[Everything Ever] really is the game I’ve been playing my whole life. I know a lot of people play a similar kind of game, but I have been completely obsessed with it forever. It’s my favorite game of all time and the game I’ve always wanted to make.
I made Everything Ever because I get bored waiting for things. And ever since I was a kid, I had to wait for things: for the food to get there at a restaurant, to finally get to the Great Smoky Mountains (or wherever) on a road trip, to get to the front of the queue for the rollercoaster, I was always waiting around with my friends and family, just looking at our hands, sitting there with our butts in our pants.
So we’d play this game. Somebody would say a category (“Movies with a monkey in them” or “Bands with a food in their name”) and we’d go around the group naming those things. Sometimes we’d buzz in, like EHNNNH! (this is supposed to be buzzer sound): “Blind Melon!” or BZZZT (does that seem more like one?): “The Lion King!” or sometimes we’d just go around the group.
And we’d laugh and laugh and the hours would zip by as you pulled that obscure potato chip flavor or song about a city, or you’d try to squeak in “Deep Purple, and I’ll tell you why: purple is a flavor and flavor is a food” or “Monkeys, Monkeys, Trains & Automobiles.”
But like most things, my dumb friends and I were bad at it. We weren’t bad at naming the things, we were bad at coming up with the categories. We’d do like “Movies about Ghostbusting” or “People on Mount Rushmore” or “Songs about finding out if somebody else likes pina coladas” and the lists wouldn’t end up being very long.
And then we had the best idea: What if somebody else came up with fun categories for us? And then nobody did... and so I didn’t think about this until like 20 years later.
"I love it when games take the kinds of things you do for fun anyway and give them structure and rules and props."
Here’s the part where it becomes Everything Ever. Everything Ever is the kind of game I like because I love it when games take the kinds of things you do for fun anyway and give them structure and rules and props. Like, putting things in a box that gives you the materials to create moments. Moments of joy, moments of interaction, moments of hilarity, and moments of surprise. Moments you tell stories about later. Moments that can only happen when you’re in the moment.
This list-making game was exactly that. I can’t tell you how many incredible moments I had playing this game. Because it lets you show off what you know without having to know too much. It was about thinking things up without having to think too hard. It was about movies and TV and food and music and books and art and sports and the world and people and literally everything ever.
"It was going to be called Every Tom Cruise Movie Ever Made."
And I had the perfect name for it. It was going to be called Every Tom Cruise Movie Ever Made. Because that was the kind of list you’d do! Cocktail, The Last Samurai, Risky Business, Minority Report, Interview with the Vampire, and Vanilla Sky (is vanilla a food?). Tom Cruise is fun to think about and so are his movies. The game would be about making all those other lists but we’d call it Every Tom Cruise Movie Ever Made as an example of the kind of list you’d make.
People were quick to point out the limitations of this title. “Nathan, people will think this game is just about Tom Cruise movies. It’d be like if you opened a store called Scissors, Scissors, Scissors and it didn’t only sell scissors.”
It’s not exactly like that, but I guess I get your point, fictional person I made up.
I put the title on hold for the time being and made a bunch of category cards. And I wanted the category cards to all be good. To be mostly stuff people already knew and that you wouldn’t need to have a lot of specialized knowledge about. No trivia, just saying the names of the things.
The criteria for categories:
"Danielle Deley is a super-talented artist, and she did all this amazing art"
So I came up with 469 category cards and we thought they were all fun. And my friend Danielle Deley is a super-talented artist, and she did all this amazing art for the cards in her distinctive style.
Ok, what else. We added these judge cards, that you could use when people were giving iffy answers. THESE HELPED OUT A TON. Like, sometimes people would give answers that were technically correct, but they were annoying. The judge cards let you nudge an ill-intentioned player, or call them out when things got out of hand. And we were watching Law & Order when we had the idea for them, so we used authentic TV-judge language on them.
We printed up all these cards and kept playing, trying to squeeze the most fun we could out of them. And we quickly found out how much more fun it was to have to think of things in two different categories at the same time.
NOW we had a game!
Quick, name a Song with the Word “Time” in It and a Kind of Bean.
Name a Captain and a Kind of Furniture.
Name a Candy Bar and a Beatles Song.
“…Baby One More Time and chickpea!”
“Captain Kirk and nightstand!”
“Oh Henry and Hey Jude!”
THIS THING JUST GOT TWICE AS FUN.
And as we kept playtesting (I mean, really just playing), we thought there was no way to make this THREE TIMES AS FUN, so we didn’t even try until we realized that you could name one thing that’s in both categories.
“Name a Pirate and a character with a color in their name.”
“Name a movie that’s set in the future and a country in South America.”
“Name a summer camp movie and a ball.”
