Overview
After finishing this article I decided to go back and re-read. It was then I realized I wanted to make sure I prefaced this article to what it is. I wrote the article to walk through the ConSim Game Jam experience in an almost diary format. I wanted to cover things like how our team came together and the creation process itself. As such I don’t go much into the ACTUAL game itself. If I did this very long post would be twice as long. I do plan on making a post on our game: Al-Mansur’s Gambit, but just not here. This article I wanted to serve as a primer for what it is like to be in the Jam and hopefully inspire folks to join next session. Hopefully it hits that aim. If you are curious about our game please feel free to leave a comment. I’d be happy to connect, demo the game for you! Until then thanks for reading my overview on the Jam.
Background
I’ve had a handful of hobbies over the years: videogames, guitar, even a brief foray into comic books in middle school. None however have hit me as hard and really captured my attention like board gaming has the last couple years. I compare board game to video game link similar that a lot of people compare books to movies. A board game forces you to use imagination. You are physically involved as well as mental. Often times you as the player carry a lot of mental load that computer games have automated for you. I find this much more engaging and a much more social experience these days than online gaming ever could be.
While I really have taken a shine to hobby gaming I really have grown to love historical games. The thing I like the most about historical gaming is its ability to model history. It allows you to engage in what the great Volko Ruhnke would call “historical tourism.” It allows you to escape for a bit and visit a historical timeline. There you walk a bit in others shoes. You explore the decisions that faced people in that time period with an agency no book or movie can offer. That is such a fascinating aspect of this hobby that I have come to love.
ConSim Game Jam
So how does that bring me to the ConSim Game Jam? One thing I’ve come to love is reading how designers take concepts and abstract them into mechanics to match a theme. One topic I’ve often heard repeated by designers: “I (read/heard/thought) about this event and designed a game because no body had designed the game I wanted.” Those stores get me thinking about game design and wanting to experience it myself. However, as much as I wanted to try my hand at design, the prospect seemed so daunting and scary. It was always something I thought “maybe someday.” and pushed aside.
When the second edition of the Jam was announced I immediately was interested. The Game Jam is ran by a group of dedicated individuals that are both fantastic designers and awesome people. Each have a huge interest in the historical gaming space. The Game Jam brings together teams of individuals with 72 hour deadline with a goal of creating a game from scratch. The established goals for the Jam isn’t to make a polished game. Rather it is to have fun, break down barriers of design and deliver a thematic game.
Team Crossboys
I was lucky enough to join up with a fabulous team! First off was “Dr. Crossbows,” Stuart Ellis-Gorman. He literally wrote the book on the medieval crossbow. If you don’t believe me you can score a copy on Amazon: Right Here. He also has his own blog covering books, games, and history. You can check that out at: https://www.stuartellisgorman.com/blog.
Also on our team was Pierre Vagneur-Jones. He is also super knowledgeable in medieval warfare has done some work on game design already. With such talented individuals all I could do was hope to not let them down and hopefully contribute! We started chatting on discord about a week before the event. As we chatted, we decided to have a few concepts fleshed out so we could meet whatever the design challenge would be.
The three ideas we came up were was as follows:
- The Jacquerie Revolt in 1358 France: This had some interesting politics, revolution, and counter revolution going on. Definitely a bit of history not covered in wargaming and one that sounded interesting and I hope to see make it to a game someday
- The Sack of Rome in 1527 and last stand of the Papal Swiss Guard: We wanted a siege concept as a choice. This was my lone theme contribution as I’m a fan of sieges, and I think it is an interesting story. Spoiler alert, I’m still researching this one in hopes to possibly do something on my own with it
- The Fall of the Songhai Empire to Moroccan Saadians in West Africa 1591: This was a VERY off the beaten path topic with interesting wrinkles. It includes asymmetric factions, lots of terrain effects, and political infighting on both sides.
I was able to find some information on all three conflicts at the local campus library. This helped as I did a “crash course” on all three topics. We fleshed ideas out on all three to prepare for anything going into the announcement. We thought we were ready, that was until we heard the challenge…
Let the games begin
The challenge
We knew going into the event we likely would have to make a card driven game (CDG.) This was hinted as the judges were introduced online. First was Mark Herman: The creator of the CDG genre of ConSim games and design legend in the space. Next was Jason Matthews, Co-designer of one of the most famous of all CDGs: Twilight Struggle. Last but certainly not least was Candice Harris, contributor on Board Game Geek. She has been an awesome advocate for wargames and historical ConSims, by brining her perspective to the greater BGG audience.
