Designer's Diary part II - Next Step

Ok, so I had an idea that actually worked pretty well. What I needed was a catchy theme. My fellow designer once told me: „don't try to come up with an unique theme, people like 4 things: cosmos, castles, dragons and animals”. There are hundreds of games sharing those themes, but yet people still play them. 

 

So, let it be cosmos, I thought. But I know nothing about it. Castles and dragons then. It will be fun. And so, after few miserable attempts, my game started to turn into „animals” direction. To be more specific – a farm, where players breed animals, feed them, where you can cut woods, improve storehouses etc. 

 

I had a big bag of game elements I brought from Essen Spiel one year. I opened it and it turned out that I have a large number of identical tokens in 4 different colors. This was food for my animals. And I needed animals of course, but there were non in that bag. So I made them myself – rectangular shape with four numbers on each edge, that was their number. 

Dealing with a player board was much easier. Special space for animals. Wood seasoning track, forests, ponds, storehouses. And so my farm started to grow. Animals got their four colors, as did the storehouse improvements, everything started to look pretty neat...