“Name a scientist and a kind of car.”
“Name a breakfast cereal and a magazine”
“Blackbeard!”
“Brazil!”
“Meatballs!”
“Tesla!”
“Life!”
THE POSSIBILITIES ARE SORT OF LIMITLESS, IN A WAY, IF YOU THINK ABOUT IT.
"...the killjoys in the group made us change the name from Every Tom Cruise Movie Ever Made..."
So, by this time it was called Everything Ever (the killjoys in the group made us change the name from Every Tom Cruise Movie Ever Made so it wouldn’t be “confusing” or “deceptive” or “too long for a name” or “not even really what the game is” or “potential lawsuit from Tom Cruise, who is almost definitely a kind and understanding person but might have an issue with having his name associated with a thing he has zero association with.” And a couple of these reasons are good ones, I guess.
At this point in the designer diary, I’m really glad people mostly just look at the pictures and don’t really read them. Because I had this other idea that didn’t go anywhere. I wrote—get a load of this—fake movie quotes to put on every card. They didn’t contribute anything to the game, had nothing to do with how you’d play it, were deliberately confusing, and weren’t really specifically related to the category on the card. About these fake movie quotes, people said “we’re taking those off, right?” And at this point in the process, the people saying that were the publisher.
"It’s a lighter-than-air party game!"
I’m kind of all over the place with the timeline here, but at this point, the game was going to be published by Floodgate Games and they had a ton of good ideas that made this game even better. And some would argue, more of a game.
And they loved Danielle Deley's art, so they got her on board to do all the art for the whole dang game, with unique illustrations on every single card. That’s why it looks so good!
And they helped add some ways to change the categories more frequently throughout the game. You win the game by taking the fewest cards. So if you don’t know an answer, just take the card and change the category! Or change the category with a card from your hand and press your luck on taking a big stack of cards later! This was fun and added a little bit more strategy to the thing.
We didn’t want to give this game a ton of rules. It’s a lighter-than-air party game! It’s why we call it the “party game you’ve been preparing for your whole life.” Because it’s all stuff you already know, just by living in the world for however many years.
But I hope you can see that everything we did put into this game was to make it as fun as it possibly could be. That’s all it is. A game that’s supposed to be fun. A game that’s kind of about everything (not just Tom Cruise movies, although that is still one of the cards). A game for everybody. A game you can play anywhere (just grab a stack of cards for a road trip or whatever). A game about everything ever.
Sounds cool? Get Everything Ever here!
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Releasing today at Gen Con is Everything Ever - The Party Game You’ve Been Preparing For Your Whole Life! We’re so excited about this new game and we know you're gonna love it! We've been sneaking out little bits of information about this one and we can't wait to talk about it more. And what is even better is that you can order Everything Ever right now!
You can learn how to play Everything Ever, in about 10 second. It’s a social party game where players are challenged to name an item listed on each of the two cards in play. These cards range in category topics from A to Z like Every Tom Cruise Movie, or Every Fish, or something from one of the 250 different categories included the box! With a limited number of cards played per game it will be a while before you run out of new cards to see. If you can’t think of something for one of the cards, you’ll have to take the card as a penalty. The player with the fewest penalty cards at the end of the game is the winner. Sounds simple right?
To get out of the situation where you just can’t think of another type of apple, or a country in Africa, you have options. You can take the card as described above, or you can cover the card you're stuck on with one from your hand (just make sure you know something for that one though). Each player is dealt a hand of three category cards at the beginning of the game. So maybe you think you know College Mascots, or Sesame Street characters better than the other players, swap it out and stay in the game. Be careful though, you have a limited number of times you can use this safety maneuver before you’ll need to try to bluff your way through the round by convincing people that the Arctic Warbler is totally a real bird!
The other players have ways to either let you get away with your borderline answers, or to call you out if they think your out of order! If you can’t come up with an answer in about 10 seconds or your answer doesn’t cut it with the other players at the table you have to take the card, or cards as a penalty! Each time a player replaces a category with a card from their hand, the penalty for that stack of cards increases, and another category card is added to the two in play. Making the game just a little bit tougher.
Once a player takes a penalty card, or cards, a new category is replaced from the top of the Draw Deck. The Draw Deck is set up at the beginning of the game with 3 cards per player, so in a 6 player game there will be 18 cards in the Draw Deck. This is the game’s clock. Once the Draw Deck is empty the player with the fewest penalty cards is the winner!
But wait! There’s more!
Think you’re clever? If you can come up with a single answer that satisfies both of the cards in play you get one of two optional bonuses. You can discard one of your penalty cards. A powerful move. Or, you can draw a new card to your hand increasing your chances of changing the categories, and reducing the Draw Deck bringing the game one card closer to completion.
