Designer Diary: Dark Minions – from Zero to 60 in Nothing Flat

My design history extends back to 1974. In that long span of time, I've designed dozens of games — board games, children's games, action games and computer games, some of which were freelance-assigned projects for which I received only a fee and no design credit on the box, such as Pokerkub. Most designs required quite a few months or even years of work to function as well they were originally envisioned. Typically, a game would evolve over the course of several iterations, as components were added or subtracted, the board modified and the rules changed. The process could be relatively quick, meaning perhaps six months, or it could be long, meaning as many as a few years as the prototype might sit in a box on a shelf for awhile awaiting further inspiration.

Fastest from start to finish? Wacky Wizard Game (Western Publishing 1977), which was targeted for children. The game began life as a simple chase game to which the ingredients to make potions were later added. Since it was so simple, the game took perhaps four months to hone and off it went to the publisher. Amazingly, it looked nothing like the original prototype. The only part of the original game that was left intact was the potion making wizardry.

And the slowest? Dynasties/Sun Tzu (Jolly Roger 2005, Matagot 2010). The game began life as a tug of war contest titled Stress and was submitted to Parker Brothers back around 1982 and then again as Brain Drain two years later. As you might imagine, Parker had a bit of a problem with the negative aspects of a design that was intended to promote stress. The design was fiddled around with on and off for a few more years and was finally disassembled and filed in a drawer for almost 20 years before again seeing the light of day. Many more months of brainstorming were required to turn the game into a themed contest and playtesting consumed still more time. When finally published, the game had taken probably close to 24 years from start to finish and ironically, in its final state, Dynasties won critical acclaim and is now headed to iPhone/iPad before the end of 2011.

Dark Minions has been quite another design story indeed. I've always loved dice – their feel, their sound, and especially their potential for turning random rolls into possibilities for skillful decisions. Although my Super 3 game is often thought of as just a simple tic-tac-toe derivative, the addition of die-rolling added decision trees that extended out far ahead. Consequently, knowledge of the odds meant Super 3 had become a game of skill and if one added a doubling cube, it was on a par with Backgammon. While favorable dice rolls were still important, good decisions were now a key element. The game proved immensely popular as a result and sold over 500,000 copies in Europe alone. A mere 32 years later and my love affair with dice provided the inspiration for Dark Minions.

Let's call it a brainstorm. My passion for territorial games (e.g., El Grande) and my infatuation with dice proved irresistible. So, the first step was an immediate decision that dice would be used to attack territories. That took ten seconds. Next, I decided to go for a modular set up, rather than one board, just to make it a little different. That took another ten seconds. Rather than having nation versus nation or something pedestrian like that, I thought something horrific minions and monsters attacking medieval towns would be fun. (Warped sense of humor, I know.) That took literally another ten seconds and made the modular concept viable. The total time for building a base concept was probably less than one minute.

Prototype of a town and the final image

In 37 years of designing games, that had never happened before. I immediately sat in front of my desktop, opened a spreadsheet and began to play around with the math. That took a few days, trying to figure out how towns would be attacked and captured and how to award victory points. The first prototype was constructed the next day and played that weekend. Meh.

It all worked, but tossing only two dice seemed to leave the playtesters flat. While you could eventually add another die by leveling up, there was just not enough tactile satisfaction in rolling only two dice. Thus, a third die was added. I briefly considered adding more dice but there was a problem. If only three towns were in play (usually the case), then adding more dice would likely be overkill. To make the process of leveling up more meaningful, three red dice with higher numbers were introduced to the mix for those who were able to level up. The red dice sides were numbered from 3 to 8, which meant average rolls of 5.5, compared with 3.5 for the black dice, a substantial improvement. In addition, since rolling 1 on a black die was so disadvantageous, I made the 1s into +1s, which could be added to any other die. The math and the spreadsheets were taking on a life of their own. However, at this point, I was still only about a week into the design.

The base design worked well enough but was almost too simple. It needed another layer of complexity. Since the base mechanisms worked just fine, there was no way I was going to layer complexity to the base, so I needed an external layer of complexity. Enter the Overlords. The Overlords all break the rules of the game in different ways and allow various tactical and strategic approaches that would otherwise be impossible. Since they all came with a cost, players would now have to judge if an Overlord was fairly priced given his/her situation. The 15 Overlords took another two weeks to design and a few playtests were needed to adjust costs and powers.

Before a month had passed from the original brainstorm, the game had almost completely taken shape. A series of regular playtest sessions were initiated with LI-game group members and when my youngest son had his college buddies over, they were immediately drafted to playtest. Naturally, there were a few tweaks here and there, but after a dozen playtest sessions, I was convinced Dark Minions was ready for primetime. Coming up just a few weeks away on the calendar was Alan Moon's The Gathering of Friends and since there would be publishers attending, I did not contact any publishers, instead waiting and fine-tuning the game before packing it up and flying to Columbus. Needless to say, the game was well-received. From start to finish, including Zev Shlasinger's commitment to publish Dark Minions took roughly eleven weeks. Incredibly, Z-man Games' prototype already had the first expansion in the box and a second was already being designed.

Al Newman

From left, Herb Levy, Greg Daigle, Karl Heinz-Schmiel and Georg Wild playing a Dark Minions prototype at The Gathering of Friends, April 2010, ten weeks after the idea for the game was conceived