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The Inspiration
The inspiration for Stampede came from playing games with my teenage daughters. My eldest daughter has never been much of a gamer. She would play the occasional game with the family, but would never propose to play one herself — so imagine my surprise when she tells me one day that she regularly spends the lunch break at school playing a card game with her friends. When I asked her which game, she replied, "Monopoly Deal", then went on to tell me how they are having such a blast playing it.
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It also gave rise to a challenge I set myself: Make a card game that my eldest daughter would like to play with her friends and which I as a gamer would also enjoy. This was the design challenge that ultimately led to Stampede.
The Challenge
I wanted to make a card game that would appeal to teenagers and young adults. From the experience with Monopoly Deal and my daughters, I learned that if I were to succeed, the game needed to be easy to explain and quick to play. It also needed to allow for smart plays while not shying away from a bit of luck. Also, to make sure the game would end with a climax, I wanted the game to end as soon as one of the players reached the win condition, like how UNO ends when someone plays their last card.
Finally, I knew that to interest players like my daughter, I had to include a take-that element. Her eyes would light up as soon as she got the opportunity to meddle with other players. However, I also wanted the game to appeal to gamers, and I know the distaste they typically have for random and unfair take-that mechanisms, so I decided that the take-that element should be as balanced and fair as possible.
So I wanted to make a card game that was simple and fast, with a clear win condition and with some take-that without being overly unfair.
Developing the Mechanisms
I started the design by crafting a clear and simple goal: Be the first to collect five of the same card. This part of the design has never been changed since, although it has been slightly amended as you will find out later in this story. The goal also led to the working title: "CINQO".
I also wanted the game structure to be simple and familiar, so I thought of three basic moves to form a player's turn:
• Take a card from the deck into your hand.
• Play a card from your hand into your collection.
• Perform the corresponding action.
To include the take-that element, some of the actions needed to involve the stealing of cards from other players. But that can easily turn into situations in which one or more players become targeted and are left with hardly any cards and chances to win. It was this type of random and unbalanced take-that that I wished to avoid. I figured that in order to keep it fair, when you take a card from someone, you must give a card back in return, so it is always an exchange, albeit an involuntary one.
Along these lines, I thought: What if I keep it simple and limit the actions in the game to all be exchange actions? You can exchange cards between your hand, the opponent's hand, your collection, the opponent's collection, and the deck. I set the hand size to three. This would give players some agency, but not so much as to slow down play. From these simple rules, it logically followed that at the end of your turn:
• Your hand size is always the same: three cards.
• You have one more card in your collection than at the start of your turn.
To see whether the game would actually work, I built a very simple prototype. It turned out that the game worked quite well, but player choices were a bit limited, so I added a central exchange area, which added one more location with which to exchange cards.
I started testing with a new prototype that included as many different kinds of exchange actions I could think of. I quickly realized that the game would be better if I limited the exchange actions to exchanging either one card or your whole hand (i.e., three cards). This would ensure the game would stay simple and, just as important, quick; there is no need to deliberate about which card from your hand to keep when you are exchanging your whole hand.
After this followed another round of testing and trying out different combinations of actions until I ended up with a set of actions that worked really well together. In fact, I was surprised by how interesting a game came to result from consistently applying such a simple set of design rules.
A Happy Accident
In the early prototypes, each action corresponded to a specific color. When printing the second prototype, I figured I could save a lot of ink (and money) by printing the cards directly on colored paper. Once I had done this, I quickly realized my mistake. Yes, the front of the cards were beautifully colored, making it easy to see which actions you had in your hand. The backs, however, had the same color, making it also easy for everyone else to see which actions you had in your hand.
However, keeping in mind the famous words of Bob Ross — "There are no mistakes, just happy accidents." — I figured it couldn't hurt to test with this card deck. The tests showed that it was actually fun to see which cards your opponent had in hand, and it didn't hinder gameplay too much. This change, however, did take away the element of surprise. In the end, what I decided to do was to put two colors on the back of each card, one of these corresponding to the actual color on the front. This allowed players to strategize, while still maintaining the element of surprise.
