The Thought Process

A new game has been released. In Territory, you are playing cards to a 5x7 grid, using the special abilities of those cards to discard or turn (take control of) other players' cards. In the end, whoever controls the most territory is the winner.

For a full description of the game, or for a free download of the rules to have a look, check out the Territory page on The Game Crafter.

But that's not really what I wanna talk about. I'd like to give you an inside look at the thought process, at the way one change can have profound impacts on a game's design.

In my original tests for Territory, the game had 54 cards and a box that would just fit the cards and the rules. The way you knew which card belonged to each player was by the way the card was facing. You turned your cards so the bottom was facing you. The game was fun, but as the board filled up it got harder to track which cards belonged to which player. Card facing worked, but it was slow.

And so I added markers. You get 15 markers of one color and you always have a marker of your color on your cards. With that one change, the game was suddenly much easier and much more fun.

But that left a design hole: Since the game needed markers, the box was too small. It wouldn't fit both the cards and the markers.

And that led to this thought process:

1. Obviously, we need a bigger box to fit the markers.
2. Now that we need a bigger box, we'll have more room for cards.
3. Since we have more room for cards, let's expand the game!

So I started thinking of things I could add. I didn't want to change the base game, because the original 54 cards worked and were fun. So instead I added cards as optional rules, meaning there were additional cards you could snap into the deck when you wanted to use them to change the game in some way. In the end, there were 4 optional rules that added a total of 54 cards, doubling the original size of the game!

Territory, which was already fun, is now so much better. The playtesters are loving the new optional rules and the snap-in cards. They love changing the rules and changing which cards are used between each game, keeping each game fresh and unique.

And all of this resulted from such a simple thing as wanting to add markers to make the game easier to track.