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The One Hundred Torii was one of those prototypes I pitched — except that it was called "Dot to Dot" and it looked like this:
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Initial Brainstorm
Back in 2010, I had only one published game — Kachina, which was later republished as Völuspá — and I thought, why not try to make another game like Kachina, i.e., a tile-laying game with lots of different ways to score?
I brainstormed different scoring methods, and one idea struck me as interesting and unique. What if the tiles contain different icons, and you score one point per tile based on the shortest path to an icon of the same color? That idea got a lot more interesting when I introduced winding paths on the tiles. Players would build a twisty maze with the tiles as they played.
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Except that I wanted players to receive extra bonuses for the paths they created, so I decided that some tiles would have gates on them, and if your shortest path went through a gate, you would receive the gate bonus. My first prototype had three gates: one gate gave an extra point, another a token, and the third a peek. Tokens could be turned in for special powers, such as taking an extra turn or playing one tile on top of another. Plus, the player at the end of the game with the most tokens scored extra points. A peek let a player look at an extra tile when they refilled their hand. My dad suggested the "dot blocker", a pawn that players could buy to cover and therefore nullify one of the dots on the tiles, allowing for really long paths.
This initial rule set proved popular with playtesters. People enjoyed the easy rules and the thinky puzzle the game offered. I thought I had a strong prototype when I showed it to Ravensburger at SPIEL in 2012.
Searching for the Right Theme
Based on publisher feedback from SPIEL, I realized the game had several issues — some large, some small.
The biggest issue was that abstracts don't sell. I thought I was doing myself a favor by making my prototype look like Qwirkle, which had won the Spiel de Jahres in 2011 — but Qwirkle is a unicorn. The wider market demands beautiful themes, not just abstract shapes.
Coming up with a theme for "Dot to Dot" proved challenging. I considered a fast food theme, with different restaurants on streets in a city. It kind of made sense that a hamburger joint would be worth less if another hamburger joint were close by. I thought of wild animals in a natural preserve, but what were the gates? It didn't really make sense. I got stuck for a few years on how to proceed. "Dot to Dot" sat on the shelf.
With the success of the game Lanterns: The Harvest Festival, I wondered whether an Asian theme might make sense. I still had fond memories of my trip to Japan to visit a childhood friend in 2005. He and I had traveled through the many gardens of Kyoto, and I remembered loving the big red torii gates. Maybe these were the gates I was looking for? I renamed the game "Torii" and identified six garden features that I remembered from my trip: a fountain, a shrine, a bell, a flower, a bridge, and a lantern.
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I struggled to get images of torii for my prototype. There were no images of torii at the angle I needed. What was I going to do? Then I found I could buy a small desk-size torii online. I took a photograph of this small gate at the angle I wanted.
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Now I was starting to get back on track. The other feedback from Ravensburger was that the game was too long. My original prototype was sixty tiles, as in Kachina, but I realized that was too long. I reduced the number of tiles to 48, and that seemed better. I also worked to make every tile as exciting as I could, adding more double gates and double icons on them.
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A New Publisher with New Ideas
Enter James Hudson of Druid City Games. In January 2017 on the League of Gamemakers website, James asked whether anyone had games they wanted to pitch. I spoke up and pitched James my torii game. He seemed intrigued and took a copy for evaluation.
James' feedback ended up being instrumental. He liked the game, but found it too mathy. Scoring involved a pen and paper. Players counted up the length of the shortest path they made, then added extra points for red gates. I could see his point. I immediately went to work trying to find a better way to score.
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James liked the new scoring method, but in the end, he decided "Torii" was not what he was looking for. No worries, though, as James and I ended up doing Sorcerer City together, and that Kickstarter did very well.
Pitching to Pencil First Games
Fast forward to Gen Con 2017. I went to that show to promote the launch of Whistle Stop, but I also brought a few other games to pitch, including "Torii". I met with Eduardo Baraf of Pencil First Games, who I had met online through the League of Gamemakers. Pencil First Games was creating a name for itself for beautiful garden games like Herbaceous. Maybe "Torii" would fit in Ed's line-up...
Ed did like the game, but he wanted to do some development first before he would sign it. I thought the game was already pretty close to finished, but as was the case with Whistle Stop, as described in this designer diary, I was definitely wrong about how much more could still change.
Polishing, Polishing 'til it Shines
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First, the tokens. Maybe I should have thought of this, but after I changed the scoring system to use tokens and cards, I never went back to change the other tokens in the game. A player still earned a different type of token by going through certain gates and only those tokens could be turned in for powers. Why?, Ed asked. Why not allow players to turn in any type of token for powers? Players would then have the choice of collecting a particular token to earn a scoring card or spending it for a power.
Which leads to the second point, the gates. Ed right away said three gate types was too many as we were going to be hard pressed to find three different colors of torii that looked good and distinct. Admittedly, the gates that gave "peeks" seemed underpowered compared to the other two, so they were cut — except that Ed also suggested that we eliminate the secondary tokens used solely for buying powers. In that case, what should the second type of gate do? Well, if the red torii give you an extra token of the garden feature you scored, maybe the stone torii would give you an extra token of a garden feature you didn't score. Now players could grab the tokens they needed even if they didn't draw tiles showing desired garden features.
