In anticipation of the Kickstarter launch of Crumbs! The Sandwich Filler Game, its designer (Jon) and publisher (Scott) will be discussing the process of designing a game from concept to creation!
In our first entry, we introduce ourselves and how we came to create games!
Jon: I dipped in and out of board gaming throughout my life, but as inevitable as day turning to night, it crept back into my spare time and started to take over. Next thing I knew I had a modest collection fighting for space, so I gave myself a self-imposed '1 in 1 out' policy. Not too long later, I discovered microgames. And lo and behold, a loophole was invented! If I got rid of a decent sized game, surely I could replace it with a load of small games right?!
Side Room Games and Button Shy Games in particular grabbed my attention. Enjoying quite a few Button Shy games and becoming aware of their 18 card design contests got me thinking about whether I might be able to design a game. Initially, I began to think about designing and came to a few realisations:
Although I do enjoy all types of games, for me I love something that thematically makes sense and immerses me in a game.
I prefer strategy and puzzle games with perhaps a smidge of luck or randomness.
As I’d spent more time playing solo microgames over the Covid-19 lockdown/s and beyond, I wanted to design what I know.
I enjoy wordplay/puns way too much and concoct most of my ideas around a name I’ve come up with.
With that, I began thinking about a few ideas based around 18 cards. Ideas that would have theme and user experience at its core, be relatively simple to learn but have meaningful decisions and different difficulty levels. And lastly, with only 18 cards to utilise, something which would feel like the game was bigger than that restriction and that people would want play again and again.
Scott: I've been into tabletop gaming for almost 25 years, starting with miniature wargames, roleplaying games, card games, and most recently, board games. Each of these phases has dominated my life until the next comes along! I've also worked in the tabletop gaming industry for the last 6 years, which was my childhood dream, 4 of those running my own company Minerva Tabletop Games, designing and publishing board games.
I love strategic games, enjoying eurogames and abstract strategy games, but with one caveat; they have to look good! My background in art and design means I favour games with distinct and unique artistic styles, and it's that focus that I brought to Minerva. This ultimately led me to design my first game, the art-themed colour-mixing game Swatch, featuring artwork inspired by the Bauhaus art movement.
My love of minimalism defines my approach to gaming, curating a modest collection of games that features a lot of small-box games. It's also how I enjoy designing games, I find a restriction on size or components breeds creativity and poses an interesting challenge. I'm constantly impressed by games that deliver strong, simple-to-understand mechanisms perfectly, with additional elements offering more depth to provide an experience players want to keep coming back to.
The social aspect of gaming is my favourite, and getting to know other designers and running my playtesting community in South London has allowed to make many great friends, as well as meet a lot of talented designers and help them develop their games. It's an amazing feeling catching up at shows and seeing others succeed that makes all this worth it.
In our next entry, we'll reveal how Jon and I came to meet and make Crumbs!
In the meantime, find out more about Crumbs! and follow the project on Kickstarter below:
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