Board Reveal, Design Diary Two, Artist Blog, and Stretch Goals!
over 1 year ago – Fri, Oct 21, 2022 at 06:24:24 PM

All the things!

We have a lot of updates for you this week so I am going to try to keep my comments to a minimum. We're going to show you the updated board; let you know more about our other artist on the game, Makiyah Alexander; briefly discuss our stretch goals; discuss a new good development briefly; and then let you see Scout's latest design discussion! On with it!

Board Reveal!

Below is the current art for the game board. In layout it is similar to the prototype board, but so much nicer with Lamaro's art! I love how the space comes to life with Lamaro's design from the farm fields to the forests to Vicksburg. 

More Art!

As Lamaro is the lead artist for the game you have heard a lot about his work for the game. But we also want to take a moment to talk about Makiyah! Earlier this week, she answered a few questions from us about her experiences working on the game as part of our "Three Questions With..." series on the CMich Press website. Go check it out here: 

• https://cmichpress.com/2022/10/17/three-questions-with-makiyah-alexander-on-rising-waters/

With that, I also wanted to give you a taste of a bit more of her art as well. 

Stretch Goals

We are currently on our way to our first stretch goal! We have been talking to both our manufacturer as well as some other potential providers of organizational solutions for the game.  The next stretch goal after that is the upgrade to wooden tokens for the flood and levee chits! We have a little under two weeks to go and are hoping we can hit both of those targets!

Surprise Development

Tabletopia reached out to us last week about getting a version of the game up and running for people to play online. We are working with them to get that implemented. Once that is ready to go we will share it with our backers first! 

Design Diaries #2: Prototyping by Scout Blum

I love the prototyping process. For me, it’s one of the most creative, energizing parts of game design.

My initial prototypes, like most designers, utilize very basic elements. Index cards, sheets of paper taped together, miscellaneous bits and pieces. Since I teach game design in the classroom, I have a wide variety of dice, tokens, meeples – so that’s useful in starting designing. I’ve also collected a lot of rather oddly specific pieces – lots of little plastic dogs for a pet adoption game I thought might need 3-d pieces, for example.

I probably tend to start finessing my prototypes earlier than some designers. The art, layout, and feel of the components helps me think about my design more concretely, so I like to have components that look “real” fairly early in the process. Sometimes this means I invest a lot of time in putting together, printing out, and then correcting elements early on. For me, it’s worth it, although some designers may work differently.

I use Adobe products for my initial artwork/designs/layout – Illustrator, Photoshop, and InDesign. They take a while to master (I certainly haven’t yet), but each has a LOT of really good videos on how to use them. If you’re willing to invest the time, they’re incredibly flexible, high powered tools to use in the design process. But they’re also rather fiddly and can be immensely frustrating. I spent hours designing something before I learned the power of layers in Illustrator (where you can put different elements in different “layers” of an illustration, and thereby be able to just work on that part without changing the other parts). I also have a tendency to spend hours on color combinations or ways to layout cards. And, being self-taught and with no design or art training, I’m sure I’m missing a lot! And once the professional art gets added – by the wonderful Lamaro Smith in our case – the cards simply transform!

When I’m doing prototypes, I print out the card images on 8x10” stickers, cut them up and stick them on a deck of regular playing cards. That gives a good feel for the card, but the sticker increases the thickness of them, so the deck looks a lot bigger than it will be. If I need smaller cards, I use leftover business cards (I’m still using some I got when I was working as a paralegal through grad school).  For boards, I print the board image out on multiple stickers and put them on heavier weight paper – or sometimes art boards. I try to make sure that my sizes of everything are exactly what are needed for final components to make the transition to a professionally-produced one easier.

Once prototypes get finalized, I send them to GameCrafter. I’ve generally had good experiences with them. Just be careful around the time of big cons – especially Gen Con. Order your copies well before that if you need them! Because of the pandemic (the first complete version of the game was developed just as we went into lockdown in the spring of 2020), we also made use of prototyping and playtesting on Tabletop Simulator first, and then later Tabletopia. Digital playtesting proved really useful for me to get a wide variety of players as well as see how the components worked. Of course, sometimes playing digitally provided its own challenges unique to that environment. The dice we used in the game could be far more fiddly and difficult to manage than they would in an in-person game – and all that increased the play time for the game in artificial ways as well.

One of the most interesting things for me is how playtesting changes prototypes over time (or not). And that’s very true with Rising Waters. The initial prototype included a main board and then a long, thinner board sitting next to it. The main board, interestingly, hasn’t changed all that much. I took some hex graph paper and plotted a map of the area north of Vicksburg. I consulted with elevation maps and plotted approximate elevations for the land areas. Initially, the land hex areas were color coded by elevation – as the board got more finalized, I opted for a “watercolor” looking background to the land and water.

The thinner board, called the “levee map,” represented the Mississippi River (and some rivers that flow into it) above the original map – and was broken up into areas defined by actual levees. The continual breaking of levees was a huge problem for downstream residents, and I wanted that in the game. But it quickly became apparent that the levee map generated problems. When those levees broke, it was catastrophic for the board – just too much water and the game was ending too quickly. And the players had no control over it. So, I ditched that component. Although I liked it, and I think it added to the historical sense of context of where the water came from, it simply didn’t help the players understand the game as I wanted them to.

The only component that has changed dramatically has been how we calculated the water. I started off with small blue cubes in the first version of the game. Those added up too quickly, and it was hard to get enough of them in the right spaces. For a more concise way to express water and levee levels in the game, I shifted to dice – which provided a more compact component with numerical information. And I like lots of colored dice. The dice remained in the game for a long time – and are still in the virtual game on Tabletopia. Due to cost constraints, the final version will feature numbered tokens, though. Not as pretty, but certainly convey the appropriate information.

