Archive for Aaron Natera
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When you think of dinosaurs, HUGE bones might first come to your mind. But they left behind more than bones, some left behind their footprints too! These track fossils are found all over the world. One of the neatest examples is found in the Paluxy riverbed near Glen Rose, Texas, USA. Here it appears that a large predator was stalking a huge plant eater. You can walk along river bank and follow the path they took. Empire of the Dinosaurs seems to be back on track after a little side trip. If you were to follow its tracks lately first you would go steadily forward making progress, then suddenly spin backwards, then zigzag all over, twist around, and end up falling down leaving a nice impression of your face in the mud.
I had an inscrutably frustrating problem around the “nesting sites” area of the game. I never really felt comfortable with how it was designed, but good grief! When I decided to change it the “frustration-o-meter” went through the roof! I threw everything I could possibly think of at it and got so discouraged I was on the verge of giving up. But it seems to work now and I’m happy with it. So I think I’ll leave that whole experience for a future post. But for now it’s time to get up, wash up, and set some new tracks forward!
So… Let’s talk about math. Hurray! Everyone loves math right???
Empire of the Dinosaurs is a card game but it also uses dice. Generally you will be making a die role and then using cards to modify the value of that roll. Most people can do simple math, even if they don’t particularly enjoy it. (Even a T-rex could at least count to 2.) Though the game only uses simple math, I came to the conclusion there is too much of it.
I wanted one of the core concepts of the game to be the decision of not only what cards you play, but maybe even more importantly, about what cards you don’t play. The cards in your hand have two functions. First, they can be played to the table and used to accomplish your goals in the game. And second, they can also be “discarded” for game effects.
It’s this second discarding mechanism that I enjoy most about the game. This is how you trigger dinosaur’s abilities or modify a die roll. Let’s say you were planning on playing a powerful Triceratops on your next turn, but right now your Iguanodon is under attack! Do you discard that Triceratops to help save it? Or do you let Iguanodon get munched by a predator because you want to hold onto the card?
I like it a lot, but a subtle problem starts to arise. Players will make their die rolls and establish a base value for something. Then a sort of back and forth arms race of escalation ensues where players are discarding cards and changing values. It’s easy to lose track of where you’re at, and where your opponent is at. Though it’s not too hard to look at the cards you discarded and refigure it, it can happen several times. Having to recalculate begins to bog things down and a fierce battle starts to feel like more like balancing your check book.
So what to do? These are dinosaurs not calculators!
Though I strongly resisted this for as long as possible, I came to the reluctant conclusion I needed to add cardboard tokens or counters to keep track of values. Ugh! First off, originally I only wanted to do cards. Not a bunch of fiddly pieces! Second, this is clearly going to drive up the eventual manufacturing cost. But I bought a nice round hole puncher, got a glue stick and started making them anyway.
And guess what?
It’s a MUCH BETTER play experience! In fact I think it cuts another 10 to 15 minutes off the game. Players were literally just adding stuff up that long. By using counters it’s easy to see at a glance exactly what the values of you and your opponent are. You still need to add things up, but now you don’t need to keep looking back at what you discarded to refigure where you’re at.
Additionally it opened up some new design possibilities. Previously when dinosaurs were injured, players would turn them sideways to indicate it. But as cards are moved around, it’s easy to forget and accidently leave it right side up. Plus it’s annoying to read the card’s game text oriented like that too. Instead, now you just place an injury token on the card. I also came up with a disease token that does some nasty things.
So the math is still there, it just doesn’t get in the way of the game.
But I think clearing up the math and making the play experience smoother only emphasized what I didn’t like about the “nesting site”. And so like a baby dinosaur separated from the herd I got a bit lost wandering around trying to fix it.
Fortunately, this baby dinosaur ran into a panda. (Which I’ll explain next time.)
