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[Editor's note: Uwe Rosenberg doesn't use BGG much, but he does write about his creations, so publisher Korea Boardgames is posting this diary on his behalf. —WEM]
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Polyominoes are created by connecting squares together — not neatly from left to right, but crisscross as long as they touch edge to edge. With 3/4/5/6 squares, you can construct 2/5/12/35 polyominoes, and this sequence continues further: 108, 369, 1285... Somehow, mathematicians around the world want to stay busy.
I was surprised by how mathematical everything related to polyominoes is to read about. It involves rotations and reflections. When you invent games with polyominoes, you bring them to life. You notice which parts can be nicely puzzled together and which ones give you trouble...and you notice which parts are especially enjoyable to twist and turn. My favorite piece is the 2x3 rectangle in which the third column has shifted down by one position.
Through a series of games, I've gained a better sense of polyominoes. I kept the squares for the polyominoes and drilled round holes into various squares, which significantly increased the number of different pieces. The holes should trigger something when placed on specific squares. This resulted in the games Indian Summer and Spring Meadow. I've made the polyominoes more variable by allowing the dismantling of a partial square at certain ends. For pen-and-paper games, I've introduced polyominoes that are not directly connected to each other. Of course, something like this works only when you draw out the polyominoes. This led to the creation of the games Patchwork Doodle and Second Chance.
Even these insights would be worth mathematical classification. However, the mathematician (probably a man) would likely prefer to count how many polyominoes have a hole instead of a square...:strip_icc()/pic7731331.jpg)
Continuing in my exploration, I have also diagonally cut individual squares. This created entirely new pieces that resemble the famous Tangram puzzle in terms of shapes. As in Patchwork Doodle, your goal is to complete as large of a rectangular area as possible, round by round, without any gaps. (You can use small triangles (half squares) to fill in any inaccuracies.) Each player is provided with the same pieces, and the game evolves differently for each player due to varied starting formations. This game will soon be available as Tangram City, specifically at the Korea Boardgames booth (2-C148) at SPIEL '23.
Thematically, we decided to turn this puzzle into a city-building game. The city's mothers and fathers should design their city in a balanced way, distributing both sides of the tiles evenly on their landscape board – an additional challenge to keep players engaged even in the tenth game.:strip_icc()/pic7735719.jpg)
Meanwhile, I've also developed two games in which isosceles triangles are adjacent instead of being formed into squares. There isn't a name for such formations – and mathematical considerations are completely absent, at least as far as I can find. Perhaps one of these games will appear someday, and perhaps it will serve as a basis for scientific examination by some mathematician. Counting holes works wonderfully here as well.
Naturally, there are also composite hexagonal tiles, but each hexagonal tile consists of six isosceles triangles – essentially, it's just a special case of the "polytriangelinos" I've just described. I'll take the liberty to call them that.
Yours sincerely,
Uwe Rosenberg
To submit news, a designer diary, outrageous rumors, or other material, contact us at news@boardgamegeek.com.
Archive for Korea Boardgames
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Sun Sep 17, 2023 7:00 am
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[Editor's note: Korea Boardgames' Leon Scheuber has translated and submitted this designer diary on behalf of game author THEKI. —WEM]
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World Changers, which I designed, is a card game for 1-4 players released by Korea Boardgames in 2021. This game has a very simple rule of repeatedly picking one card (or passing) while competing for the highest score of your acquired cards, but the interaction of the card effects can create unpredictable developments. The game is more complex than it looks at first.
World Changers is a game about gathering great historical persons from roughly four thousand years ago during the origins of civilizations to the present age and forming the best team to make humans prosper again on another planet. However, the game had a long eight-year history before it was completed. Here I will introduce this history.
In 2013, I used to have a lot of text chat conversations with my friends. At that time, I was thinking of simple games and ideas that could be played in a short time only via text chat. I was able to roll the dice on the text chat and make secret choices through a third party, but naturally it was not possible to prepare images like in Tabletop Simulator, to express the position or the front and back of the card, or to use a randomizer like a deck of cards. As a result, all the games we were playing were perfect information games and lacked replayability, but that was enough to entertain me and my friends.
One day, I was very interested in a rule that was included in a game brought in by a friend. In that game you generate the effect written on a card when you acquire the selected card, but if you acquire another card through the effect of the card, that second card's effect will not be activated. This rule prevents the interaction of cards from becoming too complicated, but it also means that you can ignore the disadvantageous effect of a card that might say something like "Instead of being powerful, a demerit effect occurs at the time of acquisition".
