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The Cast of Characters
I'm Steve Bennett. I've dabbled in game design for twenty years, with several party or creative games that I regard as essentially done except for that pesky publishing issue.
My wife is Judy Martin, a quilter/quilt designer/quilt book author of some considerable renown in that particular pond. For the past 26 years we have worked mostly side-by-side at our home, publishing Judy's books.
Judy and I have always played games – as a couple, with other couples, later with our two kids. We've always played word games together. We went through a trivia phase. There was a party game phase. Of course we went through a children's game phase. We were glad that one didn't last too long! For the last ten years we've been in our Eurogame phase.
We always thought it would be fun to make a quilt-themed game. After all, quilting was an unused theme, and who better to create such a game than Judy and me? We felt Judy's name would help sell the game to quilters, thus reducing the risk for the publisher that picked up our game.
The Early Attempts
The art of patchwork quilting is, at its core, working with geometric shapes of varying colors to create either standalone quilt blocks or quilt blocks that produce a larger overall pattern for the quilt. Understanding how these geometric shapes work with each other; being able to determine what size to make them; and having the eye for color, value, and contrast to make the patterns pop are some of the skills that Judy possesses in spades, skills that have enabled her to design and publish patterns for one thousand original block or quilt designs in her career. (To put that in perspective for non-quilters, one thousand published designs makes her the Babe Ruth or Hank Aaron of quilt design. I prefer to not think of my wife as the Barry Bonds of quilt design.)
Building a game around the skills enumerated above is not something we can recommend. Our early attempts were focused on building quilts from a variety of squares, rectangles, triangles, and other shapes. It was more a puzzle-making or puzzle-solving process than a game. We played around with real-time implementations but didn't like how that worked. And we never found a way of scoring the quilts that satisfied us.
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Early board for prototype that had more in common with Bingo
The biggest problem is that to make a beautiful quilt, you need a lot of different patches — but having a lot of different patches means that often you won't be able to put the right patches together. It's one thing if Judy has designed it in the computer, given you the pattern, and told you how to make it; this is what she does when she writes a book. It's quite another if she gives you a selection of patches and says, "Here. Go make something from this." It can be done, but it's just as likely to lead to something both ugly and frustrating.
Every now and then we'd drag out our notes and paper quilt patches and kick around some new ideas — then we'd put it all away and get back to playing good games. Over the years we also tinkered with ideas that were less puzzle-making and more Eurocentric, but every attempt yielded more questions than answers.
The Rio Grande Games Design Contest
Every industry has a system of gatekeepers that keep the rabble from wasting the time of the decision makers in that industry. If Hollywood studios read every script written in the U.S., they wouldn't have time to actually turn any of them into Ishtar or Waterworld. I'm a quilt book publisher, and I've had people send me unsolicited manuscripts, void of good ideas, good designs, and good grammar. If we had to deal with a steady flow of such things, we'd never get Judy's books to market.
The game industry, while more accessible than most, is no different. There are barriers to getting looked at and seriously considered. When the Rio Grande Games Design Contest was announced in June 2009, Judy and I decided to drop everything and just work on a game. It represented the greatest opportunity for access we were likely to get. It wasn't quite now or never, but the contest created a sense of urgency for us.
The contest was set up in a fairly free-form fashion by the indefatigable Nate Scheidler. Eleven cities with active gaming groups were given the opportunity to arrange a local competition to send a prototype (along with its designers) to the Chicago Toy and Game Fair in late November. The twelve winners — twelve because Chicago sent two games — then got a half-hour each to pitch their games to Jay Tummelson of Rio Grande Games. One game was guaranteed to be published. (I won't rehash the nuts and bolts of the contest as you can read about it on this BGG thread.)
Our first obstacle was finding whether one of the local competitions would let us enter. They were all free to set up their own rules for entry. We live in Iowa, at least four hours from any of the competitions. Some wouldn't consider it, feeling the competition was only for their local designers. Others would consider taking us, but there were logistical hurdles. Fortunately for us, the organizer in Orlando, Pat Matthews, agreed to take our game.
With a place to send the game, now all we needed was a game to send to the place!
The Mantra and the Niches
Simple enough for non-gaming quilters and interesting enough for non-quilting gamers: from the beginning that was our stated goal.
To give our game the best chance to succeed in the marketplace, we had to be able to snare quilters whose exposure to games might well be limited to Monopoly or Pinochle. A quilt-themed game with the depth of Puerto Rico would not cut it with quilters, save those who are already serious gamers or those who are Judy Martin completists. Simple enough for quilters — we had to keep reminding ourselves of that goal.
