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aaron belmer
United States
St. Louis
Missouri
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My grandma used to say that she introduced me to my love of games while I was a little kid with Scrabble. We played tons of Scrabble at her farm in Bunker Hill, Illinois. She was amazed by how advanced and smart I was for my age, but really I bet just about every grandmother will say something similar about their grandchildren.
My Aunt Pat, on the other hand, claims that she introduced me to my love of games by taking me and my brother Joel to various video game arcades. Pac-Man, Frogger, Dig Dug – you name it, all I wanted was more quarters.
I remember being an eight-year-old kid at church, sketching mazes on the front and back of our bulletins. I'd make mazes like Gordy Lachance crafted stories. I would make them so tough and intricate that only a sheer maze GENIUS would ever find his way out of these labyrinthine paths and dead ends. I made hundreds of mazes. I think that was about the time that I fell in love with the creative design aspect of games.
Fast-forward many years: In the early 1990s I discovered what would be my passion for the next decade: Magic: The Gathering. I would visit friends who worked at a local movie theater – projectionists, managers, concession workers – and they'd put on the movies, then we'd retreat to the back room to play endless games of MTG. I took part in Friday Night Drafts and entered tournaments here and there.
And then I happened upon a certain game at Gen Con 2008: Last Night on Earth.
Um, WOW. Until that moment, I'd never been much into board gaming. Aside from the usual suspects (Monopoly, Axis & Allies, Stratego), I'd never been introduced to the world. I watched as Jason Hill demoed this unbelievably amazing game right before my eyes. Did I want to try it? Of course I wanted to try it! Zombies, modular boards, shotguns – it's like my eyes were suddenly wide open. Board gaming was actually...cool and amazing.
I bought both LNOE and A Touch of Evil, and we played them immediately. To this day LNOE is still one of my favorite and most influential games. I also started designing variants and scenerios for the game system, some of which are posted on BGG.
Over the next few years, I realized that while I treasure a good Euro, I mostly fancy myself as an Ameritrash – sorry, "Thematic" – sorta fellow. Give me theme and feeling over a clever mechanism any day. For my approach to game design, I usually preach the mood, feel, theme, idea, and story of a game first, and the mechanisms will develop themselves.
When I set out to create Sanitarium, I set strict rules for myself:
• I wanted a game that plays in 30 minutes or less – a horror "super filler" if you will. I wanted to do for the horror genre what games like China did for Euros.
• I wanted a horror theme. I love horror, I love zombies, I love monsters.
• I wanted to limit myself to the fewest bits possible. I wanted folks to be able to learn the game in five minutes and set up the game in less than two.
I knew that I wanted to make a game with cards and didn't want a board. I pictured a game in which the back of the cards were hallway spaces, and the front of the cards were...something. I cut out sixty or so rectangles out of notebook paper and lined them up in various ways, trying to figure out how to construct a basic network of hallways. A maze, if you will.
I knew I wanted my character to be able to travel on the back of the card, looking for...something. I considered round item counters to be placed face-down on the cards, but again, I wanted to minimize the number of objects used, so the front of the card would have to hold the information.
It was then that the basic premise of the game took form: There are thirteen items, all which enhance play and break the rules, and the first character to find his predetermined three "quest" items wins the game.
Sixty card deck. Two of each of the 13 items. Twenty-six items. Check. Need more stuff. Actions right. Stuff that does stuff. Tension, screw your neighbor, drama, conflict. The staples of Ameritrash. Check.
For pacing, I wanted to add cards that didn't do anything, but were simply a way to encourage free movement throughout the maze, so some cards weren't anything other than a dark hallway, essentially the same thing as the back of the card.
Also, I wanted to add rooms and in the end they serve two purposes. You have to end your last turn in a room once you find your three items. Also, rooms look cool and visually appealing. I wanted photos from actual sanitariums that had been closed over the years, something that would trigger a twinge of memory of what once was in the room, something dark and twisted.
I hadn't yet decided whether I wanted each room to be unique and do something (a la Betrayal at House on the Hill), or whether I wanted to keep the design simple, keep it quick and filler-ish. Ultimately, through playtesting, Kathleen Gardner (aka, funkdonut on BGG) suggested that a character should be able to jump from room to room. (Think Clue, with players moving from the kitchen to the study.) This improved the game, as it allowed greater freedom of movement and strategic avoidance of monsters, so I didn't need to do anything special with the rooms for now since they served a definite purpose. Future expansions and scenerios? Maybe.
In Sanitarium's original design, a player not only had to find his three items; he first had to determine what those actual items were. First half, deduction game; second half, search/area-movement race game. How did that work? So if I'd found the Candle, the Straightjacket, and the Rope (as you could have three items max), I could ask my neighbor (who could peek at my three "quest" items) whether I possessed any of those needed items. He would then tell me how many of the correct items I held, but not which ones. Deduction, then quest.
