Pack your bags, we’re heading for a trip down “Denial”. So far, I’ve wrestled with my creative muse, wrangled with game mechanics, and tackled the near vertical learning curve of computer graphic design. I thought I had this game design gig licked until I was derailed by the insidious specter of Denial.

Recently, the design of the Arachnid game was going OK. I was at version #24 when I decided to change things up.I modified a few things to make the game more interesting, which seemed to be working. I also decided to tackle the biggest problem, quarterbacking, which can be a serious issue with cooperative games like mine. I scraped the shared tableau where players selected their actions, for individual hands of cards for each player. It would work similar to the hand of action cards in the game “Concordia”. This way, the players can manage their characters on their own, without an alpha player constantly telling them how to play. This seemed to work….sort of.

I ran through a few simulations of the game, but kept getting hung up at a certain point in the game. I would tweak a few things, then try it again, just to end up at the same impasse. I kept tweaking, and running tests, but amazingly, something would always distract me or I would discover something else that had to be fixed around the same time that the strange flaw would appear during the game. I even put the game aside for a while, hoping the flaw would somehow work itself out. I was in a serious state of denial.

It took a lot of effort and a little soul searching to finally face the fact that the game was currently broken. My new fangled solution to the quarterbacking problem just didn’t work. Reluctantly, I scraped the new card based action system and replaced it with individual player boards with worker placement spaces. Not only did this get the game back on the right track, but it proved to be a more flexible system, while still reducing the quarterbacking issues. I had wasted a great deal of time and effort because I didn’t want to admit to myself that the game was broken. It was surprisingly easy to lie to myself, rather than face the possibility of a long hard path in front of me.

Designing, whether it’s machines or board games, can be a really fun and challenging endeavor. It can also be an arduous and tiring task. Those are the times when we’re tempted to overlook the flaws or settle for something that is just barely good enough. It is important to recognize these biases that arise during a design. Taking an impartial look at your project through another person’s eyes is a simple concept but it is definitely not easy.

I’ve gotten over myself and busted through the latest wall of Denial. The design is back on track. I hope, after all of this, the game works well. I guess the players will have to decide this for themselves. Just like Martin Luther King Jr said, I just have to “keep on keeping on”.