But interesting enough for gamers. Judy and I tend to swim in the shallower end of the Euro pool. While we love us some Puerto Rico and Power Grid, we're more likely to sit down to Ticket to Ride or Carcassonne. We wanted to create a gateway game, one that could be pulled out to introduce your mom or your skittish co-worker to the world of wonderful games you play — but to be a great gateway game, it needs to be one you'll play with other gamers simply because you all enjoy it. When Judy and I play Carc, usually it's not because we're trying to pull someone into our gaming orbit; it's because we like the game and want to play it. Interesting enough for gamers — we had to keep reminding ourselves of that goal, too.
In addition to wanting to create a gateway game, we saw some niches we hoped to fill. The most obvious was the much-cliched "girlfriend/spouse" game. While Judy and I both realize gamers are gamers regardless of size, shape, gender, hair color, or any other distinguishing features, we also realize the pages of BoardGameGeek are filled with pleas for suggestions for games that one's wife or girlfriend can be enticed to play. If we could just make a good game about making quilts, we would have an obvious candidate for all those girlfriend/spouse GeekLists.
Another niche we sought to fill was that of games with well-integrated themes. It was important to us that the gameplay mirror what quilters actually do in real life. We wanted quilters to feel at home with the game because they are doing the same things they do when they make quilts. And we wanted gamers to feel like they were really quilters. Neither of those goals would be met if we merely slapped some fabric on cards and called it a quilting game.
Thebes is an archeology game in which you're digging into bags containing treasures of varying values. Your dig might be productive, or you might come up with nothing but sand. That's a game in which the game play and the theme dovetail perfectly. Lost Valley, an exploration game, is another one. Judy and I don't have a problem with abstract games with so-called pasted-on themes, but we definitely prefer the experience when the theme is central to the game play. In Quilt Show your game actions are drawn directly from the quilting theme. That was an important consideration for us from the very beginning.
Looking for Inspiration
I think most new designers start out by looking at games they like, looking for elements from those games that can be pulled out, tweaked in some way, and mixed with other tweaked elements to create a whole new stew.
Inspired by Stone Age, we toyed with a worker placement quilt game. Now visualize me making a slicing motion across my neck, the kind of gesture that is banned in the NFL. That's what we thought of that version. I should point out that someone could make a great worker placement quilting game. We were working on a tight deadline, and adequately developing and testing a more complex game just didn't make sense — but even if we had the time, it defied our mantra of being simple enough for non-gaming quilters.
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A tracking board from our short-lived worker placement version
We had another version with a map of the United States. You had to get to the quilt shows you wanted to enter, and the shows in real quilt meccas such as Paducah, Kentucky; Kalona, Iowa; Houston, Texas; Lancaster, Pennsylvania; and Ontario, California had to attract busloads of quilters. The more popular shows gave the better prizes.
We tried another version that was about buying and selling quilts. It was a speculation game. You can speculate all you want about what happened to that version!
Our first worthwhile effort, though, was informed by two of our favorite games: Queen's Necklace and Union Pacific.
We started with a deck of mixed cards: fabric in one of various colors, quilt patterns, or quilt classes. We used a card purchase devaluation system similar to the one employed in Queen's Necklace. We envisioned three tiers of cards: a Display Window, a Sale Wall, and a Closeout Bin. Each card had three prices, and its tier determined the price paid.
The best part of Queen's Necklace are the three gem sales, which comprise the game's scoring rounds. Everyone secretly decides which and how many of each of the four gems to enter. In true Bruno Faidutti fashion, you also have a lot of cards you can play in order to make a mess of the whole shebang. It creates a wonderful psychological tension for each of the sales.
From that game we got our three quilt shows, which form the backbone of Quilt Show. In every show there is a tension created by the random (within a range) prizes available. Each player is struggling with questions such as, "Should I break this large quilt into two smaller ones and try to claim two prizes?" or "Should I sit this show out since the prizes aren't good enough?" or "Do I need to add a quilting chip to this quilt in order to claim a prize (or claim the largest prize)?" or "Am I better off taking this red block and using it in a sampler quilt (all one color) or leaving it in the scrap quilt (all one pattern) I was originally intending to make?" How well you make those decisions and anticipate what your opponents will do determines the outcome of the game.
If you have never played Queen's Necklace or Quilt Show, the tension of the gem sales or the quilt shows is a stepped-up version of the tension in the property sales in the brilliant filler For Sale.
