Trauma Work.

Let’s get things real.

Throughout my life I have been failing to create games. Each failure was separated from the next by a hiatus of several years. Each of these designs spawned from a story. Save one. The very first one. I still cry when I remember the context of its release as well as its first review.

My inspiration led me to create a masterpiece revision of Stratego. No story, just Stratego: reduce the randomness, simplify the type of units, allow for deeper strategic analysis, divide the play time by two and replace the childish art by Monet-like illustrations. The critic quickly put it in his folder (a backpack) for review later and he diligently completed it by throwing the game in a bin that very evening. He didn’t understand what it was, why he had received it and he wasn’t so much into games anyway.

Call that a friend, you? I don’t.

Still. A very important reviewer looked at my work and decided No. Taken his knee-jerk reaction for the only one I will get for my creations, I did nothing in pursuing this line of work for years. Never again! Today, we start the work of unraveling trauma.

New Rule: Do not let an experience become a reference.

Easy, huh? So now that we trashed this reviewer’s work down the bin, what do we do?
As you know already, Peaceful Purple Horizon, the problem with every Grand Openings, is really all the following-up, very many and less than extraordinary, regular openings.

Years of habit of not completing a design cannot be erased by deciding to not-not complete the next one. We have a goal but how to get the motivation to go to the end?
Harsh self-critic, procrastination, lack of motivation… I am afraid to lose hope again at the first hurdle: a strange smile from a play-tester, a magisterially tangled rule, a misspelled name, a missing component, required sleep. We need something that pushes us or pulls us towards completing that goal, ô Pebble From The Sun.

I know at least one area of life where we all tend to start something and complete what we start, no matter what, and that’s the professional life. And the professional life is defined by deadlines. Something to keep us moving throughout. Always. And where do we find deadlines in board games? Yup. Contests.

Benefits:

• Get the current game out of your brain
• Learn to boost your creativity and see if you can adapt to a theme
• Meet a very supportive community
• Discuss with fellow co-designers
• Receive soft and comprehensive judgement on what you deliver
• Money
• Feedback and progression

6 out of 7 is good. After days looking online, I found five contests coming up. In closest deadline order:

1 – BoardGameGeek 9-cards – 31st March
2 – Boardgame Workshop 2019 – 21st April
3 – BoardGameGeek 54-cards – 31st May
4 – GameCrafter Elegance – 17th June
5 – GameCrafter Social deduction – 12th August

Five contests. Five months. Nothing in a lifetime, Bicentennial Alpha. Shall we shall take the oath to try our best to complete one design for each of those five contests? Yes? At last, give me your Pinky!

The first contest is soon, very soon, so we are disengaged from completing a short-story for it. Best case, if you must have a background: find inspiration from a favorite author.

9-cards. 9 characters. Amber seems like the way to go for me.

Have you decided which direction your game will go?

OK. Have a look. Think. I’ll be back in few days. I promise.

I just need to find tutorials about how the BGG site works first.