The next moment, various ideas came to my mind. I felt that this rule was even more widespread, and I was convinced that the game could be replayed and actually commercialized, so I decided to work on the redesign with the permission of my friend.:strip_icc()/pic6253974.jpg)
The cards that started it all
The most important thing I wanted to emphasize was the interaction. To achieve that I first decided on a card with a standard score. Having one "standard card" — the Citizen, 3 VP — with no effect made it easier for me to design and for players to estimate whether they can get three or more points in one turn. Next, I made a "powerful card" — the Spy, 5 VP — with a very high score, but with the side effect of giving one of the player's own cards to an opponent when the card was obtained.
I also created a "mediator" card — the Dancer, -1 VP — with the great effect of getting an additional card from the display when acquiring it. If you pass the "standard card" to an opponent due to the effect of the "powerful card", your opponent's score cannot improve by more than three points. However, if you get the "powerful card" with the effect of the "mediator" card, the effect of the "powerful card" will not be triggered according to the game rules. (The effect of a card obtained by an effect of an other card will not be activated.) This means you don't need to give away one of your own cards to an opponent and therefore are able to get more than three points. Or if you pass the "mediator" card to an opponent due to the effect of the "powerful card", you get rid of the negative point of the former and obtain the high score of the latter.
To possibly protect you from the effect of the "powerful card", I created a "guard" — the Bouncer, 4 VP — which has no effect when acquired, but which keeps others from giving you cards via the effect of other cards, such as the negative cards you may receive from your opponent as in the above example.
In this way, I designed the cards to connect the interactions. I ended up making 32 cards, but most of them were designed to have positive or negative interactions with at least six or more cards. In this game, six cards are randomly selected for use for each player, and as a result, I succeeded in creating a game with an unpredictable extent but simple general rules.:strip_icc()/pic6253975.jpg)
Draftwerk as it was sold at Tokyo Game Market
In 2014, I released a game called Draftwerk at the Tokyo Game Market. I was able to sell more than 250 sets at two Game Market conventions and through consignment sales to board game shops in Japan. This was the prototype of today's World Changers.
In early 2020, I received an email from Leon of Korea Boardgames to republish the game. The most significant change is the presentation. The game was created under the guidance of mechanisms, so I couldn't come up with a presentation that I was happy with. Draftwerk had 32 unique cards of professional categories that you often see in the fantasy world, but I was dissatisfied with the fact that players would not understand why they are collecting these people. However, given the great idea of "gathering historical greats to form the best team", Leon dug deeper into this backstory and suggested the name "World Changers". I was interested in great historical figures because of the influence of Civilization, so I enjoyed working on World Changers.:strip_icc()/pic6219130.jpg)
Many other improvements from Draftwerk, such as redesigning cards, changing rules, adding solo rules, etc., make World Changers a very nice game. As for the components, as a result of Leon's efforts, a history booklet containing explanations of the great personalities is included, as well as beautiful new artwork and chips to improve playability. By all means, I would like you to read this booklet and play the game while imagining the scenes where great people from various eras are all involved.
THEKI
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[Editor's note: This is a translated designer diary from Jonathan Lee, the author of Mine Deeper, who is not active on BGG, with KBG editor Leon Scheuber handling the translation and publication. —WEM]
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"Plinkplunkplinkplunkplinkplunk ... the sound of gems falling!"
It's an honor to introduce you to Mine Deeper, a game full of tension and suspense. My name is Jonathan Lee, the designer of this game. I am currently working as a computer programmer in Korea. I have two sons (six and four years old) and a daughter (six months). As they are growing up, they naturally grow up seeing the board games on our bookshelf, and now they're playing board games that fit their age as a hobby. In fact, my older son is as good as I am in winning Ticket to Ride or Carcassonne, so they're helping me as very good (and unpaid) board game testers.
For me, it's okay to play kids games once or twice in a while. The problem, however, is that children aren't satisfied with playing a game only one or two times, so I was thinking about what kind of family board games could be played by a very young child, yet that an adult could still enjoy, and I came up with the idea for "Push Push" (which would later become Mine Deeper).
The Thrill of Seeing Boulders Falling
I like Indiana Jones a lot, especially that famous scene when Dr. Jones has a boulder rolling behind him and he is trying to escape the cave. The thrill of watching the hero being chased by a dangerous boulder is fascinating, and you can feel a similar thrill in Mine Deeper: It is the thrill of making sure my gems will be safe when my opponent pushes one square of our shared wall from the other side.:strip_icc()/pic4955559.png)
Idea notes drawn on the mobile phone before making the prototype
When the idea of Mine Deeper developed in my head, I imagined the main component being a giant wall. Place the wall between the players, then place the marbles on each side. The rules are basically determined by the components:
1. Choose a part of the wall.
2. Push it.
3. Check the color of the dropped marble.
It takes less than a minute to explain, and actually the rules are simple enough to understand without having to listen to an explanation at all. From the start, the game was about pushing one part of a wall to make a marble fall, and I thought that was already a lot of fun. If the other person pushed the wall once again from the other side, there was a memory element added as a bonus as you had to remember which part of the wall you already pushed.
