Designer/Curator Diary: A Museum of Curiosities

I often relate my experience of SPIEL not just in terms of the people that I meet or the games that I play/buy, but with reference to the sheer inspirational kick the event gives you as a game designer. For the week or so that the fair occupies 100% of your waking time, you are living and breathing the hobby; at SPIEL you cannot — and absolutely do not want to — escape games. Indeed, Snowdonia, Paperclip Railways and Guilds of London were all conceived at the fair. With the pandemic causing the postponement of most conventions in 2020/2021, this usual wellspring had dribbled to a dusty halt...or so I thought.

Having being confined to barracks, a long-nurtured-but-backburnered ambition to curate and run my very own Museum of Board Games began to coalesce. eBay is, simultaneously, your greatest ally and your worst enemy in this endeavor. Hopping from one theme or publisher to the next, time freed by working from home — and some spare capital sloshing about — saw me radically increase my acquisition of vintage games and gaming ephemera. As the exhibits-in-waiting began to fill — and spill from — the shelves of multiple rooms, I began scouting for potential premises and by mid-2021 I was measuring the chosen shop unit for cabinets and mulling the contents of the gift shop.

The Museum on its opening day: August 28, 2021

As anyone who has ever worked in, or operated, an "attraction" knows, the gift shop is absolutely key. A moderate entry fee alone won't support the overheads (especially in the off-season), so what better memento than being able to take away an actual board game?!

And given that a significant proportion of visitors WON'T be Geeks, the shop can't just be a haven of standard Euros and hobbyist "gateway" staples. I need it to be mass market. Fighting my usual tendency for "layers and layers", I determined to design the souvenirs "from scratch"; drawing from the simpler mechanisms of the past, I set myself some basic rules:

• Components should be standard, inexpensive (to keep costs down), and minimal, e.g.. dice, simple cubes and -eeples, no more than a few cards, etc.
• The games should be easy-to-learn/play (one card/page of rules)
• The games should be suitable for gamers and non-gamers (fillers, basically)
• Everything should be able to fit into a small, matchbox-style gift box or baggy
• The games should be fun!

The first output from this method was a boat-racing game with movement determined by the blind-bidding of matchsticks, which are great as currency and also essential for measuring (end-to-end) how far a successful player moves. No player who makes the same bid as any other is allowed to move, so the greed vs. caution groupthink adds the appropriate tension.

As a first prototype, it worked very nicely from the off with pleasing feedback as an end-of-the-evening closer: simple to explain, quick to play. The design finally resolved itself into a product when I was clearing out my shed (after a water-logged, roof collapse) and discovered a whole drawer of sheeples delivered as "overs" from the 2014 production of Ivor the Engine. I rethemed from boats to sheep, added unique abilities and daft motor-racing pun names (Michael Ewemacher, Jensen Mutton, etc.) and Formula OviNE was born.

In progress, a race to the barn and back

One game is hardly a "range", so I made sure to keep the notebook handy, and within a short period, variations of Formula OviNE began forming. Each had their own wrinkle on the central bid/race mechanism. Atlantic Crossing made it through the arduous QA process with its return to a boat-racing theme, but with added movement-affecting weather and events.

Across the Herring Pond...

However, with the Museum open and visitors enjoying playing many of the exhibits "for real", it was easy to identify which games got the most positive reaction: tiddlywinks (TiddlyGolf, Tiddlytennis and Sea-Winks), measuring/observational games, shooting games, and racing games, in particular, all of which inspired the following:

• MatCHIO — show-jumping with tiddlywinks on a course made of cubes, matchsticks, folded paper fences, and the box itself

Four faults!

• The Frog Prince — a measuring game in the style of Froschkönig.

• Island Racing — inspired, thematically, by the Ahoy! series of race games from the 1930s. Island Racing adds a directional weather mechanism similar to that in my larger Attention All Shipping prototype, uses dice instead of matchsticks (for movement programming), and introduces obstacles and collisions to increase player interactivity on a selection of pre-prepared map boards.

• Finally, while not a product of establishing the museum, Firebox — a bit of real-time fun put together by Ben Bateson, Matt Green, and myself at a playtest weekend back in 2016 (!) — is the reason that the museum games exist at all (albeit in their small quantities). All of its components — matchsticks, tiny dice, and train-eeples — have been a rich source of materials for the spin-off designs. I'd purchased enough stuff to make around 100 Firebox sets to support the Ugandan (Chrysalis) project but needed only thirty or so in the end; the "overs" are quietly occupying shelf space and are, like the rest of the catalogue, ripe for larger production in the future (publishers willing, of course). In the meantime, this exclusive batch of curious diversions will serve visitors very nicely indeed.

With my son now helping run the Museum when I have "real work" commitments, I put him to work counting, cutting, and sticking; assembling copies in the quiet times; and, slowly, building up a supply.

In the meantime, being surrounded by so many lovely things from 200 years of gaming history is storming my designer brain in the entirely pleasurable way that my convention visits do. The notebooks fill with domino-based scribbles, Rummy/Happy Family re-workings, modernized parlor games, 18XX meets tiddlywinks and — yes! — even a few basic roll-and-move propositions. Going forward, it's inspiring to pause and take a look backwards...

Please consider becoming a patron of The Museum of Board Games.

Tony Boydell