Designer Diary: Frigiti – a Game that DOES Exist

The Idea

In January 2011, when I could not fall asleep because my head was racing with thoughts, I suddenly had this idea for a game with words that did not exist.

Don't get me wrong – obviously, to be in a game, the words needed to exist. However, up until the very moment they were created, they should not exist in a dictionary or elsewhere. Now, I know that is quite a task, considering how many dictionaries there are in the world, not to mention online resources.

I remembered how much fun my sister and I had had when we used to play "Chaos-Scrabble", in which every word one could explain was valid. So I grabbed some blank dice, put letters on them, prepared a board and wrote down the rules:

Quote:

Players roll dice to form a non-existent word. Afterwards, everybody writes down a definition for the newly created word. Finally, definitions are shuffled, dealt and everybody reads out one definition out loud. Everybody then distributes points to definitions he likes.

The First Playtest

Figuring out which letters go where

Soon after, I travelled to Boedefeld in the West German Sauerland. For several years, an annual game designer seminar has been taking place at the local Hotel Albers. Usually, we are about ten people discussing how to promote game designers and games as a cultural good. In the evening we started playing prototypes, and I put mine onto the table, announcing, "This was never played before, and maybe it is total crap." We started playing the game, and fortunately, everybody liked it. Clearly, the board was not helpful as it indicated too obviously who was first and who was last, thus destroying the fun created by playing with words. Hence, I swapped to tokens instead early on. Also, it was very clear that every player should create a word at least once. All in all, however, the game was well received. During this very first round, somebody created the word "Frigiti", which was, among other things, defined as a "small fridge" and an "Inuit woman after her menopause".

The next evening, the others demanded to play my game again. We started, and again everybody had fun. At some point somebody playing at the other table suddenly shouted: "Now I know what Frigiti is!" As the room was filled with laughter after he announced, "It is a magazine for women aged 50 plus", it was clear to me that my new game could have only one name: Frigiti.

Developing the Game

In the weeks after, I played Frigiti with a lot of different groups, but I never met anybody who did not like the game. On the contrary, most players loved it and wanted to play it over and again. In gaming contexts such as the Nuremberg Toy Fair, the first playtesters and I had great fun in naming everything and everybody "Frigiti". Apologies to everybody who suffered! However, be assured that we had big fun when doing so.

In my playtests I noticed that some players did not intuitively understand how points were distributed. The problem seemed to be that the relevant rules included two positive actions ("Give two points to the definitions you like best") and one negative restriction ("but not to the one you wrote yourself"). Some players argued that since they understood the rules, it should be fine. I did not think so as my experience is that it makes sense to listen to any problems uttered when playtesting, no matter how few players have them. So I revised the rules to "Give three points to your own definition and the two other definitions you like best", thus avoiding the combination of positive and negative rules.

Another problem occurring was that people wrote down definitions, then had to judge definitions according to who read them. This transfer also seemed to be difficult for some players, who always tried to allocate a definition to its writer, but not to its reader. I soon erased the space for the writer's name on the notepad because I discovered that no one ever claimed to have written somebody else's definition. Hence, there was no need to have such a space. Unfortunately, my hopes that this would minimize the problems above did not com true.

As a consequence, I decided to offer the chance to write down keywords of the definitions read out, so that you could avoid the transfer of marking a reader's name for the definition he read out. This finally helped to overcome the problem that people did not remember which box to mark.

Producing Frigiti

After the Toy Fair in Nuremberg I decided to produce a small print run of Frigiti myself through BeWitched Spiele. I talked to Daniel Müllenbach, who had realised the artwork for Hossa, and he agreed to create the artwork for Frigiti.

After designing a general outline for the game, Daniel was convinced that we needed small stones as tokens rather than plastic tokens. I could see what he meant, but felt that the stones were too expensive. After discussing several models of how to include the stones, we decided that a small share of the first print run should come with stones instead of plastic. We liked the idea that nobody would know whether a copy contained stones or plastic tokens, thus including a game in the game.

Professional stone sorter wearing union-approved hat

All in all, I think Daniel has done a wonderful job, although we definitely have different ideas about time management. Researching prices for material, deciding on how to realise the ten different letter dice for the game as well as ordering products was the same as always: time-consuming and more duty than fun. In the end, the last parts we needed arrived this last Tuesday at 3 p.m. At 4 p.m. we started assembling the games, so just-in-time is the word.

Together with six friends I spent roughly seven hours putting everything into the tin boxes, then putting the boxes into protective foil. After some problems with my 2010 game Freeze, many copies of which were sent back because they were slightly dented, I decided to minimize this danger. On Wednesday, Daniel and I put a short note into the stone bags explaining why there were stones instead of plastic tokens. We then distributed these games among the other games assembled the day before, closed the boxes, and stored them to be collected next Monday when I will load the car for Spiel 2011.

First step: Label the game

Networking

Early on, I opened a Facebook fan page for my new game. Playtesting in diverse groups helped to get fans for the page, but the Facebook site also gave me the first "heart attack" of this production when somebody told me on my wall that he knew my game and had already played it years ago as a play-by-mail game. I researched the rules of the game mentioned and asked game designer friends whether they thought my game and this other one were too close. Fortunately they did not think so.

Mostly, players who considered Frigiti to be familiar were thinking of the German game Nobody is Perfect or the American Balderdash. However, one "heart attack" was still in store. When I attended the press presentation of the new version of Linq by Kosmos, somebody told me he had only recently played a very similar game. We were both very glad when we realized that he had played a prototype of Frigiti that I had provided to another publisher!

Currently, Daniel is programming the website Frigiti.de, which will include a chance to enter words and definitions into an online Frigiti dictionary. I am glad that Ted Alspach, William Attia, Silvano Sorrentino, and Nobuaki Takerube have been nice enough to help me translate the rules into English, French, Italian, and Japanese. The remaining days before the convention in Essen starts will be devoted to preparing the decoration for my booth (11-65). On Tuesday, I will be off to Essen. See you there?

Andrea Meyer

Everything's in place and just waiting for closure