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About Tour Operator
Tour Operator is a worker placement traveling game with a queue mechanism that helps the game keep its theme. The game went through a lot of changes over the one-and-a-half years I have been working on it. It started as a trivia game in which you commanded a tourist through their vacations in Greece, and you had to answer tourist-related questions that would get you VP by answering them. I chose Greece because that's where I am from and I thought I would sell the game to a Greek publisher. I quickly scrapped the trivia idea, though, after talking with people in the industry and realizing that I would have a hard time selling the game to a publisher since trivia games are not quite the "hottest thing" right now.
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Early prototype cards and notes
Traveling Too Light
Disheartened as I might have been, I wasn't going to give up on TO. I sat down and reworked the whole game in every aspect. First, I dropped Greece as a subject and adopted international traveling. The map changed and the logic of the game, too. Now players had a set of 4 out of 36 characters with different tourism interests, and they needed to take them traveling around the world, satisfy their tourist interests, and get their money. I even did some illustrations for the game on Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop and started posting the images in the board game Facebook groups.
At that time, I was pretty sure I would self-publish the game, so I was posting to get feedback. The comments I got were divided. Most people would like the theme and where the game was going, but some noted that the illustrations were subpar. It was hard for me to accept that since I had spent quite some time working on them, but on the other hand I didn't want to put a mediocre product in the market, so again I listened and started looking for a professional illustrator.
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One of the tourists I designed
Meanwhile, I was putting my game to playtests. The feedback was lukewarm. It was not bad, but it was not good either and it came from experienced gamers, so I knew I was not going the right direction. Actually, I knew exactly what was wrong. Having designed TO as a party game originally, I had kept it all this time too light for what it was meant to be and what people were expecting it to be. I knew that, but to fix that meant I had to rework the whole game from scratch and I wanted to avoid doing so.
But by that time I was convinced that fixing small things wouldn't help. If I wanted to move forward, I had to scrap everything I had done and start all over...
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Early player mat during one of our playtests
Towards the Final Destination
After sleepless nights and countless working hours in my free time, I redesigned the game to its "final" version. I am sure that all of you have understood by this point that "final" is a big word for game designing, so let's keep it in quotation marks. What I mostly did was give the game a number of choices that it didn't have before, thus making it appealing to more experienced players. I still kept the rules simple and straightforward though, so TO could be played even by casual players. I really hate complex or obnoxious rules.
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An early prototype in Tabletopia, which was helpful with distant playtesting
I also found a great artist to work on the illustrations. Thanos Tsillis is an excellent guy and an awesome artist as well, and he made some amazing pieces of artwork for the game. I remember when I posted the first image that everybody was positive.
And the gameplay was finally getting somewhere as well. We ran playtests with experienced players, and the feedback was finally what I was hoping it would be. Tabletopia helped a lot with playtests, especially with people abroad. It does take a bit to do the pieces and upload the game but once you do, you can edit things easily, so I would suggest you try it sometimes.
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First work Thanos sent me; people in the FB groups loved it!
Anyway, not long after I started posting the new art, Martin Looij from Keep Exploring Games contacted me, saying that he liked the theme and the art and that he would like to check out the game. While I was happy to receive that kind of acknowledgment, I was reluctant to give TO up, to tell you the truth. I had done too much developing and marketing for it to just let it go. The TO Facebook page alone had more than seven hundred fans and we were growing quickly; at the same time, other Facebook groups such as Board Game Exposure, the Board Game Spotlight, and Everything Board Games had been really supportive, the word about TO was finally getting out there, and everything looked promising.
I had a long talk with my wife and some boardgame friends about that. They mostly thought that I needed outside experience to help bring the game to market since I hadn't done any publishing before, so they suggested I give it to Martin, see how it goes, and later try something on my own. I listened to them and signed it over to KEG, and I haven't regretted it since. Here we are, about a year after and I have my first game published and featured at SPIEL '18 — isn't that great?
Playtesting with the wife on a Saturday afternoon...oh, fun!
Lessons Learned
I would paraphrase The Doors, saying that game designing is about keeping your ears on the road and your heart upon the wheel, meaning that when making a game, you should always listen to people around you: playtesters, publishers, and gamers. Listen not only to their words but to their faces and their reactions, too, because faces speak and sometimes they speak louder than words.
That said, always keep in your heart your ultimate goal, to make a game that you and other people would like to play. Don't give up if the feedback is negative; correct and move on. Be prepared to question everything you have done and to change even when changing is the most painful thing to do. It will eventually pay off.
Nestor Tyr
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