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People always like to ask, “What was the biggest dinosaur?” For most, the word ‘biggest’ means the tallest, and while many dinosaurs were huge, others were ‘big’ in the sense of just being really really long. Possibly the longest dinosaur ever found so far is Diplodocus hallorum (formerly known as Seismosaurus) at approximately 110 feet long. (32.5 meters.) To put that in perspective, a football field is 300 feet long. Pretty impressive for a single living creature eh?
Guess what else is incredibly really long? (Besides the length of time since my last post!) Playing a game of ‘Empire of the Dinosaurs’! Until recently, most games were clocking in at over 2.5 hours! Ouch! While big numbers are impressive for a dinosaur, 2.5 hours is WAY too long for a two player card game. (At least in my opinion.) Now in its defense no one who’s play tested has specifically complained about the length. And most say that it is fun. But personally, there was always a sense of game fatigue at the end, like we chased each other around a Diplodocus hallorum 20 times.
So I’ve been fretting about how to shorten the time it takes to play without compromising the basic game mechanisms. But it’s become clear where the main issue was. There were too many turns where it seemed that player were doing very little, and recognizing the reason why seems so obvious in hindsight.
The dinosaurs in the game have what are called ‘Abilities’. To use a dinosaur’s ability you have to have a matching symbol called a ‘marker’. The trouble is that even though there are plenty of markers available, you frequently felt like you didn’t quite have enough, or the right kinds of markers to do what you want to do. (Like send Tyrannosaurus off on a hunt.) So players would do nothing, or at least very little until they felt confident they had accumulated the right cards with enough of the right markers.
Once I vocalized what the problem was, a friend simply suggested, “Why don’t you add in a ‘wild’ marker that can take the place of any other marker? Wow! So simple and what a difference it makes! By adding just a few ‘wilds’ into the decks you now feel like you have options available every phase of the game. It immediately increased the frequency of players taking significant actions, and chopped out a bunch of downtime.
How much does it save in time? Games now come in at 1.25 to 1.5 hours, a much much better length! Instead of a gigantic slow pondering Diplodocus, Empire of the Dinosaurs is now a much more agile animal.
I’m toying with a few more ideas on how to shave another 15 to 30 minutes off the playing time and get this game to be nimble and speedy like a Velociraptor! Some of it even boils down to clearly identifying icons. For example, by making the information on cards very easy and intuitive, it should cut down on the time it takes for players to make decisions.
Unfortunately my personal life is a busy one. It’s weird to consider that I’m trying to find time, in order to save time, in the land before time!
Alas, it looks like 2011 is not the year for releasing the game. But as soon as things come together more smoothly I'll put out some test card examples for comment. I'm curious as to what people will think of the design and how it can be improved. And eventually I’ll put out a few session reports of play testing.
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Empire of the DinosaursSo I notice that it’s been over a month since I last posted. Wow, time flies when you have nothing to say! (Just kidding, I actually have plenty of stuff to say but I’m afraid to!)
As you can see I’ve post a few art images but no real rules, and no pictures of the cards themselves. I’ve also discussed a lot about the creative process and the theme, but not any meaningful details on the game play. Why?
Well, have you ever cooked a turkey stuffed with dressing and the oven buzzer goes off, but then you see the bird is not quite cooked yet? So you put it back in the oven, but now you don’t know how long to keep cooking the thing, so you have to watch it close because you might burn it? Empire of the Dinosaurs is not done cooking yet, and I don’t want to burn it!
The problem is that I’ve been trying a few new things that significantly alter the text, the terms, and the appearance of the cards, though the basic game is unchanged. The buzzer went off long ago, but the more I play it, the more I need to work out some minor flaws. I’ll give a simple example: The word ‘fossil’.
Since the game’s initial beginning I’ve used the term ‘fossilize’ to mean the same thing as ‘discard’, and the term ‘fossil pile’ to describe how discarded cards end up in a discard pile. At the same time I use ‘fossil’ in another sense regarding scoring. For a long time I’ve had this nagging feeling that I’m overusing the term ‘fossil’ and trading clarity and simplicity for what I think is a cool thematic way to describe tossing a card away.