Thursday afternoon I happened to be leaving work just as the kickoff stream of the event started. I listed on my short drive home. You can catch the kickoff stream on Homo Ludens YouTube channel right here: ConSim Game Jam ’22 Kickoff
The challenge was set:
- Design a Card Driven Game that utilized 54 cards and a total of 54 components (dice, counters, cubes)
- No maps or player mats could be utilized
- Only other components not counted were the rules, player aids (so long as no pieces were set on them)
Initial thoughts
Immediately we had to pivot. If you watch the kick off video you will hear the organizers talk about a team that started making a map. That team was us! We all had leaned towards the Saadian-Songhai conflict and went as far as Pierre making quick map of the Niger valley. This really threw us the first roadblock. Particularly because, one aspect that is vital to the conflict was the terrain. The conflict itself takes place in an area that sees desert terrain on the border of the Sahara, mountains to the north, and swamps along the Niger.
We immediately started throwing out ideas and one that stuck was a tableau style game. This allowed us to show control of spaces without a map. The thing that popped in my head was adding suits to the event cards. This allowed an ability to still factor in the terrain effects without a map and give an interesting element to a CDG.
Both Stuart and Pierre are on GMT 5 hours ahead of me, so while they went to bed I used the evening to research. First was a listen to the Homo Ludens CDG design discussion with 2 out of the 3 judges plus Volko: CDG Design Discussion
Next I scribbled out some summary of themes as well as made a rough outline of how the tableau and movement would work. I did these in PowerPoint and sent them to my team to look at when they got up Friday morning.
Day 1: Rush to Prototype
Morning
The benefit of having a 5 hour gap is that it allowed us to stretch the day. As Stuart and Pierre slept, I’d work and vice versa. When I awoke that morning I found that the guys had really made some big leaps. Waiting for me was a spreadsheet of events that had started to come together as well as a list of key locations that would make up the tableau cards. We knew that we’d need to get a prototype fast in order to start moving pieces. I had taken the day off of work for the Jam. Therefore I told the guys I’d get cards and components built in Tabletop Simulator (TTS.) In the meantime we scheduled a call in the afternoon to review the workshop and go from there.
The only problem with the plan was that I had never made a workshop in TTS. If that wasn’t bad enough, I have little to know design skills and had to figure out the quickest way to build card decks. Lucky for me I am used to learning programs from scratch on the fly for work. Therefore I went to my handy instructional tool: YouTube.
I ended up finding a channel called Ludo Lodge: https://www.youtube.com/c/LudoLodge. The channel had some quick and easy tutorials on getting started with both TTS and a program called nanDeck: https://www.nandeck.com/. This is a free program that allows you to build a deck of cards from a spreadsheet of information. These two programs really were the core of the whole weekend for me.
Afternoon
Within a couple hours I had built a quick and dirty set of files for locations, event cards, and leaders. I then grabbed literally the first images I could for card backs online just as placeholders. Before you knew it I had uploaded components to TTS and almost missed our call while I was finishing up the last tweaks by end of the day Friday.
Evening
After our call, I left with homework for the night. First up was to figure out how to make a custom D3: or six sided die that only had 1-3 on it. A common theme but Stuart has a knack for making me find new things to figure out technically! Luckily google and YouTube again came to the rescue. Next thing I knew I was creating a new dice template and uploading to TTS.
After my fun making dice, the next task was to get the game into Steam as a workshop so the guys could iterate on it without me logged on. The first demo was saved to my local account so I had to host the game for anyone to play it. Making an actual workshop and uploading it so that they could keep playtesting was something we needed. All in all it was a productive day. I went to bed exhausted but exhilarated! It was hard to believe we had a prototype already. It was broken and needed a ton of work, but we had SOMETHING. That was the most important thing for me.
Day 2: Refine, refine, and refine again
Morning
Saturday morning I again awoke to some great discussions with Pierre and Stuart. Pierre and I played through a game and got a little farther than the last time before hitting some rough patches. We already had made some serious tweaks.
- Event deck was trimmed from 30 to 25
- Leader effects added in
- Political Favor and Support for each side was added with counters
The next item I wanted to do was figure out a good icon symbol to make up our three terrain types: Swamp, Mountain, Desert. If there is a commonality in my design from a visual sense it would be called “functional.” The last thing I wanted was to waste half a day trying to make something flashy. I just wanted some symbols that you could easily distinguish and that the form would be intuitive for the terrain it specified. I used MS Publisher of all programs to whip out a few shapes with minor embellishments. These would form the basis of our “suits” that or game uses for terrain.
Afternoon
Another serious cognitive issue we found early was that it was difficult to look at your opponent tableau and remember what location was linked to the other. I had text in the upper corner of each card, but reading that was difficult. To aid with play as well as give a sequence of play the next item I began working on was a player aid. I wanted to get a graphic representation of the tableau like it would be on a map. Again I went to Publisher and by Saturday evening I had created another small file, this time something to use to help aid players flow through the game.
Evening
The last thing we did that evening was decide on a name. There was many to run through. Our working title for the game was Saad Times, but we wanted something not so tongue in cheek. We ended up with Al-Mansur’s Gambit: The Fall of the Songhai Empire 1591-1603. It was nice to finally put a name to what we had been working on. From that point it felt like we actually had a game! Maybe it needed more work, more balancing, more aids, but we had a game.