That’s Everything Ever! Well, about this game anyway. Everything Ever is available right now to order! We hope to see you all playing it at your next game night, at a convention, or out at the pub!
Your gaming time and budget are valuable to you, so we do everything we can to hold our games to a demanding level of quality. Paramount among these factors are the memorable experiences they create. We’re confident these titles will be a great fit in our extended catalog - offering a high quality 2-player gaming experience, emergent storytelling, quick turns with meaningful choices, and great strategic depth while being easy to learn.
The well-defined boundaries of board games have always been so central to their attraction. A cardboard box filled with clear rules, discrete turns, incremental costs and gains, min-ing, max-ing, and so on… inevitably, I want to test these limits, and real-time games have always seemed like an area with so much promise! I’ve played just about every one of them I could find, each one falling short of the dream of satisfyingly pushing the limits of timing in board games.
In late 2020, We signed up for the Pitch Project, a short-lived but amazing pandemic-era event connecting designers and publishers virtually, with high hopes that the pedigree of the project runners (Sen-foong Lim and Jay Cormier) would stir up some magic. We reviewed, we ranked, we received pitches, and several games stood out; but none more than a minimalist-style sell sheet of textless cards and sand timers about flying paper airplanes. I immediately needed to try it, and Kevin Hamano (the designer) was quick to respond.
Print-and-play file hand-off quickly led to a signed publishing deal. I could tell this game was something special. Simple, yes… but special in that simplicity. I got to work on development, cutting away the “cruise” mechanism where you could set a sand timer on its side, reworking the theme (unlike paper airplanes, kites have strings), added the “grand finale” where players can’t flip the “wild” timer toward the end of the game to get the excitement ramping, and added three different challenge cards to increase the difficulty a groups get good at flying kites together.
Having long wanted to work with industry legend Beth Sobel on illustration, she was the perfect fit to capture both the serenity and tension of flying a kite. We decided to have all the single-color cards be traditional kites, and the double-color cards be represented by various creatures to give the look of the game a bit more spirit. The vibrant orange kite on the bright blue sky for the cover immediately captures the excitement and dynamism of a windy day of kite-flying.
We’re thrilled by the community response to Floodgate’s foray into real-time games and love watching the joy (and excitement) that Kites brings to the table. It’s been a blast so far, and we’ll certainly continue to explore everything this genre has to offer… keep on keeping your eyes to the sky for what’s next.
Ben Harkins
Developer (Kites)
Recipe by Danielle Schneider of @BoardGameBakes
Looking for a delicious and homemade gift to give to your board gaming friends? Or are you looking to spice up Santa's visit this year? Even if you're just looking to satisfy your sweet tooth, these sugar cookies are a quick and simple recipe that highlight the beautiful dice from Sagrada.
Makes about 24 Dice Cookies.
Here are the ingredients you'll need for the cookies and the homemade icing!
Sugar cookies
(You can add 1-2 tsp of your favorite extract to give it a fun twist!)
Royal Icing
Directions
For the Cookies:
For the Icing:
Get Decorating!
I, hope this helps bring some board game whimsey to your holidays this year! If you want to see a video on how to make these cookies and a lot more edible board game creations, find my YouTube channel, Board Game Bakes! Happy Holidays!
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Here's a bit more from Charlie Mackin (co-designer) on the learning goals Décorum sets out to achieve:
"Décorum requires cognitive flexibility, perspective taking, and compromise to play, and mechanically encourages developing these skills. When players are given their requirements for fulfillment, they immediately begin planning. They will naturally envision what the board needs to look like to win and which moves they need to make to get it there. As the game progresses, they will be forced to change that vision many times. The mental model of their end state must remain flexible. Their partner will often make moves designed to directly contradict their envisioned end state. A successful player will learn to take on new information from their partner, either from a rule share or by watching their partner's moves, and find a new end state to work towards."
Learn more about Décorum - A Passive Agressive Game of Co-habitation
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Gen Con 2022 will be here before we know it! We're bringing all new games and an all new booth design to this year's show, so if you're headed to the Gen Con we'd love to see you at BOOTH #439!
If you're not on your way to Indianapolis for "The greatest four days in gaming." fear not! These will all be at your local game stores this August.
Sagrada: Glory releases as the third of the Great Façade series of expansions to Sagrada! Like the two expansions that game before (Passion & Life) Glory is a modular expansion introducing new options to test your artisanal skills!
All-new Strife Dice are available in every draft pool with placement restrictions. Pioneer Objectives reward the first to achieve their goals. The Flourish module encourages specific and unique dice placement. Mix and match these to fit your mood whenever you play Sagrada!
Kites is an exciting release for us! Our first real-time game puts 2 to 6 players to the task of having a lovely day at the park flying kites. Nobody wants the day to be ruined by letting any of the kites crash right? Work together to keep all the kites in the air until you've played through the whole deck of cards!