It’s kind of crazy but I’ve had a very difficult time coming to the decision to just drop it all and call discarding a card ‘discarding’! And you know what? The game is better off for it; it’s more intuitive; and no more confusion surrounding the context of when the term ‘fossil’ appears.
And then I realize just how many cards reference ‘fossilizing’ or ‘fossil pile’, not to mention a bazillion places in the rules. All of which has to be redone.
I’m a busy man, and this all takes time. Plus this is just one example of changes I’ve been working on. There are some others, and so I’m suddenly a little shyer about discussing all the particulars just yet. I know the moment I post a card image I’ll kick myself and have to re-do it. Or I’m sure that when I explain how Events, or Threatening, or Pack Hunters work I’ll realize I need to modify it slightly…etc… So for now hold tight.
Empire of the Dinosaurs is almost done. The pleasant smell of well roasted Triceratops is wafting from the oven, but we’re not quite there yet.
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Empire of the DinosaursLast time I wrote about games being about direct “conflict” versus a “race”. To illustrate, imagine that this was a game about World War 2. And instead of dinosaurs there were infantry, tanks, and aircraft. All of these “units” could be utilized offensively to attack an opponent. In other words, all of them are useful for “direct” conflict. The winner would be the one who eliminates or inflicts the most damage on their opponent. You might even have two “sides”, like the Axis vs. Allied powers.
To some degree it’s the predatory dinosaurs like T-Rex that would best fit the idea of an offensive unit that directly attacks your opponent. (Big jaws and huge teeth!) But then where would plant eaters fit in? Though they had horns and spikes, thematically they would not work very well for direct conflict. I suppose they could conceivably “defend” a nest or territory, but they wouldn’t naturally choose to go on the offensive. You don’t see Zebras chasing down and attacking Lions! Or why would one herbivore attack an opponent’s herbivore??? Plus there are no “sides” in the natural world. The Hadrosaurs vs. the Sauropods would make no sense. So the original game’s goal was more about conflict and dinosaurs eating dinosaurs, but since the majority of the dinosaurs in the deck are herbivores, it didn’t work very well.
What about a race? In this type of game players are in a race to be the first one to achieve some kind of goal. It could be attaining a certain number of points, crossing a finish line, emptying your hand of cards, or accumulating the most of something, anything, even the greatest number of purple magic tarantulas. Whatever the goal is, the point is to achieve it first. So when my friend won by not playing any herbivores, I knew I had to alter the approach to be more of a “race” instead of a “direct conflict” model.
But what should that goal be?
Herbivorous dinosaurs ate different types of plants and that’s partly why they varied so much in size and shape. I decided to represent this through three icons.
Fern icon: These represent the low smaller plants Like ferns and horsetails. These appear to have been much more widespread then grasses like today. (Though grasses did exist.)
Cycad icon: These were non-flowering palm-like plants with woody stems and tough leaves, cycads, seed ferns, and cycadeoids. They represent the smaller and medium trees and plants.
Conifer icon: These dominated the landscape for much of the Mesozoic, and are the slow growing evergreens, likes pines, redwoods, and monkey puzzle trees. They represent the tallest and highest type of vegetation.
The way I originally used this I thought was quite clever and simple, but turned out to be more of a pain. The goal of the game would be to have territory cards that had a certain number of each of these icons. You would then stack the same number of little plant counters on top of them. The first thing you would do each turn is “ring the dinner bell” and have all your plant eaters eat. For example, if a long-necked saouropods liked conifers it could eat them by moving 1 conifer counter off the territory card onto the plant eater card. Each dinosaur could only hold so many counters and that forced you to keep playing new plant eaters. The first player to clear their territory cards won.
It worked pretty well, sort of. It just was WAY too fiddly! Trying to set up and count out all those little counters became a pain once the novelty wore off. Plus now the emphasis had switched to the point that you could very easily win without playing a single predator! The predator’s role became more of just a method to slow down your opponent, since killing a herbivore meant all its icons went back onto the territory card.
