HoopCAT Games - 2013 Year in Review

January 2013 started big with Unpub3, where Attatat was well received by the play testers. One of the players who sat down for a round was Dan Yarrington of Game Salute.  His constructive suggestions to our Attatat prototype led to a longer face-to-face discussion that ended with a request for a copy of our self-published Fill The Barn for evaluation for a distribution agreement. Needless to say, I drove home in a great mood Sunday night. And just when I thought it couldn’t get any better, I hadn’t been home from Unpub3 for 12 hours when we received the Monday morning email notifying us that Casual Game Insider magazine was reviewing Fill The Barn in their Spring 2013 issue and would add it to their list of recommended casual games. The hardest part when you get that kind of news from a quarterly magazine is staying quiet the next 3 months until the publication.

Three weeks later Game Salute formally offered HoopCAT Games a distribution agreement for Fill The Barn, opening the door to distribution channels and a trade show presence that previously had been out of our reach as a two-person husband/wife home business.

April brought the South Jersey Unpub, and the debut of our new cooperative prototype game FireBreak. I was extremely nervous about the first play of this game anywhere other than our friendly family game table. While our sons really enjoyed game, that was no guarantee that anyone else would. I prepared myself not to be disappointed if FireBreak received a cool reception. Instead, we were genuinely yet pleasantly surprised at the enthusiastic South Jersey play test response and further Unpub Minis into the spring.  As had happened with Attatat, it was the Unpub response that caused us to realize that Firebreak was actually a better game than we gave it credit for.  Ever since, we have been working to get the balance right.

April also brought the long-awaited Spring 2013 edition of Casual Game Insider with its review of Fill The Barn.  While we already knew the thrill of positive online reviews, there was still a feeling to hold that shiny magazine in our hands and see page and ink given to our game in the review column.

In May I paid a visit to Washington DC and the Labyrinth Games & Puzzles middle school game club along with fellow Unpub designer Matthew O’Malley for an experiment in junior play testing.  It was truly a fun afternoon, as well as an opportunity to see how children would respond to FireBreak. My favorite quotes of the afternoon were the references to “barbequed elk” as those middle school play testers worked to save the wildlife preserves from the spreading flames.

We had more fun with child gamers in August with a Fill The Barn championship as part of the Juniors Events at the annual World Boardgame Championship.  We had no idea what type of participation to expect, so imagine our surprise when 25 children filed into the room! We had a two-hour window to teach them how to play, play the opening round of five 5-player games, then the championship round. Aiden with an “e” from New York won the trophy (we also had an Aidan with an “a”, so that’s how we distinguished them). The children had fun playing; we had fun hopping between tables to referee.  Will we do it again in 2014? Absolutely! 

Our one letdown of the year came as Autumn approached and we realized that we would not publish Attatat in 2013. Fill The Barn had taken us only 10 months to self-publish from first test play to when the first copies were on a store shelf. However, being the first game we made, its production received 100% of our attention during that period.  With Attatat, that could never be the case, since some time still had to go to Fill The Barn marketing and sales, and other portions of time were going to FireBreak. Harder still, Attatat did not fit a mold of run of the mill components of game board and cards, adding a slight extra challenge to figure out the most cost-effective way to manufacture. Slowly, we arrived at the conclusion that despite our inclination to self-publish, our games might be more successful if we focused on the game design and looked to more-experienced publishers to worry about the just-as-important details like art, manufacturing quotes, and marketing.

The Unpub Zone at the Congress of Gamers in September was a chance to put the latest version of Firebreak back on the table, as well as a revamped version of Attatat that replaced the numbers with Egyptian-themed pictures. The FireBreak feedback from the late spring Unpubs had been that it was too easy. Sometimes a designer can over-correct, and the version we showed at Congress of Gamers made it overly hard with a win rate of only 30% for the day. This was the day that Bruce Voge of The Party Gamecast made his valiant last stand using his yellow meeple to defend the airport from the flames. And yet the amazing thing about that day is that the more our players lost, the more they wanted to play again to try for the win.

Our October good news came when we learned that an article I had submitted to Casual Game Insider magazine had been accepted for the Winter 2014 issue. It was thrilling, yet once again we had to mute our public enthusiasm for the 3 month wait until the actual release in January.

Our efforts to get Firebreak properly balanced by Unpub4 took a slight pause for Dice Hate Me Game’s announcement of the 54-card design challenge during Unpub4. I had already been toying with an idea for a 55-card game to launch on the Unpub circuit in Spring 2014.  After an emergency meeting of the executive leadership of HoopCAT Games (my wife and I), we decided to accelerate the next idea to meet the challenge deadline. And thus Lady of the Diamonds was born in November.

