Quivit – Designer Diary

Quivit – Designer Diary

The Idea for Quivit! came to me in 2019 while I was taking a shower. Wanting to create a game for the longest time and while working on another game that had been causing me frustration, I thought to myself maybe I need to be more simplistic. It was at that moment this 4 color idea hit me and a flood of ideas came rushing to my brain. I jumped out of the shower and headed straight to Target for supplies. With supplies in hand, aka “Construction Paper and Tape”, I proceeded to cut out hundreds of colored squares, tape them together and arrange them into a grid and “PIVOT” (original title) FYI. After fusing with the size of the grid, I realized that this would work, so being a graphic designer I was not going to be happy with play testing with construction paper squares. I literally set up the whole game in Illustrator and had it printed to start play testing and tweaking. Shortly after playtesting I realized I had the design knowhow to graphically set up the game but lacked the written and mathematical knowledge to truly balance that game and knew I needed help and that when I asked my now partner in crime Jason.

-Andrew

As mentioned, I am an analytical guy, afterall I write commercial software for a living and went to school for Engineering. I have “built” D&D and Battletech campaigns since I was 13. I can see most things in my head, but it’s not until I write it on paper (sometimes literally) that I can start to see the imaginary lines connecting the thoughts in my head. Over the many years, I have perfected my ability to organize and “feel” the flow of my thoughts and put them into words.

Unfortunately for me, my brain is more mechanical than artistic. The wording of a game, layout and mechanics are not unlike writing technical design documents for software, but artistic I am not. Fortunately, Andrew and I talked and our partnership in games was the perfect setup. With Quivit! I did have to fight my nature to add rules and make it more mechanical, grin, but the simple nature of the game allows it to be highly approachable to everyone.

We definitely hope you like the game!

-Jason

Evacuate – Designer Diary

Evacuate – Designer Diary

Evacuate came about because I thought, “What game wants the player to be in the middle of a pack? Not the first, but not the last.” In most games, you are racing to be the first, the one in the lead. So I had to think of a way to convince the player that they didn’t necessarily want to be in the lead. What if there was danger all around and you didn’t know what was around the next corner? Would you want to lead the pack? And if the danger is all around then you don’t want to be at the back of the pack either. You want to be protected like the president with people all around you.

Next, I wanted a game that everyone started equal and had the same opportunities to play cards. There is luck of the draw in most games or roll of the dice. Evacuate (basic game) gives the players the same set of cards in their hand. This allows the players be on equal footing, and pushes them to out think their opponents instead of hoping for a good draw. In Evacuate, players need to estimate what everyone else is going to do on a turn and play accordingly.

Deck building has been something that I really enjoy, but has been done many times in other games. I thought “What about everyone contributing to the deck that is built? That would be different.” So in Evacuate, if a player loses a miniature, then they get to decide what card is added to the Nomia Deck. The deck is built by the community of players during the game, of course it might start to segue in a certain direction trying to even the playing field.

Finally, randomness is a necessary evil in a game. I would prefer that their was not randomness or very little. I really think the key to randomness is that it is the same for all players. Meaning that all players have to deal with the same randomness, be it a die roll or a draw of a card. In Evacuate, their are two random events that happen. First, the community built Nomia Deck has a card drawn each turn. The card is random, but all players have knowledge of what cards are in the deck – giving them the ability to predict what card will be drawn next. The other randomness in the game is the corridor that the players are running on. The player that reaches the end of the current corridor gets to choose if the pack turns left or right – thus they draw two cards and choose one for the next corridor.

I hope that you find Evacuate as fun to play as I enjoyed designing it.

Thank you,
Jeff