Take turns playing cards, flipping the matching sand timers, and coordinating with other players to ensure none of the sand timers run out. If a timer runs out, a kite has crashed! Kites is an exciting and fast-paced game that you can learn to play in less than a minute! Once you’ve mastered the standard game, additional challenge cards add seamlessly to the experience. We know people are going to love this one!
Late one night, in a spreadsheet-induced stupor, game designer and Floodgate owner Ben Harkins' vision began to blur. As he stepped away from his computer and slipped on an empty Keto power bar wrapper… rolling down the stairs he crashed, headfirst, into his game shelves.
The next morning he awoke to find his hands neatly placed within two of the fallen game boxes. The combination was so elegant. So obvious. So wrong, but so… write! Sagrahtzee was born!
This innovative, groundbreaking installment to the roll & write genre of parody games comes to you fully playable via a free print-and-play! (the team couldn't bear dealing with another production cycle) It's easy to learn and will take a lifetime to master (or at least what will feel like a lifetime). All you need to play the completely free game is a printer, paper, ink, a computer, a copy of Sagrada, and 6 colored pencils! (Or Crayons, we won't judge)
Print and Play Sagrahtzee Now!
Simply add two of each dice color from Sagrada to the dice bag and you're ready to roll! and write. or color. You know what we mean...
What's that? Does the whole family want to play? Well of course they do! Just print out sheets for everyone. Or keep your secret love of randomness to yourself and play solo, hidden away on the bathroom floor with the door shut; we'll never tell your game group about that time you rated LCR a 9.5 on BGG.
*legal stuff: This is a parody game provided for free as a joke for the April Fools holiday. Floodgate Games, LLC is not associated with or sponsored by Hasbro, Inc. or the "Yahtzee" brand.
Décorum is played in a series of scenarios. In each scenario, the players’ home will start with certain decorations, accouterments, and paint colors in each room of the house. Whether the scenario puts the players in the roles of new roommates, a couple with different aesthetics, or a family with many different points of view, the goal is the same: decorate the home so everyone is happy. Will you figure out how to compromise and still get what your personal objectives call for, or is it time to move out? There’s always a solution, even if it doesn’t feel that way.
On your turn, you’ll make a single change to the house: add, remove, or swap out an item in a room, and of course, repaint the walls. The items, wall hangings, lamps, and curios. The changes you make work toward meeting your secret conditions, such as “There must not be any retro objects in the living room”, while hopefully working out for your partners.
After making your change, the other players can make a comment. However, it being a passive-aggressive game, they can never share exactly how they feel. Sticking to statements like “I love it!”, “I hate it!”, or “I’m fine with it.” (of course, never sharing why they feel that way), these hints are all you have to go on to find a compromise. By paying attention to each player’s actions and reactions to your decorating choices you’ll begin to get an idea of what your housemates’ objectives are, hopefully leading to a harmonious household.
Designed by Charlie Mackin, Harry Mackin, and Drew Tenenbaum, and featuring a bright, modern-classic art style by Michael Mateyko / Komboh Creative, Décorum provides plenty of cooperative puzzles to solve together! Followed up with a mobile app for an infinite stream of new scenarios, Décorum is sure to outlast that hideous wallpaper in your kitchen.
]]>Come check out what we're up to!
Vivid Memories is a token drafting game about building connections in your mind to better remember your favorite childhood moments. Critically acclaimed and referred to as a "Brain Burner", Vivid Memories is available at your local game store and the deluxe version is available direct from us! Doesn't that playmat look great?
We were thrilled to acquire this incredible line of games and make Fog of Love and its expansions available under the Floodgate Games catalog. This is a game experience like no other, a relationship simulator that lets you play out a romantic comedy as a board game!
Fog of Love: Love on Lockdown is an all new expansion exploring the unique situation of being unable to go out and how relationships cope when there is nothing really to do. We've got a lot more content planned for these games. So, if you're new to this game definitly give it a look; and if you're a longtime fan of Fog of Love, the best is yet to come!
Coming Soon! Décorum is a game of passive aggressive cohabitation. A fully cooperative experience for 2 to 4 players. In each scenario, players are given specific objectives on how they would like the shared home to be decorated. However, each player cannot say what their objectives are and the puzzle isn't solved until each player has satisfied all of their objectives. Can you find a way to help the other players achieve their goals as well as your own?
We're incredibly excited for this one to come out in the next month or so. Sign up to our newsletter to be notified when pre-orders open and keep your eyes posted for reviews and playthroughs from content creators coming out soon!
This year is going to be a banner year for Sagrada fans! Coming out around May or June, the third Great Facades expansion, Glory will be released! Glory will complete the first phase of Sagrada expansions that already include Passion, Life, and the 5 & 6 Player Expansion.
