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I have a soft spot for games like Fairy Tale, The City, and other short games that have combos – but not negative or brain-melting ones. I don't necessarily play those games to win; I play them to play well and have fun.
A Fistful of Penguins started as a dice game in which each face of the die had a special ability. That was about it. For example, what if the one pip and the six pip together made more than 12? What if each three pip face was equal to the number of three pip faces showing?
Stage A: The idea was that there were pennies as currency and seven identical dice. You got two pennies per turn and could use them to buy new dice or reroll one of the already rolled dice. Since some dice hurt the value of other dice, you did not always want to add more. At the end of your turn, you earned pennies from the bank based on your roll. You could also save pennies from turn to turn, so you could use none on one turn, then four the next turn. Whoever had the most pennies at the end of the game won.
I also tinkered with how many turns each person would have based on how many players were in the game, thinking that twenty turns for all players combined was about right. I have since learned that that is nuts! No one wants a game where you have to count the players to determine the number of rounds, and twenty is way too high anyway.
We all have plenty of dice around the house, right? Buy a few round white stickers and stick them over the faces of the dice, and you have yourself a customized dice game. It is also amazingly easy to modify mid-game.
I did know one thing starting out: If I ever wanted the game to be published, all the dice would need to be the same. It is expensive to make eight customized different dice. I don't know if this is true with stickered dice, but I started with that assumption and it did drive the design process.
Game design is not solitary, even if only one designer is listed. With Fistful, over ten people substantially contributed to the game, whether they know it or not. In early iterations, I forced the game on friends and family. It was okay. The combos worked. How do I know that? Well, no killer strategies showed up after extensive balancing. I also used my friend Excel to model situations. Calculating probabilities is tricky because you make certain assumptions, make a math mistake, then tweak a rule on the fly during a playtest that changes everything.
Ultimately, I went more with feel than with strict balance. At the same time, I was playing with what should go with the dice. The easiest and cheapest items would be a pad and pencil, but I sort of imagined the design as a bar/wagering game, so I stuck with pennies because they were waterproof.
Stage B: I was tired of luck, so I changed the game. The active player rolled three dice and showed them. Each other player then rolled one die (keeping it secret from all but the active player) and placed pennies next to that die to show its cost. The active player could buy that die to use the face that showed.
I enjoyed this because everyone was involved. Sometimes two people would price the same die differently, which led to interesting discussions that tended towards game theory: Did you help the active player more than you helped yourself by pricing the die that way? I still really like the game played that way, which made it into the rules as an advanced variant. Yes, your initial roll is luck, but the rest is based on your opponents. You might buy a cheap die just to reroll it – or an expensive one because if you buy a set from different players, it helps your roll more than the aggregate cost. There was no longer an option to buy an unrolled die from the bank. Nate Beeler encouraged me on this version, which was great because I thought I might be the only person enjoying it.
If you have gamed with a wide variety of people, you can guess the problem: Analysis paralysis. People started doing math in their heads based on what other people might have and how they might price their dice. Please don't play the advanced version with those folks.
Anyway, we had a game with dice and coins. It was fun, and everyone was engaged all the time. Yes, the die interactions were slightly mathy, but they were okay. I got up early one morning to meet Michael Adams for coffee and brought it along, as he had asked to see it. After a few rolls, he looked at me and suggested I try my turn again. It was odd as he was looking at me, not the dice. His next words really resonated and still do: "You are playing the game, but you don't look like you are having fun."
I had never thought of looking at the players rather than the goings on in the game. After some discussion, he had a killer idea to address the lack of fun. Instead of having the players spend their victory points to reroll/buy dice, add a different currency. At first, I thought that suggestion was stupid as it added more bits, reduced the tension of spending VPs to get more VPs, and did not add anything. As we talked it through, it became clear that the stress of whether to spend VPs on rerolls was negative tension, not positive tension. Michael is an experienced game designer, and I am not. His advice was worth its weight in gold coffee beans, as I told him at the time. Never mind that advice has no weight.
Stage C: I added a second currency, stupidly using pennies as the new tokens and poker chips as the new currency. (Can you spot the problem? Answer at the end of this paragraph.) I played with this idea and felt there needed to be more interaction, so I added a die face that stole a bit from other players – not so much as to hurt, but enough to sting lightly. This meant that at the start of the game I had to distribute pennies and chips to each player so they could lose money before making any. Because I did not want any targeted take-that, the stealing was programmed as "steal from the left". With one die showing that face, you steal one from the left player; with two dice, you steal one from the left player and two from the second left player. This added fun because you could sell the active player a die that would steal from someone else. At the same time, if everyone did that, you would lose more to the active player than you gained from the sale of the die. (Answer: Don't use money as points and chips as money. People could not comprehend that the pennies were not money but the plastic chips were. I feel that way when I play Fortune and Glory now.)
