It was our first board game so we didn’t know much about design or manufacturing. It was a real challenge to produce a game in 9 months. In fact, we had tried to design a totally different game for 6 months (it looked more like a toy than a game). But it didn’t go well and 3 months before the last submission, we had to restart the whole project, throw away everything we had done and start from ground zero again. It was daunting but we did it.

 

So how did we achieve this :  3 months, 1 game? :

.First, we decided to focus on a core mechanic. After 2 weeks of brainstorming, we found something: “Let’s play with words that give magical power”. It seemed rather simple and ideas came pretty fast. At the end of those 2 weeks, we got some idea of what the game would look like (in terms of design).

 

.We came up with different ideas of how to create sentences, but we chose only one: using pronouns (me, you, all) with verbs (heal, hurt, swap) and connecting them with conjunctions (and, or).

 

.After that we had to sort out what was playable and what was unplayable. In order to do that, we had to define what was the effect of each word, how they could synergize with each other and how they could be used in different circumstances. For example, let’s focus on the word “heal” (soigner) : it can be used to regain 1 health point if it is used after a “Me” (moi) but if it is used after an “All” (tous), then all the players regain 1 health point.

 

Eventually, we had to design the game board, because we had problems balancing the conjunctions (and,or). We decided to place them directly on the board at the beginning of the game, so the players had to play around it if they wanted to cast stronger spells.