A Warning To All Board Game Designers!

Hey everyone. In one of my earlier posts (in the 'Welcome To BGDF' forum topic) I mentioned that I might talk about the game that I just gave up on - the one that crashed and burned.

Well, this is it:

This certain game I had been cultivating the idea for, for about two years, and I had actually been working on it for about one year. (The board game was called 'Winds Of Fate', and was an attempted Ameratrash-Euro hybrid.) I'll try to briefly explain the basic premise:

Theme:

In a nutshell, the theme of the game was of nautical adventure in the golden age of piracy. Although many concepts were taken from historical evidence, many were also of my own invention, and by no means historically accurate. For example, the actual location of the game was not specified, although it was implied that it was a warm Carribbean-like environment that was (prior to the game) unexplored. Basically, players were captains of ships (you could control more than one captain, and more than one ship), and could either be pirates, explorers, merchants, or even politicians. The game was geared towards adventure, although it also had quite a lot of strategy. I took my inspiration for this game mostly from Assassins Creed Black Flag (video game), Merchants And Marauders (board game), and Sails Of Glory (miniatures/card game.)

Mechanics:

The mechanics that were included in this game can basically be divided up into two parts: The Ameratrash mechanics, and the Euro mechanics. The main Euro mechanic was essentially the heart, or the backbone, of the game: Each player controlled at least one ship, which was represented by a player board with an illustration of the ship on it, and many different action spots situated all over it. Players assigned their crew (workers) to different action spots on their ship, which would allow them to do different things on the main board. Some of these action spots could become damaged, and different kinds of ships had different action spots. Also, when a player was in a port, they could assign their crew to the different port actions to buy goods, repair cargo, et... Now for the Ameratrash mechanics: There were many of these, although the most notable ones were the explorable map (main board), the insight cards, and sea and land movement. The main board/map was made up of a series of large tiles, consisting of points of interest, islands, ports, storms, fog, and mostly water. As the game went on, players could explore new tiles, and expand the horizons of the new world. The insight cards were my favourite part of the game (and still are.) They were cards that players could gain, that would give them certain information - these could be quests and adventures to go on, or secret pirate meetings that were being held, or villages in danger, or treasure maps, or submarine technology, or even books of mystical spells. Players could exchange this information, or sell it, or even torture it out of each other. Players could move and combat their ship(s) along the water, and they could also move and combat their crew along the land. This game had a lot of customization: Players could customize game length, game difficulty, and even the different types of insight cards that players could include in their game.

So what was the problem?

Now we get to the point. (Finally.) After the first play test of 'Winds Of Fate' I realized that the game had one over-arcing flaw that was virtually impossible to fix: The Ameratrash mechanics and the Euro mechanics clashed, and so did every other mechanic. They just couldn't fit together. Why was this? Because, when I was first working on the concept of this game, I came up with a bunch of mechanics that I thought would be cool, and then I worked on them individually, refining each one until it was perfect. The problem was, when I tried to put the mechanics together, they just didn't fit: The game didn't feel smooth; it felt like a bunch of individual mechanics held together by a weak glue that might just let it all fall apart. Furthermore, I should have play tested this game sooner, so that I would realize this serious problem, before I had put years of effort into the game. Since the only way of fixing this would be to restart, I trashed the game, and now I simply think of it as an extremely valuable learning experience.

Morals of the story:

1. Get your game on the table as soon as possible.
2. Think twice before designing a Euro-Ameratrash hybrid. It is very difficult to do right.
3. Don't design a bunch of mechanics and try to fit them together afterwards: Instead, create one or two central mechanics, and branch off of them. (I find that creating a web/mindmap helps with this.)
4. Don't be afraid to just let a game go, and use it as a tool for further learning, to make better games in the future.

Anyone else have any sad stories to share? :)