Stage D: I added the reroll currency to a die face. Even though Michael had suggested it, it took a while for me to change one of the die faces to give the player more reroll/"buy a die" tokens. This changed the game substantially because you could now get more rerolls than other players at the cost of getting fewer points for that roll. This was what eventually became the penguins.
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Early versions of the animal dice
The problem was what to search for. I thought transportation might be fun, so I looked for car/train/plane icons. I found a great site, then asked friends and family about the idea of transportation as a theme. The looks I got were glassy eyed stares or polite "Oh, that sounds nice". Ugh.
At one of the sessions, Lizzy Palmer mentioned animals and while that seemed boring to me, I added it to the list. In polling (aka, bugging) people, a diverse crowd liked the animal idea. I knew that people liked Zooloretto because of that panda on the cover, so I started tinkering with animal icons that I found at that site: Icons etc.
I don't have mad computer skillz, so I found a freeware program called Inkscape, which I totally recommend. Even better, although I did not know it at the time, the icons I had chosen were svg files, which meant they were vector graphics, which I subsequently learned are great because they are resizable without problems. Armed with Inkscape and animal icons, I went to work iconifying the die faces. This worked out well, and by the end of this process, I had prototype dice, pennies, and chips.
I tinker too much. I had a combo of a moose and a squirrel scoring more than they did separately. I liked Rocky and Bullwinkle, so it was an easy inside joke. At one point I changed the squirrel to an alligator, thinking that was a more memorable animal. The playtesters howled and threw me out of the room until I changed it back to a squirrel. The homage lives on thanks to them.
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Moose and squirrel live on!
Stage F: While continuing to playtest, having a theme leads to starting to think about a working title. I went through at least twenty working titles, knowing that the publisher would likely just change it. The best title by a mile came from Lizzy: "Roll Through the Cages". At the same time, feeling I needed a title that was not an inside joke, I called on my word- andpun-loving sister in Boston and dad in Portland, Oregon. They knew I was working on a dice game that had an animal theme and came up with tons more ideas. My title at that point was Zoo Dice. Inspired, no? Well, my sister came up with As Zoo Like It and the name stuck. Yes, it was punny. Yes, it was longish. But honestly, it had a fun to it that while highbrow was also immediately recognizeable to many.
Stage G: Okay, now we have a game with a title. There is this very important phase I have not touched on yet: rules. Rules are hard to write. My game had three bits, yet it took forever to get the rules clear. Then there would be a tweak and three sections would need changing. This took a good chunk of time because six pages of rules for a family dice game is not a good thing. This took forever, but I am not sure what else to say about it.
One interesting aspect of writing rules is that you come up with edge cases that have never occurred in playtesting. Often it is because the situation does not break the game and offers no player any benefit. You can try to break the game as a playtester, but there are always things you never thought of.
Another area of contention was the tie-breaker. Assuming more than one player has the same amount of money, should the tiebreaker be points in the last round (not easily trackable), number of penguins left over (weird), or turn order (with the later player winning)?
The publisher later solved this problem with a roll-off. This raised the question of whether unused tokens should have any value at the end of the game. The problem was that if you rolled penguins in the last round, they were useless as you had no next round to carry them over to. At the same time, adding a substantial value to penguins in the final scoring seemed antithetical to the two currency design. Nate broke through on this one, suggesting that penguins could be cashed in mid-turn. This saved the penguins in the last round and also permitted a rule that was not round-specific. I hate niggly rules for narrow situations that players easily forget. By making penguin dice cashable mid-turn, they had good value and could be of negligible value at the end of the game without ruining their value for the last round. In addition, because cashed penguins did not go back into the dice pool, players had a harder time getting nine kangaroos, the highest scoring roll.
Stage H: Once you have rules, wonderful things can happen, like blind testing. Well, I sat in on a few tests and quickly noticed a problem. For the first few rounds, people could not remember what the dice were and how they interacted. This was a large barrier to entry. The animals totally helped because they were semi-mnemonic in that you could remember that the camel was five points. Once people got it, everything was fine, but the start was a problem. At this point, I decreased the starting number of dice to make it easier to calculate for a newbie. I also added the ever-necessary player aid. Why didn't I think of adding it earlier? I have no clue. If you have a game in the works, stop reading and go make a player aid for your game. Then pick up this saga again.
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The playing aid in the published game
Stage I: Things were going fine, but the game was still slow with those with AP. As I did solo playtesting, I could not easily price dice to sell to myself, so I started using a pile of dice and permitted myself to buy a die for a token instead of just using them for rerolls. This worked okay and greatly the game's fiddliness, but at the cost of having everyone engaged. Suddenly, the game dragged with lots of players because you didn't care that much about what others were rolling, even if they could steal from you occasionally. At this point, I veered off into the woods in search of a way to engage everyone while keeping the idea of the active player. I never quite found it, but have hope that some day I will. When I started testing this version, a nice thing happened. People debated what they would do if they were in the active player's situation. To this day, I can play with my family and think it obvious that my daughter should go with lions when she chooses to go with moose and squirrels. I like that in a game.