I liked the three icons, and I liked how the herbivores had something to do besides lay down on T-rex’s dinner plate. I was also using the counters as a form of energy. So for a herbivore to use its game text it had to eat plants, and then “spend” those plant counters by putting them back on the territory card. I liked the idea of a “cost” to use a dinosaur’s abilities, but what about the predators? Introduce a 4th set of meat counters???
No, little cardboard counters had to go. In fact what I really needed to do was to blend a game of “conflict” with a “race.”
I decided that the goal would be to score a certain number of points in the form of “fossil bones”, and how predators and herbivores score those points would be very different. Ignoring predators can lead to defeat, but so would ignoring herbivores. You need some of both to win, and that way it’s up to the players to decide which route to victory they want to emphasize.
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So after years of working and tweaking and fiddling with my game I was dismayed to learn of a new card game coming out called Dinosaur King.
I totally freaked out.
What if it was exactly like mine! Or worse what if it’s way better than mine! In fact, what if it’s the greatest most successful card game ever invented by mankind!!! Who would even bother to glance at mine???
Then later I saw the game. My reaction became: “What a relief!”
First off, it’s nothing like mine. (Phew!) Second, it’s more like Pokémon with kids “summoning” dinosaurs (aka monsters) to fight each other. And third, one “special” card had what appeared to be a Styracosaurus ridding on a SURFBOARD!!!! At least that’s what it looks like to me. It’s ridding a wave coming toward the beach on some kind of red thingy. What in the name of all that is good, decent, and paleontological, is a 3 ton Styracosaurus doing ridding a surfboard??? It’s preposterous!
However it does help illustrate what I was and was not going for when I started to design the game. A recent post by Brian Switek on http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/dinosaur/ says it very nicely: “That’s the trouble with dinosaurs. Not only were they living animals that are objects of scientific study, but they are also malleable cultural icons that can terrify as much as enlighten.” So despite having “educational” facts on the cards, Dinosaur King’s story portrays dinosaurs as fantasy monsters used by the evil Dr. Z in a plot to take over the world. I understand season 2 of the cartoon also involves Space Pirates. So I guess in that context a Styracosaurus on a surfboard makes complete sense!
Right off the bat I knew I want to educate as well as entertain, but I didn’t want to distort what dinosaurs were either. In other words this would be a game about dinosaurs in their environment. Dinosaurs and just dinosaurs!
No time travel.
No DNA cloning.
No alternate reality.
No prehistoric “cave men.”
No talking dinosaurs or ANYTHING cute.
No modern technology of any kind, …or Cadillacs.
No cute kids ridding cute dinosaurs on surfboards while fighting space pirates.
And to be honest, that is what made it so hard to design; trying to balance the fun of a game with the educational opportunity. It’s especially difficult when you consider that a card game is pretty abstract to begin with.
Consider the example of deep time.
Most people think that all the dinosaurs ran around living together at the same time. But that is not the case, and different species were sometimes separated by millions of years. Even if they existed at the same time, not all dinosaurs lived in the same places. Just like Kangaroos and Polar Bears don’t hang out together today, T-Rex probably never ran into Velociraptor. Plus scientists divide up the Mesozoic Era when dinosaurs lived into three different periods called the Cretaceous, Jurassic, and Triassic. You could further drill down to specific “formations” where certain assemblages of dinosaurs co-existed. While that would all be educational, the limitations imposed would make for a terrible game. So in Empire of the Dinosaurs, none of that matters and the dinosaurs co-mingle without any restrictions. However I made the conscious decision to limit all the dinosaurs in the game to the Cretaceous period. (If and when this ever gets off the ground, I imagine an expansion would then cover the Jurassic.) So to some degree I’ve tried to convey the idea that dinosaurs lived at different points in time, without it impacting game play.
