Designer Diary: Goons of New York 1901

Picture a game jam. A month-long game jam. With three hundred designers. Under the age of 12.

That's what we do at Brooklyn Game Lab every day.

One of our endeavors in a recent semester was to homebrew an expansion for the hit game New York 1901. By the end, our kids — with the help of our friends at Blue Orange Games — had made their first foray into game publishing!

Each day in our after-school program (and summer camp), we guide students through something we call "lab". During this two-hour session, a group of fifty kids learn, play, and deconstruct a popular board game together.

After gameplay, each child provides structured notes on winning tactics, losing lessons, and ideas for new elements and mechanisms — then the students stand and present these thoughts, after which they vote for their favorites — all with the goal of reinventing the game.

In the case of New York 1901, after two weeks of work we had whittled five hundred submissions down to 98 distinct ideas for modifying the game. These included things like airports, day and night phases, taxes, eminent domain, and of course zombies. The heavy-hitting classics made the cut, too: Godzilla, King Kong, and a "gigantic worm".

At this point in the process, our stellar creative team stepped in to review, consider, and sort the top hundred ideas. After working to surface common threads, three leading visions emerged:

• The first proposal was "King of New York 1901" in which we co-opted the monsters from King of Tokyo/King of New York and added them as NPCs. These forces-of-nature were designed to stomp the city to bits as players built around them. I'll note that "monsters stomping things" is a permanent fixture on our mod shortlist.

• The second was "Into the 20th Century". In this version, the scoring track was treated as a literal timeline of the city of New York. The 1 spot on the scoring track signified the year 1901, while the 20 spot signified 1920 and the start of Prohibition! The Great Depression, World War I and II, The World's Fair of 1939 — all of these dates were given some in-game significance and tied to the timely progression of the game (as denoted by the leading-most player).

• The third was "Gangs of New York" or its softer-sounding cousin, "Rise of the Kingpins". In this model, dozens of PvP ideas were packaged together in a way that conveyed the feel of NYC in the 1920s and 1930s — grit and all. We loved designer Chénier La Salle's attention to historical detail in the original game, and this vision doubled down on his commitment to the time period.

As our creative team discussed more broadly how each of these visions might play, I sat turning one of the game's plastic "worker" tokens over and over in my hand, appreciating the detail. One of my only criticisms of the base game is that these fantastic pieces tended to spend as much time off the game board as they did on it. They commuted in and out of the city, but didn't live there.

We asked ourselves: What if the opposite were true? What if they cluttered the board with old-timey hustle and bustle? Oppressive! Territorial! For us, the idea of turning the workers into "goons" immediately changed the feel of the city, creating a downtown that felt alive, occupied, seedy, imposing — and we knew that we'd chosen the best direction.

The other core concept that emerged to round out this vision was the idea of more distinct districts in the city, something emblematic of NYC, such as Chinatown or Little Italy — a sense of turf. We wanted the districts to have not just color, but flavor.

And so idea #33 of our 98 top ideas was selected as the keystone submission! It was simple: "You hire gangs to take over other companies' buildings, destroy them, and get rid of the reserved buildings." We arranged dozens of ideas related to PvP interference, all spiraling out from this hub...

We researched mafia history and drew up generic gangs (long live "the blue barbers"), laying out all of the lab-generated mechanisms that allowed players to use worker tokens underhandedly.

With the overarching goal of changing the feel of the city, we introduced five "dives", including a casino, a prison, and of course a speakeasy. These pre-placed buildings fit nicely over the parks and other unused decorative spaces on the original board.

Ultimately, the mod's general framework was simple: Control the most turf in a district, and you control its gang. Each turn you could deploy one worker as a knuckle-dragging goon or detour a rival goon into one of your dives.

Over time, a colorful boss emerged as the patron saint of each of our gangs:

The dives also took on lives of their own as our kids included mini-games to make visiting them even more immersive:

As we prepared to go to print, many of our beloved elements were put on ice — but as we teach our young game designers, the most important part of your design is the part you love, but leave out.

As we handed this document off to the Blue Orange team, we wiped our collective brow. My staff, my kids, and myself — all proud to have our work recognized and taken seriously, and to give some little thing back to the world of gaming that has been so incredibly good to us.

#ModEverything

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Editor's note: Here's a little more detail about how Goons of New York 1901 works: Once all players in the game have reached the Silver Age, you look to see who controls the most territory of each color on the game board (with pink being excluded in two-player games).

Whoever controls the most of a color takes control of that boss, and at the start of each of your subsequent turns, you can use the "goon power" of one of your bosses to place a goon in a particular location, such as on a street or on a specific Bronze Age skyscraper. You'll score points for this goon based on certain conditions, but if someone ever controls more territory of this color than you, that player takes control of the boss and you have to say goodbye to those goons. —WEM