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In early 2012, I went directly from knowing and playing games like Settlers of Catan to sitting down with my girlfriend to learn and play Arkham Horror. It was way too big a leap for us at the time. We were exhausted after five hours, and we didn't feel like we "got" the game even after that.
Coincidentally, I had just discovered BoardGameGeek, where Arkham Horror was listed and ranked among the top 100 best board games at the time. I (very naively) thought to myself: "If this is supposed to be one of the best board games out there, I think I can do better."
As it would soon turn out, I was wrong — well, on relative short term at least.
Designing a board game is not as easy as it seems at first glance. It's not until you make your first prototype that you realize how difficult it actually is. It's somewhat easy to make a game system that's playable, but designing a game that is fun and something you want to play again and again is not.
After a couple of tries, I did manage to design a decent mid-weight euro, and I went to SPIEL in 2013 with two meetings booked: one with Z-Man Games and another with Czech Games Edition (CGE).
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Overview of "Dig for Victory", the prototype I pitched in 2013
With puddles of sweat under my arms, I somehow made a convincing pitch to the Z-Man himself. He took a copy.
When I met with CGE, the owner called for a guy to come sit with us. At the time, I could tell you the names of only a handful of designers, and of those, I would recognize only a couple in real life — but here was Vlaada Chvátil sitting down with us, and my focus went from pitching my game to focusing on breathing. I dropped pieces left and right trying to explain the game, while they alternated between asking me questions and conversing with one another in Czech, me sitting there like a deer in headlights trying to read their facial expressions.
It was a no (go figure).
Z-Man also responded with a rejection about six months later.
Highs & Lows
The high I had been riding until then had passed, and now I felt like I didn't know what I was doing. It made me quit — for a while at least...
Some time passed and another joy — the biggest of my life — would soon occupy my time as my girlfriend and I got pregnant. Our son is now almost four years old and a board gamer to be for sure!
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One of my favorite pictures of our son
In the meantime, I would still engage with the local design community, but my excitement for making games was not in full gear. It would only slowly begin to rise as I was asked to run a board game design competition at the biggest role-playing and board game convention we have in Denmark. Over the years, I've had designers like Jason Matthews, Asger Harding Granerud, Jeppe Norsker and Tina Christensen co-judge the competition with me. I even helped Asger with prototype "artwork" for his first released game, Flamme Rouge, back in the day, and the small online designer community I started on Facebook is now the second biggest board game related group in Danish.
My role, I felt, was in the encouragement of other rising designers, and not so much my own designs.
The Change
That changed in 2017 when I went to the SPIEL game fair in Essen on very short notice with exactly one of my recent designs in my luggage. I didn't have any meetings set up, but I wanted to give it a shot, so I did the cumbersome work of going booth to booth, asking whether anyone had time to take at look at my game. Needless to say, nothing came of it, even though I did get to sit down with a couple of publishers to pitch my game.
Going home, I was disappointed and I felt like it was a missed opportunity. I thought: "Next year, I will come back, and I will come back prepared!"
I already started designing in my head on the car ride back. I needed to come up with something original and exciting, thinking: "In the games that I like to play" (mostly mid-weight euro-style games) "what would be an original twist?"
One idea: "What if every space on a scoring track had a resource or special action on it?" I had Lords of Waterdeep in mind as an example. Then you would not only have to think about scoring many points, but also the pace at which you scored them as smaller scoring missions would be more attractive and larger scoring missions more risky.
I knew it would be way too much to create an entirely new mid-weight euro game just to put bonuses on the scoring track, so I tried to refine the game to be ONLY the scoring track. Of course, if you have a game with only a scoring track, you effectively have a racing game — but in this case a racing game in which you not only needed to get ahead quickly, but also land on the right spaces as you went along.
This was the birth of "Banana Jones", a game in which players took control of an adventurer, exploring and raiding a temple for gems of different value and rarity. The gems would be worth points only in sets of three, emphasizing the need to hit the right spaces as you went along.
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Overview of "Banana Jones"
I worked on that game for about six months. It gave me so much inspiration and energy to design again that I've done a multitude of prototypes since then, even a mid-weight euro game that I co-designed with Allan Kirkeby.
The Twist
Then one day, an idea struck me like lightning, and within twenty minutes I had drawn and tested the entire layout for "Banana Jones: The Dice Game". It worked!
