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Fast forward to 2005. I'm a little older, not much wiser, and still in love with games. My D&D group had long been disbanded, and I was recovering from a pretty nasty M:TG habit. Every once in a while I'd find myself doodling in my notebook about a game I'd like to make. Somewhere in these pages I wrote, "In the future, old broken-down robots are sent to the recycling facility to be melted down and made into new parts for new robots." This is the idea that eventually led to Go Goblin, Go!, a game that has absolutely nothing to do with robots.
The first version of Disassembly Line (as it was first called) was a practice in roll-and-move. I had the idea that maybe I could do something different with this oft-maligned game mechanism. The board was a fifty-space track that ended at the incinerator. Players had three robots they would move down the track by rolling dice. The idea was to get your robots as close as you could to the incinerator without sending them in. Three different colors of six-siders were in a bag from which a player would draw three dice to roll, then move one robot for each die. A player could then choose to keep any of these dice to go towards making a set (which would earn them more points), throw the rest back in the bag, and play would continue until robots started jumping into the incinerator.
The first night of playtesting was a riot. It started with four of us, and passing friends would jump in until there were seven or eight of us at the end (not including the ones who had left to go to bed). There was much laughter and merriment, but something didn't sit right with me. Sure, we had had a lot of fun, but we also had had a lot of drinks.
So, what was the problem? Even my brother (who can be the harshest of critics) said the game was good. Was it just anxiety? Was I the issue here? No! That couldn't be it... Could it? Nah, definitely not. I eventually figured my problem was that it was still very traditional roll-and-move. You roll a 6, move six spaces, and blah. So what to do?
I started researching racing games, and came across Reiner Knizia's Winner's Circle. The way someone had described it was that you rolled the die, and that determined which horse(s) you could move. I read through the rules, and it didn't quite seem that way to me, but I liked the idea.
I decided that I would let players move any robot on the board, rather than having a set group in their own color. I made counters to "program" each robot to move on certain die rolls. For example, if a robot has a 3 program, a player may move it when he rolls a 3. I also figured that if a robot has two of the same program, it would move twice for that roll. After a few playtests the programs ended up having two numbers each (like dominoes), which solved a few interesting bugs with the mechanism.
I also experimented with different track lengths (and settled on a much shorter ten-space track), different numbers of robots (ended up at six, which is where I started), and other little tweaks here and there. For scoring, I'd come up with giving each player a set of cards from which he would select his team of robots to score with. I played around with that quite a lot. The game was coming together nicely.
Fast forward to 2010. Again, a little older, maybe a bit wiser this time. Gaming had been put on the back burner for a little while, in favor of work and family issues. I had just moved and was getting my personal life in order. I was attending Marcon in Columbus, Ohio with friends, one of whom pointed out to me a game design contest with a chance for the winner to be published.
The next morning I dragged myself out of bed, managed to get some caffeine into my system, and made my way to the contest. The rules were simple: They gave us materials to work with, and we made games from them. As I perused the available bits, I pondered some of games I had made before, and wondered whether I could make any of those from the pieces in front of me. This is where goblins enter the picture.
When I saw those goblin minis on the table, it all clicked. Robots were cast aside. Programs became commands bellowed by harsh goblin taskmasters. Batteries were replaced by rocks thrown at these underlings in an attempt to motivate them forward toward a pit of lava. I grabbed the minis along with some counters, and made the board, cards, and dominoes with what little artistic ability I could muster. I wasn't even thinking about the fact that I was in a contest. I'd caught that old bug again, and I wanted to create.
After our allotted time was up, everybody got to show what they'd made. I was a little nervous, but felt like I presented my game well enough. Then I saw the competition and became fairly sure I wouldn't win. Who cares? I did my best, and my game was still pretty good. I should be proud of myself. And the winner is...
"Me? Really? But I thought..." As I started gesturing towards the fellow I thought was the sure winner, our hosts reassured me that I had, in fact, won.
This brings us to the present day. Go Goblin, Go! is coming soon to a FLGS near you, courtesy of Twilight Creations. Finally, my nearly lifelong dream of getting my game out there for everyone to enjoy is coming true. It's a fun, quick game with a fair amount of strategy mixed in with the luck, some understated bluffing, and good tension towards the end. Just give it a chance. You might like it.
Thank you for reading,
Jon David Faeth
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