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At the beginning of 2019, my employer allowed me to take one month off from work in order to enroll in a full-time course at the Berlin School of English to become certified as a TESL teacher (Teaching English as a Second Language). I knew that this intensive course also meant that I would have no time for most of my other activities, including game design, so I vowed to put all my projects to the side temporarily in order to focus on the course.
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An intensive course in teaching English was supposed to put all game designs on pause
However, just as Steve Martin discovered, it is very difficult for creatives to turn off their creativity. And so it happened that, while I was fully immersed in learning the art of teaching my mother tongue to adults from around the world, I accidentally designed a game.
I should not have been so surprised. After all, my environment is oftentimes my inspiration, and I view daily life through the lens of play. Suddenly altering my routine was bound to expose me to new stimuli, especially in the ever-changing city of Berlin.
Taking the subway downtown was something I hadn't done on a daily basis since I worked there as an architect over twenty years ago. I reveled in mixing with the masses of people streaming in and out of the underground tunnels, like tributaries emptying into the Elbe.
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Emerging with the crowds from the Berlin U-Bahn
One of those first mornings on my way to school, as I was waiting on the train platform, a man near me caught my attention. He was drawing lines in a book. I edged closer and tried to peer inconspicuously over his shoulder. It was a book of puzzles consisting of numbered circles, and he was drawing lines to connect the circles. The circles were like islands and the lines were bridges, and whenever an island had as many bridges connected to it as its number, the man crossed that island out.
As we boarded our train, I was so intrigued that I looked it up on my phone. Before the train arrived at my school, I had already downloaded a free app with the puzzle and had solved several of them.
These puzzles are called "Hashiwokakero", or "Hashi" for short.
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I downloaded this app to try the puzzle for myself
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Puzzle
I have a confession to make: I don't really like puzzles. Not jigsaw puzzles, not logic puzzles, not puzzle hunts, and not even escape rooms (although this did not stop me from designing several puzzles when I had a pitch appointment in Essen one year with ThinkFun).
In a puzzle, there is only one solution, one road to follow that everyone must tread — and it's guaranteed to be a well-worn road as I will be far from the first to ever solve a puzzle. In a board game, having only one solution — one path to victory — is considered poor design at best, "solved" at its worst.
The best modern board games usually allow for the creativity of the players, with multiple branching paths to explore. Sometimes you can even go off-road.
In fact, playing my game Pandoria (co-designed with Bernd Eisenstein) online at Yucata has exposed me to different playing styles from around the world, some of which we never encountered before in our test groups in Berlin. That's one of the exciting things about game design: creating a world and then "letting it loose". When I explore that world further myself, even I discover things I haven't seen before. It is as if the game has taken on a life of its own.
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However, despite all my prejudices against puzzles, here I was on my phone in the train, enamored with a simple, one-solution "game" with no replayability. It was the mechanism I liked so much, the number of bridges being determined by the number on each island, and the challenge of making it all fit together. And it had a topographical feel to it, rather than the stale numbers-in-boxes puzzle books that had been so popular recently.
Yes, this simple mechanism could be the basis of a game, a competitive game that allowed for creative play with different challenges each game.
I arrived for my class on time, but during my coffee break, I made my first sketch.
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How quickly can you solve this mini-puzzle I made?
To Roll & Write, or Not to Roll & Write?
It is interesting to me to follow trends in the boardgame industry, and I enjoy new challenges, but trying to design a game using the latest hot mechanism or a popular genre is never a motivation for me. I have yet to try my hand at making a deck-building game, and Alea Iacta Est/Order of the Gilded Compass is the closest thing to "worker placement" I've ever tried. And with the market recently becoming saturated with "roll & write" games, making one of my own was not exactly a priority.
But as I said before, games often take on a life of their own, and this even starts to happen during the design process. When I worked as an architect, we would often say, "I think this is what the building wants to be."
It was clear from the beginning that Hashi, the game, wanted to be a roll & write, and it was my job to make that happen, no matter what my reservations were at the time.
Gamifying a Puzzle
The thing that captivated me about the "Hashi" puzzles was their main mechanism: the number of bridges needed to complete an island was equal to the number on that island — but since a puzzle has only one solution, the numbers were already pre-printed on the islands.
As a gamer, I wanted the freedom to assign the numbers as I played. The positions of the islands would still be predetermined by the map — although there could be many different map variations included — but it would be up to each player to fill those islands with numbers and connect them with their bridges. Each turn, players would be given a new island number to write on their maps and a number of bridges to draw between islands. These would, of course, be determined by dice rolls each round.
Playing the Game vs. Playing the Players
If I was going to enter the field of roll & write games, then I had to address one of its greatest weaknesses, in my opinion: a lack of player interaction.
There is a long-standing — and often emotional — debate in the hobby between those players who prefer interactive games and those who would rather compete against the game system unhindered by their opponents.