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Overview of "Banana Jones: The Dice Game"
"Banana Jones" and "Banana Jones: The Dice Game" did not have similar mechanisms, but the scoring was done with the same gems of different rarity and in sets of three. I knew from playtesting at the time that "Banana Jones: The Dice Game" was the home run of the two, but I wanted to push them both, so I kept them in the same theme, thinking a publisher might pick up both.
Full Sails
Fast forward to SPIEL '18, where Allan and I had booked 23 meetings to show off ten games: four from me and one we had co-designed, with the rest being Allan's. We had a very good show, handing over twenty prototypes in total, with further requests from publishers to mail them some of the prototypes that we'd run out of.
I'm getting a little ahead of myself here as I think this success had two major factors:
1) Going to meetings with Allan by my side really helped the otherwise introverted me be in a much more comfortable situation. (He's previously been CEO of a computer games company, and his first board game, Itchy Monkey, debuted at that show.) No puddles of sweat under my arms this time! Before the convention ended, I surprised Allan with a big box game as a present to say "thank you". Sometimes just being you can make a huge difference for someone else. Allan surely did for me in this case!
2) A couple of months before SPIEL '18, we sent out requests to publishers for meetings along with our sell sheets. A few of them responded with an immediate request to have one or two of our games sent out before SPIEL, so we did that. Thursday morning, before the convention openedWhite Goblin Games, I woke to a text from White Goblin Games saying they'd played the game on Wednesday evening and they wanted to publish it!
At that instant, I no longer felt like an imposter. I was now a full-fledged game designer, and I walked into each and every meeting over the following days with that confidence in mind. I made sure to thank White Goblin Games when we met on Friday to discuss the details going forward. I'm still very thankful for it. The timing could not have been better!
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Now, what is the game about?
First, the theme was changed from Banana Jones (my self-imagined setting) to a story about the Māori, the indigenous people of New Zealand. In Māori, "Ka Pai" means "Well done!", which is exactly the feeling the game inspired in players when I playtested it.
Doing some research on Māori culture, we decided first on the name, then on the thematic story told by the game:
As players, you host a social gathering of different Māori tribes, each represented by their own symbol. Placing the same tribes next to one another will increase their power (in sets of three to score points) and can potentially also spread the stories written on the totems in the corners and center of the player sheets. These totems were historically put up by the Māori to show their connection with the land and their ancestors, so the more of them you connect, the further the knowledge goes, and the more you will score.
As a little twist, one of the tribes — the one represented by the symbol / — does not have a base score when completing sets of them, but each time a set of them is formed, they allow a player to increase the score of sets of any tribe (symbol), including themselves.
The mechanism of how, where, and when players gets to write the different symbols is also fundamental to the gameplay experience. The game comes with two custom dice, each with a different distribution of symbols, and each round they are rolled (by any player). All players then use the result to write on their own player sheet.
If the dice show two different symbols, each player can choose to draw either one of the symbols, but not both. However, if the dice show two identical symbols, all players must write both symbols, and they must be placed next to one another. This, paired with a hierarchy in how rare the different symbols are and how many points they score for getting them in sets of three, presents the players with interesting choices each round.
Players can write their first symbol in any free space, but going forward, all new symbols must be placed next to an existing one. The interesting choices come from deciding which symbol to write, where to write it, and how much of a risk you are willing to take. Every so often, a double roll will challenge players with what I call an extra-frustratingly-fun challenge. Maybe you were already hoping for that exact double roll to come up? Or maybe you will seize the opportunity and rethink your strategy?
A completed player sheet
As the game goes along, players will be more and more devoted to what they are already doing, building up the tension towards the end. This is when I realized during playtesting that Ka Pai was going to be a hit. I've never done a game before that made players spontaneously express themselves to such a degree. Comments like "Yes! Just what I needed!" or "Roll double squares, please!" or "Oh no! That's not what I needed. Where do I place these?" have been consistent throughout all games I've witnessed since the first playtest. These expressions grow as the game progresses.
Fifteen minutes later, the game is over and inevitably someone says, "Who wants to try again?"
This is something that I've always aspired to achieve, and it brings me great joy to experience it, each and every time I bring Ka Pai to the table. I know that it will bring fun and joyful moments to a lot of people in the future. That is worth the world to me, so I promise this will not be the last game you'll see from me.
Thank you for reading!
Mads Fløe
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