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.

Ideas do not exist by themselves. Stories do and whatever their core ideas, those can only exist when surrounded by contexts, means and goals. Weirdly, they can sometimes themselves be the context, the mean or the goal. Developing an idea means focusing on what you want it to become or how to integrate it to what it is, what you already know, or what you already have. What it is by itself means nothing.

Funny thing, some people sell themselves as “individuals who have ideas”. Have you ever found someone deprived of imagination? Yes, that doesn’t exist, and the funny paradox is that by contesting to everyone else the ability to have constructive day-dreams, the aforementioned exceptional thinkers automatically display a certain lack of it.

Anyway – “why are you here” was your question, yes?

First. Because you are very smart, clever and imaginative. You probably came here by mistake and so adding “lucky” to the long list of qualities already associated with your beautiful self is justified.

Second. This blog is about writing and board games as it says at the top. If it doesn’t, consider the writer for the bear he is, just coming out of hibernation, inexperienced in WordPress and anything social (but mainly WordPress). One precision though: this will not necessarily be writing about board games.

Ideas, we said. Let’s share some.

Here is one: write a book.
Here is two: build a board game.

Yes, as your magnificent eyes have read, those are ideas devious of any context or mean. Two simple examples of “why don’t I”. No story to sugar-coat them so they are, for now, simple goals. Worthless. Let’s add some contexts and see if yours match mine. Please repeat out loud, especially if you are in a public place and that one concerns you:

“I want to write a book because I got a bloody embryonic idea of a book years ago and it’s still here so I might never get rid of it if I don’t write it down. And too bad if it’s bad: I just want it out.”

Spiteful self-critic is my curse so I will probably never complete a book. I don’t mind the work but I end up trashing everything I write (how do the others do it?).

Please state out loud the following one if it’s closer to your muse:

“I want to build a board game because I got a bloody embryonic idea of a board game years ago and it’s still here so I might never get rid of it if I don’t build it out. And too bad if it’s bad: I just want it out.”

According to some reviewers and critics of the board games world, you need to be a board game designer to design a board game. You must be born that way. Damn it. I fail again despite my best intentions. More over, you need others to confirm the validity of a design and I am surrounded by isolation so I have very few potential testers in my area (how do the others do it?).

Alas. Pearl of the World, I am afraid if you repeated one of these statements, you are mistakenly imagining yourself unworthy. Be strong and tall in your head and so shall you be for the others. You are already such for me. What are you for yourself?

If I bring no comfort remember to seek the more clairvoyant writers and helpful board game designers ready to share their own journey… they will help more than me. I am, after all, only a encouraging voice in your ear, a soft pat on your back, a sweaty hand on your knee and a probable slap in my face.

Now let’s review. What do we lack? A mean, of course! And thank you for reminding me, Ô Blinding Flame of the Galaxy.

So, here is three: build board games as a mean to write stories.

A clever idea. So smart that I still remember when it emerged in my mind because of two improbable reasons: it was a Monday and someone else was saying it at the time.

So there: this blog aims to document the effort of writing and building board games (in this order) and tie them together if such thing is possible. Other areas will be explored as they relate to my peregrinations on my self-inflicted endeavor. They are pell-mell: comparisons of anything board games (reviewers, games, web sites, podcasts, etc) and my discoveries in crowdfunding (methods and resources).

(Yes using the anglicism of the french word pêle-mêle was not necessary when listing only two items but it was a way to tell you something).

So shall we start?

If you are already gone, Drop of Rain from Water-less Horizons… Bah, well, alright then. I get it. My blog-writing skills hide a desire not to look pedantic and it’s easier to write here when I add some non-sense. After all, writing is, as Terry Pratchett wrote once: “Bugger”. Or maybe he said: “Writing is the most fun you can have by yourself”. And so do I intend to do and you are welcome to stay and share your own thoughts, efforts and progresses.

Here we go.