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As I mulled that over, a second catalyst came to me in the form of Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood. This was 2010, and the popular video game franchise had sprung into the multiplayer market for the first time. The multiplayer premise was fascinating: You walk around 16th century Rome among throngs of people trying to kill your mark. But the real tension came from that fact that some other human-controlled player is stalking you to do the same thing.
One day, riding home from work on my bike, these two things that had been percolating in my mind came together. By the end of my commute, I had the basic concept that there would be dozens of unique player pieces on a simple board, you would know only which piece was yours, and your goal was to eliminate each other player's secret piece before you were eliminated. I was trying to recreate that Brotherhood tension on a board.
I needed to scale down the game to simple board size, so I knew that Rome was too big. I needed a new theme to guide the design. Where would you be able to hide in plain sight without anyone knowing your identity? Where would you seem to move around aimlessly? A costume party! The board design came quickly and has always been the same layout: four long rooms surrounding a square room. Since each room touches at least three other rooms, the design allows for fairly free movement, but one room is always too far away this turn.
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Final board layout
The movement rules had to be as simple as the board. Since it was a hidden role game, you obviously couldn't move only your own piece, but I wanted a little bit of luck so that players weren't completely free to move any piece at any time.
Enter the die. Four sides of the six-sided die match the colors of the four exterior rooms. When you roll a color, you can move any piece in or out of that colored room. This gives you access to all of the pieces in the game except for the pieces in one room. The middle room touches all of the rooms, so it didn't need its own side on the die. This die arrangement meant that I could have two sides dedicated to assassination attempts, thereby moving the game along more quickly, which is important in an elimination game. More specifically, the remaining two sides of the die represent you eliminating a piece from the board, but with the stipulation that your secret piece has to be in that same room.
Most of this brainstorming occurred in my designer notebook. Good game design advice that I heard early on is to get a playable prototype as soon as you can. For me, that's where LEGO comes in as those blocks are an easy first prototype medium.
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Prototype characters and cards
LEGO minifigs were a no-brainer for the dozens of unique player pieces that I needed. I had a sizable collection already, but I did need to add a few costume party tropes to the mix like a werewolf and Frankenstein. I used Bricklink.com to fill out my costumed character needs as well as to get pictures for the cards. I started with thirty minifigs from all walks of LEGO genres: Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings, superheroes, etc. I picked thirty because it was a multiple of five (the number of rooms) and it seemed like a big, but not too big, number for a LEGO house party. When I assembled them on the board for the first time, I was amazed at how much it really looked like a costume party!
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The original prototype had a red room in place of the seafoam; this is a second prototype
Playtesting from there added a few tweaks and rule additions, but with my wife's challenge, I tried to add rules only when absolutely necessary. (One example of that is the seppuku rule: If you are alone in a room and must eliminate a character, you are dishonored and must eliminate yourself!
From testing with a variety of populations and player counts, I learned a lot. I playtested with gamer friends, non-gamer friends, middle school students, kids as young as age 6, random people at local game shops and organized playtests with recurring people, and ultimately, my local convention.
Early on, I found that thirty was too many pieces. Elimination games can outstay their welcome, and with so many potential targets, games took longer. I scaled down to twenty-five, then finally settled on twenty to get the game duration where I wanted it.
Players also didn't like to be forced to kill when they were in a sparsely populated room, but I didn't want the game to stall, so I came to a compromise. Instead of eliminating a character in your own room when you rolled black, you could draw a card from the deck to signify that character leaving the party. This modification still reduces the character count on the board and keeps up the pace of the game, but my gamer playtesters found an advantage to performing that action every time, so I needed a limit to the number of times you could do it. With a twenty-card deck, minus the player count max of five, that left three cards for each player. Thus, you can take this replacement action at most three times.
Other problems were less mathematical. Take the Jar Jar effect, for instance. The Jar Jar effect was the first time I ever saw theme interfere with mechanisms in one of my designs. The first kill in Costume Party Assassins is sometimes a shot in the dark. However, all other things being equal, when a player has a choice between killing Jar Jar, Harry Potter, or Gandalf, nine times out of ten Jar Jar dies. I realized this was a design problem when I drew the Jar Jar card as my secret identity and I thought that there was more of a chance that I would get eliminated on a whim than with any other character.
Now, some people may have prejudices against Harry Potter, R2-D2, Spiderman, or any other character on the board, but when one character has a statistically higher chance to be eliminated based on bias, this is not good. I called this the Jar Jar effect and consequently, Jar Jar was removed from the game. That was when I started to make conscious choices about which characters to invite to the party.
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Final cards and meeples next to their prototype counterparts
This was also the time I started thinking about actually publishing Costume Party Assassins, so I took out all the licensed characters. I knew publishers would not be excited about licensing fees. (Though I did make my own personal all-Star Wars edition that my daughter and I still play.) With the thought of publishing, I also wanted to even out the gender balance in the game. I wanted players to be able to see themselves in their role, even if they weren't exactly role-playing. In 2010, LEGO had not made the strides that they have today towards evening out the gender balance, so for my prototype I was at the mercy of what LEGO was producing.
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In this version, you need to tell the difference between a storm trooper and a scout trooper.
Sidenote: Admiral Ackbar often adds a compulsory "It's a trap!" throughout gameplay.
The real breakthrough for publishing came at a local convention in 2013. I attend Gamestorm in Portland, Oregon every spring with a bevy of new designs that I bring to GameLab, a local playtest hub that sets up playtests with convention goers, designers, and industry guests.
In my interactions with industry gurus that year, no one seemed to be interested in Costume Party Assassins for themselves, so I asked the question, "Who would be interested in a game like this?" One answer I got was Playroom Entertainment, so I did my research and found that their line really did seem to embrace the dark themes in a light way. Killer Bunnies? Who else to publish a family-weight game about assassination?
I checked their website to find that they did, in fact, take submissions. I emailed a brief overview, and after a week, they wanted to see the rules. I sent the rules, and after a month, they wanted a prototype. I sent the prototype, and after few more months, they wanted a contract. We signed at the beginning of 2015, almost five years to the day after the initial idea came to me on my commute home.
Final box art, with a variety of races and genders! Thank you, Playroom and Ultra Pro!
If I would have lessons to pass on from my experience, they would be:
1) Have patience with publishers, and always follow up.
2) At some point in your design process, put yourself in the publisher's shoes. Try to think about things that concern them but may not concern your design (cost, box size, gender balance, etc.).
and, most importantly,
3) Listen to your wife.
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