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The Making of Genji - Tales and Trivia
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Dear Fellow Geeks, I've just been putting the finishing touches on Genji, soon to be released from Z-Man (rules are currently downloadable here: http://boardgamegeek.com/file/info/31483). I thought I would collect a whole bunch of fun random trivia here in order to enlighten and entertain. Genji is a game based on the romances of Hikaru Genji, sometimes referred to as the "Shining Prince" because of the meaning of his given name (hikaru = "to shine"). While Genji was not a real person, many have surmised that he was based on a real individual (or individuals) known to the author, Murasaki Shikibu. There was, reportedly, even speculation about this at the time the book was being written and released chapter by chapter (in and around the period from 1000-1020CE). Genji takes the tack that the players are nobles off to prove that they are as gentle and romantic as the Shining Prince so that they can claim to be the real-life inspiration for The Tale of Genji. Genji has been the culmination of about a year of work and sleeplessness. What with a son, a wife, and a day job, I didn't have much time to pursue my hobby of game design. I chatted about design with my friends on the Board Game Designers' Forum and entered a few of the monthly challenges there. It was when I went on a trip to Japan to see the inlaws and outlaws that I finally had the time to get down to designing something real: my wife was going to stay on in Japan with her parents for a couple weeks along with my son*. The 9 hours on the plane alone was used to good effect, and by the time I touched down back in Sri Lanka I had an alpha ruleset. When my wife came home, I had a prototype ready for her. She was (quite appropriately) the very first alpha-tester for this game about Japanese poetry and romance... appropriate not only because she's my wife, but because I was actually looking to make something that we'd be able to play together. *I have now determined that one week is the maximum amount of time I can be away from my wife and son without exhibiting signs of total mental collapse - such as compulsive housecleaning and worrying if my son is near a road or sharp object... maybe... someplace.
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Posted On: 2008-04-01 12:42:56
Edited On: 2008-04-01 12:34:56
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Before anything else, however, I'd just like to say this is an auspicious year to publish Genji. The Tale of Genji is officially 1000 years old:
http://ca.reuters.com/article/oddlyEnoughNews/idCAT139768200...
And yet, in many ways, it still reads like a modern novel. The character development is intense, and Murasaki creates rather masterful continuity in the lives of all her characters without the benefit of a "find and replace" function!
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3 Comments []
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Posted On: 2008-03-22 02:34:23
Edited on: 2008-03-22 02:48:51
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I live in Sri Lanka, but I am an expatriate (kinda - ask me privately how that works) Canadian. As a Canadian - accustomed as I am to wide open spaces and the decided lack of openly-carried assault weapons - and a dad, I tend to spend a lot of time at home. Sri Lanka has very few wide open spaces in reach of Colombo, and has a lot of police checkpoints and occasional impromptu army checks. Sometimes, due to the traffic, it's better to just stay off the road. It's additionally difficult to explain standing in traffic for an hour (on what would normally be a 10-minute trip) to a youngster who has THE NEED FOR SPEED.
I needed some kind of activity that I could do at home, where I didn't have to worry about traffic (and the occasional roadside bomb). After discovering the BGDF (Board Game Designer's Forum http://www.bgdf.com/tiki-custom_home.php), I got more and more back into the board game design hobby I had so enjoyed as a youngster. |
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Posted On: 2008-03-25 07:16:00
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I didn't know what had happened to me. Sure, I had made one or two prototypes before, but this one was different. I wanted to work on it all the time. I worked like a man possessed. Clearly, it helped that my wife was away in Japan and I had nowhere to put my... err... how shall I say it - creative energies.
I began reading back over the BGDF website for information on prototyping cards, I made a few charts of what card distribution I wanted and looked around for indications of good deck sizes. I started painting a few illustrations and laying out the basic card designs in Flash.
Yes, Macromedia Flash 4.0
Believe it or not, the animating frames that you can work with in Flash allow you to flip from card to card as well as carry over design elements. The vector conversion is very good and I had a lot of the functionality of a good (though old) graphic manipulation program. The cards for Genji are still based on those first tender steps, and yes, they were developed entirely in Macromedia Flash 4. |
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0 Comments
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Posted On: 2008-01-13 02:03:19
Edited on: 2008-01-24 09:00:20
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Getting my wife to play the game was a rather interesting experience.
My wife thinks games are mostly for kids. I'm also a miniatures wargamer and this has somewhat heightened the degree of suspicion she has about my beloved games. She thinks the game is just a reason for me to gather with my like-minded friends and play the equivalent of dress-up with the little toy spaceships I buy and paint.
