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Scott: It's a frosty Sunday morning in Hamburg, Germany. I emerge, bleary-eyed, out of bed with the blanket still wrapped around me, my breath condensing in front of my face like some sort of hungover dragon.
I shuffle over to my computer, where I plop myself down, ready to do a few hours of nothing until my stomach tells me it's safe to eat — the usual routine for an Australian working as a DJ in a country that's demonstrably too cold.
But this time, instead of the usual fare of videos of cats sneezing or dogs falling over to prod my brain into a semi-functioning state, I look over to my small but burgeoning collection of board games and make a decision, a decision to find someone in this town who would actually want to play them with me.
You see, being a DJ makes you nightlife friends: party people, the kind of folk who spend the early hours of the evening (or rather, what we would just call "the evening") preparing for later, which involves a whole lot of food, music and movement — these things being three sworn enemies of sitting down and having some nice organized fun. They weren't interested in connecting Cadiz to Stockholm for a sweet 21 points.
Typing a message on BGG looking for a game buddy feels a bit like delving into the world of online dating. What if they're weird? What if I'm weird? Not long after posting, I get a private message from a half-American, half-German guy named Shaun. He's keen to meet and play some games.
Now before this completely devolves into a blow-by-blow biography of how I slowly mutated into my final form of Full Geek, know that Shaun and I hit it off and started playing games regularly, and my collection began getting the lovin' it deserved. Fast forward a number of months, when after a nice night of games and dinner, the pair of us simultaneously divulge a dirty little secret we had been busting to tell each other.
"I've been… designing a game… really? Me too!" We both stutter at about the same time. It feels a bit like coming out, a huge rush of relief and endorphins fills the room. My ideas, resigned to being trapped in a notebook, could finally possibly see the light of day and be fabulous. "What's your idea? Let's try it out!" I had designed a game about the mob. He had designed a game about golf.
Turns out my game is pretty crap. His game is pretty crap, too.
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Dirty little secrets
But it is the start of a constant, never-ending, at times deafeningly distracting partnership of game designers. We make a pact: No matter who comes up with an idea, we share it, work on it together, try to get it polished, and perhaps even published — unless of course the idea is crap, which it often is. We get better at spotting that. Our big dream is to have a game come out at Essen. (Spoiler alert: This story has a happy ending.)
One day, Shaun calls me up with two ideas, one is about toy soldiers conquering bases, the other a dry mechanism with no theme yet, something about "I split, you choose". I like the idea of the mechanism but am a bit lukewarm on the toy soldier thing. We chat for a bit, then hang up. Later on, I call him back because I think I've had a bit of a brainwave regarding his idea.
"Hey, Shaun, I've had an idea for your toy soldier game, you know, the 'I split, you choose' game."
Shaun: "No, those were two different games."
Scott: "Oh, were they? I must have gotten confused. Anyway…"
Shaun: "Wait though… that's a great idea!"
Scott: "But I didn’t tell you my…"
Shaun: I hang up. Everything is falling into place as I almost fall out of my chair — that's how awesome the vague ideas forming in my head seem to me at this point. They are not quite wonderful yet — but we are getting there. We still have to make pirates out of fruit. Keep reading, you'll understand.
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A first iteration
of the game
It's a simple area-majority hodge-podge I somehow manage to cramp into a normal deck of playing cards. I'm sort of tickled by the theme but not getting anywhere with it.
The other idea firmly planted into my brain is due to games like Piece o' Cake by Jeffrey Allers and San Marco by Alan Moon and Aaron Weissblum. The "I-split-you-chose"-mechanism I first encountered in those games was something that held my designer brain in a sweaty headlock and just wouldn't let go. The bittersweet decisions always kept me at the edge of my seat and to this day give me the right kind of gut-wrenching play-pain.
I want to put my spin on this wonderful mechanism. But how? Having an older brother, he always split and chose at the same time, so no experience there. The only thing I have is the idea that the things you split and chose can be used in-game and to score. Not a lot to work with.
