Isn’t Walk the Plank a pirate-themed game, so why are you talking about plush toys? Welp, I was deep in the throes of school at the time, and we were studying how bacteria and viruses attack our cells, and how the body defends against them. The drama always sounded like an action movie or a spy novel, with the microbes as the lead characters. Personification of cutesy animate and inanimate things has exploded in recent years (reference cute avocado), so I thought why not these characters? … ok, maybe I was also going crazy from the many hours of studying. 

If you might have guessed that the conversation between Stephen and me quickly led to board and card games. You are correct. The point is that we let the conversation lead us somewhere organically, without putting up walls and stunting the creative process. 

The ultimate question was: “Should we take the time and see if we can create something fun together?” We both answered “Yes!”.  

We settled on moving from the plush toys to building a game. Why the switch? Well even though plush toys can be fun in their own right, games are so much better. 😀 We could have loads of more fun. 

Likely, too, we had just finished up our annual “Winter Rendezvous” where a small group of college friends meet together to hangout and catch up on the year since we all live in different parts of the country.  Competitions are a staple of the weekend, and board games quickly integrated themselves into the hype. Stephen and I thought of how fun it would be to add to the laughs, yells, screams, and general excitement of the weekend with our own game.  We began to visualize the possibilities, and thought, “what the heck, let’s try to make something”, but where to start?

Quick interesting side note….

To this day wherever we’re thinking of our game, we visualize playing with the Winter Rendezvous crew (Michael, Taylor and Danny). We ask ourselves questions like: 

• Would this make Taylor cry with laughter? 

• Would Mike jump out of his chair in dismay or object to this card (to the enjoyment of the rest of the group)?

• Would Danny make his signature face of shock and awe at a twist in the game he wasn’t expecting? (also to the enjoyment of the group)

If we can answer these questions, we feel like we passed the pressure test. The real fun is when we get to test it with them! So here’s the point – we’re trying to visualize potential players instead of “buyers” of the game. If we can visualize the people that we love spending time with enjoying themselves and building memories, then we’ve accomplished our ultimate objective.  

Returning to the origin story….

Where did we start? 

Apart from playing board games here or there (Stephen had more experience), we certainly aren’t expert gamers. By design (no pun intended) we discussed that we didn’t want to research anything about building a game. Not only were we not in a rush, we didn’t want our minds clouded immediately with other people’s ideas and approach. 

Both deep into our studies, we had no room to make any significant commitment. We started with: 

1. ~15 minutes per day to our project

2. 30 minutes once per week for video call to discuss what we learned/thought about

3. After 4 weeks, have an open discussion about whether we want to continue the project, and another “check-in” after 4 more weeks to see if we want to continue or pull the ripcord and bail. 

I personally found the open dialogue and checkpoints extremely helpful. We didn’t need to worry about someone being more invested than the other or having hard feelings if one person wanted to back out. We kept it with low commitment and open ended. It was all about sharing in exploring the idea together and hanging out. If either of us deemed it as too much, not the right time, or whatever other reason, then the person could opt out no problem.