Normally I talk about TTRPGs on this blog but here’s a diversion on some other game design I do in making other kinds of tabletop games. This is something I’m working on now, a flip and write about learning geography. I chose Africa to start with, and I came up with a simple idea: you colour in certain countries and then have to work adjacent. That seemed like it would work, especially when I saw that the Democratic Republic of Congo bordered nine different countries. There were about 50 countries in Africa, and if you dealt out three cards from a deck, I did the maths to figure out how likely it would be to get one of those countries be one of the nine countries that border the DRC.

The easiest way to do this kind of probability is to consider the opposite: if none of the three cards fit, then the first card has to be not one of those cards, which means 41/50, the next has to also not be, which is 40/49, and the next also has to not be, or 39/48. You can even estimate this: 9/50 is about 20%, so you need three times for 80% to hit, which is (8x8x8)/(10x10x10) = 512/1000, so 51% of the time in those three cards there will be no cards that matched, which means 49% of the time there WILL be a card that matches. Not great, but it seemed a decent start. (You can see how good an estimate this is because the first number comes out to 54%, very close to 51%).

As Cole Werhle observes so well in this great video, game design is about going around a loop as often as you can, as fast as you can. So I found a map of Africa online and randomly generated entries from my spreadsheet (I use google sheets). This let me test the mechanic VERY quickly. As Werhle also points out, playtesting is best done with a very specific idea in mind. I was able to just test this one idea. And it didn’t really work. It was too likely to not get a country that matched your cards. So I had a new idea, which was that if you couldn’t get to a specific country, go to one that matched a category of country. I went off to wikipedia and grouped African countries by their population, when they joined the African Congress and the height of their highest mountain. Now I had two countries you could go to directly, and one “back up” card that was “go to this category”. I really like Welcome To – it seems to me to be the very best flip and write, so my original idea was each card would also show on their back one of four kinds of bonuses you could score, and so you’d have this choice of going to the two direct countries, or to the back up, and you might choose depending on the bonus. That felt like a decent mechanic. It was time to test it properly. I’m someone who rushes to get to physical templates because I think kinaesthetically – I solve problems better when I’m holding the cards in my hand.

I went to the shop and bought a $2 pack of 100 penny sleeves, a pack of playing cards and a bunch of different coloured sticky-notes. One thing I often do is do this stuff while watching TV or watching seminars for work. A few hours of write, stick, sleeve and I had my deck. I was worried the actual core mechanic still wouldn’t work at all but I ignored that worry and made the prototype anyway, because I knew there was only one way to tell if it worked and that was to make it. It used to frustrate me greatly to make 100 cards and watch something fail but I’ve learned to get faster at making the cards and learned to tolerate the failure, because learning those things helps me loop faster. And I was right to do so because as predicted, as soon as I had the cards in my hand, I saw that three cards was just too many. I went back to two, and that seemed to click.

Now all I needed was a rough map. I found something online that had the countries marked and was white, imported it into my free Canva account. I added some ideas about bonuses to make some countries worth going to for more points, and borrowed another Welcome To… idea of using your bonuses to increase how much you scored for each area. I did NO stop to figure out if my scoring ideas were balanced or even good. All I wanted to test was: is it an interesting choice to pick the exact country and get a bonus, or go with a category, and will you always be able to do one of those two?

At this point I was still thinking that something would force you to choose which bonus you got – a boat, a plane or an elephant (which meant you could increase your scoring for each section). Those letters are part of an idea of ticking off country names by starting letter. I couldn’t make the boxes look good and it’s just floating there but it was enough to test! Pretty does not matter. Amazingly, the mechanic DID work: it was an interesting to try to colour in adjacent countries and such. I also realised an easy way to add choice was to let you choose ANY bonus. I took that very basic version to my testing group and it actually goddamn worked. People felt it was an interesting and fun choice to pick which country to colour in. The scoring was totally broken but remember: I wasn’t testing that.

But since the scoring was broken, I had another go. I also made boats only able to go to one of the sides of Africa. I got rid of the postcards since they weren’t scoring enough and added “rest days”. Again, please note how ugly this is. Still, it was enough to put in front of another testing group.

Now I was worried because until this point I hadn’t dealt with my biggest problem: how to put the information about each country onto the map. Instead, I was handing everyone a table to use:

That worked but was inelegant. I knew the game wouldn’t really be fun if you had to use a table. I figured the only way it would work is if every country was about the same size and then we could colour them and pattern them. So I went to an artist I knew and asked him if he could draw a map that was mostly geographically accurate but each country was about the same size.

One of the goals of the game was to teach geography and this just didn’t look right. I suggested we do it it with colours and patterns. It didn’t look great either.

This is where collaboration helps because my lovely artist was like “I think I can do what you want with symbols”. See, I’m not good at visual stuff. Lots and lots of game designers are, but not me. Unfortunately, hiring artists costs money and four years ago I couldn’t afford this, but I scrimped and saved and I could say “I can pay you $50/hour”. (All up it was around $500 for what you see here. Which eight years ago was more money than I could dream of having. But I scrimped and saved and busted my ass with other things.)

The next step was of course, to get it playtested.

As you can see, the borders are really hard to see. We had to fix that – but I knew that before playtesting. Again, I didn’t STOP though. I just asked my playtesters to ignore that part and do their best, and try to concentrate on the icons. The icons were what we were testing. And the icons WORKED. So now we just had to make the sheet clearer. We also got some good feedback about scoring, but mostly, we were testing clarity. So we looped on that part.

Now we have a way to add everything up, and the boats are much clearer. I also made some changes with scoring, and moved the numbers of points for things off the map. That way I could change the numbers without paying my artist more. Likewise, I got my artist to change some of the scoring stuff as well because I’m not made of money. I tested a few thigns, then got all the changes together so he could do them in one go. Always try to save money!

Playtesters were very clear on one big thing about this version though: there should not be elephants where there are no elephants. Thematic integrity is a big deal! Someone also said that writing ACROSS Africa made them feel like colonisers, so I changed the name. I also figured that at some point I’d want to bring goals into the game. I didn’t know if the goals would work but I figured they probably would, so again to save money I asked my artist to just add some suitcase boxes on the map for goals to come.

Now it’s time to test the scoring again. Will the numbers on the map hold up? I probably should have turned them into empty circles so I could change them with cards. But for now, it will do. I also tidied up the cards so they now have the specific country on the front and the categories on the back, making them easier to read. But they don’t need to be any prettier yet, because they are clear and working. I’m saving up to make the cards nicer, while I also test the scoring. That’s going to take a while and some spreadsheet work, but it’s only NOW that it’s worth testing that, because again you try to test one thing at a time. And it’s also clear enough to enter the Geo-Facts challenge, where it is a semi-finalist!

And that’s how the sausage is made. Tiny steps, iterating fast, iterating often.