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The Initial Idea
"Like a phoenix from the flames"
As is often the case, the idea that started out Cherry Picking actually came from another game I was working on. In that game, I was looking for a way for players to allocate their pawns to various projects. The order of entry was important. One of the things I tried was simultaneous selection. Each player would secretly select one of the projects. If a player was the only one to select a project, he was allowed to allocate one of his pawns to this project; otherwise, bad luck.
This mechanism worked fine for its purpose and was fun, but it did not add enough value given the added playing time and rules complexity, so I took this mechanism out of the game — then I decided to explore it further in a separate game.
The First Generation of Cherry Picking
"A journey into the wondrous world of simultaneous action selection"
I played around a little with the design space that this mechanism offers and after a few iterations I arrived at a game about collecting fruit cards of different values. Each fruit card scores its face value. On top of that, bonus points could be scored by collecting sets.
Fruit cards were available from slots, with as many slots as there were players. At each slot a fruit card was available each round. To obtain the fruit cards, each player would play bidding cards. Each player started with the same set of bidding cards, consisting of a card for each slot, plus two special cards: a ladder and a basket.
Actual game play was simple. Players blindly selected a bidding card from their hand and revealed simultaneously. They then proceeded to take the fruit card corresponding with the slot they selected. With a ladder, a player was allowed to pick a fruit card of his choice from any slot first. The basket allowed a player to pick a fruit card of his choice from any slot after all other cards were handled. After each round, fruit cards were replenished and players took the bidding card they played back in their hand, except for ladders and baskets which were discarded.
The main catch in this game was that if any players bid the same card, they would have to bid blindly to see who was to get the fruit card. To do this, each player had a set of ten coins that could be spent only once. In case of a draw, none of them would receive a fruit card.
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First generation prototype, with separate decks of fruit cards and bidding cards
Fun fact: From the start of the design process, when I selected the theme of collecting fruit, the prototype went under the name of "Cherry Picking". It felt like a fitting and catchy name, and it never changed — not even when the game ended up with a German publisher famous for using funny, made-up German game titles.
The Problem
"The first step in solving a problem is to recognize that it does exist"
The game that resulted was like a variant of Raj in which players bid on several cards simultaneously. It was fun enough but nothing special and reminded me too much of other games in this genre. It also suffered from the two problems that I have with most games in this genre:
1) The existence of separate decks of bidding cards and fruit cards makes the set-up complicated.
2) The penalty for choosing the same action as someone else can be really harsh, especially since this is often out of your control.
On top of that, I was unhappy with the separate bidding in case of a draw as this added another layer of complexity. In its current shape, the game was too complex to be a good family game, while it did not have enough meaningful decisions for gamers. Worse even, the fun factor was lacking.
The Breakthrough
"I shut my eyes in order to see"
So I was stuck — time to take a step back and think. In game design, it's often beneficial to consider multiple problems at once. This tends to spark your creativity and you may just stumble upon a single solution that solves all of them. I had one of those wonderful moments when I considered that I could combine the bidding deck and the fruit deck into one — that is, the cards to bid with would be the same cards that you were bidding for. This obviously solved the first problem, but it also made it possible to replace the use of coins to settle tiebreaks by the face values on the fruit cards that were played. What's more, having a single deck of cards allowed me to introduce the rule that a fruit card that was taken would be replaced by the bidding card that was played to take it. Eureka! Sometimes, the newly placed fruit card would be even better than the one it replaced, thus providing the perfect consolation prize for a player who bid for the same card.
As a bonus, the game now also moved more quickly as you no longer had to deal out new fruit cards after each bidding round.
The Second Generation of Cherry Picking
"Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end"
In the next iterations of Cherry Picking, I incorporated these changes into a well-wrought game. The final version has five different trees, representing the bidding slots. At the start of the game, each tree is seeded with a random face-up card from the deck. All other cards are dealt to the players.
In actual gameplay, a player playing a banana card has to take the card corresponding with the banana tree and replace it with his bidding card. If two players play a banana card, the player who played the higher ranking card goes first. The same holds for all other types of fruit.
A player playing a ladder card has to take a card corresponding with a tree of his choice and replace it with his bidding card. Initially, if more than one player played a ladder simultaneously, they would get nothing, but I quickly realized I could now simply let them collect the ladder they had just played. This was a big improvement. The tension of having ladders collide was still there, but the severe consequences of a collision were now mitigated by getting a consolation prize. Indeed, when a player is trying to collect ladders, he may even play a ladder in the hope of a collision.
