Designer Diary: From Push Push to Minesweeper to Mine Deeper

[Editor's note: This is a translated designer diary from Jonathan Lee, the author of Mine Deeper, who is not active on BGG, with KBG editor Leon Scheuber handling the translation and publication. —WEM]

"Plinkplunkplinkplunkplinkplunk ... the sound of gems falling!"

It's an honor to introduce you to Mine Deeper, a game full of tension and suspense. My name is Jonathan Lee, the designer of this game. I am currently working as a computer programmer in Korea. I have two sons (six and four years old) and a daughter (six months). As they are growing up, they naturally grow up seeing the board games on our bookshelf, and now they're playing board games that fit their age as a hobby. In fact, my older son is as good as I am in winning Ticket to Ride or Carcassonne, so they're helping me as very good (and unpaid) board game testers.

For me, it's okay to play kids games once or twice in a while. The problem, however, is that children aren't satisfied with playing a game only one or two times, so I was thinking about what kind of family board games could be played by a very young child, yet that an adult could still enjoy, and I came up with the idea for "Push Push" (which would later become Mine Deeper).

The Thrill of Seeing Boulders Falling

I like Indiana Jones a lot, especially that famous scene when Dr. Jones has a boulder rolling behind him and he is trying to escape the cave. The thrill of watching the hero being chased by a dangerous boulder is fascinating, and you can feel a similar thrill in Mine Deeper: It is the thrill of making sure my gems will be safe when my opponent pushes one square of our shared wall from the other side.

Idea notes drawn on the mobile phone before making the prototype

When the idea of Mine Deeper developed in my head, I imagined the main component being a giant wall. Place the wall between the players, then place the marbles on each side. The rules are basically determined by the components:

1. Choose a part of the wall.
2. Push it.
3. Check the color of the dropped marble.

It takes less than a minute to explain, and actually the rules are simple enough to understand without having to listen to an explanation at all. From the start, the game was about pushing one part of a wall to make a marble fall, and I thought that was already a lot of fun. If the other person pushed the wall once again from the other side, there was a memory element added as a bonus as you had to remember which part of the wall you already pushed.

Push Push, or the Alpha Version

The first fun part of Mine Deeper is hiding the gems. The player has a set number of spaces in which to hide their gems. It's easy to think of the treasure hunt game that I had fun with when I was young. Playing treasure hunt was always on my mind, and I was thinking: "How much fun would it be if I were the one to hide the treasure when it was so much fun to find them?"

As I got older, there weren't many opportunities for me to hide treasures, but in Mine Deeper, I can set the location of the gems that my opponent have to find each game.

Alpha version, with holes drilled to speed up the 3D printing

The alpha version was made with a 4x5 grid, and there was no mining theme yet. The players were divided into red and blue colors, and each received 14 white marbles, five of their colored marbles (red and blue), and one rainbow-colored marble. If you dropped all the marbles of the opponent's color, you won the game.

The alpha version was designed so that my six- and four-year-old children could play together, without the help of an adult. It's a simple game in which you have to push the right part of the wall to drop your opponent's marbles. It seems like you're playing with 100% luck, but it actually takes a little bit of psychological warfare, such as when you place all five gems in a row or something like that.

And of course there were also the rainbow marbles: When the rainbow-colored marble falls, you can place the already fallen marbles back onto the wall. Rainbow marbles create variables in the game.

My kids enjoyed the alpha version very much — until my older son complained that he was smarter and didn't understand why he had lost to his younger brother. The older kid then asked me whether I could change the game so that it was not decided by luck only.

The final version of Mine Deeper comes with a refined version of the rules, but if you're playing with very young children, you might want to try the alpha version of the rules.

Minesweeper, or the Beta Version

If you've already played Mine Deeper, or if you've checked the game information here, then you might have thought, "What? This sounds kind of similar to Minesweeper." Yes! That's right. If you don't know Minesweeper, I'm sure you are quite a bit younger than I am...

I was thinking about how to satisfy my older son's request, and I thought, "Let's use white marbles without any function, but give a hint about the marbles of the other player with other colored marbles." When I developed this idea I noticed that the rule was quite similar to the classic video game Minesweeper:

1. Yellow marbles must have one player marble adjacent to them.
2. Black marbles must have two player marble adjacent to them.
3. Black and yellow marbles cannot give hints to multiple player marbles.

These simple rules completed the beta version, but the difficulty of the whole game went up. The older child understood the rules, but his younger brother found it difficult to understand them. Of course, the game had also become more strategic.

Unlike the alpha version, which was mostly luck, I was able to play with more deduction about the location of the marbles of my opponent. When I tested the beta version, I thought it was a game that I could suggest to a publisher, so I sent out the prototype to Korea Boardgames and got a positive response.

Modules in beta version 2.0

manufactured for playtesting

Prototype Creation

The tools that I usually use to develop my board games are paper, knives, scissors, pens, and so on. I don't think other board game designers are much different.

The prototype for Mine Deeper was created wholly using 3D printing. Of course I could have made it out of paper boxes or other materials, but Mine Deeper was a game with a lot of the same components — the boxes that make up the wall — so I thought it would be a good idea to make it with 3D printing because then each component would be exactly the same size. That said, making it was tough.

The alpha version was created using simple 3D dotting tools, but the beta version was commissioned to be modeled, improving the deficiencies of the alpha version.

I have experienced a number of unexpected situations while creating and testing the different prototypes. In many cases, I just didn't understand the nature of 3D printing well. For example, the walls couldn't move because they were too tight, then when I thinned down the walls to save material costs, the walls broke and the boxes moved left and right.

However, all in all, it's a very satisfying result to finally get it right, though it's time-consuming and expensive. If you're building a board game prototype, I'd like to let you know that 3D printing can be an option.

Mine Deeper

I know that publishers usually spend a lot of time trying to make the designer's ideas into a finished product. As for Mine Deeper, because the basic rules were simple and the prototype was clear, it wasn't likely to take long to bring the game to publication. Even so, the publisher suggested a number of modifications and supplements to improve the game:

1. Including set-up cards for young players who find it difficult to set up the wall by themselves.
2. Increasing the wall size from 4x5 to 5x5.
3. Adding a player board as a memory aid for dropped gems.

These are the three biggest improvements, while there's also been a lot of changes in the details. Since then, we've continued to try to improve the game's maturity through open playtesting and refining with lots of feedback.

Final version with handy set-up cards and a tray in which the stones can fall

We put a lot of time and effort in Mine Deeper, and I sincerely hope you will enjoy playing it.

Jonathan Lee