Intro
Stories are a great source of inspiration for games, and they are everywhere. It’s a rainy day. I am at a bookshop, and the book Around the World in 80 Days attracts my eyes. I have read Jules Verne in the past, but I feel I need to do that again. Is it just a children’s book? Does it have something to tell me? That is what I want to discover.
Page after page, I discover the book has something unique to narrate: a pervasive sense of adventure. The characters are continuously struggling between the tension to arrive in time and the desire to collect adventures and experiences. They are rushing, but they also feel this urge to enjoy life and all it has to offer around the world.
That feeling… I have it! Time to start working!
That feeling is what I want to have in my game: a feeling of struggle between rushing to the end and having wonderful experiences. How to do that in a family game of less than one hour? Where to start from?
Well, is it really an option to have a game around the world without a map of the world? Maybe, but that is not my choice. A map, first. And it must include the path described in the book, with the cities of the main episodes.
The first prototype
The Suitcase
When I think of traveling, I immediately think of a suitcase for all I need — and that’s exactly what Phileas Fogg does in the first episodes of the book: He enters his mansion and calls his loyal Passepartout to prepare a small luggage with just some clothes, to get ready and immediately move towards the coast.
How to make the feeling of a small suitcase that’s obviously too small for comfortable traveling around the whole world, with the easiest mechanism so that it feels natural to players? I go for a Tetris-style system with clothes in different shapes and sizes and a grid in which to put them and move them freely.
The first version of suitcases and accessories
The system immediately feels good. The handling of the items is a bit poor with thin cards, so I stick them on a thick board and check the feeling. Yay! I can see the players having pleasure in touching them, adding them to the luggage, moving them to make space for another item, and eventually sacrificing one.
The almost final version of suitcases and accessories in the prototype
Girls Just Wanna Have Fun
I am on the road for the first playtests. I usually playtest with the association Atlantide Giochi Savona, where I find a lot of smart family/casual players, the ideal target for the game.
Many players in the association are women, so it’s obvious I have to do something to make them feel represented in the game. Of course, the book was published in 1872, and most of the protagonists are males, but that should never be an excuse for game designers to avoid trying, so I make all the clothes double-faced with male/female style clothes. Anyone is free to choose the side for each item — and even go gender fluid. Players immediately appreciate it.
Clothes have two sides
The Diary
Scoring goals during the game is a good and safe system to challenge players gradually, give them rewards, offer a pleasurable moment now and then. (During a test, a player shouts “I won!” when reaching her first goal, which is very symbolic for this kind of pleasure.) I go for a well-known process:
1. Collect items (within the space limit).
2. Trade a set of items for points and actions.
3. Draw a new goal.
I add a twist to the point scoring: Points are not marked on the usual tracker, but you keep track of your personal achievement in a diary of cool adventures. Goal after goal, you build your diary, adding the card on the right of it as if you were writing a real diary. Each page with an inspiring picture and sentence about your adventure.
The first concept for the diary of adventures
Where to find inspiration for those adventures? From French and worldwide literature of the time, of course! I start to collect ideas from the books I read, and I ask my friends for suggestions. Again, I am lucky: My friends read a lot.
The Mechanism
The atmosphere is ready. But what about the mechanism?
I want a simple mechanism with significant dilemmas between rushing to London and buying clothes to have new adventures. I want to encourage player questions such as: “Should I take a train now, or should I buy a hat?”
I love to have high interaction in my games, so I want the answer to be strictly linked to what other players are doing in the next turn.
The previous month I had been thinking of an increasing cost per action system. Each action has an area to mark the cost for that action, and you pay less if you are the first to take the action. This mechanism gives a good amount of interaction: As a player, I want to predict what other players are going to do next in order to take that action before the cost increases. Instead, I can delay actions that are not attractive to other players now.
The typical thought I wish players to have is: “My opponents are going to travel by train, so if I don’t want to pay more, I have to take a train now. For the hat, I can wait.”
The increasing cost system with a special coin for three-player games
Also, I work on a mechanism to reset those costs for each area, trying various alternatives and picking the one that feels smoothest: Every n turns, a newspaper arrives bringing news and a new scenario, and the costs are set back to zero.
I am ready to test.
Playtesting Phase
Time for the game to hit the second table: the playtesters’ one. This is the most interesting and enthusiastic phase for me as a game designer. You see how people react, you get encouragement from friends and casual players, you see the idea coming to life. Usually, if it works it will keep the same core spirit for the rest of the process, even if many changes will be made.
In this phase, you have to be careful because the enthusiasm for the new game can dazzle the designer and the playtesters. Luckily, my playtesters are many, and they don’t get easily dazzled. I start to collect precious feedback and to debate all the aspects of the game:
• Is the duration okay? Can I remove one or more turns to make it feel more intense?