Stage J: Well, it was about time to take it to a con and expose myself to the slings and arrows of more people. This meant buying boxes, making box labels, getting enough dice, pennies, tokens, rules, and player aids for a few copies. Animals was a fine theme, but I talked to Dale Yu briefly about this and he, I think, mentioned the idea of showing that the game was amenable to licensed properties. Off I went. Knowing the two biggies, Hasbro and Mattel, each had licensed properties, I added a Star Wars-themed die and a die of Disney princesses. I liked them. I believe this is commonly known as putting the cart before the horse.
Stage K: I arrive at the con with my proto as well as parts for a few more. I am excited. I sit down to play with Kris Gould of Wattsalpoag Games and Mik Svellov. Kris had played the game before, but perhaps had not seen a recent version. Kris had a great idea about the game being too tight with rerolls and suggested that the first penguin should be one reroll token, but the second one should be two, etc. Wow. It really opened up the game without adding much length. In that same game, Mik was frustrated that each token could reroll only one die, so we scrapped that on the fly and permitted the rerolling of all dice for one token. Okay, here I am at a con with printed stuff and we just changed the game in two major ways. Luckily, a thumb drive and a hotel business center was all I needed. Presto.
Stage L: My first pitch, with Mike Gray of Hasbro. He was very polite and talked about what he did and did not like about the game as well as how it might and might not fit into its product lines. It was enlightening in a new way. I had thought about a game as a standalone item, possibly with a license slapped on it, but no, there was a whole big world out there. Hasbro + dice game = Y_h_z_e. A dice game would go to the Yahtzee division, and they were not looking to develop products to compete with their flagship. Duh. I'm not saying my game was going to compete with it, but it highlighted that a pitch has to do with far more than the game, including other products coming to market and in development, new licenses that are being negotiated, and tons of other things that you have no ability to know about. He had great ideas for the game as well and was extremely generous with his time. He was also the first person to mention the idea of target audiences in a concrete way. I took that with me, and it helped with subsequent pitches because I customized the pitch to both the company and to a target audience that its product line already reached. One idea that I learned about later was the idea of creating a sell sheet on the game, so publishers have a takeaway even if they don't want a prototype at that time. (Designer Jay Cormier has helpful advice about sell sheets on the Inspiration to Publication blog.)
Stage M: After a marathon of pitches, a few publishers wanted prototypes. I stayed up assembling them and handed them out. The game industry moves slowly and I got some feedback quickly and some not so quickly. I am now jumping ahead about six months.
Stage N: At a prototype session, Kris Gould asked whether my penguins game was still available. I said yes, thinking it was small talk. Wattsalpoag had exclusively published Kris's designs to date, but he expressed interest in the game, and I happily handed over the latest version, including some post convention tweaks, but nothing major.
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From Stage N to publication was a total rocket. A few changes were made to the game, new art was created for the dice by Mike Raabe, who works at Wattsalpoag and has illustrated Guillotine, Magic cards, and tons of other cool things that I learned about only after the fact. He also created the amazing box art, and Kris and Mike worked tirelessly with the fabricator to get the penguins, dice, and everything else just right. They did an unbelievable job in a short time.
I had a minor rule suggestion and only then learned that the rules had already been translated into four languages. I had never even thought about the lead time needed for rules translations. Anyway, all was well and cruising along. Before I knew it, Spiel 2011 had arrived and Wattsalpoag was featuring the game, retitled (correctly) by Kris as A Fistful of Penguins.
It did not seem real, but I was astounded to hear that the game sold out at Spiel on opening day. [Editor's note: Jonathan has written about his initial response to the first public reactions to the game, as well as other after-publication topics, on Opinionated Gamers.] After Spiel, the rules were reprinted for all the copies not shipped to Essen and a few chips were swapped out to make the game more colorblind friendly. Now the big distribution is starting and we'll see where it goes from here.
All I can say is that it takes a village to make a game. Thanks to all!
Jonathan Franklin
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Okay, seriously that's waaay more than a fistful, Mr. Franklin!
P.S.: Stuff left out:
• Kris's initial offer at the Gathering of Friends, which I did not realize was serious
• Jesse's input as I cannot remember anything concrete
• How I carried the game around in a tiny green box due to a desire for portability
• Poker chip denomination confusion – I assumed red was $5 and blue was $10
• The addition of penguin chips, kanga chips, and solo rules
• Don't contact game company personnel via private (Facebook) routes
• Choosing to pitch the basic version rather than the advanced
• Distracted pitches, with a game rep watching Mindflex behind me
• Cooperation, with Peter Eggert suggesting I talk to Christian H.
• Other contributions from other playtesters?
Image courtesy: Bruce Allen, aka Arzach
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