However I went too far in trying to avoid treating all dinosaurs like monsters. For example, in one early version of the game my opponent played nothing but Predators. He totally ignored all the plant eating dinosaurs and just stuck with predators and won. I was shocked because I realized there really was no reason to play herbivores, even though the game revolved around them. They sort of just sat around and munched on plants, but they weren’t tied to the goal. Why?
The answer has to do with being in “conflict” versus being in a “race”. That and World War 2. Till next time,
…SURFS UP DUDE!
Oh… And this is a Styracosaurus:
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At the time I started developing Empire of the Dinosaurs I was playing basically 2 games, The Decipher Star Wars CCG, and the strategy game Star Fleet Battles: Captain's Edition Basic Set. What do these two games have in common, besides super-cool space ships and aliens? A million money sucking expansions? True, but not what I was thinking of. I can sum it up in one word:
COMPLEXITY.
Star Fleet Battles is a monster of a game that comes with a phonebook, ...er, I mean rulebook. Now, don’t think I have anything against complexity. I thoroughly enjoyed every one of the marathon games we never finished. Yes it’s true; I’ve never succeeded in playing a game of SFB to completion.
Similarly, with every expansion the Star Wars CCG introduced a new set of rules, new mechanics, new keywords, new card types, new clarifications, and new ways to overwhelm and alienate new players.
Why were those games so complex? One tries to simulate every single aspect of running a starship, from the weapons and sensor systems all the way down to allocating power to the crew’s toilets. The other tries to simulate a huge sprawling space opera, from the destruction of planets down to Aunt Beru pouring Luke a glass of Blue Milk.
So my initial approach to Empire of the Dinosaurs was to create a sprawling mass of complex rules and ideas that in essence turned them into spaceships and Jedi and the whole mess felt nothing like playing with dinosaurs. I got way off track.
Dinosaurs weren’t that complicated. They weren’t stupid either. The whole “pea-sized” brain thing has been over sensationalized. They didn’t have any angst because their father was an evil overlord of the galaxy, and they didn’t have to charge their phaser banks. They weren’t war machines, or even mindless lawyer-eating rampaging monsters ala Jurassic Park. They were marvelous beautiful animals that lived and flourished in a past we can only imagine. They were not “characters” like in a movie, but they had “character” in the bewildering array of shapes and features their bodies displayed.
What helped changed my viewpoint? For one thing, the game wasn’t any fun. So duh! Something had to change. And second I came across the game Federation Commander. Basically a streamlined, sleeker version of Star Fleet Battles. Now FC is still a complicated “big” game, but nothing like SFB was. And as I read designer Steve Cole’s explanations on why they simplified things, it made a lot of sense. Third, Decipher’s game WARS became absurdly cheap and I tried it out. Again, it’s a simpler stripped down version of the Star Wars CCG and in my opinion played much better.
But the best thing was that while researching to find out what kind of dinosaur games had been made I discovered BoardGameGeek. Seeing the huge variety of game mechanics made my head spin. But it also helped me see how the wide variety of complexity levels often tied to the theme and subject mater. Another interesting thing is the concept of a “gateway”’ game. Something with simple rules that emphasizes fun above complexity. I bought Ticket to Ride and was amazed at how just a few simple rules could still generate a lot of decisions and provide some deeper strategy for the player.
So what to do? What exactly should I be going for? A heavy deep strategy game filled with rules on how the orientation of a T-Rex tooth needs to be compared to a Triceratops hit table chart and calculated against the number of ferns in the terrain hex while subtracting any Stegosaurs with their tail spike’s photon torpedoes loaded?
Or a fun filled gateway game where turning in sets of Hypsilophodons and Pachycephalosaurs lets you score points by building routes of eggs between volcanoes?
So next time I’ll go over the basic goals I came up with, …and also just how ridiculous a surf board can be!