Labels for these positions can be negative and unfair: the former often referred to as "mean games" and the latter as "multi-player solitaire", even when not many games are purely one or the other.
As one of my favorite type of games to design is tile-placement (Citrus, Heartland/Gunkimono), I don't shy away from direct player interaction. However, I am also not opposed to players having their own private "sandboxes" in which to play (Jedzie pocaig a deleka), and I even designed a game with both, a central competitive space together with a private space free from the influence of your opponents (Rolnicy/Gloomy Graves). But even in my sandbox games, I try to have at least some interaction, which usually comes from some type of race.
The Urgency of a Race
Another thing I find missing from puzzles is a sense of urgency. The fact that you can take as long as you like to solve a puzzle is part of its appeal as a leisure activity. Games, on the other hand, usually have a time limit. Simply playing a game until the time is up, however, isn't that interesting to modern audiences. We've grown accustomed to a "story arc" in well-designed games, something that builds tension as the game progresses to a climactic finish. The tension and sense of urgency increase as the board fills up and players seek to finish what they started.
In Hashi, you have the built-in goal of completing as many islands as you can by the end of the game, when you no longer have any more islands without numbers.
However, I wanted more urgency than simply "finish this by the end of the game". Each player had their own board, but I wanted them to be looking at their opponents, too. Additionally, I find that games with multiple goals are usually more exciting and allow for more varied playing styles.
So I designed several additional goals for the players, and if you were the player (or players) to complete these goals first, you received a larger bonus than simply completing them before the end of the game. One of those goals is completing a chain of six finished islands that are all connected to each other by bridges. The other is completing a number of islands with flags that are scattered around the board. There are four red flag islands and three blue flag islands, and completing each group awards bonus points as well.
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The three bonus goals in the game, with more points for those who complete each one first
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One of the bonuses is completing all flag islands of one color
It is, of course, a challenge to complete all of these additional goals by the end of the game and nearly impossible to complete them all before your opponents do. Not only does this create the sense of urgency, it also adds to the interaction as players look at each others' boards to see how they are progressing toward each goal, then adjust their own strategies accordingly.
I also designed interaction into the dice mechanism. There were two dice, each with a number between 1-6 and 1-3 lines (bridges) on each side. Players took turns rolling both dice, then placing one die on an illustration of a bridge and the other on a picture of an island. All players then wrote the island number on a free island of their choice and draw the number of bridges shown on the die designated for bridges. In this way, the active player had a choice and could take into account the positions of their opponents as well as their own position.
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My prototype
Playtesting and Pitching
I have to admit, playtesting a roll & write has its advantages! After I had completed my studies, I traveled with my family for a week vacation to an old farm that also had guest rooms and was tucked away in the mountains of "Swiss Saxony" south of Dresden. It is a beautiful and peaceful retreat from the big city, and we've made it our annual winter tradition.
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A winter retreat was perfect for sledding...and playtesting Hashi
We also invite friends to join us during the week, and I brought along several of my prototypes, including my new one, Hashi. And even when others were not interested in playing, I could play the game myself and experiment with different board configurations.
The game was also easy to bring on the airplane during our many flights overseas, and it became a favorite one for my wife to play while traveling, often attracting the eyes of other curious passengers, who would then ask where they could buy a copy of the game.
But there was also a sense of urgency in getting the game to interested publishers. After all, I was surprised that no one had attempted to use the Hashi puzzle mechanism in a game before, and I knew that there may be others working parallel on the same idea, so I made a black-and-white version that was easy to print and play, then sent it to several German publishers I knew, as well as several friends around the world to expand my pool of playtesters.
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Publisher Development
I was thrilled when Nürnberger-Spielkarten-Verlag responded that it was interested in the design as NSV is a world-renowned publisher of roll & write games. I'm also a fan of editor Reinhard Staupe, and he was excited about the game.
Reinhard wanted to change the game to a flip & write, however, and it did improve the game as we could eliminate the extreme situations of rolling too many high or low numbers, which were not as fun. We were also able to print all of the cards on the player boards so that players could keep track of the cards that were still in the deck (to eliminate the need for card-counting), but, of course, one card would be out of play so that you would not have perfect information for the final rounds.
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The prototype for the flip & write version
Production
I am very happy with the clean, serene art and graphic design by Oliver and Sandra Freudenreich. NSV included high-quality dry-erase markers with the game, and the player boards are double-sided, offering players two different map variations.
However, these only scratch the surface — so much more is possible! My prototype included ten different boards, each with different island configurations and different rules and goals. Hopefully, if the game does well in the market, some of these will also be published.
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More boards ready for future expansions
Accidental Game Design Redux
The design of Hashi showed me that I cannot help but design games, even when I'm not trying to. And it also opened the door to a new source of inspiration. I now find myself mining puzzles for other interesting mechanisms that can be used in the more creative space of board games...
...and this time, I'm doing so intentionally.
Jeffrey D. Allers
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