Wow, it's been a long journey. Going on three years now.

I've been digging through some of my old backup files for Manaforge, and it occurred to me that the game I have now looks almost nothing like what I started off with. Aside from the basic concept (roll dice to get resources, spend resources to get cards), it feels like just about everything in the game has gotten changed in some way.

My first iteration of the game looked something like this:

Several versions later, the cards looked more like this. The concept of card 'colors' was introduced. The dots had been given shapes to help differentiate them. (Even back then, making the game color-blind friendly was a consideration.) The area in the bottom-left was an attempt to make certain cards only usable with specific numbers of players. Also the concept of card powers was introduced, giving the players a second source of points as well as additional outlets for any extra dots they may have.

The next couple of versions were very busy. Two more concepts were added. 

The first new addition was tapping the cards. In playing the previous versions, players would often get confused about whether or not they had used certain resources or card abilities already. So in with the 'tap' concept, made famous by the Magic card game. Used a card? Turn it sideways, that way you know you can't use it again until next turn.

The second addition was upgrading the cards. Many cards now have levels, with only the top-most level unlocked at first. In order to unlock additional levels, the player had to pay the cost to add 'Charge' counters to the card. Each 'battery' added to the card opened up a new level, granting access to stronger abilities. But adding a Charge taps the card for that turn, so it's an either-or proposition. A couple of cards also went the opposite way, starting with Charges but expending a Charge each time the card is used. When the card runs out of Charges, it becomes useless.

Fast-forward a few versions. At this point, I had started calling the game "Facets" and giving it a sort of a business feel. The players were professionals in different occupations, competing to see who is the most successful at their job.
The card names changed to reflect the color of each occupation. (Red: construction, Yellow: banking, Green: gambling, Blue: teaching)

'Charges' became 'Upgrades'. Cards didn't automatically have point values anymore (though many cards still explicitly give points). The resource cards became stronger, and the point-generation cards became more important.

Also around this time, I switched from using GIMP to making my cards with a script-based utility called nanDECK. Fantastic tool for anyone with any coding experience. (Not quite as much for those with more of an artist bent, but the tool has made some recent improvements for those with that mindset as well.)

(Placeholder artwork. I don't own the illustrations shown above.)

Around this time, I noted that the business theme of the game wasn't sticking well. Since the rules were stable enough, I decided to do a retheme, changing to what I know best: high fantasy. Resources to mana, cards to spells, points to prestige, card colors to elements, coins to crystals. This revision was code named "Conjurers". Even if the theme itself wasn't very well thought out, just having something to bind the game together helped tremendously. And, of course, having some cool pictures on the cards helped to get attention, even if I couldn't keep the art. Mechanically, this is the same game as before, but it's amazing what a fresh coat of paint can do. :)

And the rest, as they say, is history. :)

January, 2013

Now that I think about it, I really have been playing board games my whole life, more or less. My dad introduced me to all kinda of games when I was little. Chess, checkers, backgammon, cribbage, 5 card draw poker, Klondike solitaire, blackjack, Parcheesi, Monopoly, Risk, Mille Bornes, Scrabble, Yahtzee...  and probably a dozen more I'm not thinking of. He often liked to complain (in a good way) that as I got older, he had a harder time winning against me.

Growing up, my friends introduced me to more new games. Magic: the Gathering, Talisman, Nuclear War, Illuminati, HeroQuest, Magic Realms, Hacker, Give Me the Brain!, The Great Dalmuti, Cosmic Encounter, and so on.

So I guess it makes sense that I'd end up building my own someday.

I lost interest in board games temporarily when I moved away to go to college. But a few years ago, some friends got me back into it. And I realized what I had been missing. The games had gotten a lot more varied, a lot more complex, and a lot higher quality since I had been 'away'. New ways to play, new challenges. I was hooked again.

I was just coming down off of a wonderfully long holiday vacation. (Not often I get two weeks off in a row.)  I had spent a good chunk of that time doing chores around the house, stuff that I'd been putting off for too long. Some of that work went to cleaning out old junk. One piece of old stuff in particular was a notebook from one of my grade school classes. On the inside cover, I noticed a doodle I had drawn long ago, a four square pattern of red-yellow-green-blue with various symbols in each square. I didn't think much of it at the time, just put it away and kept cleaning.

It wasn't until a couple of week later that the inspiration hit me. And I mean the word "hit" pseudo-literally. Not that an actual object collided with me, but that's about what it felt like; there was an audible 'thump' as my own personal muse decided to slap me on the back of the head and say "make this, stupid". I had been playing a lot of the board game Seasons then, so the idea that came to me was similar to that, though different in many respects. And that idea wanted out. Felt like my brain was going to explode with all the possibilities; I had to get the idea fixed in some sort of medium before it decided to dig its way out of my head and run off on its own.

What followed was a flurry of prototype component purchasing. Note card paper. Label paper. Circle punches. Plastic chips. Colored markers. Card sleeves. And dice, lots of dice. Numbered dice. Blank dice. Colored dice. Six sided, eight sided, ten sided.

My first card prototypes were made using GIMP. Printed, cut out with scissors, sleeved with old game cards. Simple things, really; large colored dots in the middle (benefit), small colored dots at the top (cost), and text at the top with really imaginative names like 'red' and 'double red'.

My first dice were blanks with tiny rectangular sticky labels with colored dots drawn on them. Each player started with a pool of 6 six-sided dice, and chose four to roll at the beginning of their turn. Kind of Yahtzee style, where you had a number of 'rerolls' before you were stuck with what you rolled. A player used the rolled dots to 'buy' one or more cards, and cards went onto the player's board to give more dots on future turns. A player could also 'upgrade' the dice, exchanging a six-sided for an eight-sided, or an eight-sided for ten-sided; the 'extra' sides on the dice had special bonus powers.

The cards were arranged on a 'treadmill'. Old, unpurchased cards got cycled off one end while new cards came in on the other. The cards all had point values on them; simply add up your cards at the end of the game to see who won.

I managed to get some friends to play this first prototype. The game was clunky, no question. Expensive cards would appear at the beginning of the game, when nobody could buy them. Some cards were worthless, others too strong. Some of the dice powers were worthless. (One die had an additional reroll power; I lost count of the number of times someone would reroll and get the same side again.)

But even in those initial playtests, the spark was there. Somewhere, buried underneath all of the confusion, was a tiny kernel of fun. That people wanted to play again (after lots of fixes, of course), said that the game had potential.

Fix. Test. Fix. Test. Fix. Test.

Amidst the fixes, I determined that the game needed a theme. Looking for inspiration, I remembered that old school notebook. The red square had a depiction of a flexed arm (muscle). The yellow one had a lightning bolt (power). Green had a four-leaf clover (luck). Blue had a book (knowledge). I juggled those concepts around until I came up with the four 'currencies' (work, money, influence, knowledge), applied a business-ish theme to the game, gave names to the cards, and gave each player a 'character' that corresponded to a color.

And Facets was born. :)