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When paleontologists go searching for dinosaurs they know where to look, but they have no idea what they’ll find. When they do find fossils they’re frequently incomplete, partially eroded, probably distorted, and disarticulated. Sometimes they don’t even know what they have until they get cleaned up in a lab.
So after meeting my new nephew and heading home, I thought I had a good idea for a game. When in reality I just had a general idea of how to begin, not an actual game! It was an idea that was incomplete, partially eroded, probably distorted, and disarticulated. In short, I had no idea what I actually had.
Prototype #1
So I rush home, and pull out a bunch of white index cards and stat labeling them with various dinosaurs I think are cool. I start listing their abilities, and a point value, plus a cost to put them in play. Because I wanted to center the game around herds of dinosaurs I added a note on each one about whether they could be in a herd or not. (I even scribbled some drawings on them.)
Plus these are dinosaurs, the “terrible Lizards” right? So I made Action cards with things like chomping, stomping, leaping, tail smacking, and even an extremely powerful card called…”smelling!” (I have no idea what I was thinking.)
And so I sat down to “play”. Not with any rules of course, but just to get a feel for what it would be like. I thought, “This is going to be great!” …Except it wasn’t.
It seems silly looking back, but I didn’t have a place to play the dinosaurs. Where do they get played to? Where do they do all their chomping, munching, and smelling? So out came the index cards again and soon I had made swamps, mountains, rivers, and valleys full of ferns. These new territories I arranged into a row that would divide the two sides. Ok so now it’s time to play! ...Except it wasn’t.
What was the goal??? What are you supposed to do with dinosaurs? How do you score points? I decided that you would get points for creating herds, along with points for dinosaurs your predators killed. Ok, now I’m ready to play! …Except I wasn’t, again!
Now the question became “what is a herd?” I decided it would be multiple copies of the same dinosaur stacked together in a pile. They would get more powerful the more copies you had together. Now it’s play time! Except, you guessed it, it wasn’t.
Immediately I saw that herds didn’t work. Trying to consistently pull multiple copies of the same dinosaur out of a big deck of cards proved impossible unless I both increased the number of copies, and reduced the different kinds of dinosaurs available in the deck. Neither of which I wanted to do.
And that’s how it went. Each time I started trying to play a real game I ran into problems, or realized I had no mechanism to handle a situation. (And also what was up with that “smelling” card??? That had to go!) But over all this was still the right approach.
What I was doing right:
Just to reiterate, my point in doing this blog is to explore the creative process of designing a game. As of this writing I’m play-testing and tweaking Prototype #24. I’m not going to go through every single iteration of every single prototype and bore everyone to death! But I do want to illustrate what I think I did right.
First I chose a theme. Hopefully it’s something others would find interesting and exciting, but it’s vital that the designer feels strongly about it. You can see from the initial attempts that the process is dynamic and even frustrating. If you don’t have a passion for the subject you’re not going to stick with it. I will never for example design a game about Mammoths or Saber-toothed Tigers because, although I am one, I don’t like mammals.
Second, just work off of index cards or scraps of paper for a while. Scribble on them. Erase stuff. Move everything around. Everything I’ve described about the game so far did not survive the process. Not the herds, not the territories, or anything; it all changed eventually. So there is no point burning a ton of printer ink altering things over and over again until you’re far along in the design process.
Third, save everything. Have a notebook and jot down every idea and observation about the game you have. Do not rely on your memory; otherwise you will forget important stuff.
What I did wrong:
First, I went from index cards to trying to design the layout almost immediately! Now, let me clarify that a bit. I like to be artistic. So I found that the game design often flowed between what I could dream up, and what I could practically fit on a card. Sometimes I completely rejected ideas just because they didn’t look good. But if I was to start over, I wouldn’t even worry about it. Just get the game done, THEN start doing the layout design and the artwork.
Second, I couldn’t wait to do the artwork! So right away I painted my first card image. A Centrosaurus nasicornis.
And once I did this painting I wanted to do more, and I wanted mocked up cards to put them on. So I continually went back and forth between painting dinosaurs, designing the cards, and actually developing the game.
