First Playtest

Over the last month or so, I’ve been working on card designs, ideas, and mechanics for Food on Paper. Last week I had finally reached a state where I was ready to print out a bunch of the components. Over the weekend I was able to get Food on Paper to the table with some friends and my wife! This was very exciting for me as it was my first time ever conducting a playtest for a board game.

There was a lot to take in, and I received some great feedback. We didn’t actually finish the game, but I didn’t feel like we needed to - I have loads to process already. This is some of the common feedback I received:

• The game starts too slow. It takes quite a few turns before anyone has enough ingredients or coins to feel like they’re making any sort of meaningful decisions.

• Players end up with lots of ingredients that they can’t use. There are times where available ingredients just don’t match up with the ones needed for recipes, Player are then stuck with a bunch of dead cards in their hands.

• Objectives feel cool, but take too long to reach. We played for quite a bit an we only completed a few objectives each. The idea was that you’d be able to get all 5 objectives out in maybe 30-45 min.

• Kitchen upgrades felt hard to obtain. The benefits offered by the kitchen upgrades felt good, it was just hard to pay for one.

• Overall, it just took to long to get moving. This seemed to be the general consensus. There’s potential, but it just takes too long to get moving.

There’s a lot here for me to digest, but I already feel like I’ve got a bunch of ideas flowing that could potentially address each of these issues! I’ll follow up on changes I make in the coming weeks.

Food on Paper

I’ve always loved playing board games, but recently, they have started to garner more and more of my attention. My wife might even tell you that it’s becoming a problem (and she’s right - we are running out of space to store the collection). Working as a video game designer for last nine years has taught me a lot, and video games continue to be a huge passion of mine. But, I’m excited to see how much, or how well, my learnings from video game design actually translate to board game design. So what is this game?

Food on Paper (working title) is card drafting/engine building game in which players collect ingredients from the shared market in order to complete recipes. Completed recipes will earn coins that can be used to purchase kitchen upgrades. As players complete recipes and upgrade their kitchens they will be competing to complete “star” objectives. The first player to build a 5 star restaurant will be the winner!

This game borrows from other established games with well known mechanics and I’ve tried to keep it relatively simple. My goal is to finish this game, and as it is my first board game design, I think keeping the scope and complexity reigned in a bit will work to my advantage. I do have some ideas for a few mechanics that could be layered in (like a food fight!) if it feels lacking. But, I’m going to start simple, and build from there.

I’ll give a quick breakdown of each of the systems I have in place thus far, and a preview of what the components are looking like!

NOTE: I’ve designed all of these cards using AI art. This is meant to be temporary and will be replaced at a later time.

The Market

On a player’s turn, one of the actions they can take is to “go to market”. When a player does this, they will choose 2 ingredients from the market. These can be drawn from the five faceup market cards, or drawn blind from the top of the market deck. There is a “wild” ingredient (I’m calling all spice) that players are only allowed to draw one if drawn from the faceup market.

Recipes

After amassing some ingredients, players will be able to use those ingredients to complete recipes! A completed recipe will payout a certain amount of coins. The more ingredients used to complete a recipe, the greater the payout. Ingredients are dispersed equally (well, very nearly) across all recipes - so any one ingredient shouldn’t be more valuable than the next - all spice excluded.

Kitchen Upgrades

Players will be able to use the coins they’ve collected to purchase upgrades for their kitchen. These upgrades will allow players to draft more cards from the market, make more money for completed recipes, allow for substitutions in recipes, or more!

Star Objectives

Players will have a shared pool of objectives. If at any time during a player’s turn, they’ve satisfied an objective, they will place one of their 5 stars on the objective. The first player to place all of their stars will be declared the winner!

As Good a Time as Any

Well, it’s been a while since I’ve done this. The last blog post I created was in July of 2015 - and I’m pretty sure I was forced to do so as part of my classes at the time… But, perhaps as I’ve aged, I’ve also “grown up” a little. I’ve decided there’s merit to keeping a blog as a designer - if for nothing more than my own personal reference.

I’m not sure exactly where all of this will go, or what the content here will be like long term. But, for starters, I’ll be reporting on a game that I’m designing by myself. This is board game, which is something entirely new for me! I’ve already been working on this for several weeks, so the next few posts will be an effort to catch up to where I am currently.