In a Design Rut? Shrink a Big Game.

Lately I’ve witnessed an incredible surge in interest in micro games in the board game community, mini versions of existing games in particular.

Ok, I’m willing to admit it might be just me. I’m really excited about micro games right now. But objectively, I do think I’ve seen more acknowledgement of micro games from the wider hobby board gaming community in the past few months.

For one thing, Board Game Geek’s Project Shrinko is alive and well. Growing rapidly, even. There are 35 games on the list at the time I’m writing this post. Some I’ve tried (Catiny is worth sticking in your backpack) and others I’ve heard good things about.

I’ve also been seeing well-known content creators giving these small games a nod or two, granting them more respect than I would have expected from reviewers who tend to prefer heavy and/or high-production hobby games.

As a designer, I’ve fully embraced the concept. I often struggle with where to start mechanically when I’m designing a game. Typically, the process begins with a theme popping into my head that I want to bring to life in a board game. But what often (inevitably?) happens after that is I create a bloated mess of a prototype that includes a mish-mash of mechanics–and too many of them.

But lately, I think I’ve stumbled into a better strategy. They say creativity thrives under logical constraints. For whatever reason, condensing board games into micro versions seems to be a constraint that works for me.

My first effort at this (or rather, the first effort I was willing to release into the wild) was Pocket Watch, a micro version of the small box game Set a Watch from Rock Manor Games. Set a Watch, when you boil it down, is an extremely elegant game, so it was a pretty seamless process to distill it down to an 18-card game. That said, it required some creative thinking to find solutions for packing a ton of cards and oversized player boards into a pocket-sized experience. It got my brain working.

And it spurred the idea for my best design so far.

I had been playing Palm Island, the wonderful no-table-needed game designed by Jon Mietling, and I realized that my recently-designed Pocket Watch could probably be modified to be played in-hand.

So I starting working on it. A few of the conversions came easily: I basically saddled the mechanics of Pocket Watch onto the table-less chassis of Palm Island. But some parts were stubborn. For example, Pocket Watch relies on dice for input randomness. Where does that come from in a table-less game, where my only components are the cards?

Or how about this one: How do you keep track of things in-hand for which you formerly relied on cubes? Pocket Watch used cubes to track things like character health, the round you are on, and the number of monsters you were unable to defeat.

I won’t go into detail on how I overcame these problems. That’s for a different post, and you can see the final results by taking a look at Griphold Tower. The point I wanted to make here was that these two design challenges–condensing a big game into 18 cards, and converting that game into a no-table-needed experience–were exactly the constraints I needed to truly innovate in my own design.

Think about it. Shrinking a big game has a ton of helpful constraints baked in.

• You are forced to trim the fat. There’s no room for chrome in 18 cards.
• You are forced to maximize the space you have. If you’ve never designed with multi-use cards, you will in this exercise.
• You’ll need to innovate on mechanics. This is the part I love. You won’t be able to fit in every mechanism. Some will be abstracted, some will be left out completely, and others will be transformed. It’s the best feeling when you realize that a particular change you made to the game was an innovation rather than an iteration.

So if you find yourself in a rut, or you are just looking for your next challenge, go ahead and try one. Pick a game you like, or find the biggest-box behemoth you know how to play, just to see what you can do with it. I’m currently trying to shrink Gloomhaven into an 18-card no-table-needed micro game (you heard me). I’ll let you know what kind of mini monster comes from that exercise.

Let me know in the comments if you try shrinking a game yourself. If you’ve done it before, share what your experience was like.