When the email came in saying Penny Press has been chosen as a finalist in Cards Against Humanity’s Tabletop Deathmatch, I couldn’t believe my eyes. I read the email twice, then three times, looking for the ‘thanks but no thanks’ wording, but all I could find was an invitation to pitch our game at Gen Con.

Which didn’t give us much time. Robert and I had entered the Deathmatch -- not on a whim, but without real expectations of making it to the final round. We’d also entered Penny Press in the Boston Festival of Indie Games, a fantastic local game development expo that we figured we had a better shot at. In the end, we got into both, and those experiences really helped propel Penny Press toward its finished form.

With Gen Con a few months away, and Boston FIG soon after that, we suddenly had a deadline to to whip our game into shape. That proved to be critical, as the time pressure forced us to make some decisions about the game that we’d been dithering on, to write down a full set of rules, and to put the game in front of a bunch of strangers.

That last one was perhaps the most important. We’d playtested Penny Press with local folks, but most of them had been friends who were inclined to support our design efforts rather than point out the game’s shortcomings. And we were always there to play the game with them, which allowed us to smooth over some of the rule ambiguities or mechanical problems.

For the Deathmatch, we were pitching the game to a panel of industry heavyweights who could see through weak mechanics and papered-over problems like they were glass. Penny Press would be judged as it is, and not how we’d wish it to be.

For Boston FIG, we sent the game off to be ‘blind’ playtested -- testers would have to read our rules and learn the game on their own, without any guidance from us. The game would stand or stumble on its own.

Fortunately, Penny Press -- and its designers -- came through both experiences all the better for them. The judges and the testers brought up some issues, but they also found a lot of strengths. That gave us the confidence to push on with fine-tuning Penny Press and diving further into art design.

It’s a scary thing to push your creation out into the world for strangers to poke, prod and critique. But at some point you have to discover if your ideas have legs outside of your circle of friends. The answer might not always be one you want to hear, but it’ll usually be the answer that moves your design in a productive direction.

We had problems with Penny Press. Lots and lots of problems. 

And each time we had a problem, our first instinct was to whip up a game mechanic or new rule in an attempt to iron out said problem. But problems (and their solutions) can beget more problems in game design, increasing complexity while making it harder for the core gameplay to shine through.

Take ‘blank’ stories, for instance. When headline cards come out in Penny Press, story pieces get added to the board. If there’s a green square story on the card, you put a green square story on the board’s green news beat (the colors represent the different news beats of the day such as War or Crime, but for now we’ll just call them colors). 

The problem as we saw it was that news beats could empty and then, depending on the card draw, not be filled. We didn’t want empty news beats, so we came up with ‘blank’ stories that, when they showed up on a headline card, would fill an empty news beat with that size story.

But there were lots of exceptions: if there were two empty news beats, you did one thing, and if there were multiple blank stories during the set-up phase, you did something else. Players had to wade through a sea of ‘if, then’ statements in the rules just to manage this one small part of the game.

We played this way for the better part of a year, and for the most part, things worked okay. It wasn’t until we began writing up the final rules that the blank stories jumped out at us because of how much text it took to explain them.

So we took a step back to examine why we were using blank stories in the first place. We discovered that we were actually concerned about an even distribution of stories with sufficient ‘coverage’ to fill a player’s newspaper. We cut the blank stories, making sure we had a fair distribution of stories on the headline cards, and were delighted to find that the game was better as a result.

This wasn’t the first time we’d cut something out of the game only to find the act of cutting had improved game play. It’s still a bit counterintuitive; how can adding be less, while subtracting is more? Still, we’ve learned the hard way that when problems arise, it’s not a bad idea to step back, look at the game as a whole, and see if some mechanism or rule doesn’t need pruning.

(Note: Robert steps in to add his perspective.)

Matt and I gave a lot of thought as to what a Penny Press end game should be like. We wanted it to be exciting, building to a climax, but it should also be fair to all players. It shouldn't be the only part of the game that matters (because why else would anyone need to play the rest of the game?), but it should matter a little more than the first part of the game because players do have experience with what is going on at this point. Most importantly, it should leave players with a feeling that they just played a really great game of Penny Press.

In Penny Press, players choose to score points whenever they feel it is most advantageous, which they do by publishing a newspaper. There are no game rounds, and it is up to the players themselves to make sure they keep pace and get enough scoring opportunities during the game. The game ends when the fastest player publishes his final newspaper, but to keep things fair, we decided that all other players would get one more chance to publish.

This worked well enough, but there was an issue. Publishing is the most time consuming thing in the game. Player turns go really fast, but when someone publishes and scores there are all kinds of things that need to happen. In our end game, every player published, which slowed things down considerably. We wrestled with this for a long while, but we couldn't really come up with something better and we finally decided that good was good enough.

Fast forward a few months, to when we got to sit down with Mike Selinker (of "Pathfinder Adventure Card Game" fame) and Rodney Thompson (of "Lords of Waterdeep" fame) for a play test session. This was a great game of Penny Press with lots of backstabbing and nastiness going on. Afterwards, Rodney told us that he was excited, ready to go again, and then he got to the end game and things started to drag, and he wasn't as excited and ready to go again anymore.

Shoot! Fail. We knew the end game needed more.

And then Mike Selinker said something that made all the difference. I don't remember his exact words, so I will have to paraphrase, but it came down to this: "If you have played a great game and have had a great experience, just get out. Finish up the game as quick as you can, and get people ready to play again."

