Designer Diary: Space Maze - why annoying others is so much fun

The first prototype I made for Space Maze was way back in 1997. I had seen the movie Cube and was intrigued by the concept of rooms with trap doors that needed different skills to get through. I especially liked the fact that each character had his own special skill. My seventeen-year-old imagination started running wild – and this time it was not about a girl.

I used Paint to design square rooms with different traps on each side, for example, a hole in the ground with spikes that only the character who could jump real far would be able to pass. I took Warhammer 40K figurines and sawed off bits and glued on others, trying to make them look like they had a special skill to match with the trapdoors. The game was played with 25 "rooms" placed in a 5x5 square with an exit room in the middle, similar to how the game is laid out now.

Your goal was to find the key and go through the exit. Walking onto a "?" space made you draw a token to reveal what happened. You could find all sorts of things: helpful items, plateaus that rotated rooms, or monsters you'd have to battle. When meeting other players you could battle them as well.

Making It Better

Space Maze has gone through a lot of prototypes since then and a lot of those were played over and over again. I had made a game mechanism that was very open as there wasn't a definite way to win, and players could use their creativity to find the fastest way to the exit. I noticed players weren't interested in battling each other, focusing instead on finding tokens that helped them change the board to their liking. My focus therefore became making the design more simple. I wanted it to be all about the basic mechanism, no fuss.

I removed the battle system and changed the special skills into colors because it was easier to oversee and more direct. Instead of tokens I created action cards so that players could play more strategically. If you want to change the maze, you should be able to do it anywhere, not just where you found the token.

For the same reason I changed the goal of the game from finding the key and exiting in the center to grabbing the relic and bringing it back to your base. This way players don't just randomly walk around the maze until the key is found. Instead there's a clear goal everybody is chasing. With everybody chasing the player carrying the relic, he's at a serious disadvantage, so I gave the relic a special power: You can wear it on your head to become colorless so that you can pass through any doorway. (While the space theme was already present, this is when I sculpted the aliens.)

But the biggest change was yet to come. At that time you resolved all your actions in one turn, using six dice for activating different options. This worked nicely except that during your turn everyone else could do nothing but wait.

To change this I wanted to make a pool of dice out of which players could choose only one die each turn. But if I stuck with six dice for each player, the game would need 24 dice! To solve this problem I removed all the spaces on the board tiles that were meant for walking so that moving from one tile to the next is now only one move. I bought blank dice and painted alien feet on them in the colors of the aliens. This allows you to use just one die for the movement of all aliens in your team.

Pre-production samples of the game board tiles

Sticking It to Opponents

This final change made the game a lot of fun. On top of the nice tactical options available when maneuvering through the maze came a tension-building system with a pool of power dice everybody has to tap out of. It allows you to disrupt other players' plans and annoy the hell out of players who think they had it all planned out. There are always a lot of cheap laughs when you miss a chance to grab the relic because your so-called friend snatched that green die with four power points on it that you needed so badly.

Space Maze requires you not only to have plan B. You need to start thinking of plan C, plan D, and more. You can't push solely toward making it to the relic because everybody is going to be there. You need to spread out your chances, make sure you get all your team members to move around the board, preferably in different directions. You never know which way the relic is going to move, and you don't want all your aliens on the right side on the board when the relic starts moving to the left.

The best thing is that players don't always do what is best for them. Sometimes it's so inviting to totally ruin the plans of others that you just have to, and that's why I'm sure that I've created a good game. I think it's important to have good tactical options and not too much luck in any game, but on top of that I want to be able to have fun, even when I'm not necessarily winning. This game does all that and more. If you play once, you're probably going to think it's fun – but only after playing it twice will you start to see the huge set of tactical options and creative play possibilities. In every test game I've played, I see first-time players thinking: "Darn, nothing useful I can do this round!" I then point out what else they might do with the cards they've played and more often than not they're completely surprised.

Traversing the Maze of Production

After all these years Space Maze is finally being produced, even though I never really searched for publishers that might want to license my game. About a year ago I met a woman who used to be in my class at school. She's now the owner of her family company that has been in the toy industry for many years. She was interested in setting a new direction for her company and wanted to know what I was making. After playing my game she was very enthusiastic. Because she already had a lot of experience and contacts in the industry, we've set a goal of publishing games ourselves under the name Wacky Works. The company is still fresh but expect to hear more about it from now on.

Space Maze is our first project and will be released at Spiel 2011 in Essen, Germany. The first printing is very limited, and we have started taking preorders on our website. (For details on the game play, download the English (PDF) or Dutch (PDF) rules from BGG. German rules will be available at Spiel.) As a bonus we have created a free mini-expansion, a set of three cards titled Rollercoaster. The card is a great addition if you like pestering your competitors!

I'm excited about the release as being able to develop my own games truly is what my whole life has been about. I would like to thank everyone who helped me along the way, especially Erik Slijpen at Kelderman en van Noort who taught me a lot about design and helped me give the artwork a professional look. If you have any questions concerning the game or anything else, just ask.

Michel Baudoin