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Emmanuel Aquin
Canada
Mont-Saint-Hilaire
Quebec
And D-Day Dice, too!
I'm an "A"vatar.
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Dice have always hated me. As early as I can remember, those little cubes have mocked my futile attempts at getting lucky. From my early Monopoly games to Dungeons & Dragons, from The Settlers of Catan to Last Night on Earth, throwing dice always felt to me like a terrible duel between my hand and some unknown cosmic forces. Every good roll I obtain is greeted by gasps of surprise and relief, as if I had temporarily defeated an unseen enemy.
And yet, I love dice. They are magnificent little objects, feel great in your hand, and make the most satisfying noise when they hit the table. I have collected them for the longest time, in all shapes and sizes, so it was only a matter of time before I decided to explore the world of dice games. Call me a masochist.
Rolling My First Game
Not counting the Yahtzee games I played as a little boy, my first contact with a dice game was Roll Through the Ages. The quality of the components really got my attention, and from the first roll, I was sold – not to the game itself, which I found a bit lacking in tension and theme, but to the idea of having dice as the main component of a game.
I quickly sampled as many dice games as I could to understand what was out there. (Of the ones I tried, at the time I was most impressed by The d6 Shooters' theme and storytelling.) Of course, mitigating the luck factor became a priority: My game had to be winnable by people like me, the poor souls whom dice hate so much.
My problem was that I had never designed a board game before. My only experience as a designer was Airborne in my Pocket (coming soon to Kickstarter!), a World War II mod I did for Jeremiah Lee's excellent Zombie in my Pocket (also coming soon to Kickstarter!). So starting a new game from scratch was a daunting task. I had an idea about the Normandy landings, but didn't know where to go from there. So I grabbed a lot of dice to playtest my basic idea, which was "roll dice to stay alive". As luck would have it, I had just bought Zombies!!!, which came with red and blue dice. Since I already had a couple of white dice lying around from another game I just bought, I grabbed some red, white and blue dice to put myself in a "patriotic" mood. (Forget for a moment that I'm Canadian; rolling red and white dice wouldn't have the same impact.) D-Day Dice was born. Well, almost.
Humble beginnings
Red, White and Blue
I was all excited about trying out my very first game. I was all, "Hey, look at me, game designer at work!" But man, what a disaster! The Normandy landings never felt so boring and mechanical. While playing, my lack of experience as a designer was so obvious I wanted to cry. Desperate to make the game interesting, I improvised a new rule: If I roll a triple result on a red, white and blue die, I would get a cool bonus. That didn't help much. Once I was finished, I really thought I was done.
But that "red, white and blue" idea stayed with me. If only I were more clever, I was sure I could make it work. Lacking divine inspiration or experience, I did the next best thing: I playtested like hell.
Streamlining
My first version had only one resource: soldiers. I thought that it'd be cool to lose soldiers to get items buried on the beach, and lose soldiers to recruit specialists hidden behind obstacles, and so on. That was fun for about three seconds.
So I added more resources, like Courage, Stars and Tools. And slowly but surely, the game became playable. Somewhere along the way, it even began to be fun – roll Stars to recruit Specialists, Courage to Advance, Tools to find Items. There was only one bad result: Skulls, representing death, with Skulls cancelling other dice.
Since I didn't want the game to be too abstract, I quickly decided the action would take place on a "battle map" showing the beach itself. Each sector would have its own attributes, so in addition to managing your dice rolls, you'd have to decide where and when to move to maximize your chances of staying alive.
Once my hands were bleeding from throwing too many dice (or my girlfriend's hands, see here), I decided to upload my little game on BGG, for all to see (and critique). Throwing my baby to the lions would be the final test. If I did good with this, I thought, I had a chance of creating a good game, one day.
To say that the reception on BGG was awesome would be an understatement. I was overwhelmed by the positive feedback, the questions, and the general involvement of the community. That feeling gave me wings, and I entered D-Day Dice in two different design contests, one in France and one in Canada. I was lucky enough to become a finalist in both contests, which allowed me to meet other game designers and publishers. Plus, my game was critiqued by game professionals, so there was a lot of fascinating feedback. Tom Werneck (founder of the Spiel des Jahres) was part of the French jury, and he told me one thing that stayed with me: My game needed more interaction.
An Offer You Can't Refuse
As the design contests took place, I was approached by three publishers for D-Day Dice, which was great and stressful at the same time. I didn't want to disappoint anyone, and I was sure I was going to choose badly no matter what I did. Then a fourth publisher came along...
Enter Valley Games. They were Canadian like me – the other companies were French, American and Belgian – and wanted to not only publish the game, but a whole line of games based on D-Day Dice's mechanisms (the RWB system). How could I refuse?
The Little Box That Got Bigger
So I started working on the commercial version of D-Day Dice, taking into account all the feedback I had collected over the last year (from BGG users, jury members and other game publishers).
The interaction missing from the original game was now foremost on my mind. Now, you could get bonuses that helped other players instead of you, and other players could earn Awards that would help you, too. Somehow, everything fell into place. My game, which played too much like solitaire before, became a truly cooperative game. To stay alive, players would have to help each other while still having their own problems to solve. All the changes I included in the game were so natural I felt stupid for not including them before.