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The early prototype with colored backs
An Alternative Goal
When deciding on a goal for the game, this seemed obvious: Collect five of the same card to win. This goal worked well in general, but there was one problem. Sometimes things just didn't work out for a player, and it was hard to collect five of the same card. There is a certain amount of luck involved, and sometimes luck isn't with you. However, this situation could be frustrating while playing, and if you can't make progress, this takes away a lot of the fun of the game.
The answer to this problem was simple in the end — just add a different goal. Instead of collecting five of the same card, you could also win by collecting all nine cards. This was an easy solution that not only fixed the problem, but also made the game more interesting.
A Bit of Theme
Next up was figuring out a theme for the game as just using colors was somewhat boring. Animals seemed like a fun theme, and they allowed me to put symbols (of the animals) on the cards, making the game more accessible for the color-blind.
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Card front and back side of the first version with animals
Debugging the User Interface
Continued testing with a wide audience revealed that a significant fraction of test players did not grasp the working of the central mechanism — exchanging cards — during their first playthrough. This had to be fixed. My first instinct was to fiddle around with small changes to the rules to make the game more intuitive. However, these changes backfired and only made the game more complex in the end.
Meanwhile, I started to observe that people were actually struggling to understand the iconography used. Although the iconography made perfect sense, it cost too much brainpower to process, brainpower the players needed for other things as they were learning a new game, so I decided to shift my attention away from the rules towards improving the iconography.
I started testing different versions of the iconography. I needed a lot of iterations, and I needed to find fresh test subjects for every iteration as the thing I wanted to test was how quickly new players understood the symbols. I did a lot of tests in which I did not explain the cards; I just started playing and observed how quickly people understood the effects of the different cards. After four or five iterations — and a lot of test subjects — I settled on the final prototype design. The iconography used in the actual game is the same with a few minimal tweaks.
The final touch on this topic was to add the stamp collection dimension to the theme. The main purpose of this thematic choice was to reinforce the main mechanism in the game: exchanging cards.
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Card design of the final prototype
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Card backs of the final prototype
Finding a Publisher
Five months into development, I showed the game to some big German publishers. Although they liked it, they thought it was too complex for their audience. This was based on the prototype I had before I improved the "user interface", and their feedback was one of the reasons for improving that interface.
I stayed optimistic, however, as my test subjects were keen to play this game, so with the improved version I went to the Spielwarenmesse toy fair in Nürnberg, Germany a year later and showed it to some more publishers. Zev Shlasinger from WizKids was enthusiastic about the game and offered to sign it just a few days after I had demoed it to him.
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During development, the working title of the game had been "CINQO", wordplay on both "cinco" (referring to the numeral 5) and UNO — a simple name that was easy to remember and sounded good. However, Mattel had already published a game called Cinq-O, and WizKids thought this was too similar, which meant we had to find another name. After a brainstorm with some test players, Zev came up with the wordplay Stampede, and we settled on it.
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Artwork and Graphical Design
Christopher Fiore from Fiore GmbH created the final designs for the iconography, adding some nice details such as making the cards you take from the deck float just a bit above the deck. Another nice detail we added was to have embossings on the stamps that differ for every individual card of the same animal. For the design of stamps and background, we tried out two completely different styles, finally settling for the fantastic and fresh design from the WizKids in-house design team.
Cards in the finished product
First Reactions
As the first reviews are out now, I am pleased to see they are all very positive. My favorite so far was a quote from the Game Boy Geek review, stating that "this game should be sold in mass market stores right next to UNO". This made me especially happy as it confirmed I had achieved the goal that I set myself at the beginning: Design an accessible game that my daughter would enjoy to play with her friends and with me.
It was also great to see a group of strangers having fun with the game in the GameNight! playthrough video. The discussion at the end in which they remarked on how clear the iconography was was especially satisfying after putting in all the hard work to get it right.
Lessons Learned
• Experience-first design can be very powerful.
• KISS (keep it simple, stupid) restrictions help.
• GUI (graphic user interface) matters; it took me roughly two months to design the rules, but two years to design the GUI.
Jeroen Geenen
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