Push Push, or the Alpha Version
The first fun part of Mine Deeper is hiding the gems. The player has a set number of spaces in which to hide their gems. It's easy to think of the treasure hunt game that I had fun with when I was young. Playing treasure hunt was always on my mind, and I was thinking: "How much fun would it be if I were the one to hide the treasure when it was so much fun to find them?"
As I got older, there weren't many opportunities for me to hide treasures, but in Mine Deeper, I can set the location of the gems that my opponent have to find each game.:strip_icc()/pic4941764.jpg)
Alpha version, with holes drilled to speed up the 3D printing
The alpha version was made with a 4x5 grid, and there was no mining theme yet. The players were divided into red and blue colors, and each received 14 white marbles, five of their colored marbles (red and blue), and one rainbow-colored marble. If you dropped all the marbles of the opponent's color, you won the game.
The alpha version was designed so that my six- and four-year-old children could play together, without the help of an adult. It's a simple game in which you have to push the right part of the wall to drop your opponent's marbles. It seems like you're playing with 100% luck, but it actually takes a little bit of psychological warfare, such as when you place all five gems in a row or something like that.
And of course there were also the rainbow marbles: When the rainbow-colored marble falls, you can place the already fallen marbles back onto the wall. Rainbow marbles create variables in the game.
My kids enjoyed the alpha version very much — until my older son complained that he was smarter and didn't understand why he had lost to his younger brother. The older kid then asked me whether I could change the game so that it was not decided by luck only.
The final version of Mine Deeper comes with a refined version of the rules, but if you're playing with very young children, you might want to try the alpha version of the rules.
Minesweeper, or the Beta Version
If you've already played Mine Deeper, or if you've checked the game information here, then you might have thought, "What? This sounds kind of similar to Minesweeper." Yes! That's right. If you don't know Minesweeper, I'm sure you are quite a bit younger than I am...
I was thinking about how to satisfy my older son's request, and I thought, "Let's use white marbles without any function, but give a hint about the marbles of the other player with other colored marbles." When I developed this idea I noticed that the rule was quite similar to the classic video game Minesweeper::strip_icc()/pic4943146.jpg)
1. Yellow marbles must have one player marble adjacent to them.
2. Black marbles must have two player marble adjacent to them.
3. Black and yellow marbles cannot give hints to multiple player marbles.
These simple rules completed the beta version, but the difficulty of the whole game went up. The older child understood the rules, but his younger brother found it difficult to understand them. Of course, the game had also become more strategic.
Unlike the alpha version, which was mostly luck, I was able to play with more deduction about the location of the marbles of my opponent. When I tested the beta version, I thought it was a game that I could suggest to a publisher, so I sent out the prototype to Korea Boardgames and got a positive response.Prototype Creation:strip_icc()/pic4941763.png)
Modules in beta version 2.0manufactured for playtesting
The tools that I usually use to develop my board games are paper, knives, scissors, pens, and so on. I don't think other board game designers are much different.
The prototype for Mine Deeper was created wholly using 3D printing. Of course I could have made it out of paper boxes or other materials, but Mine Deeper was a game with a lot of the same components — the boxes that make up the wall — so I thought it would be a good idea to make it with 3D printing because then each component would be exactly the same size. That said, making it was tough.
The alpha version was created using simple 3D dotting tools, but the beta version was commissioned to be modeled, improving the deficiencies of the alpha version.
I have experienced a number of unexpected situations while creating and testing the different prototypes. In many cases, I just didn't understand the nature of 3D printing well. For example, the walls couldn't move because they were too tight, then when I thinned down the walls to save material costs, the walls broke and the boxes moved left and right.
However, all in all, it's a very satisfying result to finally get it right, though it's time-consuming and expensive. If you're building a board game prototype, I'd like to let you know that 3D printing can be an option.
Mine Deeper
I know that publishers usually spend a lot of time trying to make the designer's ideas into a finished product. As for Mine Deeper, because the basic rules were simple and the prototype was clear, it wasn't likely to take long to bring the game to publication. Even so, the publisher suggested a number of modifications and supplements to improve the game:
1. Including set-up cards for young players who find it difficult to set up the wall by themselves.
2. Increasing the wall size from 4x5 to 5x5.
3. Adding a player board as a memory aid for dropped gems.
These are the three biggest improvements, while there's also been a lot of changes in the details. Since then, we've continued to try to improve the game's maturity through open playtesting and refining with lots of feedback.:strip_icc()/pic4941751.jpg)
Final version with handy set-up cards and a tray in which the stones can fall
We put a lot of time and effort in Mine Deeper, and I sincerely hope you will enjoy playing it.
Jonathan Lee
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