• Should I give players more space to score adventures, or should I force them to rush and always feel short of money?
• Is the space in the luggage okay? Should the player be comfy, or feel a very strict limit?
• Should the adventures be text-only, or should they have images? Or maybe, only images to make it language independent?
• How to balance the game for the number of players?
• Should I make the game 2-4 only, or should I make it possible to play with five players?
• How to balance the value of each adventure card in points? What formula to use for this problem which is reminiscent of the “knapsack problem”?
After more than two hundred playtests, the game finally feels ready for presentation.
The Crazy Ideas
There is always a moment in which the game designer starts to think of details which are useless to the current development phase. My useless detail is the box of the game.
I start to think about how cool the game would be in a real suitcase — then I actually build one.
Building a suitcase from cardboard
Sometimes, even if those details are not useful, they help the designer to build the vision for the game: a game in which you travel, feeling comfortable and a bit nostalgic.
Publishers
What publisher to show the game to? Is this game more suitable for a German publisher or for a French publisher? Better to contact known publishers first, or to use the game as an occasion to meet new publishers?
I start to look around and meet publishers at fairs and online, collecting feedback and opinions. In general, the feedback is very good, but I also collect some refusals and delusions and confusing feedback: The same game is too complex for some, too easy for others.
Each publisher has their vision, and I have to find the right trade-off between following suggestions of the experts of the industry and my own designer feeling. This is never easy.
The Meeting with Piatnik
There is a new tremendous way for a game designer to present games to publishers: online. You can present it any time, any day, from your home, with your prototype already set up on the table and no wasted time. Personally, I love this way.
This is how I meet Florian at Piatnik. We have an online meeting for one hour to show three games: “All three of them with the same effort please.” The presentation is good, and we immediately have a good feeling. All three games take the road to Vienna.
After some months, I receive good news: “The gameplay is very intuitive, easy to learn, highly interactive, but also tricky to master. We want to publish it.”
In the following months, we do a pressing work of checking and discussing every single little detail. We test every assumption, we reconsider every choice to confirm or tweak it. We retest in parallel until we are totally happy with every aspect of the game. So far, this was my most intense experience in working together with a publisher.
Also, we start to work on the graphics and on the characters, and the publisher comes up with an intriguing idea: We should do something to be more inclusive. They suggest having four different sets of characters to represent people out of the common stereotypes. I love the idea. We go for it (and we feel proud).
The four player boards, front and back
Also, Florian suggests having two sides for the map, with different rules for the end of the turn. We work on an alternative version and implement a system that reminds me of Terra Mystica to give expert players more choices on the B side of the map.
Elegance, or the Weight of Sacrifice
In the process of developing the game, some choices are not easy. The original prototypes came with more rules and elements, the most interesting of which was Inspector Fix. As in the book, an inspector distrusts the crazy bet of Phileas Fogg and thinks he is running away with the money. The player who collects more suspects at the end of each period has to lose time to answer the questions of the inspector before being released.
After some tests, we decided that less is more, and we make a strong decision. Au revoir, Inspector Fix.
Designer Rule
The frenzy for elegance overwhelms me. I come up with the idea to remove one of the key rules of the game and see what happens. I test the game by letting players buy clothes from any market regardless of the city they are in, and I have very clear feedback. Family players feel more comfortable, but expert players prefer to have a stronger challenge. The original rule requires players to plan their actions according to the city in which they want to score the next goal.
With the publisher we discuss how to implement this variant. We go for an option that I consider cool: The base game has the original rule, but we include a “Designer Rule” for family players.
The Final Title and Cover (and Games with a Similar Theme)
Around the World in 80 Days is a well-known book, so we cannot hope no one ever thought of a game about it. We check BGG and the web for games that could be similar.
We are lucky. We find some games with a title inspired by the book, but none of them is similar or seem to really grasp the atmosphere of the book.
We move towards the final product, and we start to see some sketches on the cover.
First drafts for the game cover
The artist Felix Wermke gives us different versions — and all of them are brilliant. We have to decide what idea of the game the cover should convey: A character-centric game? A game with a lot of elements from all around the world? The lightness of traveling and flying? A warm vintage sensation?
Draft after draft, we arrive at a solution we love. One last step: changing the title to 80 Days, short and simple.
The final cover
The Last Drafts
In the last weeks before SPIEL ’22, the artist shows us more sketches for the final illustrations, and we refine the texts in German and French.
We are ready to go live!
Final draft of the assistants
Some final-stage drafts of the adventure cards
