In my last post, I talked about the world of shifting islands and magical journeys that forms the setting for Bloomhunter. But that project existed before Anneka and I decided to make a board game. This time, I want to touch on how we went from the initial desire to deciding what kind of game we wanted to create.
Both of us love board games. For as long as we’ve been together, we’ve been playing games together. It was inevitable that we’d try this at some point — we even tried once before, slapping together a card game called Smoke-Filled Room about 1920s dragons jockeying for political power. That never went anywhere. But when we hit on the current idea, we both knew pretty much instantly that we wanted to take it as far as we could.
The concept that ultimately grabbed both me and Anneka was an aspect of the Greensea setting born from an image I dreamed up years ago: an airship gliding into port, so laden with freshly gathered flowers that they garlanded its masts and rigging. You’d be able to smell the sweet scent of such a ship long before you saw it, and its arrival would be a festival in itself. But the people crewing the ship could only have gathered such a bounty through a long, difficult search. Could we turn that quest into a board game that would evoke the theme while being fun to play?
Our initial design was a pick-up-and-deliver game that played like a combination of Istanbul (which I love) and Firefly: The Game (which I don’t much like, a fact that may explain what happened next). Players moved around a fixed board and gathered flowers from a set of islands, with greater rewards for traveling further. This version played solidly, but we couldn’t escape the fact that it was boring. Every game played more or less the same. The far-flung voyages lacked a sense of story. Anneka and I pushed doggedly ahead, tweaking and refining, but eventually we both agreed we had made exactly the pizza delivery simulator we’d initially set out to avoid.
So we went back to square one. This time, we went with a design inspired by Century: Eastern Wonders, in which the focus was less on discovering rare flowers beyond the fields we know, and more on making advantageous trades in an already civilized Greensea. The key mechanic was that once you’d set up a chain of deals in one sector of the board, you could trigger the entire sequence at once and net a huge profit. Carefully setting up the dominoes and knocking them down for a huge turn is one of my favorite things about gaming, so it made sense as a foundation.
Unfortunately, we didn’t even get through a single full game of Bloomhunter 2.0. The mechanics didn’t add up to a meaningful experience. No turn had a sense of direction, and nothing about it felt fun, even the big sector-activation moments I’d been so excited for. After about an hour of crawling morosely around various hexagons, I caught Anneka’s eye and we both decided not to finish.
The failure of version 2.0 was a blow. Neither of us was excited to go back to our well-worn drawing board. But a signal fire burned within us both, making us confident that a game on this theme could work. So we picked ourselves off the ground and began to have an entirely new conversation. As for what we decided on…I’ll leave that until the next post.
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