In contrast to Firebreak which has undergone 9 months of endless playtest-adjust-repeat, Lady of the Diamonds came together faster than any other game idea I’ve worked on.  The mechanics worked with very little adjustment from almost game one, while the scoring system fell into place (with some excellent suggestions by my wife and younger son) after only a few test plays.  The HoopCAT family loves this game. My go-to gamer play-tester wants a chance to play it more, while some non-gamer friends we squeezed a play test from described it as “fun”. The design challenge has some pretty stiff odds with over 40 submissions.  Yet even if it does not rise to the top of the competition, expect us to keep Lady of the Diamonds on the playtest circuit in 2014. This one is a keeper.

Just as 2013 began on a positive note, so it also ended well…with an offer to regularly contribute guest blogs to Casual Game Revolution! So starting in January 2014, the Casual Game Revolution blog is where we will be posting any thoughts on family & casual gaming.  We’ll still use the HoopCAT blog for posts that focus more on our games or our company.

We move into 2014 with 3 strong prototype games: Attatat, FireBreak, and Lady of the Diamonds.  This makes us very eager to see what our 2014 end-of-year blog will say 12 months from now. Until then, Happy New Year, and remember throughout 2014 that often what you play is not so important as whom you play with. 

Our Move away from Self-Publishing

This blog is for the benefit of any who are wondering why we haven’t published Attatat yet.   Or why we as a proclaimed self-publisher are submitting an entry to the Unpub4 54-card challenge sponsored by Dice Hate Me Games. Or why we are excited about the number of publishers who are attending Unpub4.

After much careful consideration, thought, and prayer, HoopCAT Games is moving in a different direction.  We are moving away from self-publishing and seeing whether we can publish our designs through other game publishers.

We will enter 2014 with 3 unpublished prototype games:

-          Attatat - This path-building, tile-removing abstract has fared extremely well in Unpub playtesting;

-          FireBreak - Our cooperative game where players work together to save a park from a forest fire has been rating even higher with Unpub playtesters, and;

-          Lady of the Diamonds  - Our entry to the 54-card challenge entry is good enough to make the rounds on the Unpub circuit in the Spring if it doesn’t catch the eye of the competition judges first.

Our goal as we move into 2014 is to find publishers for these games.

The self-publisher must be good at a lot of things, then well-connected and adequately-financed for those things which they are not personally good at.

Having a great game is important, being willing to work tirelessly is essential, yet those two things are not enough to guarantee success. Art and graphic design also matter. You must pay attention to the production and shipping and warehousing details.  Marketing is just as important if not more important than the quality of the game itself.   Self-publish a fun game and you will receive positive reviews, yet good reviews alone are not enough to ensure your game will fly off the shelf and onto game tables.

We realize that there are other small publishers out there who are far better than us at picking the right artist, arranging the production details, running a Kickstarter campaign, using social media effectively, and marketing on a limited budget.  Attatat, FireBreak, and Lady of the Diamonds are all great games.  We want them to be all they can be. And allowing those games to reach their full potential probably means our letting go of some of the control and letting others with different strengths than us publish our games.

We do not regret self-publishing Fill The Barn.  It was an accomplishment that we will continue to treasure in our family memories many years from now.  We developed the idea, found playtesters, worked with the graphic designer to get it ready for commercial publication, coordinated details with the manufacturer, arranged the freight shipment from the Michigan factory, arranged for the warehousing, contacted reviewers who wrote positive things about our very first game, visited area stores who put our games on their shelves, then found a distributor who had the national & international reach to get our games places far beyond where we could go. It was a huge task with a myriad of smaller individual tasks, and we pulled it off to self-publish our first game. We also learned first-hand some valuable lessons along the way. 

Yet if our next games can do even better in the hands of others who are stronger in other key areas, we don’t want to hold our games back from reaching their full potential.  Our HoopCAT logo may not appear on the next games we help to create.  Yet while our name may no longer be on them, trust us when we say our hearts will always go in them.

Help the Yellow Meeple Raise Money for Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals with Extra Life

Photo courtesy of Dr. Wictz's Board Games

Our Yellow Meeple is in Indiana right now with his other meeple fire ranger friends to help Jim & Adrienne Jones of Great Big Table raise money for Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals during their October 25-27, 2013, Extra Life game-a-thon.  The meeples need your help too!

Last year, Jim & Adrienne reached out to us with the story of their young daughter, asking if we could support their 2012 game-a-thon. It was an easy decision for us. When they asked, they had no idea that our family had its own children’s hospital experience a decade earlier.

We sent a copy of our newly published Fill The Barn game along with our donation last fall. This year we have no new (published) game to accompany the donation, so instead we offered up a prototype copy of a cooperative game that had earlier caught Jim’s & Adrienne’s interest.  And while game designers always have spare meeples here and there, we were very careful to send a specific meeple to Indiana.

This specific yellow meeple gained a slight bit of notoriety when it was used for some Firebreak play testing at the Unpub Zone during Congress of Gamers at the end of September.  Bruce from The Party Gamecast committed early to using the yellow meeple to save the airport from the spreading wildfire. And what a valiant effort it was – we lost the game, but by golly the airport was still standing.

