Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop. Stopped

Once I had created a game that I felt really good about in snakes and ladders and horseshoes and hand-grenades…I stopped.

For me, at that time, it wasn’t about “making” a game, it was about “designing” a game. Honestly, the REALLY fun thing for me at the time was just figuring out how to make a board game that worked. Just making something that wasn’t broken out of the box was the whole thing.

So for a little while, I decided that the fun thing to do was just to “design”. I designed a space travelling board builder. I designed a Stranger Things themed game. My son took notice and since we’re basically the exact same person, he decided that he wanted to design a game. So we did.

My son was a huge fan of a boy who almost died at the time, so we started by building The Battle for Hogwarts (a name that already exists in the game world). It worked out pretty well. It was a cooperative game where you went around the board and worked with friends to defeat some of your favourite Harry Potter villains.

Then, after 156 straight games of Monopoly, I remembered Gabe’s other piece of advice for would-be designers.

“What if you built an expansion for a game that already exists.”