Designer Diary: When I Dream, or A Dream Come True

Once upon a time in a kid's movie, I heard an amazing quote:

No dream is too big and no dreamer too small.

And it is so right! Never stop dreaming. But what are dreams really? And how do they affect our lives? I don't know, and in fact I am not so keen to know after all. All I know is that they are awesome and maybe even necessary. Either when sleeping or daydreaming, dreams have a meaning, that's for sure. What affects our dreams? Do they depict our inner shelf, or are they affected by our everyday experiences? So many unanswered questions, but I won't analyze it anymore. I could write about dreams all day long!

Instead I will write about my first to-be-published game: When I Dream. As you probably already understand, I like dreams a lot! There was also a time that I was even keeping a diary of my dreams — but I also like board games, too. In my free time, when I do not play, I am constantly thinking about themes that can be transferred into board games.

First, let me tell you a bit about my game. When I Dream is a party game in which each round one player becomes the Dreamer and puts on a sleeping mask for the two minutes of the round. The other players become the Dream Spirits, and in those two minutes, they draw dream cards, one at a time, and try to help the Dreamer guess the words on those cards. The fun part, though, is that some of the spirits are naughty and want to confuse the Dreamer to guess wrong! So let's take it from the beginning...

I participated in the sixth Greek board game design contest in 2015 with two games, and I had such a great time! I met great people who I admire and they sat to play my games, so I knew that I couldn't miss the 7th design contest in 2016. I had a game already prepared, but then I came up with the idea of a dreamy party game! My closest friends aren't hardcore gamers, so I decided to create a game to play with them, and if it turned out to be good enough, I would participate in the contest with this game, too. And the ''music'' for my game would be… what else… dreams! But I needed to create the ''lyrics'' — the mechanisms — of the game.

The first idea was that one player would be sleeping, of course. A cloth mask would be great for keeping his eyes closed and it fit the theme. The other players would try to describe things that appear in his sleep and are parts of his dream, and that is the idea I started with.

"But it would be too easy to identify the dream if his teammates spoke clearly, so what about his teammates giving fewer clues? Maybe one word each, this could maybe work… Still though, it would be very easy to find what he is dreaming about… Oh, that's it! Some players will try to confuse him! Great!"

With all these things spinning into my mind, I gathered some friends to have the first playtest. To do that, I used the cards from the game Hedbanz. There were four players, and each card had a word and an image. I also picked someone to be the "bad" guy who would try to confuse the dreamer — and it actually worked quite well!

The following day I started working on the game, writing down words to make my own cards. I wrote three full pages with possible words. Oh my god, my choices were endless! I could put every single word that came to my mind, but then I thought better of it and reduced them by keeping only words that could be guessed with just two or three clues. You see, when your eyes are closed, it is not so easy to guess correctly, especially with someone trying to confuse you. Let's take for example the word "watermelon". If you hear the clue words "fruit-summer-red", you can easily guess it, but if you hear "fruit-summer-yellow", then you would probably mistake the item you're supposed to guess as a melon — and that was the point of each card/word. With some thought, the traitors would be able to confuse the dreamer.

After a lot of brainstorming, I made the first prototype consisting of two hundred cards, each with a word and an image found online, then the playtesting began. It was so easy to playtest and to find people willing to play because of the nature of the game. Fast and funny!

Each game had a lot of laughs, and everyone wanted to play again as soon as they finished. People seemed to enjoy it a lot. And through the players you can feel it, too. In the first prototype version, I used a timer app that beeped every five seconds so that no player would take too long to give a clue, an addition that I removed from the base game for later playtests because it confused many players.

After many changes, the game was now as follows: One player closes his eyes with a mask. He is the dreamer of this round. The other players assume the roles of good, bad, and trickster spirits. Every round lasts 120 seconds in which players give clues for cards that the dreamer needs to guess. Every good guess gives points to the good spirits and every bad guess gives points to the bad spirits. Trickster spirits are also a late addition in playtests and maybe the most fun role to play! At the end of the round, the dreamer can storytell his dream for extra points using the cards he guessed.

After months of playtesting, I appeared at the first pre-show of the contest with When I Dream.

Many people playtested the game that day. A designer I admire, Vangelis Bagiartakis, also playtested it and told me the design had great potential. That day Drawlab Entertainment also playtested my game, and they saw that potential in When I Dream, too!

I got a call from Drawlab the following day while I was away for a business trip, and I was ready to jump into the sea from happiness! And when I later heard that the artists of When I Dream would be Vincent Dutrait and Christophe Swal, I was thrilled! I couldn't believe it! I was living in a dream... Later I was approached by other great publishers, but we had already started working with Drawlab and the future looked bright.

The first thing to do was clean up the words according to what worked best and worst in playtesting, which reduced the number of dream words down to 120. This was easy. I also divided the cards into categories. In each playtest I kept changing cards that I found too difficult or too easy. I wanted all the words to be equally hard or easy to describe — goodbye, gravity! — and also to be a single word (goodbye, ejection button).

The final day of the contest was a blast! The convention center was full of people and When I Dream always found players eager to try it out. At the end of the day, the judges awarded When I Dream the third best game of the contest (tied with Motion Pictures, which turned out to be the other SPIEL 2016 release from Drawlab). But even more excitingly, the people showed their love and appreciation, and When I Dream won the people's choice award with an enormous difference from the second-best title! What more can I ask? People's appreciation is something unique!

After a while, the first art samples for the cards arrived. I loved them all, but they were not really what I expected. I was concerned that the piranha was too scary for children who may play the game, the chef too violent with the lobster. We discussed it with Drawlab, who understood what I meant and reassured me that the final art would not be "aggressive" or "violent". They had in mind more surreal and bizarre illustrations, and both Vincent and Christophe were in line with these. The art took a turn to look more dreamy and playful and it was amazing! Every card now is a unique piece of artwork.

Artwork was our main concern from the very beginning as in playtests we saw that players, because of the pressure of time, were giving word clues according to the images they saw in the card. A great example of that is the "boar" prototype card. As you can see, the boar in the prototype card wears a fancy yellow helmet, and this guided many players (maybe one in every two games) to say "helmet", "hat" or "yellow", which has nothing to do with the boar. And the worst part is that those players were not bad spirits. We concluded that a lot of things on each card was the way to go. After all, a dream is weird, right?

Now that the time for our trip to Essen is coming, we have the art of almost all the cards ready. Day by day, we will have more and more before the game goes to the printer. They are big (almost Dixit-sized) with amazing artwork and two different words on each! The game will come with a cloth mask and point tokens. High quality, great artwork, and a lot of fun for the players — exactly what I need for my first published game!

Hope you enjoy the game and never stop dreaming!

Chris Darsaklis