If you're planning to attend Gen Con 2022, you may be among the first people to get your hands on the long awaited Sagrada Legacy. So get your colored pencils ready for a unique Sagrada experience and stay posted to our social media channels and our newsletter for more info as it comes out!
Thanks for visiting. We'll see you at the table!
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For 2 to 4 players, Décorum is a cooperative game where players work together to decorate a house. The tricky part is figuring out how to achieve your own secret goals while compromising with the other player(s) who are each attempting to satisfy their own home décor requirements.
Décorum is a scenario-based game. In each scenario, the players’ home will start with certain decorations, accouterments, and paint colors in each room of the house. Whether the scenario puts the players in the roles of new roommates, a couple with different aesthetics, or a family with many different points of view the goal is the same: decorate the home in a manner where everyone is happy. Will you be able to figure out the best way to compromise and still get what your personal objectives call for? Or is it time to move out?
Designed by Charlie Mackin, Harry Mackin, and Drew Tenenbaum, and featuring a brightly colored yet minimalistic art style by Komboh Creative, Décorum comes with 30 unique scenarios in the core game box providing plenty of cooperative puzzles to solve together! The introductory scenarios will get you playing in just a few minutes, but don’t let it fool you, each scenario provides new challenges to explore and even some new content to unlock!
“This game is so much fun - collaboratively solving the puzzle - and we're excited to share it with you. We have tons planned for new scenarios and are even working on app integration for players to access to an infinite stream of new content. .” – Ben Harkins (Floodgate Games owner)
On each player’s turn, they can add an item to a room in the house, remove an item, change the wall color of a room, or swap out one item for another. The standard items are modern, antique, retro, or unusual versions of Wall Hangings, Lamps, and Curios (which you might know better as knick-knacks, tchotchkes, or bric-a-brac). When a player decides to place an item, the other player(s) are prompted to give feedback, but are limited to what they can say: “I don’t like it.”, “I love it!”, or “I’m fine with it.”, but never sharing why they feel that way. By paying attention to each player’s actions and reactions to your decorating choices you’ll begin to get an idea of what your housemates’ objectives are.
As the game progresses, you’ll reach a round limit where you can have a “heart-to-heart” or a “house meeting” in which each player can finally share one of their objectives directly with the other players. If this happens, hopefully, you’ve been paying attention to their other wishes because if the game reaches the final round without each player being satisfied with how the house is looking, the scenario ends in a disharmonious defeat.
But, if you’re able to pay attention to how the other player is reacting to your choices and what decorating options they are choosing, you can come together in a happy home! After each scenario, you’ll tally up your score to see how you did, and if you’re ready for your own home décor show.
“I love how players throw themselves into the roles in each scenario, really playing the specific characters as they try to solve the scenario.” – Ian Birdsall, Floodgate Games Marketing Manager
Décorum is coming to your favorite local game store in January 2022. Check out the BGG page for more information and join the conversation in the forums. Décorum will be shown at AwSHUX, Essen Spiel, and PAX Unplugged if you’re able to attend and give the game a try.
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Fog of Love, a two-player romantic comedy as a board game that has players exploring love and relationships through interesting and quirky scenarios , fitting right in as a game that creates everlasting experiences!
Originally published by Hush Hush Projects to critical acclaim, Fog of Love has grown to include three content expansions, It Will Never Last, Paranormal Romance, and Trouble with The In-Laws. Each of these expansions adds new content for players to experience.
“I’ve been utterly fascinated with Fog of Love since it’s Kickstarter project and beyond -- it’s an honor to be able to bring this incredibly unique game to your table.” - Ben Harkins, Owner
Floodgate Games is ready to take Fog of Love to the next level with even more expansions and stories to tell. Already planned is a full expansion that focuses on queer and transgender stories and the situations that reflect those communities.
This release will be joined by an all new expansion: Love on Lockdown, a love story that explores the relationship quirks and challenges of the strange events from the past year. With these expansions and a planned reprint of the core game coming in Q4 2021, longtime fans and newcomers to the game have much to look forward to!
“The wonderful thing about Fog of Love is that anyone can identify with the trials, tribulations, and silly situations that arise in relationships. These shared experiences are what gaming is all about!” - Ian Birdsall, Marketing Manager]]>
Fast forward to Essen 2017, and the release of Azul. This beautifully produced, but still essentially family abstract game, was instantly popular and seemed to herald a shift in the fortunes for this style of game (Narrator: It did!). Brett and I were present at the fair, pitching a range of prototypes as we normally did, and subconsciously or not we noticed Azul and the effect it was having. Of course, as designers you take in all kinds of stimuli and they somehow mix together in your head to produce new games – in this case it was quite simple: we wanted to make a game in the same space as Azul, a beautiful, tactile family abstract game.
