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In 2017, Matt came over in February. My family cleared out of the house for the weekend, and Matt and I got to work on the games we wanted bring to Unpub for testing. That's the annual cycle: In October we start getting momentum on new ideas, and right around the beginning of the year they come together. We whip them into shape for public playtesting at Unpub in March and get them ready to pitch at the summer conventions like Origins and Gen Con.
Matt and I were hard at work. We bounced between a few games: a game about raiding and trading inspired by Liar's Dice got on the table, and after a while we switched over to a mancala game about rain and crops. We kept hitting a wall with each game. That's normal, but it doesn't mean it's not frustrating. At some point we decided to take a break.
And that's when I pulled out Tangoes. Matt had grown up playing with tangrams, but my first introduction to them was when I was a freshman in college. There was a copy of Tangoes in my college dorm's common room. Tangoes features two sets of tangrams in two different colors and a deck of silhouette shapes that can be made from one set of tiles. The case has a slot that serves as a card stand. You place the card in the slot, and two players race to find the solution. Folks were absolutely cutthroat about it and played all the time. I had fond memories of working my way up from a novice player to an expert, capable of hanging even with the masters of the game, the architecture students.
Matt and I played for a bit, and as we played we started wondering whether a different kind of game could be made from these tiles. We soon realized that as much fun as it is to puzzle out how to assemble an image, it was even more fun to make your own pictures. Right then we decided that we would find a great game buried in this four-thousand-year-old Chinese puzzle.
With the seed of this idea of using tangrams in a more free-form way, I ordered a bucket of tangrams in different colors from an educational supplier and raided my Codenames for a bunch of word cards. Matt and I decided that each player would get two sets of tiles in two different colors. This was the first key iteration to the game. We decided to call the game "Tell-A-Gram" and to keep our ears open for something better.
At Dreamation, a playtesting convention held by the fine folks who run Envoy, I showed this germ of a game to other designers and to playtesters. I knew there was something fun in here, but I wasn't sure how to make it shine. My early artwork efforts were not promising.
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My attempt to make "teeth" was underappreciated
Peter C. Hayward, founder of Jellybean Games, was one of the people to see the game, and he was immediately hooked. He made the second key suggestion, which was to not just give players two sets of tiles in two colors, but to make each tile have two colors: one on one side, one on the other. I went home that night and glued 32 set of tangram tiles (224 tiles in total) back-to-back to bring that idea to life.
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Peter's early work included this cubist representation of his native Australia
While people were starting to get the hang of the game, it was clear that Codenames cards weren't going to cut it. Too many words weren't really suitable, and players were getting frustrated. Fortunately, the Dreamation community is generous and supportive, and I ran into a designer I knew, Zintis May-Krumins, who had a prototype on hand of a cave-painting game. That game included a stack of cards with a few nouns per card, and Zintis let me borrow them to run the game. (Zintis' game, Cave Paintings, was published by R&R games at the end of 2018!) This was another big moment in the game's development as allowing players to select from a few different words on a card helped give players more choices and a greater sense of ownership of their creations.
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Michael R. Keller, designer of heavy euros like City Hall and Captains of Industry reveals a more thematic side with this picture of a dragon
It was clear, coming out of Dreamation, that we had a fun game on our hands. Now it was time to get to work. What was the best list of words? Which were easy to make and which were hard? We tried lots of variations and kept showing the game off wherever we could. Peter reached out to let us know that Jellybean Games would be interested in publishing the design, and Nicole Perry, the operations expert at Jellybean, started sourcing components, getting quotes and imagining all the product features.
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Tanya Hrabsky's scorpion was an early hall-of-fame entrant
One bittersweet moment from this time period was the addition of the playmats. The mat that comes with the game is an incredible work of design. You can basically give someone the mat, and it teaches them to play in moments — but I'll confess that one of the experiences I most enjoyed about the game had to be left on the cutting room floor.
As you can tell from the photos, seeing the sculpture in the right orientation is critical. But before there were playmats, which allow an artist to easily rotate their work, players would grab a piece of paper and a pen and walk around the table. Players were like art critics or gallery-goers, examining each piece of art in its proper orientation, making appreciative or puzzled comments, then jotting a guess down on their papers before walking over to examine the next piece. This was kind of a pain, and players don't typically like to have to get out of their seats during gameplay. For this game, however, it felt really thematic.
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It's only a lawnmower if you look at it the right way
Today, that element is gone from the game, and instead we have these awesome playmats. The whole way we got to them was an accident: While setting up to show off Show & Tile — more on that name below — at the Connecticut Festival of Indie Games, I realized I hadn't brought a tablecloth. Next door was a dollar store, so I ducked in, hoping to find something I could use. There were some plastic tablecloths that were too flimsy and a gingham vinyl tablecloth that I thought would be too distracting to serve as a background — but then I spotted some black placemats!
When I laid out the tiles on the placemats, I really liked how it looked. People started taking more pictures of their artwork because of how nicely they were framed — and what was especially cool was that players could now rotate their artwork to make it easier for other players to guess.The playmat makes it possible to play the game more easily in situations with less room to move about and with players who have limited mobility. Its accessibility convinced me that this was the right way forward for the game.
Shortly after that, I went to Chicago to see Matt and we visited Ben Rosset's playtesting night. There, we played a new prototype called Black Hole Council, from Don Eskridge, the designer of The Resistance. A bit intimidated by the high-octane group, we nonetheless pulled out our game. It was a hit! We had worked out the scoring system by then, which gave points to players for guessing right, but also incentivized players to create artwork that others would guess. We had also stabilized the overall turn structure, settling on four rounds for the game length. At the end of the successful playtest, everyone was excited about the game...but not the name "Tell-A-Gram". Fortunately, a very creative player suggested "Show & Tile", and we immediately knew we had a new title.
Even a wholesome game like Show & Tile can't avoid a bit of bathroom humor!
All of us worked really hard over the next few months. We playtested all the different words and added new ones. Peter suggested that we make additional word packs that were based on categories, and we started adding more words to those lists, eventually developing four category packs. Tania Walker developed our iconic logo and box as well as the scoring pad and playmat that made the game easy to teach and play.
In all, hundreds of people were involved in creating, designing, playtesting, printing and shipping Show & Tile. More than any other title of ours, Show & Tile was designed out in the open, through public playtesting and crowdsourcing, and our jobs were to curate and edit as much as to invent. Tangrams are themselves an ancient Chinese puzzle, and humans have been enjoying them forever. We're excited to share this newest way to enjoy tangrams with you today.
Isaac Shalev
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