Designer Diary: How Traveling the World Gave Birth to Scuba

My name is Martin Looij, and I'm a board game designer from the Netherlands. I love scuba diving, traveling, and board gaming (in that order). From July 2014 until May 2015, I was traveling through North, Central and South America, and while hanging in an overland truck for up to 14 hours a day, I started thinking about making a board game about my #1 passion: scuba diving.

I have been scuba diving since I was eight years old, and I still absolutely love it, so I started designing a board game about diving with sheets of paper, markers, and used egg cartons. In the picture below, you can see me working on Scuba in Baños, Ecuador.

From that point on, Scuba kept developing rather quickly. From the start, I focused on making Scuba as realistic as possible, but I quickly realized that it is hard to translate the concept of diving into a board game. After all, diving is very relaxing and that would translate to boring gameplay, so I had to come up with realistic ways to design an interesting board game. This is where concepts such as "currents" and "dust trails" came in.

Currents

In real scuba diving, there often will be currents that affect your dive. Sometimes you will make a drift dive, which is starting at point A, then drifting along the current and finishing your dive at point B. Since this is something exciting, I wanted to implement this into my game. After some experimentation, I decided to go with the element of surprise. Before a player starts diving on their turn, they draw a current card to see whether there is any current and which fish (or divers) are affected by it. In the game, currents mean that fish could swim out of the diving area, so when other players discover them, you can't just wait forever to see them, too, which adds a sense of urgency to the game.

Dust trails

In real diving, you don't make trails of dust. You will be trained properly so that you hover above the bottom of the sea without touching the floor with your fins. In Scuba, however, dust trails are a given. I added this element because otherwise it would be too easy to follow other players and spot their fish as well. In the game, you leave a trail of dust behind you that will stay for one round, during which other players can't see any fish that are on a space with your dust. (The cubes are used to indicate dust.)

While I developed the basics of Scuba, I was traveling through Ecuador and was still using egg cartons and pieces of paper. Then we hit Peru, and in a small beach town, I was able to find three magnetic chess sets to upgrade my "designer kit". With these sets, I had a game board and enough magnetic pieces to stick small pieces of paper on them with letters and numbers to indicate the type of fish. Pawns were also included in the set, which I could use as player pawns. This might still sound like a poor prototype, but it was a huge step up from the small cardboard pieces that were all over the place.

In the following months, I kept working on making Scuba as realistic as possible, yet an exciting and fun board game. I introduced events that made the game more exciting and thematic. When diving in the game, you can now find treasures, get grabbed by an octopus, or get seasick.

One of the event cards

There was still one crucial element to include in the game: air. You start with 20 units of air. This is 200 bar of 3000 psi, but non-divers can just call them units of air (as long as you don't call it oxygen). The implementation of the air in the game was actually quite easy. In diving, the deeper you go, the more air you use, so I used that principle in my game. When diving at 0-10m (0-30 ft), you use 1 unit of air. For every 10 m (30 ft) lower than that, you use one additional unit of air, and that worked out really well. On the board, you can see the amount of air you will use at a certain depth.

The air you use at certain depths

When the mechanisms of the game all came together, I started searching for an artist and a graphic designer. Whenever I had decent wi-fi — I was traveling through South and Central America at that time — I searched for artists with a style that would fit what I had in mind. I ended up contacting a few of them and asked whether they could send me a sample card with a turtle on it for $30.

The first three artists also tried their hand at the graphic design. (Note that turtle 3 and 4 are made by the same guy.) I asked the Dutch board game community Bordspelmania to help me choose between these artists, and I ended up settling with artist 3. Artist 4 made an awesome turtle, but was too expensive for this project and couldn't work fast enough on the 18 animals, box, and board needed for the game, so I decided on artist 3: Shaz Yong from Malaysia. I didn't like his graphic design well enough for this project, and just as I was about to start looking for one, Sebastian Koziner from Argentina saw something about my project on BoardGameGeek and dropped me a message saying that he was interested in the project. He would do the graphic design for one card for free to show me what he could do. He sent me his design, and I instantly loved it. So how did the card with the turtle end up? Like this:

Final artwork of the turtle (graphic design not yet final)

Now I had a concept, an artist, and a graphic designer. When I came home in May 2015, the next step was playtesting. Over the course of the months, I used all sorts of playtesting: local game clubs, Dutch and Belgian board game conventions, and many blind playtest sessions. I made three prototypes and they made quite a journey. I optimized a lot of game rules and by November 2015, playtesting was done. I sent the games out to video reviewers and went from game designer to game publisher.

Final game

Meanwhile, Sebastian and I worked on the Kickstarter page. Video reviews started to come in and luckily they were all positive! The most common conclusion of the reviews was that the game did a good job of portraying the feeling of scuba diving, without getting boring. Since this was pretty much my exact goal when starting designing the game, this felt like a huge victory!

The Kickstarter funded and was delivered a month early, with the game also being available at SPIEL 2016. Now you know how Scuba was made!