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I caught wind of the contest from a post at the Board Game Designers Forum, and the contest guidelines required that the design use both dice and cards, that the game materials fit in Blue Panther's card/dice tower, and that the game be short.
The length turned out to be the sticking point. Every idea I came up with was obviously going to exceed 30 minutes. After wasting a lot of time just coming up with an idea to work on, I was ready to give up and move on to another project. Sometimes giving up is what you need to do. I don't necessarily mean "giving up" as in "quitting", but "giving up" as in "letting go of the notions that you have yourself locked into". In this case it was little of both.
Having decided that I wasn't going to be able to make the deadline, I stopped trying to create a 30-minute strategy game. That's when it dawned on me that a mix of pattern recognition and speed could be fun. I did a quick write-up of the idea and WHACK I realized I had just designed a party game. This was a surprise to me since in all my years I had never designed a party game of any type, nor had I even tried to do so.
The game came together quickly, which was fortunate since I had used a lot of time on the other concepts. I'm not going to get into much detail about the design process as the game is incredibly simple and most the work involved working out the distribution of card symbols, which I am certain would be a real snore fest to read. Instead, I'll tell you how to play Snag, along with a few things I did that may not be obvious at first glance.
As previously mentioned, the game comes in a dice tower box, with 2D6 – one red die and one blue, each having six of twelve symbols on them – and thirty square cards, each showing four different symbols. Players take turns drawing a card and playing it into a field, then they roll the dice.
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The players simultaneously try to find the symbols shown on the dice adjacent to one another on the playing field. The symbols can be on the same card or (preferably) on different cards. When you find a match, you place a finger on each symbol to claim the card(s) on which the symbols are located. In the example above, there are two opportunities to score.
Each player may score only one set, so claim the set on two different cards, if possible. You probably have noticed that a given symbol may appear on either color background, which may or may not match the die color. Color is irrelevant for claiming pairs and is there to help confuse the eye. The game is played until all cards have been exhausted with the winner being the one who claimed the most.
I didn't hold out much hope of winning because I knew Blue Panther didn't publish party games. I even went as far as making a bit of a joke out of my submission by stating that the development team at PyroMyth Games (my business entity) had determined Blue Panther LLC was in need of party games in its line and Snag was designed specifically to fill that gap. I figured if I was going to lose, I might as well have a little joke to myself.
Months passed, and I had all but forgotten the contest when the email reached my inbox. But I didn't read the message, at least not right away simply because I hadn't checked my e-mail. Instead, I learned about it when another game designer congratulated me on winning.
Thinking back on it, being congratulated by my peers is better than an e-mail any day...
David Whitcher
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