It is an excuse to play with the toys we could never purchase as youngsters, but that is an entirely grown-up activity! I mean, it costs lots of money, doesn't it? That makes it, by definition, the province of those with credit cards...
So, when I pulled out a huge double deck of cheap playing cards - each one with a painstakingly glued-on face to be used with Genji - she was a bit amused at my silly shenanigans... but she played. She played every time I alpha tested. Friends would come in and stay over with us for visits, and she'd play - always. I could tell she felt a little bit odd to begin with, but then she started getting into it, and getting more and more fiercely competitive.
I did marry her for a reason... |
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0 Comments
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Posted On: 2008-01-13 02:34:23
Edited on: 2008-02-16 12:54:39
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What happened next was a series of prototypes, tests, rules rewrites, and more tests and protoypes. The game started with a 9-card hand and no replenishing until the end of each round, through a 7-card hand down to a 6 and then 5-card hand with replenishing from the draw pile at the end of each turn. Symbols changed. Cards changed. Layouts evolved. I was blessed with a series of visitors to our house (and a chance to go home and see all my friends) in order to playtest the heck out of Genji. I took profuse notes and compiled them into a word file.
I was also taking the rules out for a spin with my friends on BGDF. I would copy and paste chatlogs wholesale and stick them into my playtest notes. The pages of notes and sketches and charts in my office threatened to take over. |
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Posted On: 2008-02-16 12:06:34
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So how was the game prototyped?
Well, generation one was two decks of ordinary playing cards with slips of paper individually glued to their fronts. I did each one, printing the cards out on the printer, cutting them out with scissors, and then gluing them to the front of each card with glue stick. At first, I started by taking sandpaper to the fronts of the cards to get the gloss off, but then I decided that was ludicrous and just glued right on the gloss - and damn the torpedoes. Strangely enough, not a single one came off.
Second generation was printed in the same way but glued in sheets to cardboard hanging file folders. I cut them out with scissors again, and they were quite serviceable.
Third generation I did while back in Canada, by going to a print shop and getting the card fronts and backs properly done up. I had access to a guillotine, so my cuts were nice and straight. I simply printed the fronts and backs on one piece of plain bond paper, laminated both sides, and then cut out the cards. That made a rigid enough, glossy card that shuffled very well. Things were starting to look (and play) real.
You can see pictures of the fourth generation prototype here:
http://www.bgdf.com/tiki-view_forum_thread.php?comments_pare...
Here's a shot in-play.
I'll talk more about it later in the list... |
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Posted On: 2008-03-02 07:08:24
Edited on: 2008-03-23 02:21:22
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From a usability perspective, things changed a lot from first prototype to final product.
First of all, there were two major design issues with the original prototype that had to be changed: the position of the icons and the presentation of the cards. A friend from BGDF insisted that the icons should be in the upper left so the cards can be properly fanned. That made sense. It was impossible to see all the icons on the cards in the first proto if the hand was fanned. The cards themselves I thought were originally quite simple: black on one side, white on the other. Easy to tell whether it is a top or a bottom verse, right? WRONG! This was, unfortunately, a grave mistake. People kept on mixing up top and bottom verses. I quickly went to a different design at the suggestion of one of the playtesters who also works as a graphic designer: change the shape of the text area to show which side is which.
Another change - this time to the rules - made the game far more simple: the removal of one of the elements from the princess cards. Originally, all princesses had an individual flower that could also be matched to given poems. This was founded on good intentions to base the princesses on the suits of the Hanafuda deck. This was removed as it added little to the game except work.
The final version of the Princess Cards is far more more like those of Hyakunin Isshu (100 Poems by 100 Poets) than in the original proto. In part, it's because "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." It Hyakunin Isshu has been around this long without substantial change, why gild the lily? It's also because the colours of the podia on which the princesses sit interfere with the symbols. The symbols now are far more clean and crisp set flanking the calligraphy on each Princess Card. |
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Posted On: 2008-03-02 10:22:00
Edited on: 2008-03-08 11:34:00
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It reminded me of nothing so much as Witch Hunter Robin. You just keep waiting and waiting for the good part to come and it never does.
I must say that I am really curious about the game though, moreso since I saw a rules question that asked about the "Cuckoldry bonus"...
I read it for a bookclub, and most people read the abridged version but a few of us said "screw that" and read the whole thing. While discussing it, we realized that we didn't really have anything more to say than the folks who read the abridged one.
As I said below though, the story of the game design and surrounding intrigues was awesome.