This was a huge eye opener. Just get out? Finish up as quick as you can? Don't strive for epicness? We went back to the drawing board and devised a way to get the game over with quick, and it all came together. It probably took us less than 30 minutes to come up with all the rules. When we play tested the new end game, which we called the “Final Edition,” we discovered that because it is now so quick, and because players have some really interesting decisions to make, the epic climax we had sought so hard for got thrown in as a bonus.

The first time Robert and I played Penny Press, things didn’t go well. We didn’t even make it through a couple of turns before realizing that the mechanics -- as we’d set them up back then -- were fundamentally flawed. 

The game play was cumbersome, and the rules were hard to keep in our heads. We had reporters filling specific slots on game locations to pick up stories or activate powers, but the flow of powers and story availability slowed the game down to a confusing crawl. 

Not everything was broken. We liked sending out reporters to lay claim to stories, and we liked bringing those stories back and assembling them onto a newspaper front. So when we changed things, we kept this core gameplay -- at first by accident, but later by design.

That didn’t mean we wouldn’t tinker with our core gameplay. We reduced the number of story shapes; we cut back on the size of our front page; and we changed how the reporters go out and grab their stories. But that core gameplay of sending out reporters, taking stories and laying them out on the front page became our rock when making design decisions. 

When we ran into problems, or when we were tempted to add or subtract mechanics, we’d ask ourselves: How would this affect the core gameplay? And that was important, especially in the early days of Penny Press when the game could have gone in so many different directions. 

So now that we had an idea for a game -- an historical newspaper game, tentatively called Penny Press -- it was time to make a prototype. 

I’d been thinking about Penny Press for a while, slowing building the mechanics in my head, but there’s only so much you can do before committing your game to the real world. Without a prototype, it’s really hard to see what parts work -- and more importantly, which ones don’t. 

In building the first prototype, I kept things simple, using materials I had on hand, such as index cards, printer paper and parts I salvaged from thrift-store games. I drew some things by hand and used clip-art for the rest. 

This accomplished two things: it kept costs down, and it made the emotional barrier to making changes quite low. Because we didn’t have that much time or effort invested in the first prototype, it was easy to adjust cards and parts after playing it a couple of times (and there was plenty to adjust!).

Later, we’d spend more time and money updating Penny Press, but in those early days when so much of the game remained in flux, the fast and cheap prototype was our friend.

Ideas are easy, it’s said, but execution is hard. That’s certainly true, but coming up with the right idea for a game is important, too.

We kicked a few of the usual tropes around the table -- outer space, sports, etc. -- but Robert and I settled pretty quickly on an idea I’d been messing around with: Penny Press news barons duking it out for readers in old New York City. 

We liked the Penny Press idea for several reasons. It covered an interesting historical era we hadn’t seen in too many other games. The theme lent itself to some interesting ‘reporting’ mechanics. And with my background in journalism and Robert’s interest in history, we had a pre-existing foundation to build the game upon.

That last thing turned out to be pretty important. Whenever we ran into trouble with the game play (and we would, a hundred times over), Robert and I could fall back on what we’d eventually call the game’s ‘core’ -- the very essence of Penny Press, in terms of gameplay mechanics, theme and our life experiences -- to keep the game’s development on track. 

It all started, as these things are wont to do, in a bar. 

Robert and I had finished up a game night at Triple Play, our local friendly gaming store, but it was a nice night and we weren’t ready to go home. So we settled in at the Seven Barrel Brewery, ordered a few drinks, and began to talk about games. 

How we like games. Things we like in games. What we might do differently if we made a game. And finally, that maybe we should make a game ourselves. 

At the time, it didn’t feel like that big a leap from players to designers, though I’m not sure we would have made it without a little social time away from the gaming table (and perhaps a drink or two). I do know that we never expected to take our game design as far as we did, and that process is what we hope to detail in this designer’s diary.

In journalism school, aspiring reporters are taught to answer the five Ws -- Who, What, Where, When and Why -- in any news article they write. As Robert and I begin this designer’s diary about our upcoming board game, Penny Press, tackling the five Ws seemed a perfectly appropriate place to start. 

WHO: Robert Dijkman Dulkes works as a computer programmer by day, but by night (and weekends, too) he’s an avid gamer and board member of the Green Mountain Gamers. Robert’s background in art education has proved valuable as he and Matt have begun designing games together, and he has two last names, which is kind of fancy.

Matt Golec (www.mattgolec.com) only has one last name, but he pulls his weight in game design all the same. Matt’s background in newspapers and his flexible schedule as a stay-at-home dad have helped move Penny Press forward, and he’s the ‘I’ in most of these designer diary entries.

WHAT: Penny Press is a Euro-style board game about newspaper barons competing for readers in late 19th century New York City. Penny Press was a finalist in the Cards Against Humanity's Tabletop Deathmatch at Gen Con 2013, and was selected to participate in the 2013 Boston Festival of Indie games. 

Penny Press is being published by Asmadi Games. 

WHERE: While Robert and I live and play games in the Upper Valley region of Vermont and New Hampshire, we’ll be posting these designer diary entries for world-wide consumption at Facebook and the ‘news’ forum of the game’s BoardGameGeek page. 

WHEN: We’ll be posting entries about once per week, with a higher frequency possible as we get closer to publication and the video series that came out of the Tabletop Deathmatch. 

WHY: We’ll cover the ‘Why’ of why we designed a game in the next entry, but as to why this designer’s diary? We’re hoping to tease out the planning, philosophy and choices that went into making Penny Press, both for ourselves and for anyone else interested in the game design process.

Thanks for reading. If you find these entries of interest, please help us by sharing them on Facebook, Twitter or other social media so people can learn about our game in the runup to its publication (and likely Kickstarter). We can’t succeed without you!