Worm Up! Or, "why I review games"

Alex Randolph is the designer of Worm up! - a game that just received a Major Fun award. An elegant little game for children, adults, families. A minor masterwork.

There's a quote by Randolph on the side of the box. I think it explains much about why his game is as fun, and as elegant as it is:

"Somehow," he writes, "I feel that boardgames are the beginning of everything truly human, and so, ultimately, of the highest human endeavors, especially those which I find most precious, because they have no purpose outside themselves. They are, themselves, their purpose. Poetry, art, music, story telling, pure mathematics, pure science, philosophy...all are spiritual luxuries. Luxuries are things that delight us, that we long to possess, but that we can very well do without. They are not practical. They are not needed for our survival. And board games? Board games are luxuries, too, of course, albeit minor and marginal, but in the sense of non-utility, perhaps the purest."

Such insights explain much of what fascinates me personally about games, and why I devote so much time to reviewing them.

Speaking of which, here's what I wrote:

There's something gently lovable about Worm up! O, it's fun, all right. Major FUN, in actual fact. But it's funny, too. And so spare in its design that it's what you might call endearing.

The colorful little game box contains 5 sets (each in a different color) of 7 wooden hemispheres. These are used to make worms - take a set, put the hemispheres, hemi-side down, in a column, and there you have it, your basic worm.

Then there are 4 black cylinders. Also wooden. And some cardboard pieces. Thick, durable cardboard to be sure. One of these pieces serves as the finish line, and two of the cylinders fit on either end of it. The other two cylinders are placed about 2-feet away to create the starting line. The other cardboard pieces are also in 5 sets. Each set consists of 5 rectangular tokens, numbered 4, 5, 6, and 7, and one with an X on it.

Once the goal and starting line are set up, players line-up their worms. Each of the 3 to 5 players selects one of the cardboard tokens, places that token face-down on the table, and turns their tokens over simultaneously. Players who have chosen the same number token don't get to move their worms. The others move their worms, one segment at a time, starting from the last segment, and sliding that segment to the head of the worm, the player who chose the lowest number going first. The X token allows you to either move your worm (any number that hasn't been already chosen) or move the goal (which takes on evermore strategic significance as the game progresses). To move the goal, you put your finger on one of the cylinders (anchoring it), and then, with your finger on the other cylinder, rotate the goal as far as you want to.

You can move your worm in any manner you wish, positioning pieces so as to make it twist and turn to block your opponents, as long as each worm piece is placed adjacent to the piece most recently moved to the head of the worm. Even though you're just sliding these little wooden half-domes from the back to the font of the line, as the game progresses, the worms seem to move in a wonderfully wriggly, worm-like fashion. Because the pieces are so simple, the illusion is that much more powerful.

And of course trying to predict what tile the other players might choose so you can choose differently is endlessly surprising, turn after turn.

The rules are brief and easy to learn. The game takes maybe 10 minutes to play, though we had to play it twice before we felt that the game was over, and then had to have a quite serious discussion about why we should really be playing it at least one more time. It's good for families whose kids are a precocious 7 or older. It's good for kids. It's a good game to play between more serious games. The packaging is very spare - very little space is wasted.

Gentle fun. A happy little diversion.



from Bernie DeKoven, funsmith

LEGO and the funsmith

As you know, over the last few years I've been doing some work with LEGO on the development of a new LEGO project called: LEGO Games. One of the annoying things about consulting on new game projects is that I can't share my excitement or, more importantly, my discoveries with you.

The site is now live enough (though still under development, and not, conceptually, available to people in the US), and a couple of my articles about the LEGO Games System are finally available for global sharing.

See:

• It's Never Too Late - Confessions of a LEGO Game Consultant - an interview in which I get to be retrospective about what I've been doing with and learning from LEGO.
  

• and Designing for Fun (Part One), followed immediately by Designing for Fun (Part Two) - I find myself impartially proud of the part I had in this small part of the LEGO Games website. I get to remind grown-ups about the fun and depth of learning we find when we get to re-invent the game we are playing.
  

from Bernie DeKoven, funsmith

So, you want to be a game designer

I was tweeting around my virtual nest the other day and found this link to perhaps the first online service for people who want to design and publish their own games. It's called The Game Crafter. OK, so I was more impressed by the fact of its existence of such a service than I was by the service itself. They had to make a lot of compromises in order to get as far as they did, and though I can't recommend them to you yet, I can share my genuine excitement about the very first vanity game publisher that has crossed my virtual portal. The company is quick to let you know what kind of quality you can expect and how your profits get shared. And though you're not going to get custom-designed pieces, and your board and cards are not going to be, shall we say, commercial grade, and you can't, by law create a game to be sold to children 12 or under, the fact is that, despite all these limitations, this Cafe Press for printing games on-demand should prove of real value to many different audiences.

But, before you get too carried away by the promise of it all, if you're going to spend the time on producing your own games, you should also spend a lot of time learning about what designing games is really all about. Luckily, some remarkably clear, well-constructed, and insightful guides haave been published in the last few years. Go to the library and see if you can find a copy of Jesse Schell's The Art of Game Design: a book of lenses, for example, or Tracy Fullerton's Game Design Workshop, Second Edition: A Playcentric Approach to Creating Innovative Games, for another, or Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman's Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals. Thumb through any of these books. If you learn nothing else, you will at least begin to develop an appreciation for what, thanks to companies like The Game Crafter, you are suddenly being given to play with.

As my friend Garry Shirts says - the person who stands to learn the most from any game is the designer.

from Bernie DeKoven, funsmith