing them. This is the version of the game that I played for a long time and the one that I showed to Renegade Game Studios — and then I changed my mind.
What if I made the game even more portable by getting rid of the board? The board doesn't actually do anything, and when watching new players play the game, sometimes they would be confused about which card to take next. What else does scrapping the board accomplish? It means we can make the game more portable, bring the price down, and make it look less intimidating to non-gamers. (Not that it was ever intimidating — I just needed a third thing to list.)
Now the game was only cards and dice — and tokens. Oh, yes, tokens. If I have only a deck of cards, how do I incorporate the FUSE tokens? I couldn't stack them in the deck...but I could turn them into cards. I really liked this idea because changing them from tokens to cards opened things up for more ideas to be added. I still wanted to keep the game simple and accessible, but with tokens becoming cards the design now had more room for different ideas and options for expansions.
Speaking of options, another later addition to the game was the point system. I had been thinking about a way to add a little more replayability and choice to the game, and the point system answered both of those issues. I decided that the set-up without the board would be the deck of cards with five face-up cards in the middle of the table, and when you finished a card, you could choose one of the face-up cards to replace it. This now gave you a choice of going for easier or harder cards. Why would you ever choose to take a more difficult card? Points. I decided to give each card a point value so that players could now not only try to win the game, but also shoot for higher scores, thus adding more choices and replayability to the game.
:strip_icc()/pic2762274.jpg)
/pic2744644.jpg)
FUSE is exactly the game that I wanted it to be, and it came together quickly, too. I started working on it in May 2014 and was able to show it to publishers at Gen Con 2014 just a few months later. I had several publishers interested in the design, but I decided to sign the game with Renegade Game Studios. Although Renegade was a new company at the time, I was really impressed by Scott Gaeta, the founder and president. Corey Young (designer of Gravwell) introduced us at Gen Con, and I was immediately drawn to Scott's vision for games and the industry. Working with Scott and Renegade has been great — so much so that we've announced Covert for release in 2016 with more announcements to come in the future.
FUSE is one of those games that makes you say, "Okay, let's do that again. I know we can win this time!" I hope you enjoy FUSE as much as we have!
—Kane Klenko
:strip_icc()/pic2991689.png)
:strip_icc()/pic3002144.png)
:strip_icc()/pic2868529.jpg)
/pic3000850.png)
/pic2925304.jpg)
