Do Gamers Dream....?

Whew! It’s done!
For the last 3 weeks I have been getting 4 of my best games ready for playtesting. I have spent the last 5 days solidly printing out and laminating endless sheets of coloured card, then cutting out the bits and pieces I have so carefully crafted on them. Over 300 cards: more than 450 individual pieces – and that doesn’t even include the gameboards and cheat-sheets.

I really hope it’s worth it.

My name is Mike, and I am a gamer. When I was 12 years old, I read a little book called ‘Discovering Toy Soldiers’, all about wargames, and I was hooked. But I was designing games even before then...
The first game I remember designing was a Monopoly clone called ‘Colliery’, where instead of hotels, you built pit-mines and gained money every time you went past them. I was 10. I’ve been designing games ever since.

Then one day it dawned on me that people not only wanted to play my games, but were asking when I would publish one of them. And so the dream began.
I have set myself a year. One year in which to refine my 4 best designs and get them to a point where I can submit them to publishers and see how the dice roll. I have no illusions – if I can sell one game I’ll be happy: if don’t lose too much money trying, that would be nice.
But I’ve got to do this. I’m in my 40s, and I’ve been dreaming of this for most of my life. So now is the time. My wife and friends laughingly say that most people’s mid-life crisis involves fast cars and even faster women: ‘Only Mike’s,’ they say ‘would involve games.’ They have no idea how right they are.

So here I am. In a couple of hours, 6 gamers I know are coming round for a weekend of intensive playtesting. At the same time, a gaming friend in America has got another group to blind playtest the games over there. A few of them have played some of these games before. For most of them, they are completely new. I am going to set the packet in front of them, sit back and watch as they get on with it. Then I’m going to put on a big mental crash helmet and brace myself to get hit round the head with all the things I’ve done wrong.

I can handle it. In my other life, I’m a TV producer. I make history programmes for a living. You’ve probably even seen some of them: ‘A History of Britain’ and ‘Ancient Megastructures’ – I did them! So I’m used to people telling me in excruciating detail all the things they don’t like about my work – that’s what the editing process is all about.

The 4 games I have chosen to develop are:
BREAD & CIRCUSES: A card game of power-politics in the dying days of the Roman Republic, in which Sulla, Marius, Pompey & Caesar vie to control the Empire of Rome.
EVOLUTION: A strategy game of world domination spanning 600 million years, on a map that is constantly changing.
RUS: The rise of Russia from the Viking Rus to the Russian Revolution in 12 turns.
KINGDOMS OF THE SUN: A ruthless game of resource management in the Mayan and Aztec cultures of Mexico. Players compete to build the largest temple, but the larger the temple the more of your population you have to sacrifice to maintain it.

On my good days, I remind myself that I’m only doing this because somebody somewhere liked these games so much they asked me what I planned to do with them. But I’m terrified that the play-testers will hate them. What if I’m wrong? What if I can’t design a decent game after all. Is this all some great vanity project that’s about to come crashing down around my ears? I hope not. If this goes well, I’ve lined up another blind playtesting group of games players who don’t even know me in America. I intend to take what I’ve learned from this session and apply it to the prototypes I send over there.

With any luck, by the time I’ve finished I may actually end up with a game that somebody wants to buy.
I am nowhere near the exalted heights that InvisibleJon has reached. I’m only just beginning. But here’s hoping that it’s one hell of a ride!
M<