But when Scott accidentally/intentionally marries these two ideas on the phone, mechanisms click and interlock into a marvelous little clockwork of a card game: Players split and choose a set of cards which are used to reinforce troops in an area-majority game and the exact same cards can be used to score rather than to reinforce. You can score when you have majority at a base and strive to collect those ever-elusive victory points that way.
There it is. A game idea I fall in love with immediately and have to talk about with Scott again. We do this a lot. Our partners get jealous.
We get together, we test and tinker and more quickly than we expect, we have something in our hands that we consider "done". It's not though. We need a theme. Badly. After trying many things, we come up with fruits — mainly because I think of a great German pun for a name and persist on using it. Scott dislikes the name so much that he yells at me.
Scott: I do!
Shaun: In the game you now want to harvest the most fruit. You either plant or harvest the fruit and try to control the orchards. That works. I make some anthropomorphic cherries and lemons in Powerpoint and after printing out several decks of cards we go out into the world to present our game to defenseless playtesters.
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If life gives you lemons,
draw a cute face on those lemons
Amazingly, they don't rip our game apart but are enjoying themselves — quite a bit. Even my brother and father (who don't game) play it and have a ball. (Thanks for the feedback, guys!) We add the last zest to the game with three special cards and call it quits. We're happy, and the testers are, too.
Skip to August 2014. The big Essen game fair is coming up in October and we book a budget train with hard seats and a budget hotel with harder mattresses so that we can enter the magical halls filled with boxes of cardboard. Why not show our game there? We make business cards and a sell sheet for the game, then with a big cheesy smile and a hummingbird's heart rate, meet with several publishers. I sit in a secluded room at the ABACUSSPIELE booth and feel like a VIP, tucked away in a hidden corner in a noisy club. I give the elevator pitch and hear what I've heard a few times before: "Yeah, that sounds cool. We'll give it a go and let you know!"
They do. On December 18, 2014, I receive an email, letting me know that ABACUSSPIELE wants to sign the game and release it in 2016. I wake my one-year-old daughter and my sleep-deprived wife from their nap with squeals of joy. We celebrate with cookies and a diaper-change.
Then we wait. A long time. Forever. 2016 can't come fast enough. The months crawl by and we play the game here and there — even a few rounds with Jeffrey Allers, who planted one of the initial ideas in my brain with Piece o' Cake. He digs it. Motivated, we delve into the design of numerous other games and I spend SPIEL 2015 mostly pitching our ideas (stay tuned!). Scott accidentally double books and gets a tropical disease in Ethiopia.
Scott: I'm OK!
Shaun: Finally, things get rolling in early 2016 with a theme change for the game. ABACUSSPIELE wants to change the fruits into something else, although they like how the mechanisms and theme are tied together — and they even like my super cool name. Problem: Fruits don't sell. Pirates do, though, so we decide on the name Jolly & Roger.
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Card art by Michael Menzel.
Note how different the lemon looks!
In May 2016, we get the first illustrations by none other than Michael Menzel, and we are humbled and amazed by what he has created to breathe life into our game. Such a strange and wonderful moment seeing your creation and ideas being worked on by professionals.
ABACUSSPIELE keeps us posted on the production process, and we are really thankful how much time they take to keep us first-timers in the loop. August comes along and we see everything come together: rules, components, box art. On August 23rd, everything is finalized and sent off to the printer — the point of no return.
The product shot: the photo
that makes every first-time designer squeal
We are speechless and giddy as all get out about the upcoming months. We are releasing a game at SPIEL and people will be playing it. We will hopefully create many hours of gaming fun and tense play for couples and friends all over the globe.
Thinking about how much joy games have brought us, we are humbled by the thought that other people will find joy in our game that started as two half-baked ideas and has accompanied us over the last two years. Thanks to everybody who helped make us make this game, and thanks to BGG for kicking off this designer duo in the first place.
Thanks for reading this, and happy gaming!
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