We also liked drawing from the notion in Union Pacific that you're either adding to your hand or you're playing cards from your hand onto one or two stocks (or in our case quilts that you're working on). It's simple, familiar, and comfortable.
Our favorite part of UP is the uncertainty of knowing when the next scoring round will occur. In that game, following a particular formula, four scoring rounds are shuffled into the deck of stock cards. They pop up randomly, and that uncertainty drives the game. We would have loved to include some variation of that element in our game, but it simply made no sense. In quilting you know when the show is going to take place. You may not feel like you have enough time to finish your quilt, but you know the timing. A further problem of randomly timed quilt shows was the prospect that some shows could occur so suddenly that no one would have any quilts to enter. We needed to time the quilt shows in some way that wasn't tied to the deck.
Our solution ended up being a set number of time markers, depending on the number of players. These markers are taken with every block that is made. This allowed us to dictate the number of blocks that would be dispersed to the players in each round, assuring there would be enough blocks to make quilts to enter in the shows. It had an added value of further integrating theme into the game play: Every quilter knows it takes both fabric and time to make a quilt block.
Despite taking the occasional detour into incompatible game mechanisms, we kept coming back to what we began to call the Ticket to Ride version. We liked the comfortable feeling for non-gamers that they had two basic choices on their turn: draw cards into your hand (add fabric to your stash) or discard fabric cards and take a quilt block card (use fabric to make quilt blocks). I should point out that Union Pacific and Ticket to Ride are both wonderful Alan Moon games built with the same basic draw-cards or play-cards-and-claim-things underpinning. Though it was UP that initially inspired us, we evolved into referring to this version as the Ticket to Ride version because that game is designed to be more of a gateway game, which is where we saw Quilt Show fitting in.
Winning the Contest
I won't go into detail about being one of the four winners of the contest as I covered most of that in this post from 2009. I do want to talk briefly about one change Jay suggested during our initial pitch session.
When we pitched our game, on your turn you could either take fabric or discard fabric and make just one block. "Why?" asked Jay. (If you could do one of those word clouds of Jay's part of the pitch session, the largest word would be "Why?" and it would have the question mark attached to it. He was constantly asking us to justify our design decisions.) We did it that way because it felt right. "Aren’t some quilters faster and able to do a lot of blocks at one time?" Well, yeah. Jay's question dictated a change that improved the gameplay and made it fit the theme better.
When we went home and revised the game, allowing players to make multiple quilt blocks on a turn might have been the most important change we made. It moves the game along faster, and it allows for someone to pre-emptively end the round before the next player can get an important and valuable block.
When we first implemented this change, we allowed players to make a block, then turn over the next block in the stack. We found that this really slowed the game down. The way Quilt Show plays now, you can make only those blocks that are exposed when your turn begins; new blocks are exposed when your turn ends. As you start your turn, you know which blocks you intend to make. If you were allowed to replace the first block you took, you would have to wait to make a decision about making additional blocks. We found that made the game drag.
The Conversion
The game that won the Rio Grande Games Design Contest was a card game for 2-6 players. The game that was released in the middle of 2014 is a tile-laying game for 2-4 players. What's up with that?
In February 2011, Jay Tummelson was the featured guest at Gamicon in Iowa City, an hour from our home. We arranged to have lunch with him. Jay said his artists were just finishing something and would soon be ready to begin working on Quilt Show. I asked him how long it would take for the game to actually appear on store shelves. If we didn't have a lot of changes after the artists started, it could be out by summer. Joy of joys!!! But he wondered whether we could turn it into a tile-laying game. He felt that in a game such as this, people should feel like they are actually creating a quilt. We had a game that worked, and now he wanted us to change it! Despair of despairs!!!
We told him why we didn't think it would work. He sat there patiently and countered our various arguments with ideas from his vast mental storehouse of game mechanisms. He wasn't actually designing our game for us; he was just throwing out possible mechanical solutions to each and every objection we offered. By the time we left, we believed we could make it work.
When we got home and created our first tile-laying implementation, it was a slow and static game that we hated. We addressed some of the issues and tried again. Still bad. More fixes. Still bad. The time dragged on, and we imagined our window with the artists was closing, and if we didn't hurry up, it would be painted shut, if not boarded up.
At one point Jay wrote to us to ask if we had anything yet. Every fix we were coming up with was creating some new problem. It was like a Whack-a-Mole game design process.
Finally, I said to Judy, "We know the card game worked. Let's just try to make it as close to a one-to-one conversion as we can." And that's what we did.
