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Looking at the history of my fascination with games goes all the way back to the front porch of the house my grandfather built near Flint, Michigan, a city known fondly as the birthplace of General Motors. My brother and I, who never really got along that well, would sit on that porch trying to guess the color and make of the next vehicle that would go barrelling past our house on the way to some other, smaller town to the North or South. I always seemed to go big in my guessing. I'd yell out "red dump truck" or "yellow semi" just as a gray Chevette made its way into our line of sight. I always lost, but it wasn't really about winning or losing for me. It was about passing the time on hot summer days until my mom was ready to take us swimming at the neighbor's pool. It was about doing something with my brother that didn't involve fighting about who got to pick what was playing on TV. I didn't realize it as a young boy, but one of my favorite aspects of gaming is bringing people together to share in the same experience.
I also didn't realize it at the time, but since my first game design, The Irish Road Vehicle Guessing Game, I've come to see that I value creativity as a way of expression and engagement in whatever world I find myself in. Whether it was the local punk rock scene, involvement in the church, or the gaming world, I've always had this sense that I wanted to be involved in more engaging ways. I didn't want to be just a consumer as much as I wanted to be a contributor and collaborator – but I'm getting a bit ahead of myself...
My relationship with games while I was growing up had its ups and downs. I remember loving the classic deduction game, Clue, but having only one sibling in the house made it difficult to get the game to the table. I remember my brother and I begging for the Marvel Super Heroes RPG from TSR for Christmas, but neither of us were willing to read the book and figure out how to play the game, so we never did get our tabletop gaming engines started. (I, to this day, have still not played a role-playing game. It's a fault I hope to remedy soon.) We eventually gave up with the release of Nintendo Entertainment System and later the SEGA Genesis. He didn't want to share, and I preferred the social experience offered in tabletop games to the zombie-eyes I got when I played too much Sonic, so games and I broke up. I met rock and roll, and she looked pretty good to me, so I bought a guitar and left those RPG manuals gathering dust in the closet.
Middle school and high school were fairly game-free until one of my punk-rock-skateboarder-friends took me down to his basement and taught me how to play Magic: The Gathering. For the next few months, it got pretty serious. We were scrounging for change in couch cushions, saving school lunch money, and taking back pop cans – yes, pop; that's how we roll in Michigan – so that we could get money to buy M:TG cards. It was a sickness. In my years as a teenage punk rocker, I had managed to avoid drugs and drinking, but I fell hard for the premiere collectible card game. When I started having dreams about the game, I knew I was in trouble. I mustered all the willpower I could find and quit cold turkey. It wasn't easy but I went crawling back to power chords and 4/4 drum beats to ask for forgiveness.
For the next several years, I worked a 9-5, Monday-Friday job as the shipping/receiving manager of a large community college bookstore while keeping my evenings and weekends free to travel the Midwest as a part-time punk rocker. (Think a little more Ramones, and a little less Sex Pistols.) Whether I was unloading trucks and checking in boxes or cramming into a smelly van gigging around Michigan, Ohio, and Indiana, travelling and transportation were huge themes in my life at this time. And as much as I admired the lives of over-the-road truckers and full-time musicians, I also had a desire to be rooted in one place. I wanted to have a home and a family without having to be gone for months at a time, so I never took the plunge to hit the road full-time.
Eventually, I got my wish. I met a great girl, convinced her to marry me, and just celebrated nine years of marriage. We have one daughter and another on the way. She's been an amazing anchor for me. She's encouraged me to pursue my dreams and brings me down to Earth when my ideas get too wacky. She's also responsible for getting me back into games, though at this point, with closets and cabinets overflowing with games I'm not sure if she is still proud of the day she convinced me to pick up The Settlers of Catan from a mall kiosk one Christmas. She had played it weekly in college and made the case that it would be a fun way to spend time with friends. I hesitated as my history with M:TG flashed through my brain – but then as I remembered the fun I had, or hoped to have, with games as a kid we made the purchase. I was hooked, but in a healthier, less impulsive way. Thanks to a friend recommending BGG and its amazing database chock full of information about other unique games, I dove in headfirst finding myself especially attracted to non-confrontational Euro-style games, quick card games, and easy-to-learn fillers.
When I grew weary of spending weekends away from my wife playing shows with my band, I found my interest in gaming growing as a fun hobby I could explore in the comfort of my home surrounded by people I love. When the time was right, I left the band and quit my job to go back to school and explore new passions. Gaming helped fill the void left where music had been. It was a refreshing change of pace. I loved getting to introduce interesting games from faraway lands to my circle of friends and finding other kindred spirits who shared their secret love for this great hobby. But like everything else I have been involved in, I knew wanted more. I wanted to move from consumption to contribution and creation.
From Dreamer to Designer
I thought it would be cool to create my own game but had no idea how to do it, so I started daydreaming about themes that would make for interesting games and how these imaginary games might work. But the problem was that every idea I thought of was either bad or a game that already existed. I was just getting to know the vocabulary of gaming by watching a lot of video reviews (thanks to The Dice Tower and Boards Games With Scott), but it was such a big world I felt intimidated and gave up my pursuit to create games, figuring it wasn't for me. I began to write reviews for a friend's blog and continued to grow my collection of games. I figured my route to contribution would simply be playing fun games and sharing them with friends in my home or on the web – but that all changed after a conversation with a truck driver who was delivering food to my church.