It was that Saturday night that a playtest between myself and Stuart we finally got through a game without something seriously feeling broken. We had a working game, just needed a little polish, refined rules, and I found that a set of faction player aids would also be a big help. I made a few posts on discord and slack channels looking to see if I could find a play tester that evening, but no luck. I spent the rest of the night working on a couple player aids and updated the workshop again with some tweaks we made to components.
Day 3: Race to the finish line
Morning…Early Morning
It was while I was laying in bed at 3am that I got a pit in my stomach. The artwork I had used was just the first images on google I could find. They weren’t public domain or creative common, and I didn’t want to be disqualified for something so trivial. I sent an SOS to my team and Pierre came to the rescue. He offered to whip up some graphics so I gave him a list of what we needed and he cranked it out. I think the style is fantastic! and really gave some life to the game.
Afternoon
At that point it was all about cleaning up the loose ends and finishing the submission with all the required components. To get there Stuart did the heavy lifting with the rulebook itself. He formatted it to be clearer and added some nice illustrations to it for counters, card anatomy, and fleshed out the victory conditions. As much as the technical sides were challenging I really want to give him credit. I’ve made manuals and quick reference guides for work before. That is a long and tedious job. He did so fabulously and what we ended up with was a nice set of rules that I thought really nailed the concepts we were going for and in a very easy to read way.
Evening
Late afternoon attention focused on completing the submission. To do that we needed the following:
- Presentation of the game with a summary, image, number of players, expected playtime, and component description
- Links to game files: Rules and components
- Digital prototype of the game
- 5-10 minute video covering the basics of the game
Of those items none were difficult. We had to create the game in TTS to play given our physical distance. The rules and component files I had to upload to the workshop. All I needed to do was a few more lines of code in nanDeck so that I could print cards duplex in a print-and-play format. That was a bit more research but I quickly solved that issue.
The main freak out point here was the presentation. Our game had a lot of moving parts, and a historical theme that is not one most people are familiar with. While the guys went over rules and components, I focused energy on the presentation.
I ended up with a four slide presentation as an intro to the game, theme, and overall mechanics. I then hopped over to TTS to walk through how a turn looked and finished the presentation there. It took me four tries to finally get a video I was happy with.
Hitting submit
A real team effort in the close out, while I finished the video and PowerPoint the guys did a last look at all the rest of the submission requirements. We started to assemble a folder for all the final submissions that we would link and send to the judges.
One last upload of proofed rules, player aids, and art was made to the TTS workshop. Then I took the video link and all the links from the submission and emailed the organizers. By 6:00pm Sunday evening we had done it, and with something like 9 hours to spare!
The Long Wait
We knew going in that it would be at least September 7th before we found out the results. There ended up being 12 submissions! While I didn’t have time during the competition to take a lot of looks at other submissions, I did see a few. There were some REALLY good submissions out there.
We did take time after to continue playtesting and getting feedback as well as making some tweaks. To ensure that we didn’t make changes to the submissions, I created a separate workshop so we could update without tainting what we submitted to the judges. We updated the art on the cards quite a bit as well as adding faction icons for events.
That said it was an even longer wait than we thought. The judges found at least half of the games were VERY close to being finalists. They wanted to play through the finalists so we didn’t find results until Monday September 12.
The results can be found again on Homo Ludens right here: Results and Debrief
This years finalists were:
- Peace 1905: The End of the Russo-Japanese War: CDG about the negotiations taking place at the end of the War (Winner!)
- Kandy Crush: 2 player cube game that portrays Kingdom of Kandy fight against 3 different colonial threats over 300 years
- At the Court of the Great King: 2 player game of factions vying for power and prestige of the Seleucid court of Ancient Greece.
I believe all submissions as well as the finalists and winners will be hosted on the ConSim Game Jam website in the near future: http://consimgamejam.com/
Unfortunately Al-Mansur’s Gambit did not make it as one of the finalists, but in the end that wasn’t what mattered or why I wanted to compete in the Jam. Rather it was that chance to see what game design was about, and if it was something I enjoyed. To that regard it was a success. I had a blast and would highly recommend the experience for anyone thinking about game design.
Future Plans
Going forward Team Crossboys has taken a bit of a break with a busy September. That said we do plan to keep working on Al-Mansur’s Gambit. We would love to see this game get produced in some fashion as we think there is something very unique and fun about this one. I will likely make a post going through the details of the game soon. Also, I plan to keep updating on the blog as the game comes along so please stay tuned for more updates.
All in all I got exactly what I wanted from the experience and then some. Stuart and Pierre are great dudes and the game is a topic I knew nothing about. Learning is one of the best things about this hobby and to learn while creating it was a great experience. Definitely something I hope to do next time the Jam comes around.
