Race to Adventure! began as a dare.
Every Wednesday, my regular co-designer and I meet at local game store EndGame right after work. E.K. and I spend the time before the weekly Board Game Night brainstorming new ideas, refining rules and mechanics or going through the nitty-gritty process of figuring out what each card in a game actually does. EndGame is an incredible venue for playing or designing games—you’re perched atop a loft-style mezzanine with natural light pouring in, and you have a bird’s-eye view of the store’s entire game layout. And on this occasion, what caught my eye was the treelike stand with plushy bananas hanging from its “branches.”
EndGame patrons look down at the revelry from their upstairs perch during the EG 8th Anniversary Party.
You can see a lot of word games from our perch at EndGame. There’s Scrabble and Boggle and Word on the Street and many, many more. But Bananagrams is the only one that truly stands out. And when you actually unzip that yellow bag there’s more marketing genius: The very functions of the game are called banana “SPLIT” and “PEEL,” with alternate rules with names like “BANANA SMOOTHIE.” In its totality, this simple letter-arrangement game became something much more: a conceptual experience that could be unzipped to find a game inside.
I’m a marketing writer by trade, so this tends to be the way I think. I walk around my world dissecting the choices people make in life or business. Not judging, but observing those choices and seeing what there is to learn. I learn a lot that way. But on this occasion I was thinking out loud, and E.K. was adding his fine thoughts and soon EndGame co-owner Chris Ruggiero chimed in with his perspective as a retailer. Before long, we were talking about other kinds of games that could be packaged in a clever form to add another layer to the experience. And in the middle of that back-and-forth emerged the dare:
Chris: What if you designed a game called “Wallet” where all the bits and rules had to fit inside a real wallet?
Us: That’s a fun idea.
Chris: No … I mean, I dare you to sit down right now and actually design it.
Now, I’m paraphrasing the above because I don’t remember the exact words, but that’s precisely what we did. We sat down and right there and started gaming it out on the spot. What’s literally in our wallets? And how might those items become integral game components? So, we emptied our pockets onto the table and looked for the potential in everything from the pieces of lint to the wallets themselves. And remarkably quickly, the beginnings of a game emerged …
In next Tuesday’s Designer Diary, you’ll find out what developed from that on-the-spot session … and what any of this has to do with pulp adventure game Race to Adventure!
[...] Designer Diary 1: The Origins of ‘Race to Adventure!’ [...]