This was how Vivid started, in the early months of 2018, as a prototype called MAZE (we were trying to follow the Plan B/Next Move Games trend of calling their games with a 4 letter word, as they were a natural publisher to show our game to eventually). I personally like games with a sense of geography, and I put this into the very first prototype, requiring players to make connections between coloured termini on the edges of their boards using coloured pieces they would draft and place on different spaces. This aspect of the game survived all the way through its design and development, and can clearly be seen in the final product, but there were a lot of twists and turns beyond that! Many other aspects (shape of the board, scoring rules, tile abilities) came together quite quickly as well, and you can see that the progression of the game (seen in the images) was mostly fairly incremental – we were on to something!
We showed the prototype to many publishers at Essen in 2018, and at Nurnberg in 2019 (including Plan B of course!) but we didn’t have any luck with a publication offer. Maybe our thought that the fortunes for abstract games had shifted were wrong? I went to Gencon 2019 with not many plans to pitch – for me it was only my second time at this particular convention and I was taking the chance to enjoy wandering around (what a strange concept!) – but one of the few meetings I had planned was with Ben Harkins, founder of Floodgate Games. And thank goodness for that meeting – Ben was extremely friendly and very encouraging about Maze, and a few short months after showing it to him, Floodgate decided to sign the game!
This is the part in the story where Maze became Vivid, and this is really thanks to the tireless work of Ben and the rest of the team at Floodgate. I remember Ben mentioning in an email that they were considering a number of different themes, but one that stuck out was the idea that the player board represented our brains (inspired by the simple chance that the shape we landed on for the boards was vaguely similar to that of a brain!), and the coloured pieces were thoughts that we were trying to connect, like neurons. I think we might have thought it was a bit of a strange idea at first, but as time went on with development we saw how Floodgate moulded the game around this concept, strengthening the thematic and mechanical ties, and overall making an even better game! Of course, the moment we saw the sketches from Andrew Bosley we knew Ben had made the right decision – the whimsical notion of childhood memories fitted the game perfectly.
Overall, Vivid is a great example of a whole team of people working together – designers, publishers, illustrators – each lending their unique talents to contribute towards a shared goal. None of us could have come up with the finished product on our own, and it is the collaboration that has truly produced something that is greater than the sum of its individual parts. Suffice to say, we are incredibly proud of the game, and are very happy to share it with the world.
Matthew Dunstan (co-designer of Vivid)
May 2021
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As many of you long-time Floodgate fans know, we published a little game called Vault Wars in 2015. This year, we teamed up again with illustrator Jacqui Davis to bring you Vault Wars: Relic Roadshow. It's an expansion packed with great new content, and you can learn all about it on our Kickstarter page. For now, I'll turn the keyboard over to the designers, Jon Gilmour and Ian Moss, to tell the story of how villains made their way into the bidding war.
-Ben
Back in the before times, we had these things called conventions. They were large gatherings of awesome like minded people that you could buy games, play games, and hang out and meet new friends. The year that Dead of Winter was coming out, I was attending GrandCon (one of my favorite smaller conventions) in beautiful Grand Rapids MI. I was a new designer, with my first game coming out. I had a few other designs I was working on as well. One was based on the TV show Storage Wars. At the time it had a rather bland normal theme. I had just tested it at Protospiel (also in MI), and was looking forward to spending some time in the Unpub area of Grandcon testing it out. So I spent the first day hanging out in the unpub area, playing other peoples games, and then finally towards the end of the night, I got the courage to ask some of the designers to try out my game. I don’t remember everyone who was at that table, but I think Jason Kotarski and Jason Slingerland were both playing. Or at least one of them. It was a long time ago, but probably at least 1 Jason was present. But I digress. The playtest went great. The game was getting the experience I wanted. It was fun. It had some cool tensions. The players were bluffing and talking things up. So I was pretty excited... Except that the resounding message from all the players was “this theme sucks”. So I went to bed with mixed emotions.
The next day, I went to the vendor area and walked around. I had backed Epic Resort on KS, and was a fan of Legacy: Gears of Time, and Floodgate games had a booth. So I stopped by and introduced myself. Ben and Emily were both awesome awesome people. They were welcoming and friendly. I sat at the booth, we chatted about their games. We talked about the buzz that Dead of Winter was starting to get. GrandCon is a great con because it’s smaller, and you can get some good one on one time with people. So as we are chatting, it dawns on me. What if my Storage Auction game was set in the Epic Resort world. I loved the art, I loved the slice of life take on fantasy settings. So I brought up the game and the idea of retheming it to Ben. I’m sure he loved being cold pitched a game while trying to run the booth. It’s not a move I would do now. Anyway, long story short, Ben dug the game, he liked the retheme, and Vault Wars became my second game release!
