:strip_icc()/pic3485421.jpg)
/pic3211823.jpg)
/pic174180.jpg)
In this case, it wasn't a celestial object that struck me; it was Alan Moon. Fifteen years ago, I had officially entered the boardgaming hobby here in Germany, and I was playing catch-up with a steady diet of Knizia, Kramer, Teuber, and (especially) Moon. When I began to design my own games, this prolific quartet of the "German school" of streamlined "themed abstracts" were my inspiration.
I enjoyed playing most of Moon's games, with one of those being San Marco, co-designed with Aaron Weissblum. I thought it was a brilliant marriage of the pie-division problem with an area majority game, but the division part was possible only for 2-3 players. In fact, I almost preferred their two-player variant of the system — the tiny card game Canal Grande — to its beautiful board game parent, because even with three players, downtime was an issue.
I wondered whether it was possible to make a pie-division game that was accessible by more than 2-3 players. I thought about this off and on for a long time. Years passed and I would churn ideas through my head in those in-between times when I was on my bike, in the shower, on the subway, or drifting off to sleep at night. (Some people count sheep; I "count" game mechanisms.)
One of the issues that held me back was finding an appropriate theme. Then, quite suddenly, I had one of those revelations of the obvious, like an apple falling on my head to remind me of the power of gravity. Why not make a pie-division problem about…pies?
/pic387320.jpg)
I also wanted another choice, another option to score points and a dilemma to add more tension to the game. Instead of collecting a slice, players had the option of "eating" them (i.e., flipping them over); the player would receive guaranteed points from these slices, but they would not be counted for the end-game majorities. That was it. Fifty-five slices, and five pies later, I tested the game to immediate success. It was the first and last time my battle-hardened playtesters were satisfied on the first run-though, and it did not take long to secure a contract for what would become the best-selling game of my modest career: Aber bitte mit Sahne, Piece o' Cake, Una pointe de Chantilly, Sla je Slag (room)…
The pies looked great on a table in a café and always attracted a crowd. Gamers found it to be an appropriate "filler", and best of all, scores of my friends who do not play games enjoyed it as well.
:strip_icc()/pic1145883.jpg)
Making Games in a "Cult of the New" Industry
For better or worse, the industry has changed dramatically since I entered the hobby. Gamers have always been excited about new games, and a sharp increase in game publishers has met the demand. Admittedly, this has probably helped me find publishers for my game designs, giving me more options — but it also means that very few games remain in a publisher's catalogue for more than a couple of years. Thus, it was inevitable that sales for Piece o' Cake would eventually decline and the game would disappear from the original publisher's catalogue.
The upside to the current state of the industry, however, is that a good game can be published again, sometimes with a new theme and even new variants. With this in mind, I began shopping the game around again after it was off the market for a few years.
/pic534327.jpg)
The other expansions included combination slices that would count as a ½ slice for two different flavors, and slices with special actions or end-game bonuses on them, such as "You receive 1 bonus point for every different flavor you collect" or "You choose first on a future round". Since all of these ideas worked well and the publisher had no plans for a larger expansion, I posted them on BGG for fans of the game to print and play.
When I began pitching the game to publishers again, I went back and revised the expansions and included them in the pitch. The main change was that the special action slices were now tiles that could be placed with any group of slices.
:strip_icc()/pic3485386.jpg)
A Different Kind of Pie
In 2016, Ted Alspach of Bézier Games and I were chatting about doing a project together, and he suddenly remembered Piece o' Cake and asked whether that was available. Soon he was testing and developing the game together with my expansions and was excited about the possibilities. His suggestion to change the theme to pizza was perfect and led to some brilliant production decisions: the expansion adding bonus actions and rewards would become the "daily specials", the rules would be printed as a fold-out menu, and a scoring pad would be included in the form of a restaurant check. And, of course, the game box art would look like a pizza box!
:strip_icc()/pic3485396.jpg)
Sample score sheet and menu-style rulebook
Although the theme is based on the thin, New York-style pizza, the game is deeper due to the new mechanisms, and it also offers more variety to each game. It's rewarding for me to see it in print again with all the extra "toppings", and even more so to see the attention to detail that Ted has given the game.
I hope that New York Slice is a welcome main course for those who enjoyed the dessert of Piece o' Cake, and best of all, that many new players will want to dig into the game — and the hobby — thanks to the update.
Jeffrey D. Allers
Dinner is served — very sloppily served, mind you...
:strip_icc()/pic3496086.jpg)
/pic3495485.jpg)
:strip_icc()/pic3452580.png)
:strip_icc()/pic3491804.jpg)
/pic3157131.jpg)