I thought it was a pretty nifty mechanism, but when I playtested it, the problem was apparent from the start. It tripled the length of the game. After an hour, some folks hadn't even guessed all three of their items, and the experience was overlong for what the game needed to be.
I eventually removed the deduction aspect and just dealt three starting "quest" items to each person. They could peek at those items, then had to search quickly for them; a race through the hallway maze of a creepy sanitarium sounded pretty cool.
Prototype of Sanitarium
The game also had monsters that each player could control, and they did very bad things as well.
I playtested the game many many many times. For the most part it had positive feedback. Players had a fun time racing through the game. Fun, check. Player interaction was high as they could steal items that opponents needed, play actions on one another, and move monsters toward other players. Player interaction, check.
But. But but but. There's always a big but.
But it was missing...something. Some tension. Something to make you really afraid to pick a card from the draw deck.
It was about that time that I discovered the game Pandemic, which the wife and I have now played quite a bit. In that game, with the draw of each card one was terrified of drawing an epidemic card. That was exactly the type of tension I was looking for, so I stood on the shoulders of designer Matt Leacock and incorporated elements of that tension. I'd already been thinking about bringing actual characters (met in the depths of the sanitarium) into the fold anyway, and this seemed a good way to incorporate that concept into the game.
While researching sanitariums, I had come across a former patient who painted creepy sketches of fellow patients. I'll leave names and pictures out for now as they didn't make it into the game, but I thought those sketches made cool art for testing and incorporated them into the game. Now when you met or drew the patients, they generally did "very bad things", much like the monsters. Hopefully players felt like the tension balance was just right.
However, the more I tested, the more I realized that incorporating mental patients into my game may not be the most – let's say, PC – thing to do, so the idea of "crazy characters" was shelved for the time being.
I still had the cards in place – full of theme and tension, brimming with awful and terrible things – but what could they be? It wasn't until I demoed the game for Kathleen Gardner (again!) and the gifted students in her game design class (how cool is that?!?) at Ladue Middle School in St. Louis, Missouri that some ideas sparked. We brainstormed about the idea of hallucinations, maybe like images from Stephen King's The Shining, maybe memories or ghosts from the past. Bloody brilliant.
So the "very bad things" that were once characters became scary hallucinations. Perfect. More playtesting, more playtesting, and after that, a ton more playtesting. Tension, check.
The feedback was positive, tweaks were made, and the game was finally finished. I knew I had something really good and wanted to take the next step toward getting published. I had no idea how to go about it, though, so my first stop was to visit a few experts of the industry. Dave and Kelly Wallace have successfully owned and operated The Fantasy Shop (my FLGS) for over twenty years now, so I made an appointment to stop by, pitch my game, and take any and all advice they had to offer. They were very generous with their time and kind enough to give me audience. One of their suggestions was to visit Origins Game Fair in Columbus, Ohio. They mentioned that a lot of game companies will view prototypes there, so it may be a good starting point.
Fast forward to Origins – I made a few appointments to show off my game. One company even took the game to playtest, but eventually passed on it. Origins was also a great experience because I got to discover the board game room, which is an absolutely amazing board gaming experience for anyone who gets a chance to attend. I've gone every year since and plan to take my daughter for the first time in 2012, hopefully the start of an annual tradition.
That trip also introduced me to one of my current favorite games, Innovation. I bought it on a whim, opened it up in the board game room, and started reading the instructions. Just then a dude came up to me and asked whether I needed help learning the game. I was like, um, sure random dude. He demoed the game, and we played a few rounds. It was a great game, I could tell already. He then started talking about what some of the mechanisms were that made him want to pick up the game. And that's how I met Chris Cieslik of Asmadi Games, a very cool guy who would later be publishing my game – but I'm jumping the story a bit.
At about the same time, the Rio Grande Games design contest was in full swing. I entered Sanitarium in the contest in the St. Louis division and was one of the two finalists in the area, but was eventually beaten by another great game. I was disappointed, yet optimistic that I just hadn't found the right home for the game.
Timothy Hunt (aka, Timotheous on BGG), the head judge for the local contest, agreed. He thought both of our games were very good and believed that (if we didn't win) a push in the right direction may be what our games needed. Timothy pushed me in the direction of Asmadi Games, and thanks to Timothy's recommendation, Chris agreed to playtest my game.
I sent him a copy, and the rest is history! The game launched on Kickstarter in early November 2011 and that campaign runs through mid-December 2011.
The fantastic artwork is by the amazing Dirk Tiede. This is his first game art, as his main focus is comic books, although I'm anticipating he sees a lot more interest in his work after this.
Thanks for reading all, and happy gaming!
Aaron Belmer
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Prototype of Sanitarium
), let me just say, the reality is nowhere near as cool as your game makes it look, or else I'd still be there!