The biggest problem we had to overcome was getting enough fabric cards into the hands of the players. In the original card game, with the quilt blocks being represented by cards rather than tiles, a "quilt" could be as little as one card. It was possible to compete in the quilt show with quilts of one, two, or three cards; after all, it was merely an abstraction. In the tile-laying game, one block tile looks like nothing more than one quilt block. It wasn't enough. It needed to be larger, so the smallest quilt in the tile game is 1x3 tiles. We call it a table runner. Most of the quilts in the game are three, four, or six tiles. Getting that many quilt blocks into the hands of the players requires that you first get them more fabric. We had to streamline the process for getting fabric to players.
Early in the design process we had reduced the number of fabric cards needed to make (acquire) a block down to the one, two, or three you see in the final version. We couldn't streamline that any more.
The first thing we tried was to replace the fabric cards with cubes. We had ten cubes out at a time, with the rest in a bag. I don't remember how many you were allowed to take on your turn, but it was more than the two you could take in the original card game. Cubes didn't work for three reasons. First, they didn't evoke anything related to quilting. Fabric cards evoke fabric; fabric cubes evoke cubes. It killed our immersive theme. Another problem was the unwieldy nature of shuffling all the cubes from the bag to the draw pile to the players and back to the bag. It seemed to reduce the game to a cube-pushing exercise. Cards just worked so much better. And finally, cubes created a problem with distinguishing neighboring colors. Our cards had color icons; the tiny cubes couldn't.
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Cards from a prototype when we tried reducing the number of colors in the game to three — bad idea
The best thing we could do to get fabric in your hands more quickly was to increase the number of fabric cards you could take on a turn. It started as two, so we increased it by 50% to three.
We made one other adjustment that deepens the connection of theme to game play: We added dual-color cards to the mix. The quilt blocks in the game come in six different colors: the three primary colors of red, blue, and yellow, and the three secondary colors of violet, green, and orange. Each fabric card was one of those six colors. With dual-color cards, we were splitting the difference between adjacent colors on the color wheel. When quilters make a blue quilt, often they will venture into blue-violet or blue-green for their color palette. We did the same thing. With a blue-green fabric card, you can use it on a blue block or a green block. Having this flexibility makes it more likely you can get the blocks you need when you need them rather than having a hand full of cards but nothing to make with them. The introduction of dual-color fabric cards is the single element Judy is most proud of in Quilt Show.
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Single-color, dual-color, and dye goods cards. Can cubes give you all this? No.
One consequence of needing to put more quilt block tiles in the hands of the players was that we had to limit the number of players to four. Whereas in the card game you could make a respectable quilt with just two quilt blocks, in the tile game you can't even enter a quilt until it has three blocks, which means players need more blocks and more fabric to acquire those blocks and all of that takes more time. We didn't want the game overstaying its welcome. The solution was to cap it at four players.
Moving Toward Production
In the middle of 2013, as we were in a manic state preparing for the release of Judy's 22nd book, Extraordinary Log Cabin Quilts, we heard from the game artists for the first time. We sent them everything we had on the game. The pattern over the next few months was periods of silence followed by a flurry of back-and-forth emails between Iowa and Germany.
Because we had waited so long to get to this point, we didn't want to be the ones gumming up the works. Every time we received an email about the game, we tried to drop everything and deal with it immediately. We didn't want the artists in a holding pattern waiting for us. It wasn't uncommon for us to be working in the evening in Iowa when we would get that familiar chime that mail was received, and that mail would be from Germany where it was 2:00 or 3:00 a.m.!
When we won the contest, we were worried about how the game's artwork would be handled. We strongly felt that Quilt Show needed an immersive feel to it, that the cards had to evoke every positive feeling you have ever had about quilts. We were convinced that artists would treat the subject in too cartoony a manner, and the connection to the subject would be lost. We thought the cards needed photographs of real fabric and real quilts or quilt blocks. We were wrong.
I'm not sure which artists were responsible for which elements. I could probably go back and figure it out from the emails (or I could ask them, I suppose). Judy and I cannot sing the praises of Martin Hoffman, Claus Stephan, and Mirko Suzuki enough. Their vision made the game better than what we had imagined, and they were so easy to work with. Everyone who designs a game that is produced should be lucky enough to work with artists as talented, knowledgeable, and cooperative as these three men were.
