I have been deep in a hyperfixation rabbit hole for the last month or so. I have been working on a board game for a couple of years and suddenly everything clicked and all of the pieces fell into place so I could get it completed.

After I put the finishing touches on the first one, I took all the extra ideas that had been discarded or didn’t belong in the first game and put 2 more games together. One is complete and the 3rd one is still in process.

Since the 3rd game hasn’t been put together yet, I may not have it ready for play testing at the Gaming Retreat I’ll be attending at the beginning of next month. But I plan on bringing the other 2.

Creating games takes a lot of the same energy as writing does, but it has taken me a long time to get this far because I haven’t really studied game theory. I just know what kinds of games I like to play. And to be honest, the end result looks nothing like the initial idea. I’ve had to play it again and again and again to really hone in on what I wanted. I added lots of elements to make it fit the overall idea.

But when I started using a company to create all of the components, I had to really strip off everything that was superfluous to the game play because keeping everything would have made it too costly. In the end, I was happier with the game with the extras stripped away. Both the adding of ideas and the stripping away of elements was necessary to arrive at the final game.

Of the other 2 games, one was a completely different idea that came from the title and the other went back to the original idea I had which then turned into a completely different game. I think there were so many things I considered including and realized along the way that by the end I had 3 distinct games.

Check out my games on the Games page.