I had been hired as the Associate Pastor of a local church and was running our community outreach events to help people in need in our community. If you have followed the history of my city, you might know that while Flint, Michigan has a rich place in the tomes of the automotive industry, you might also know that it's a place known for crime and poverty. Seeking to find a way to help families in our community who were having trouble making ends meet, we began to partner with a food ministry that helped folks stretch their grocery budget by providing food at wholesale prices. So one morning while helping a truck driver unload the food for our monthly distribution, we started talking shop and something he said planted the seed that would eventually become a game.
The truck driver, an independent owner and operator, told me that the ministry that hired him to deliver the food paid him less per mile than it actually costs to operate his truck. I asked him why he worked with them knowing he was going to lose money. He explained that the reason he took the job was because he knew that after he drove to Michigan to drop off the food, he could swing over to the other side of the state to pick up a load of greens and take it down to Florida, getting paid nearly double the rate that got him up to Michigan in the first place. He essentially took the job to get part of his expenses paid so that he could get closer to a job that actually made a profit. As he told his story, I thought, "There is a game in that" and The Great Heartland Hauling Co. was born.
I went home, got out a deck of cards, some scraps of paper, and a box of bits I'd been collecting from thrifted copies of games I knew I'd never want to play and began fiddling until I had a game. I began with that theme: trucking. Then I continued with a question, "What is the essence of the truck driving industry?" I ended up with this idea: "Truck drivers pick up goods and deliver them to make money". Simple enough, right? Next, I started thinking about what kind of game I wanted to make. I knew I wanted it to work as a two-player game since I mostly played games with my spouse, so this brought to mind the Kosmos series of two-player games of which I am very fond. Lost Cities, Jambo, and Balloon Cup have come to represent games that pack a lot of punch in a small box. There is depth to play while still being simple to learn. I decided I would pretend to create a game that would fit in with the Kosmos series of two-player games. To me, this meant keeping it fairly simple in design and components.
I knew I wanted to have a deck of cards from the beginning, but what would these cards represent? I knew that truckers passed around a lot of paper with their shipments, so I figured pretty quickly that the deck of cards would include something like freight bills or packing slips representing the goods that were to be picked up and delivered. Then I began to wonder what these truckers would pick up and deliver. After a quick Google search I found a list of the top domestic agricultural goods in the United States. After glancing at the list, it felt like I could use some of the items at the top of this list to create a game that included some typical European flavor, so I chose soybeans, corn, cattle, and pigs as the goods to be represented in the game.
Once I had figured out that cards would represent orders for goods and the actual goods to be included, I began to wonder what the trucks would move around on. At first, I imagined a big board resembling a map, but then I was struck by the idea of creating something that felt like a board game that used only cards, sort of like that feeling I had gotten from playing Jambo. I figured that cards could represent loading docks around the country that specialized in certain goods and wanted to receive other goods from different parts of the region. After about an hour, I felt like I was on a roll! I couldn't believe that I was coming up with something that actually felt like a game, and one I hadn't ever played before at that!
So I continued to shuffle through game bits, found some mini poker chips to use to keep track of points, and cut up another deck of cards to use the suit symbols as stand-ins for the goods that would be moved around from place to place. I immediately imagined these suit symbols as small, colored, wooden cubes – you know, like the cubes from Balloon Cup. Four suits in a standard deck of cards and four different goods in the game added up to an exercise in easy prototyping. I decided that keeping it simple included working with what I had, sort of like a truck driver has to work with the jobs he's offered in order to keep rolling while trying to make a decent living.
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I decided to use face cards to represent the fuel that allowed folks to move from one region to another and created a set of nine loading docks to be shuffled and laid out in a 3x3 grid to create a different playing area each game. On each dock I placed a native good symbol and two other goods that would have values assigned to determine the price paid for each good delivered to that location. I played around with ways to evenly distribute the different goods until I had nine unique layouts, then I went to work balancing values of the goods with the cards in the deck. Once again, I used the basic theme as my inspiration. I figured it cost more money to transport a load of cattle and pigs than it did to transport corn and beans, so I made the point range higher on the livestock while making fewer livestock cards available in the deck. There is more risk assumed in going for a larger profit margin in this way. I wanted to make sure that people could make lots of choices with how to use their resources and didn't want any obvious path to victory to emerge. My game design came to life as I created simple restraints for myself. Every decision I made created boundaries for these bits of paper and plastic to become a game.
After I had this foundation laid, I began to create an outline for a player's turn that maximized the amount of choices within the system while capturing the quick feel of cruising down the highway. What do truckers do again? A.) They drive around B.) picking up and delivering goods in order to C.) earn a living. The outline emerged: move, do something that helps you get paid, and set up for the next drive. This turned into Move, Choose an Action (load or unload), and Refuel (draw new cards).
