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I was driving home from a game meet-up when an idea popped into my head: Would it be possible to create a dice tower in which the dice would not drop out of only one side, but instead randomly fall out in one of four different directions? I started visualizing the structure in my head and wondering how I would be able to create such a thing out of cardboard.
Once I got home, with the idea fresh in my mind, I got to work. I took a full 12x12 inch sheet of chipboard, then measured, cut out, and folded what I thought would work as a "four-way" dice tower. Once all the modifications were made, I applied tape to hold it together. At this point, my wife was wondering what I was doing; I explained my idea to her, then ran my first test by dropping four 16mm dice down the top of the tower. The results could not have been any better as each die dropped out a different side of the tower. I tried it again, and this time two dice came out of one side and the other two came out of two different sides. After testing this design several times (and adding a few more runs just because it was so much fun), I started thinking about what to do with this.
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My first idea was to have the dice tower represent some sort of portal to a dark realm of monsters, with the dice representing various creatures that the players would have to repel, scoring victory points if the design were competitive or trying to reach a certain threshold if it were co-operative. I felt there were too many games of this type out there and scrapped the idea. What else would work? Zombies? Deadly disease? Multiplying bunnies?
After asking my wife her thoughts on what might spread out in this manner, she thought of an oil rig that spills oil into the ocean, with the players then working together to manage the spill. It was a great idea, and we started to think further on it. We remembered seeing in the news sea life being contaminated by oil whenever this happens, and we thought of somehow including contaminated sea life in the game, with players needing to rescue them as part of the requirement for winning. Thus, the idea of "Black Waves" (to use the original name of the game) was born.
I got to work on a prototype. This was going to be the most complex board game prototype I had ever created, with 36 double-sided marine life tiles, a fairly large board, and a better-looking cardboard four-way dice tower that was fairly easy to assemble and disassemble. For the prototype, I didn't worry too much about the easy-to-assemble part of the dice tower and concentrated on getting the game to the table.
I'm not a graphic artist (or any kind of artist for that matter) and primarily use GIMP software for all of my preliminary designs. I started working on the game board, which consisted of an area in the middle large enough to seat the dice tower and four concentric circles divided into sectors that would encompass the marine life and player tokens. At this point, I decided to add a few specialists with game-breaking powers that would aid players in fighting the spill. I have always enjoyed games, especially co-operative ones, in which each player has a unique ability to give them the feeling that they have a special role to aid the rest of the team.
As I was working on ideas, I jotted down rules in a Google document. The original (and current) rules had players using four action points to perform various activities on their turn: move, rescue a marine animal, or push back oil, with more action points being needed to rescue a contaminated animal or remove an oil die from the game.
At this stage of the design, in order to scale for different player counts, I looked at the difference with fewer than four players and noticed the only real difference is that with fewer players, there is less opportunity to cover more of the board and all I would have to do is increase the allowable distance for each move action for each player.
The ending of the game was another factor I needed to think of, but just to get the game to the table, I first came up with two losing condition: (1) four or more of one species of animal had died (yes, they died in the original iteration) or (2) ten overflows had occurred. The players would win if the players emptied the bag of dice without a loss condition occurring.
A couple weeks later, my prototype was ready to print at my local printing place and got to the table for the first time. After a few plays, it was fairly difficult but not impossible to win. It was time to playtest like crazy. For the first week or so, I was solo playtesting a lot, playing with two, three, and four specialists. The win/loss ratio leaned towards the loss side mostly based on the number of dice being dropped. Item cards were introduced during this time to try to mitigate some of the random occurrences that can happen through the oil dice-placement mechanism that could have players in the wrong spot at the wrong time, powerless to do anything about it. Although these elements are to be expected, the item cards gave players a way to kind of have insurance to tackle these problems on future turns.
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I spent more time in the next few weeks to test with friends and family to put the game through the wringer to see how different strategies are utilized. The game still leaned on the fairly challenging side, but many times it came down to the last roll to determine the end game outcome. The overall response was very positive. I found that people were passionate about rescuing marine life and at this point, thematically, I decided that the sea life didn't die, but were put into intensive care or "sick bay".
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I felt at this point that the design was ready to be put in front of publishers to see who was interested. The annual FanExpo convention in Toronto had been growing a small board gaming section of its convention, including a publisher speed-dating session, which is where I decided to show off "Black Waves". There was a lot of positive feedback from several publishers, with one of them saying it was in strong consideration of being signed in the next two months.
I next brought the design to ProtoTO, Toronto's local board game prototype convention. After several playtests, Curt Covert of Smirk & Dagger Games came by the table and looked interested, so I invited him and his team to sit down and try a few rounds of the game. That's when Curt told me he was ready to sign the game right away. He saw the potential of it being a game that will attract many players with a great story to tell. During that very same ProtoTO weekend, "Black Waves" was signed to Smirk & Dagger Games.
Many changes came during development over the next few years, with a lot of delays happening due to the pandemic, among other factors. One of the most important changes was changing the item cards to be randomly selected at the beginning of the game and activated by rescuing one of each of the six marine animals or clearing out three oil dice. Weather dice were introduced to give the game even more tension throughout, with item cards created to work with this new challenge. Variable win conditions were also introduced to give the game clearer victory conditions, with the original victory conditions still being available when the revealed win condition could not be met. Two new specialists were introduced to work off of the new weather dice and the new implementation of the item cards. Finally, "Black Waves" took on a new name: The Spill.
Prototype set-up
What started off as an experiment of creating a multi-directional dice tower ended with a game about working together to battle an environmental disaster. Even with the many changes that The Spill has gone through, it never veered too far from the original mechanism of spilling dice from the rig and moving ships around the board to rescue sea life and manage the spill. The tension is still felt from players as the oil continues to fall out of that dice tower, and the conversation around the table is engaging as players work together to try to solve the puzzle in front of them. I am so glad to see it come to players around the world and hope they have as much fun playing it as much as I had creating The Spill.
Andy Kim
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