And then, something clicked in my head. Some kind of floodgates opened and a zillion expansion ideas came rushing to my head. What if you could play the German side? What if players could play real historical units, with unique specialists and unique bonuses? What if you had special missions to accomplish while playing? And what if you could play the landing crafts that bring your soldiers to the beach?
A Dice Game for the Unlucky
The principles of the game are not complicated: You roll dice each turn, obtaining resources (which accumulate from turn to turn). Every turn, you lose Soldiers to enemy fire. The goal is to climb the beach, moving from sector to sector, in order to reach the bunker at the top of the map. Sounds simple? It is, in a way.
The trick is to choose which dice to keep and which to re-roll. This is the soul of D-Day Dice and the hardest part to master. Me, I almost never lose a game (even though I'm not lucky). I seldom make great rolls, but I know how to transform a so-so roll into a good one (much like writing, where the re-writing part is actually the most important). Obtaining "Red, White & Blue" (RWB) triples is necessary to win the game, so players who are good at re-rolling have a clear advantage.
In this game, there are no bad dice results (except for Skulls), so you can favor different strategies. The one important resource is, of course, Soldiers, but there are many ways to obtain them. If you roll a lot of Stars, you'll recruit more Specialists, which will in turn help you gain more Soldiers and manipulate dice. If you roll a lot of Tools, you'll be able to find more Items, which will also help you gain Soldiers (and manipulate dice). Too much Courage? Not a problem: You can spend Courage to earn Awards, which will in turn give you plenty of resources (including Soldiers). The best strategy is to balance all your results: It is hard to win with only Specialists, impossible to win with only Items, and a great challenge if you only earn Awards. But a little bit of everything will get you in the bunker with Soldiers to spare.
As I said, this game is not very complicated.
Choices to Be Made
My publisher wanted me to focus on the base game, but I kept coming back with new expansion ideas. Every day, I wrote some new rules, created a few specialists and items, and toyed with new game concepts. Then Valley Games asked me to decide what was part of the base game and what wasn't. Hard decisions, to be sure, since I wanted to include everything!
But creation is always about choices, so I streamlined the game content and the rules, and finalized the base game. The rest would be expansions. You know, for the future. That's what I was told. One day, if sales are good, there would be expansions. One day.
Of course, I couldn't live with that. I wanted to be sure there would be expansions because otherwise I would try to sneak in a little more stuff in the base game. So I pleaded with Valley Games to publish the expansions. I begged. I cried. And then, I heard about Kickstarter.
A Difficult Start
Funding through Kickstarter was my ticket to expansionland! Valley was quite open to the idea, so we decided to push for expansions with the goal of printing everything at once (which is a great way to save on production costs). Supporters would get the base game and any expansion they want right now, months and even a year before the rest of the world, and I would have the satisfaction of knowing all my ideas were printed. I was in heaven.
That was before we discovered that Kickstarter is an American company, designed to help Americans. Remember the part where I said I was Canadian? Just as we were ready to launch the project, we started hitting snags. Bank accounts, credit cards & social security numbers: All those things became menaces as real and as dangerous to us as flying bullets, shelling and machine-gun fire.
It took a lot of work and a lot of determination to overcome the Kickstarter obstacles. That, and three and a half months.
Kickstarting... on Steroids!
So we finally launched our project on October 30th (timed with the BGG contest for D-Day Dice slated for October 31st). We were hoping that forty days would be enough to reach our goal...
...which we reached in 18 hours 40 minutes.
What happened? Don't ask me! It was like a tornado just hit us. Suddenly, pledges were coming in so fast we couldn't keep up with it. I spent the first day glued to my screen, pressing F5 ("refresh") every thirty seconds, hypnotized by the whole process, hardly believing my eyes.
Then we realized that we had no "overfunding" strategy. We were caught with our pants down! We had to find ways to thank our numerous supporters and to entice the rest to continue pledging. Luckily, I had a few cards up my sleeve (so to speak), so we quickly reacted by offering a few more game components. We then found, after a few intense brainstorming sessions, some cool stuff to give our supporters (which we'll announce in detail on the Kickstarter page once the details are cleared).
So here we are, a couple of weeks later. This Kickstarter project has been, and continues to be, a wonderful experience. I feel vindicated for all the hardships we had getting it off the ground, and I still can't believe our success. Words cannot express how grateful I am to the BGG community for the encouragement in bringing this game to the world.
I'm happy to say this is just the beginning: Many future expansions for the game have already been designed and playtested. (I have enough ideas to make it last a good, long while.) Also, more games using the "RWB" mechanism are on the way.
And all of this because of a bunch of dice and a simple idea: Roll dice to survive.
So come take a walk on the beach with us. Discover the secret charms of Normandy. And try not to die too fast.
Want to join in on all the fun? You still can, as the D-Day Dice Kickstarter campaign runs to December 9, 2011. With our overfunding rewards, the deal is getting better and better for supporters, old and new.
Emmanuel Aquin
GAME ARTISANS OF CANADA
The author is a card-carrying, maple-leaf-tatooed member of the GAC, the coolest and canuckest gang of game designers you'll ever meet. Our voice is getting heard more and more in the game world, with titles like Undermining, JAB: Realtime Boxing, Belfort, Haggis, Two by Two, Octopus' Garden and the upcoming FrankenDie and Midnight Men. Be afraid, be very afraid!
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Humble beginnings
GAME ARTISANS OF CANADA