Now it was really feeling like a game. I grabbed my wife and asked – no, I begged her – to try out my idea. After a couple hours of brainstorming and fiddling with game bits, I had a prototype and a system that was ready to playtest. We played it through, making up the endgame as we went along and it felt like a real game. No, it felt like a fun game. Turns were quick and the whole game played in thirty minutes, my personal sweet spot for a two-player game. To my surprise, Lisa asked to play it again. Her response really helped me to feel like I was onto something. I had designed a game!
From Prototype to Publication
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After the art was finished, we ordered a print-on-demand copy that came in the mail just in time for the Ann Arbor event at UCon. I was excited and even more nervous to hear other people's reaction to my game. I knew it looked good, and I had a lot of fun playing it with family and friends who seemed to like it – I just hoped we weren't the only ones. As the first playtesters approached the table, something clicked for me. I was ON! I explained the rules in a few minutes, and two teenaged girls started getting into the game. I stood nearby so that I could hear their conversation without interfering with their experience and overheard one of the girls say, "I know what game I want for Christmas this year! This game is FUN!" Wow! What encouragement. Other playtesters came and went, giving me great, positive feedback. I was one of the only designers left at the end of the day to hear the results of the contest. Each game had at least ten playtesters that day who rated the games they played across several different scales. At the end of the day, I walked away with second place! I had mixed emotions for sure. On one hand, I got second place, meaning a lot of people really liked my game; on the other hand, first place was awarded to an interesting game, but it was an abstract strategy game which, based on the kind of games Rio Grande publishes, I knew probably wouldn't be considered for publication. I had missed my chance by a couple of points, but I knew it wasn't the end of the line for Over The Road, the original name for The Great Heartland Hauling Co..
I started to consider publishing the game myself, so I developed it further to support 2-4 players. I wanted to print a few hundred on-demand copies and sell them at conventions, but my wife stepped in and told me that I needed to try to get someone else to pay for publication first. With her vote of confidence, I went to work emailing publishers, trying to find someone willing to play it. After a bunch of companies told me that the game sounded interesting but who declined to accept it due to full release schedules that were set two years out, I came across Cambridge Games Factory. CGF promptly requested a copy of the game to playtest, and a couple of weeks after sending the game off I got an email from CGF offering to release Over The Road. I was blown away by the speed of this whole process. In October 2010, I had an idea for a game and by the following May I had landed a publisher.
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In 2012 at Origins, I walked the exhibit halls checking out small publishers and was blown away by the great stuff coming out from all the "little guys" in the room. I was convinced that with all of these other great companies around, it was time for me to take a leap of faith and request the cancellation of my contract. I opened up my laptop and typed a letter to Ed Carter asking for the rights to my game so that I could explore other options for publication. He responded graciously, not only offering me the rights back immediately but wishing me luck and offering to reconsider entering into a new agreement if I came up short in finding a new home for my game. (For the record, I think CGF puts out some great games and also wish them luck in all it does. Note: This is coming from a Glory to Rome Black Box Kickstarter backer...)
I wasn't sure how everything was going to work out with the game. I really wanted to get it published, but I wanted to find the right fit. I didn't have money to start my own company, but I had a sense that something would work out. I was out at the movies with my wife on the night that I cancelled my contract with CGF when I got a text from Cherilyn (Monkey) Kirkman saying that she wanted to talk with me and that she would be up late. After the movie finished, my wife drove us home as I returned the call. Chris and Cherilyn Kirkman, who I had met and demoed Over The Road to a couple days earlier at Origins, told me that they wanted to pick up the game for their company, Dice Hate Me Games! Once again, blown away at the stuff happening with my first real game design in the real world, I instantly knew that Dice Hate Me Games would be a great fit for my design since they specialize in games with unique themes that appeal to casual gamers. They offered ideas for a few minor changes in the rules and a new take on the theme that was a little less "Detroit" and a little more "Heartland of America". After they suggested the new name and brightened color palette, I agreed to enter into a publishing relationship with Dice Hate Me Games. I've been continuing to work through the development process with Chris and Monkey. It's great having new sets of eyes and new ideas added into the mix. I think the work we've been doing is allowing us to put out a game that is far superior to the earlier versions.
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The Great Heartland Hauling Co. is set to hit the road for a 2013 release. It's been a long haul and I've learned a lot along the way. And for those who decide I've weaved a longer word count than what's appropriate for these types of situations, here's some cargo to stow away in your own freight trailer of game design/life advice:
1. Let your life lead you to inspiration. Don't try to force ideas that don't fit.
2. Creating boundaries creates possibilities that help you engage fully in what you want to do. Saying no to some things allows you to say yes to the best things!
3. Don't just consume. Create and contribute. Find your own way to make your mark on the worlds that you love.
4. Simplicity does not have to equal boredom. Make room for decisions in the midst of simplicity.
5. Work hard. Love what you do. Make the most of what you've got.
Thanks for stopping by to hear about my journey from a wanna-be dreamer to a published game designer. I hope to see you on the road as the story continues to unfold!
Until next time, keep on trucking!
Jason Kotarski
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