The Primary - An Election Game [Work In Progress]

Yeah, I was hoping to add a picture or two to this designer diary... but couldn't figure it out yet haha.

We kind of just did it by gut feel - at we followed the actual 2016 delegate count of the Republican party (they had ~2,000 delegates compared to ~4,000 for the Democrats.) From there, we wanted the regions to be about the same geographical size, with roughly the same delegate size (obviously with some variation, to keep it interesting) Honestly, the regions came out pretty well from our initial design. We haven't yet tried moving around states from one region to another.

To make the math simpler, we eventually scaled the delegate count from 2,413 to 240 and made each region have an even number of delegates (to help with the case of tied votes)

Also, another shout out to Chris Anderson of The Board Game Workshop podcast! I think what he is doing is great, and I hope it finds success.

Here is the third entry in our Designer Diary! Read on to learn about our experience with Adobe InDesign, Tabletop Simulator, and creating a solo variant of The Primary.

Status

I have recently discovered Adobe InDesign and wanted to just give it a few words of praise. I’ve only used it for the Data Merge feature, but this alone is tremendously valuable and helps save a ton of time when prototyping cards. In a nutshell, you can import data from a spreadsheet and automatically populate a card template, to then print out an entire deck of cards. I’ll be writing up a quick tutorial on this in the future.

Over the last week, I have also toyed around with Tabletop Simulator a little bit. It seems like a neat way to digitize a game and may be a good way to get a different form of playtesting for The Primary. Like InDesign, I’m not terribly familiar with the software but it seems like a powerful resource.

A recent podcast from the Board Game Design Lab featured Morten Pedersen and was focused on creating a solo variant for board games. I found the discussion very interesting and it inspired me to follow Morten’s design methodology for The Primary. I created a deck of cards that a solo players uses to determine actions of a dummy player / bot. The focus was to keep the central elements of the game that are fun and create tension, while simplifying and streamlining the experience for a solo player.

Issues

In playtesting the new solo variant of The Primary, I found lots and lots of things to tweak. It amazes me how well something can seem to work in your mind, but once on the table, it falls apart. I’m excited to update the rules and cards and try it out again!

Next Steps

The solo variant of The Primary will take a lot of tweaking, so I anticipate lots of playtesting. Thankfully, playtesting a solo variant is much easier the multiplayer game!

The playtesting grind will continue – we keep getting great feedback and have lots of things to test and tweak. Hopefully we can get some more remote playtesters to play and provide feedback. It’s one thing to guide players in person during playtests, but you can get very different feedback from players who are only following the rulebook. If you are interested in playtesting, please click here to sign up!

Thanks for reading our Designer Diary! What else would you like to hear about? What did you find boring? Feel free to share your thoughts and comment below!

Thanks for checking out the fifth entry in our Designer Diary! This post has been way overdue and there is a lot to cover, but today I will focus on printers and quoting for our game, The Primary.

Status

A lot has happened since my last Designer Diary entry and I'm not even sure where to begin. The game has been continually refined and the solo variant has undergone a lot of changes. Playtesting has continued to provide useful feedback, and a couple more people have provided some good remote playtests. I have done a few "rulebook swaps" with other board game designers, and that has proved very useful! A shout out to John Brieger (@dasbrieger) for the great idea!

So onto today's topic: printers and quoting. I have been doing a lot of follow up work with a number of printers as the game design gets refined and components get added and removed from the game. I initially started out using James Mathe's "Hitchhiker's Guide to Manufacturing" to reach out to printers. From there, I provided the same exact RFQ (request for quotation) to each. The hope was to compare relative costing and here is what I found:

This was very eye-opening for a couple reasons. First, there was quite a difference in cost between the various printers. Second, it was interesting to see the exponential nature of the game cost vs quantity printed. Finally, it is important to note that some printers had different capabilities and components available - so the above chart is not a 100% apples to apples comparison. For example, most printers said plastic cubes were cheaper, but one claimed wood cubes were cheaper for them!

Issues

I'm sure this will sound like a broken record, but remote playtesting has continued to be a struggle. We get a few new playtesters signing up online via our website or Twitter every now and then, and even send some components to help out the setup, but the response rate on actual remote playtests continues to be very low. Does anyone have advice on how to get better remote playtesting engagement?

Next Steps

Protospiel Chicago is this weekend and I am rushing to finish up some last-minute prototyping and preparations. This is only my second protospiel, and this time, I'll try to be there for all three days. I'm hoping to playtest some cool games and hopefully get some good feedback on The Primary.

Thanks for reading our Designer Diary! What else would you like to hear about? What did you find boring? Feel free to share your thoughts and comment below!