And third, another thing I did wrong was that unknowingly I had a lot of game baggage I needed to shed. But that’s a post for next time…
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I thought it might be interesting for some to get a glimpse of how the ‘game design’ process happened in my case. (This way everyone can see exactly how not to go about doing it.)
WHY DINOSAURS???
I love Dinosaurs. In fact I’m fairly fanatical about them. I’m the type of geek who frequents websites like http://svpow.wordpress.com/ to read about sauropod vertebra pneumaticity. I was obsessed with them even before Jurassic Park was written! My very tolerant wife has been drug all over the country visiting any museum that has a dinosaur exhibit, waiting patiently while I spend hours gazing at displays. (Truly an incredible woman!)
I also love to draw them and that is a major part of the appeal for me. My father is an artist, musician, and amateur astronomer. His job was in a lab, and when people asked me what he did for work it was kind of fun to reply: "He grows bacteria". So art and science always went together in my household. While he couldn’t teach me how to catch a football or fix a car, he did teach me more practical skills like how to paint and collect insect specimens.
What makes dinosaurs so unique to me is that while the science is fascinating, trying to reconstruct what they looked like is an art. It’s the best of both worlds. So the more I studied about dinosaurs the more I tried to depict them in their environment accurately according to the most recent discoveries. All we have are the bones and other trace fossils and it is amazing what paleontologists have been able to reveal about them. Yet for now no one can say what color they were, or how thick their neck muscles might have been, or even the posture of many of them, at least not with any certainty. So dinosaurs still captivate our imagination, wonderment, and awe. There is a lot of room for creativity when painting them, but all within a scientific framework.
Unfortunately my love of dinosaurs seemed only to be shared with individuals under the age of 8. So imagine my excitement when I later found a magazine for dinosaur enthusiasts like myself called ‘Prehistoric Times’: http://www.prehistorictimes.com/index.html They have an open invitation for art submissions and it was extremely thrilling to see some of my paintings published in PT. I wondered what else I could do with my artwork. (Hmmm... maybe a board game???)
INSPIRATION:
On 7/31/2002 my sister and her husband were expecting their first baby. We were all in the hospital waiting as this was the first grandchild in our family. Nothing on TV. The waiting room magazines were boring, (no prehistoric times to be seen). And after the first 6 hours our stories and jokes were getting old. And I mean really old. Naturally I started thinking about dinosaurs, and coupled with the situation of alleviating boredom I began imagining playing a game involving dinosaurs.
As I mulled over a game in my mind the first problem became very obvious. There are Meat Eaters and Plant Eaters, and if a game is about one versus the other, no one will want to be on the herbivore’s side because predators are way cooler! (Would you rather be a cow or a lion????) But...what if players had control of both? What if your goal was to build up your herd and protect it? While attacking your opponent’s herds? That idea seemed to immediately bloom into all kinds of others and I was suddenly talking and bouncing ideas off my brothers. At the time I was playing a lot of the Decipher Star Wars CCG, so doing this as a card game seemed perfect. Plus cards would be easy and cheap to make right? (Knowing what I know now: Hahhhahhha!!!! "Easy"...Hahhahhahahh,..."cheap",...HAHhhAHHAHhhaahh!!!!!)
Keep in mind that over 8 years ago there was no community of game designers, no boardgamegeek, and the industry was still dominated by collectable card games like ‘Magic’ and ‘Pokeman’. I had never heard of Essen, or any other ‘game’ convention for that matter. I didn’t own any tools either like Photoshop, or a digital drawing tablet. In short, I had no idea what I was getting into, or how exspensive creating a game could actualy be!
Later that day my sister gave birth to a beautiful baby boy, but something far more important had occurred. I gave birth to a beautiful idea that would later become Empire of the Dinosaurs!
…And I hope my sister never reads that last sentence.
NEXT TIME:
How all my original design ideas were a complete and total failure!
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