Overall the release went well. I was really proud of the kickstarter, and the game itself! I got to meet some super fans over the years at conventions (Looking at you Tony). But one of the pieces of feedback we had when I demoed it, and on BGG was that the vaults each having special powers was just a step too far for some players. It was just a little too much when learning the game. I’m a designer that reads all the good and bad reviews of their games. I try to take notes of things that keep popping up so I can make sure not to repeat mistakes in future designs, and hopefully fix some of them if I ever do an expansion.
So fast forward a couple years, and that’s where Ian comes in.
The first time I went to our local designer meetup (Northwest Ohio Game Designers, we’re a very creative bunch), I sat down at a table in the back room of our FLGS and shared introductions with the members of the group I hadn’t met previously. The only one I did know, because he invited me, was Jon who was setting up a game at the table as I was getting to know the others. He explained the rules and what specific items he was focused on for this test and we played through most of a game. That was one of the first games I ever playtested, and it was the last time Jon would bring it to the meetup before finalizing the design for the upcoming Kickstarter campaign. That game, which was still composed mostly of blank sheets of paper with squares and text and icons and no art or graphic design to speak of, was Vault Wars.
Fast forward: the whole world is on fire. Whoops too far, rewind a bit: Jon and I share an office where we make games and play games pretending it’s for ‘research’. It’d been a few years since Vault Wars had been on Kickstarter and Jon mentions that there is talk of doing an expansion, but there’s an issue. Vault Wars original print run was with a manufacturer that wasn’t available for future print runs. So the different versions of the game might have slightly different color profiles (manufacturers are like snowflakes, no two are the same and you shouldn’t pack a bunch of them together and throw them at your friends head). Different color profiles means that even though you are using the same color for the cards at both places, the results can look slightly different. Lighter or darker in almost imperceptible ways, but that small change would make all the difference if you could tell that a card in a players hand (or off the top of the deck) was from the expansion. That’s meta game knowledge and it can derail an experience quicker than a bad metaphor about trains.
TL;DR - If there was going to be an expansion to Vault Wars, it couldn’t add ANY cards to ANY of the existing decks in the game. No new items in the item deck, no new aspiring heroes, no new vaults.
When I heard that, the problem solving part of my brain lit up like a circuit board. I didn’t know how to do it, but I knew I wanted to try to help. So we thought “how could you take the items you gain from the Vaults and use them in a different way?” and the answer, as usual, was MAGIC. We added Relics that must be Transmuted into reality to use their abilities and gain their VP. Once we figured out the answer to that question, everything else started to fall into place. “How do we add new Vaults?” we replace them with Villain vaults that simplify the auction but add a way to get Relics into your hand. “What about Aspiring Heroes?” You have an aspiring hero who wishes for you to keep the items you gain but also an aspiring villain who wants you to transmute everything you find to fit their Relic needs. Jon and I also thought about a way to introduce more corruption with Vices (since villains have no shame indulging in their vices). And all of that without adding a single new card to any existing deck.
We then sent the game off to Ben, who developed it (along with Sam Bailey) into the Relic Roadshow expansion you see now and Jon and I are so excited for you to play it!
If you have a moment, please check out the Kickstarter page to learn more about this game of bidding and bluffing that we're all so proud of -- we promise you won't have to take on too much corruption!
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After playing The World Tree with more of the Floodgate team, we were all hooked on the puzzle-like card selection and clever use of the box to represent climbing the tree. Coincidentally, we had recently been talking about trees. A lot. Development on Bosk, our main release of 2019, was right in the middle of development and we were just beginning to make progress on artwork when Julio brought his tree game to us. It didn’t seem like the best idea to publish back-to-back games about trees, and not getting a lot of love for the shamans and spirits, I decided The World Tree needed some new leaves.
Development continued, as the dev team stoked Julio’s brilliant spark into a growing flame. Simplifying action selection, tightening up the color patterns on the cards, and beginning to add rules-cards for variability were huge improvements to the pacing, tactical choices and replayability to the game. It also let us move the crazy, but very cool, cascading rule out of the core experience and save it for advanced play. Unfortunately, much like before, the game was still a race to the top. Over many plays, we discovered that nearly every time the first player to get to the top board was the winner. This was a problem.
Back to the top… or, preventing the race to the top, rather. Wanting there to be more than a single dominant strategy, the obvious way to address the race to the top was to incentivize staying on the lower levels. In doing this, we added piles of firewood near the corners of the bottom board (and slightly less firewood on the middle board) and awarded a huge bonus to the player who collected the most firewood, and a huge penalty to the player with the least. It worked quite well, and tied in, albeit loosely -- you see, the night before the Holi festival there’s a event called Holika Dahan, notably celebrated with a huge bonfire; hence, the firewood. Explaining “why firewood” was always clunky, confusing, and not very interesting. The mechanism itself, collecting something and getting a bonus worked well, but firewood as the thematic description of the something was on the chopping block.
