Gollywood

I "discovered" board games at the beginning of 2012 and started playing in a couple of local groups (Canberra, Australia).

Almost from the beginning, I thought of designing a new game.

After some abortive attempts at designing tile-laying games, I focussed on a pick-up-and-deliver game placed in space ("Star Truckies"). It progressed slowly and went through several rounds of testing. I intended to make a Kickstarter campaign and engaged a graphic designer to draw the box (it cost me a fortune!).

Then, early last year, I realised that I didn't actually like to play the game! I still own the sturtruckies.com domain name and the business name StarTruckies, but how could I possibly keep going with it?

In January last year I played a prototype version of "Unfair" at CanCon (Canberra's gaming convention) and fell in love with it. I realised that a similar game structure would be great in other domains, and decided to design a game with some mechanics similar to Unfair's but centred on producing films rather than amusement parks.

I have now been working on Gollywood (Golly Hollywood) for half a year and have progressed quite well. Some key aspects of the games are as follows:

You are a film producer and become rich by making films and releasing them to the public. But you have to compete with other producers in the cutthroat entertainment business.

You build a production tableau of several films, and each film consists of a series of cards that you arrange on horizontal lines like it is shown in the attached image.

It costs money to keep the production open (to pay for actors and staff), while closed productions earn box office money.

Other players can affect your open productions, but when you close a production you can no longer expand it.

As you can see from the attached image, one of the appealing features of the game is that it uses celebrity look-alike characters and names. For example, "Jonathon Frokes" looks like Star Trek's Jonathan Frakes, and the science expert looks like Albert Einstein. By using my own drawings, I don't need to use pictures and worry about the issue of copyright. The game must be good enough in its own right, but the novelty of playing with disguised celebrities could be a motivation for playing it for the first time.

I have developed a prototype and written a first draft of the rule book.

I will attend Essen Spiel next October and hope I will be able to show it in the designer area, to get feedback and perhaps attract some interest from potential publishers. Incidentally, I haven't found out how the game-designer area works. I assume that one needs to reserve a table, but haven't found any information about it. This is actually one of the reasons I am registering.