Then, the third point, the powers. Ed felt that the powers should be embodied as characters wandering around in the garden, such as a poet, a gardener, and a geisha. We added more characters (five total) and normalized their powers so that they all took effect at the start of the player's turn. Instead of taking an extra turn, now players could use the geisha power to play two tiles at once and score the second one. Players also received scoring cards for getting help from a character.
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Finally, the fourth point, the potential for analysis paralysis (AP), the feeling players get when they are overwhelmed with too many options. From the beginning, my game had a hand size of four tiles and I thought that felt good, but Ed pointed out that a hand size of four meant players might have as many as sixteen options since each tile could be oriented on the board four different ways. Multiply those sixteen options by the number of possible placements on the board, and you could have hundreds of possible moves. Ed first suggested a hand size of one tile, but we compromised on a hand size of two. That seemed like a happy medium, still giving players eight options in their hand. We also introduced the vendor power so that players could get new tiles if they hated their hand.
The second part of dealing with analysis paralysis was cutting the board size itself, that is, the number of tiles in the game. The worst AP happened in the final turns when the board was at its largest. I had already cut the game from 60 tiles to 48 tiles, but Ed thought we should cut further, so I trimmed the game to 42 tiles and created rules to remove a number of tiles based on the player count. In the end, I embraced the shorter, tighter game experience that still delivered on the fun.
After about six months of development, Ed loved the new version and signed the game. He enlisted Vincent Dutrait to do the art, and Vincent's unique style brought the Japanese garden theme to life.
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Making Sure the Japanese Details are Right
With Vincent on board, I expected smooth sailing (again) to the end. However, as his incredible art brought the game to life, Vincent, Ed and I had to grapple with a new question: How do we get all the details right in this Japanese-themed game?
My game was loosely based on my travel experiences in Japan over a decade ago. Ed was a Japanese major in college, but his college days were a while ago, too. Vincent was excited about illustrating a Japanese-themed game and lived nearby in Korea, but none of us are Japanese or experts. Cultural representation in games is a growing focus these days, and even with the best research it's hard to catch everything. The last thing any of us wanted was to bring the game we love to market, then discover we mishandled something or were inconsiderate of Japan's rich culture and history.
Ed decided to bring Lisa Wilcut on board. She is a Japanese culture specialist who teaches Japanese culture and religion at a university south of Tokyo. She reviewed everything — every piece of art and every element of the game — to ensure it was historically and culturally correct. She caught dozens of small details in addition to posing a big question for us to consider.
The torii is a Shinto gate, but we also had Buddhist symbols in our garden. Did it make sense for players to pass through a Shinto gate to visit Buddhist landmarks? That was not something we had thought about. For a while, we considered changing one of the gates to a different type of garden gate. Maybe we would have one torii in the game along with a non-torii gate? However, Japanese gardens often mix Shinto and Buddhist elements together, so making the game exclusively Shinto or exclusively Buddhist wasn't necessarily culturally accurate either. In the end, we decided to keep the game as is with two types of torii and a mixture of landmarks (which we adjusted). The gardens in The One Hundred Torii are diverse and vibrant with many cultural symbols just like real gardens in Japan. Lisa agreed with this final direction.
After we incorporated Lisa's recommendations, we then went a step further and shared the near final material with more native Japanese folks, including friends from Japan, board gamers, and a journalist from a national newspaper in Japan. Even here, a few additional details were highlighted for us to adjust.
This is the first time one of my designs has gone through this level of review, and it ended up delaying development another three months. Nevertheless, the entire team felt we needed to do this and couldn't imagine releasing the game without doing so. We even added three pages in the rules with historic and cultural details of many elements within the game.
My Worlds of Board Games and Poetry Collide
Outside of board games, I am also a poet with one published book and another on the way. I enjoy writing different forms of poetry, including haiku, a traditional Japanese poetic form. While working on The One Hundred Torii, Ed, Vincent, and I struggled to come up with the right title. A game called Torii already existed, so we needed a different title.
To find inspiration for the title, I decided to write haiku inspired by the game to see what might follow. While the poems did not directly suggest the title, Ed liked the poems and decided to include them in the game. As an example, this haiku appears on the back of the box and in the rules:
Quote:
The traveler goes
Through the ancient torii gate;
Leaf falls in water
Ed challenged me to write a haiku for each of the game's five characters, and that was a fun exercise. With haiku, the poet has only five, seven, and five syllables in the three lines of the poem to somehow convey a captivating image or thought. Most haiku have a turn by line three that transforms how the first two lines are read. I hope my poems add to your enjoyment of the game.Through the ancient torii gate;
Leaf falls in water
The Journey
Nine years after the first prototype, "Dot to Dot" has become The One Hundred Torii, and I couldn't be prouder. I learned again that you're never truly done when you think you are, but when you are finally done, it's always worth the journey. Happy playing!
Scott Caputo
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