Designer Diary: How Potato Chips Inspired Gobi

Diary by Scott Huntington & Shaun Graham

Designing board games as a duo is great. You have two brains to think up ideas, four hands to build prototypes, and so many opportunities to talk about game design — and that is what we do. A lot. In our conversations, we spitball, suggest, and try to get a grip on each other's ideas. We chat and babble, and in this way nebulous concepts of play take shape, which we then strive to wrangle in and make a great game of. This is how Gobi came to be.

After a fun and fruitful night of playing some of our prototypes, we started to talk about ideas that formed during the night. And just like some swinging jazz musicians — no instruments though, just index cards and sharpies — we collaboratively improvised and came up with a basic mechanism we'd wanted to explore: Place a tile and place tokens on all adjacent tiles. That sounded easy. Easy is fun. At least we love to make easy fun in our games. So we decided to go with it and see where that idea would take us.

Well, first it took us on our separate holidays because shortly after that night, we both travelled to two different parts of the world and took the idea with us. (Spoiler: Neither of us went to the Gobi Desert.) We both wanted to think about it and come up with something. And we did.

After we returned from our holidays and were once again gathered in our design lab (a.k.a., the dining room), we presented what we came up with in the meantime. We tried a rough draft of one of those ideas, and it worked smoothly. Gobi was born — but it wasn't called "Gobi'" then. It had a silly name somehow related to bees because in this version of the game you were playing flower tiles to the table and trying to make your bees connect same-colored flowers. (Yes, that theme still sounds silly today. Good thing we decided to change it.) While we worked out the kinks of the game with multiple playtests, we also came up with the theme of making caravans in the desert. And since the Saharan Desert already has a plethora of games dedicated to it, we decided to go with Gobi.

By the way, the other idea we had worked great as well — so great in fact, it will also be published in 2019. Keep your eyes peeled!

During our design phase of Gobi, we always followed a principle we strongly believe in – the Potato Chip Principle. Just like you always grab another handful of chips and you receive something strangely yummy and rewarding each time you pop one of those salty snacks in your mouth, Gobi should give players the feeling of yummy and rewarding gameplay each round. Every time it is a player's turn, the game should give you a bite of crunchy decisions that you always want just another handful of. Therefore, you always get to do something each round of Gobi that makes you feel clever and has a sense of achievement — especially if you can use special powers you gained by receiving gifts for completing caravans. Yum!

No more bees! After the retheme, Gobi was born.

The gift tiles in our prototype were stylistically influenced by traditional Chinese playing cards.

Gobi was ready to be shown to publishers pretty quickly. We shopped it around, and in 2017 sat around a bistro table at Capsicum Games' booth at the SPIEL fair in Essen. We played, they took it back to France to consider, and shortly afterward we signed a contract. Capsicum put the game together beautifully with the help of the great artist Maud Chalmel and it was flattering to see her art bring our game to life. And when Capsicum sent us the first draft of the camel meeples, we squealed with joy!

Our first look at the totally squeal-worthy camel meeples — from draft to production copy

One year later, at the SPIEL fair in Essen in 2018, Gobi will hit the market and players can now cleverly bring the tribes of the Gobi Desert together again. It all started with a chat, was inspired by potato chips, and can finally be enjoyed by players all around the world.