Let me give you some examples. Our prototypes had always had icons for each of the colors as an aid to color-blind people. The artists turned the icons into pinheads, so that it looks like a swatch of fabric is pinned to card stock. The fabric has stray threads and frayed edges just like real swatches would. The quilt blocks have texture. It looks like the blocks are not lying perfectly flat. If you've ever seen a sewn block all by itself, you know how authentic that is. The player screens have a sewing machine and some spools of thread on them. We had no idea what we wanted for the screens, but as soon as we saw these, we knew they nailed it. The fabric was designed by the artists. (We couldn't simply take existing fabric and copy it because all of those fabric designs are copyrighted, so the artists drew their own.) We have seven single color fabric cards of each color; each of the seven cards is a different fabric. We have seven dual-color cards of each combination; each of the seven is yet another different fabric. The embroidered color icons and point values on each block tile are entirely the creation of the artists. I figured we would just superimpose those figures on the blocks. They incorporated them into the blocks. On and on and on. The block designs are Judy's original designs from her books. Beyond that, the look of Quilt Show is the product of our three talented artists.
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The designs are Judy's, but the artists are responsible for the brilliant execution
We had occasions where something drawn by the artists didn't make quilting sense. These men had a passing knowledge of what sewing looked like, but they had no experience with the nuances of quilting. Judy would explain what she needed and direct them to pictures illustrating the point she was making. Shortly after, a revised image would come our way. The artists were like sponges absorbing information about a world they had never before encountered. It is a real credit to them that they could learn and adjust on the fly as well as they did. It was a pleasure to work with them.
While I'm at it, let me praise anyone who can communicate in something other than his native tongue. All the back-and-forth with the artists was done in English. I'm grateful as my German is limited to a handful of words.
An Homage to Playtesters
I think if you were at a convention and Alan Moon or Reiner Knizia approached you with a prototype, you would jump at the chance to sit in and offer your opinion — but would you jump at the chance if it were Judy Martin and Steve Bennett approaching you?
Think about it for a minute. Here are Judy and Steve, who combined have a total of zero games published. And the odds say that the game they want you to try isn't going to increase their number of published games. But still you do it. You do it because you're curious. You do it because you want to know what mistakes you should avoid when you design a game of your own. You do it because you want them to test your game. You do it because you always slow down and gape at train wrecks. You do it because you're their friend. You do it because you want to tell people you were in on the ground floor, the early development. Whatever the reason, you do it. And because you do it, Judy and Steve are now published game designers.
It's impossible to overstate how important playtesters are to the process and how grateful we are to everyone who helped along the way. We foisted some bad prototypes on playtesters. We also foisted some not-quite-ready-for-prime-time prototypes on playtesters. A huge thank you goes out to every single person who answered the call and tried our game and provided valuable feedback.
The Unveiling
When it became apparent that Quilt Show might be done in time for the 2014 Origins Game Fair, we contacted Jay to see whether we could get in and help demo the game. Our son had recently moved to Columbus, so even if the game wasn't ready, we could justify the trip simply to see him.
We grabbed our daughter, Kate, and drove the 600 miles to Columbus, getting in Thursday evening. Friday morning the games still weren't in. I left my phone number in the Rio Grande room, then wandered out to explore the main hall. Kate and Judy were grabbing a bite. I barely got to the hall when my phone rang. They had games!
I raced back to find Jay punching out one demo copy. He handed me another, which I began to punch. Judy and Kate showed up and helped. We were apprehensive and excited. Quilt Show retails for just $34.95, and it has a lot of components: 96 cards, 160 tiles and chips, and four player screens. Could they get the quality we wanted at that price? In a word: Yes!!
Quilt Show is finally real; Steve, Judy, and daughter Kate at Origins
Seeing the game, our first game, in print exceeded our wildest hopes. Quilt Show is beautiful. The components are of the highest quality. All the tiles have a linen matte finish (like the Carcassonne tiles, for instance). The cards are sturdy and bright. The artists created the look we hoped for. In fact, it is better than the look we hoped for. Jay Tummelson authorized everything that needed to be done. He never once reined us in for wanting too much. Jay helped us adhere the gameplay to the theme with his pointed questions in the beginning of the process. He helped us even more when he pushed us into a tile-laying game. Then he stayed mostly in the background and let us work with the artists. And finally, the folks at the Hasbro plant in Massachusetts did a wonderful job of making the vision a physical reality.
I can honestly say that seeing Quilt Show in print was one of the greatest thrills of my life and Judy's. We worked hard, and the hard work was rewarded.
The Future
So what does the future hold for Quilt Show and its designers? That will depend on you and Jay. If enough of you buy copies, he might be motivated to let us do an expansion or a sequel. We have some ideas percolating in case the subject comes up. Additionally, we have some non-quilting games in varying states of incompleteness. Whatever happens, though, we're going to continue to enjoy the ride.
Steve Bennett
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