Basket cards still came last. To avoid collisions, I assigned the basket cards a value, and as with fruit cards the higher ranking basket goes first.
Since in this version of the game, the ladders and baskets can be collected just like the fruit cards, they also have to yield a score. For baskets this was easy, they simply score the face value I assigned to them. The fact that there was no bonus to be had from baskets was compensated by there being a few really high-valued baskets in the deck. For ladders I adopted quadratic scoring — that is, one ladder scores one point, two ladders four points together, etc.
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Second generation prototype
Getting the Scoring Right
"Keep it simple, stupid!"
Since the first version it had been possible to score bonus points with the fruit cards through a set-collection mechanism. Thirty bonus points could be scored by collecting sets of the same fruits or, alternatively, sets of the same values. On top of that, 15 bonus points could be selected by getting a set of all different kinds of fruits and a set of all available values. All of these bonuses could be combined.
When testing the game with gamer playtesters, it was not too much of a problem to explain the scoring. I showed them how to arrange the collected fruit cards in a matrix, and they typically caught on quickly. They were gamers, after all.
Then I tried out the game on some unsuspecting relatives. They were intelligent people and really enjoyed playing the game, but in no way were they gamers and they were baffled by the scoring. Obviously, it was too complex, so I made it easier — drastically.
The first thing I did was remove the value bonuses since they were not thematic anyway. I kept the bonuses for collecting the same fruits or a set of all different kinds of fruits (fruit salad). This worked well since it still provided opposing incentives for players trying to score the different types of bonuses. In the end, it turned out that the value bonuses had been an unnecessary complexity.
I also worked on the numbers. I wanted the bonus scores to be easier to remember and calculate. I set the bonus for both a fruit salad and a collection of four of the same fruits to 10 points. If a player managed to get the fifth of the same fruit, he would score an additional 10 points for a total of 20 bonus points. To compensate for the lowered bonus scores, I lowered the value range of fruit cards from 1-to-5 to 0-to-4. Altogether the score was now much easier to calculate.
I was happy, but would my testers be happy, too? Playtesting confirmed that the new scoring was easy enough for the family game context. It also showed the scoring was balanced. Different strategies could all lead to victory, when executed well.
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Cards from the final prototype; the images used were obtained from IMSI's MasterClips/Masterphotos Collection
Getting the Game Published
"Patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet"
So I had a great game. It was quick and fun; it was suitable for families as well as for gamers; and the components were simple: just a deck of custom cards. Now all that remained was to get a publisher. I know from experience this is the most difficult step, especially for an unknown designer like me — not for this game, however.
In June 2012, I visited the annual Board Game Designers Meeting in Göttingen, Germany, with a pile of prototypes in my suitcase. It was the first time I was going to show Cherry Picking to a publisher. I got the opportunity to pitch it to Andreas Kramer, a representative of Zoch Verlag. He liked it and took it with him. I was excited as Zoch is one of the major German publishers and has a reputation for bringing out top quality family games.
The testing process at Zoch is lengthy. Cherry Picking would gradually pass from one to the next round of testing. Altogether a little over a year passed until I got the good news that Zoch was going to publish the game.
During the final testing phase, Zoch experimented with adding extra cards to the game to be used in four-, five- and six-player games so that the hand size would be similar with each player count. Those extra cards made it into the final design.
A second change made was that the collected fruit cards are kept face down on a pile instead of face up for everybody to see. Sadly they failed to inform me of this change beforehand. Personally I think both variants are fun, but I would recommend gamers play with face-up collections as it adds an extra touch of strategy.
Below you can admire the final game with the subtle and beautiful artwork from Lena Hesse.
The published game
Wrap Up
It feels good to have a little box with my own published game inside my gaming closet. The game hits the table regularly, and I still find myself enjoying it, despite having played it many times over the last couple of years. I hope you will enjoy the game, too.
To finish, let me highlight the three golden lessons learned in designing Cherry Picking:
1) It does not hurt to recycle a good idea.
2) If you are stuck on a design and it's not fun enough, try to approach it from another angle.
3) Keep it as simple as possible.
Jeroen Geenen
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