Greetings!
I'm Kevin from Canada and I'm a board game designer. I discovered this passion when I was around ten years old when I made a card game. I failed miserably at creating a fun game (it was too complicated and I couldn't teach it to anyone), but I was tenacious. I had the habit of always wanting to change the rules of a game to see how it would change the strategies. I picked up the hobby again later and became fascinated with it. In a summer afternoon in my high school years, I drafted a simple card game that I could play by myself, and had fun doing it. I brought other people in and they played it, too, and liked it. My first success! The rules are below:
Five Hens in the Fox Pen
Objective: A player wins the game when he or she gets rid of all of the cards in his/her hand.
Set-Up: Shuffle a standard deck of 52 cards and deal five cards to each player; then, place the deck face-down in the middle of the table. Flip over a card from the top of the deck into a face-up pile. This is the pile into which players play cards.
Game Structure: The game is played in a series of turns, starting with the first player and ending when a player meets the victory condition.
How to start: To start the game, each player "bids" a card. This means that each player selects a trick and reveals it when all players are ready. The player with the highest-valued trick gets to go first.
Definition: "trick": A trick is a single card, or two to four cards with the same value. They add together. For example, a pair of Aces is worth two (an Ace by itself is 1), and three Kings has a value of 39 (Kings are 13 by themselves).
Turn Structure: On a player's turn, that player can play a trick from his/her hand into the pile in the middle if those cards add up to a number greater than or equal to the value of the last trick played. If a player can't, then that player draws cards one at a time until he or she has five cards in his/her hand. If, while drawing, that player discovers that he/she can now play a trick, then that player can do so without continuing to draw cards. (Drawing cards is bad. You want to get rid of them!) After playing a trick, or after not being able to play a trick and drawing a hand of five cards, that player passes the turn. On your turn, if nobody else played any tricks (and your trick is the top trick showing), then you can play any trick in your hand.
After I made this game, and found some success, I was stoked about game design. I tried to make a few other card games, but none of them seemed to have the same appeal as Five Hens in the Fox Pen. Alas! Later on, while going to college, I made a game with unique components that used Rock Paper Scissors as its main mechanic. It was fun! I thought it would be more fun to make it more complicated. I did, and six months later with no playtesting in between, I came up with a 23-page rule book, full of options and mechanics and things you could do. When I playtested this behemoth, my game failed miserably. So many unexpected things happened. This is where I learned the importance of keeping it simple and playtesting. Playtesting, playtesting, playtesting!
I've always been a fan of Magic: The Gathering. MTG has been a big influence on my games. Every Monday, Mark Rosewater always has a great discussion on design of Magic cards or just design in general. I would recommend it to any eminent game designer. (Do you have a particular journal that you read weekly?)
I took engineering in college and then worked for a while as a technologist before "upgrading". I picked up a project management certificate and now I'm a year away from finishing off my degree. I can't wait for that! University is a series of games, where I hopefully learn something useful that applies to my passion ;) (So far, I have; I took a course on linear optimization via the simplex algorithm.)
So far, I've talked a bit about my history with this craft, but I haven't talked about any of my recent work. I have a lot of recent work, but that's another story for another day. I have three games that have been thoroughly playtested and are ready for publishing; I'm waiting until I am out of school and in a position to take on more risk with the investment.
I expect to have some interesting and intelligent discussions here, and definitely learn something new :)
Cheers,
Kevin