That same yellow meeple has also been used by our younger son Thomas during at-home testing of Firebreak. Thomas always plays yellow during family game time. Thomas is also an alumnus of the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia NICU.

I originally had a different blog written to promote Extra Life. That first blog told much more about the story of Thomas. Yet when I checked with Thomas, he wasn’t really comfortable with us sharing those details of his early life.  As his parents we respect that.  Ask Thomas about the first several weeks of his life and he will simply tell you that his lungs were too small, he was in the hospital, and God made him better. And if you are reading this blog, it means Thomas is comfortable with this shorter version of his early life.

Whether our yellow meeple and his friends get any prototype play time controlling wildfires during the Jim & Adrienne Jones game-a-thon isn’t what’s really important.  There are some things that are far more important than my game designer ego…like raising money for Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals.

 Jim & Adrienne Jones are using their game-a-thon to raise money for Riley Children’s Hospital (Indiana), the hospital that helped their young daughter. Clicking on their names will take you to the donation page. Even if you can only donate $1, those dollars add up.

I will also mention Matt Morgan and Team Explanation Point. Full disclosure, I don’t know Matt or anyone one his team.  All I know from a recent Boardroomers podcast is that Matt & his team are using their Nov 2^nd Extra Life game-a-thon to raise money for Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. While the yellow meeple may not be at this Extra Life game-a-thon , CHOP will always be near and dear to our hearts.

There will be Extra Life game-a-thons occurring all over the country this fall to raise money for Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals. You can donate to any participant from the top right corner of Extra Life’s web page.  Search for #ExtraLife in your Twitter feed and you will find several game players participating in various game-a-thons for Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals.  Please pick one to support.  Whether you can give $20, $5, or only $1, it will all go to a good cause, one that benefits real children in real families.  If you ever see me at an Unpub playtest event, I’m happy to share more about our very real story of what one Children’s Miracle Network Hospital did for our family.

Keys to a Good Family Board Game

Our goal at HoopCAT Games is to create fun family games – games that parents and children can enjoy together. So we have had to give some thought to what characteristics are important to a good family game.  There are lots of good games out there, yet only some of those good games work well with a family. So what qualifies a good game to also be a good family game?  Here is our list: Length, Complexity, and Balance.

Length –Family games must consider how much time the average family with children (and school, youth soccer, baseball, and who knows what else) has in their schedule for a family game.  Also, what is the attention span of that family’s children? There can be such a thing as too long. Children will most likely tire of a too-long game before the parents do.  While our HoopCAT family (2 sons, ages 11 & 15) can stick with an engaging game for as long as 90-120 minutes, our family schedule often doesn’t permit more than 60 minutes for a game.  When we design family games, we aim for 30-60 minutes to fit the busy family.

Complexity - As a teen, I loved Avalon Hill games, and would study the lengthy rule books even between games.  While a hardcore gamer may enjoy repeated readings of a 10 or 20 page rulebook, it is a bad idea for a family game.  For a family game, the rules must be easily grasped, even by a child. We believe that at least one player reading the rule book once before the first play should be mandatory for any new game. However, our rule of thumb for family games is that you should almost never need to refer back to the rule book after the 3^rd play.  If a family has to frequently keep going back to the rule book even after the first few plays, that game might not be a good family game.

The topic of math also needs mention under complexity. Light math has a place in family games. Games can be a great way for children to practice basic addition or even multiplication facts while having fun. However, we feel that calculator math has no place in a family game. I have played games where you had to add 32+40+12, divide the sum by 4, then four separate  further calculations to divide that quotient by 7, 12, 6,and 8, dropping the remainder and rounding down. Some can keep that straight in their head, others cannot.  And while hardcore gamers may enjoy that kind of math as part of their gaming experience,  excessively complex math calculations are not a good fit for a fun family game. 

Balance – For a family game, this can be one of the toughest design challenges.  When designing adult games, a designer can make some presumption of equal ability. That same presumption does not hold when designing a game that an 8 year old will play with a 13 year old.  A younger brother that has no hope of ever beating their older sister may quickly lose interest in that game.  The most common solution to artificially balance the differences in player skill is to add some element of randomness (often through either dice or cards).  This randomness will sometimes work to hinder a more-skilled player and help a less-skilled player. Yet, as designers, we still want the game to reward good player decisions and have consequences for bad player decisions.   So the family game has to strike the right balance in how much the random effects the gameplay - too little, and lesser-skilled players will feel it is impossible for them to win, but too much, and skilled players will feel they have been cheated.

A game must have the right length, complexity level, and balance to qualify as a good family game.

There is one more important element–fun.   But how to make a family game “fun”  is a much harder and far less tangible topic.

The HoopCAT family loves family game time! We continue to enjoy our own family games after many plays (Fill The Barn, AtataT, and some new prototype ideas we play test as a family to find the winners). Other family games that we find ourselves often playing as of late include Apples to Apples, Forbidden Island, Qwirkle, and Ticket to Ride.