Their feedback helped shape the game’s overall mood, focusing on joy and positive interaction, and reinforced that firewood felt really out of place (unfortunately, no better ideas, though). These conversations gave me a better understanding of the festival, helped me fix the name (it’s always “Festival of Colors”, not “The Color Festival”), focused on positive interaction (shifting the points for firewood to always be positive). Overall, I was encouraged by their enthusiasm for the game and the theme! Friends are great for that, though, so unfortunately my skeptical side kicked in. I was, of course, appreciative of the support but skeptical nonetheless; I needed to get some objective feedback.
That Person Exists
Have you ever needed to talk to someone with an incredibly specific combination of skills or experience? I have... only I needed two different people, each with an incredibly specific combination of skills.
Most importantly I wanted to be sure they both had personal experience with the incredibly rich culture surrounding the Holi festival. I was sure these people exist -- they have to!
In trying to find help for these two tasks, I started by keeping it close to home (to hopefully meet in person) in a sort of “culture first” strategy. I reached out to the Indian Cultural Group at the University of Minnesota. No luck. Then, the Hindu Society of Minnesota. Nope. Then, my distribution partner in India (Bored Game Company). Nothing. Not to be discouraged, I knew my strategy needed to change. The search continues, this time “skill first”. Thanks to Kate Bullock and Suzanne Sheldon leveraging their vast networks, I was nearly instantaneously introduced to two people who were each absolutely perfect for this project.
Sharang Biswas is a talented game designer, writer and artist from New York City who grew up in India. Perfect. Shivam Bhatt is a member of the (Magic: The Gathering) Commander Format Committee and Hindu priest. Perfect.
Several calls, video chats, and emails over the following months pushed the game from a growing flame into a full blown explosion -- and a colorful one at that! Here are a handful of the invaluable changes they helped introduce:
I’m so grateful to have met Shivam and Sharang, and I can’t thank them enough for pushing this game forward in important ways, both culturally and for the good of the game itself.
I never imagined just how rewarding it would be to make a game with a theme from a culture I wasn’t very familiar with. I did a lot of research before reaching out for help, but nothing compares to involving people who have lived the experience you’re making a game about. It’s such a pleasure to be able to work with people with the talents and experiences it took to make our game, Holi: Festival of Colors, the vibrant, dynamic game it became. I hope it helps you to connect with this ancient Indian tradition through a different lens and brings joy to your friends and family for years to come.
Learn more about our game: Holi: Festival of Colors
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We're very excited to announce Vivid!
Vivid is a drafting game of building a network of connected memories -- formed by threads of colored tokens. With a touch of engine-building and a lot of character, this completely language-independent experience invokes the wonder of childhood memories with immersive art and fluid, deceptively simple gameplay that creates big moments and satisfying payoffs.
During the game, players take turns collecting fragments of childhood memories, weaving a tapestry of colored threads in their mind. By cleverly creating connections, players are rewarded for how they store memory fragments while working toward completing “core memories”, which give repeated benefits each round. Through their journey, players store important moments in their memory bank -- choosing to remember the moment as it happened, gaining new abilities, or as it was imagined, giving new opportunities to score -- all while working to meet the objective of what they aspire to be when they grow up.
Every stick is a sword. Every bike is a steed. Every moment is an opportunity.
]]>We have a fancy new Sagrada pin in the Pin Bazaar this year. Check it out!
We're really proud of the games we make. It takes a huge effort from so many talented people to bring a board game idea to life, and nothing feels better than being able to share it with the world... unless your website sucks. Which ours did. To fix this, we teamed up with a rock-star designer & developer Paul Houser to give our site the glow-up it so badly needed.
Trust me, you won't miss the old stuff. Here's a sampling of the highlights:
When you're looking around, you might spot a new friend lurking below the surface...Introducing Locke - The Floodgate Games Kraken
It's no secret that we love krakens. Growing up, Ben watched Clash of the Titans, (famous for it's awful/amazing claymation effects and "release the kraken" culminating scene), so many times he broke the VCR. Continuing the legacy, we've tried to sneak the sea beast into some of our games, and now thanks to the brilliant work by Jacqui Davis we have one as our very own! Keep an eye out as we find new places to show off the only mascot big enough to hug an actual floodgate. Got an idea for where she should travel next? Let us know!
There's still work to do, so expect a reworked support page, convention information and a few more fun things to come! Oh yeah, we'll also keep making games, for you too.
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