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We have been designing games together for years and published this game, our first, in December 2021. Life of a Chameleon is a lighter abstract strategy game based on changing colors, eating bugs, and avoiding snakes. In May 2022, it was awarded the 2022 Mensa Select designation, and we couldn't be happier. I'd like to share some of our thoughts while making this game.
The basic idea for Life of a Chameleon came from Jake. He thought it would be interesting to have a game in which the players changed their player tokens throughout the game. One of the first ideas that came to Jake's mind was chameleons since they change color. We started building on that concept and decided that in order to sneak up on food or hide from predators the chameleon would need to change its color. We know that chameleons don't change color in real life to sneak up on bugs or to avoid predators, but we thought chameleons were cool, so we stuck with it.
From the beginning we wanted players to score points by accomplishing objective cards with specific sets of bugs on them. After several iterations of testing, we found that it was too easy to collect bugs and achieve goals, so we imposed a rule that players had to fulfill their objective cards from left to right.
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After more iterations of testing, this seemed too restrictive and didn't allow players enough choice to plan out their moves. How could we land somewhere between "no choices" and "too many choices"? Then inspiration struck: Why not allow a player to fulfill their objectives either from left to right or from right to left? After even more testing, this proved to be the perfect balance between choice and constraint.
Jake and I enjoy games that have multiple ways to score, so naturally we wanted to do so in this design to add to the strategy, interaction, and suspense of the game. We added a deck of action cards that players gain by starting and completing objective cards.
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Ultimately we included both direct and indirect ways to score using these achievement cards. We started with direct ways to score — Gather and Hide – which wasn't enough, so we added indirect ways to score: Extra Action, Sneak, Move Bug, and Wild cards. The indirect scoring cards allow players to surprise their opponents with an extra wild bug, another movement, a sneaky move past a snake, or a bug lure to draw it closer. I love moments of surprise when a player can combine multiple actions into a masterpiece of points.
On the other hand, the direct scoring cards take some effort. A player will need to plan ahead to score these points. They might need to make a tradeoff and forgo extra objectives, or conversely ignore the achievement card. In other instances they could use a Gather achievement card to score and consequently remove bugs their opponent might be trying to collect.
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In the beginning, I was worried about the Gather cards. I thought the concept of herding bugs was great, but I thought that these cards would be too hard to accomplish. As we played with the achievement cards, I realized that previous choices we had already incorporated into the game actually facilitated the Gather goal and even added a deeper layer of strategy to the game.
Earlier, we had decided that when a chameleon moves into a new space with bugs that don't share a color, the player would then have to scare them away to adjacent spaces. We were then challenged with this question: What if all the adjacent spaces were occupied by chameleons that also didn't share a color with the bug? We didn't want an exception to allow bugs of different colors to reside on the same space as chameleons — which was when chaining bug movements was born! Suddenly, a player could opportunistically steer bugs through multiple spaces using chameleons with different colors. We immediately applied this rule to the movement of snakes. These rules prevented deadlocks, but they also gave players a little more control to bend the environment to their benefit.
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A difficult question for many designs we've created is how the game should end. This is a critical part of any game. The ending can create all sorts of problems, including analysis paralysis. We wanted to avoid scenarios in which the last players would spend far too much time calculating their maximum possible score. We wanted the game to have some uncertainty. We wanted players to be forced to take risks and make tradeoffs between scoring more points or being conservative. Since we had already included a twenty-sided die for placing new bugs onto the board, why not add a four-sided die for advancing the game? And that's what we did. Every time an objective card is completed, the player rolls that D4, and everyone holds their breath to see just how far down the track the game will progress.
Life of a Chameleon is an opportunistic game. Players can't plan multiple turns into the future, but instead must pay attention to which colors are on the board, where the other players are, how many bugs are left of each color, how much longer the game will last, which objectives are available, which chameleon colors are available, and which achievement cards they have collected. On the surface the game is straightforward and even easy, but after a few rounds it gets a bit deeper.
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Designing this game was fun. We went through many iterations and surprisingly ended up with something close to what we had envisioned in the beginning. This hasn't typically been our experience as we frequently change between themes and mechanisms during development. It's been fun watching others enjoy the theme and discover the subtle strategy we've designed into this game.
Nate Jenne
Nathan (l) and Jake