The Player Boards initially weren’t part of the game, but I pretty quickly added them as a way for players to level up – and something that also helped with reinforcing a sense of agency for the African Americans in the area. They changed after playtesting with multiple groups – when we added “Renewable powers” and also individual goals. Renewable powers provided players with more ways to use the Community cards – making them a more valuable asset. The addition of the individual victory points, where players take on specific roles and have tasks they need to accomplish, added another level of complexity, but also increased levels of choice. Would players work toward their goals or more community-oriented ones?

Overall, prototyping is a key component of game design (see what I did there?). Prototyping shouldn’t just be used to test out your mechanics and rules, but to help with the interaction between game play and purpose. The components should function as allies in getting the message of the game across. And, of course, just like the rules, components are iterative – they’ll morph into different things as the game changes through playtesting.

Coming up next: The Importance of Game Contests

Rising Waters has reached its goal! But can we do even more?
over 1 year ago – Fri, Oct 14, 2022 at 01:43:43 PM

We Did It!

Thank you to everyone who has already supported RISING WATERS! We at Central Michigan University Press are so excited about this game, and knowing we can continue to move forward with it has added some spring to our steps. We're going to be updating our stretch goals with upgraded pieces for the game soon. Our hope is to try and replace the cardboard tokens for water, levees, the raft, and so on, with wood pieces to make them more durable while still environmentally sustainable. So be on the look out for those.

Designer Diaries

Reaching our goal is coinciding with a few more updates that we were planning on discussing on Friday but now seems an even better moment. First, Scout is writing up some design diaries for you all. The first one, which we will include at the bottom of the post, discusses how she originally came to the topic of the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. 

Updated Game Board

Second, we should have the new and updated board ready for full reveal next week. Lamaro is currently tweaking some of the colors and making some changes related to playtesting.  The most significant is this: we are making a two-sided board one with hexes and hex groupings and one with only hex groupings. As you look at the prototype board we have hexes and hex groupings on the board. The idea behind this is that when a flood breaches the banks of a river it fills lower lying areas. The hex groupings represent the various elevations to the land around the Mississippi. Water also moves faster than people so when you move your pieces across the board you do it a hex at a time not a hex grouping. Similarly when levees are built along rivers they elevate the area next to the river not the entire low lying area. This is modeled in the game by having the levees affect a single hex not the entire hex group.  

However, we want a learning version of the game that teaches the mechanics a bit more quickly and easily and that will work in a classroom setting - enter Mississippi, 1926. Historically 1926 had lots of flooding as well. It is part of the reason the Spring '27 flood was so bad. In the 1926 model of the game we decided we wanted a board that allowed players to respond a bit more quickly and easily to the water. With a faster game play, it also fits into classroom settings.  Having both boards also provides more agency to our players. If you have '26 down and you want to up the difficulty a bit you can use the other side of the board. Additionally if '27 is giving you fits and you want to ease the challenge a bit, you can use the side of the board without the individual hexes. 

Draft Game Rules

The third and final thing we have for you this week is the current rules draft. Please note it is a DRAFT. We are still playing with the organization of the document, we are still adding some images, and we need to replace some that are clearly too blurry. As a nice bonus, when you look at the draft you will get to see some of Lamaro's board art. This is not the final board art, it is a draft in progress. 

• Rising Water Draft Rules Manual v101222

Thank you all for your support in helping us get this far! 

RISINGWATERS Design Diaries #1: The Origin Story by Scout Blum

I’ve always really enjoyed hearing the stories of how games come into this world and how designers shape and mold them over time. It’s just the historian in me – and that historian likes for things to be documented as well. So, we’ll be doing a few of these “designer diaries” – taking inspiration from the ones Matt Leacock is doing for his new climate change game, Daybreak.

In the fall of 2019, I was looking for a new history game topic for a Reacting to the Past game. Reacting to the Past is a historical role-playing pedagogy that places students in key moments in history. Using real primary documents from the time period, students take on roles and play through situations, learning empathy and important historical truths (“you have to show up to make history” is one of my favorites).

In addition to being an eye-opening pedagogy, Reacting also has a cadre of enthusiastic, knowledgeable  gamers – Patrick Rael, Andrew Peterson, Nicolas Proctor, and Jonathan Truitt among them. They were also pushing boundaries by teaching with board games in addition to the Reacting games. And they became my mentors and inspiration to engage kids in the classroom and also to work to develop my own games.

I wanted a topic that was environmental – that’s my main research area and I felt it would add a new element to Reacting’s list of games – and something that brought up issues of race. I’m also rather partial to environmental disaster stories. (My first book was about Love Canal, a man-made environmental disaster in the late 1970s and early 1980s). My idea was to find a topic that I could develop for a Reacting role-playing game that would also include a board game element to it in some way.

So, enter Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How it Changed America (1998) by John Barry. I came across this book while doing some research for a different Reacting game on the Teapot Dome scandal that also happened in the 1920s. Barry’s an engaging popular writer and he gets at some key themes of the flood. In particular, he focuses on the problems that developed when engineers limited their flood control focus solely to levees (building up land along the river). When those levees broke, they broke catastrophically and created a disaster of epic proportions.

So, I found my topic. And I initially followed Barry’s lead, thinking about how to design a game about the flood that helped students understand both the hubris of engineers in the 1910s and 20s thinking that they could “control” the Mississippi, but also the problems with overreliance on one technology. But the more interesting story, as I saw it, was the story of the African American sharecroppers who had to deal both with the flood waters (lacking any formal means to control them since they couldn’t vote or be engineers) and the racism of the Jim Crow south. Barry covers that to some extent, but Richard Mizelle, Jr. covers the black experience during the flood more fully in Backwater Blues: The Mississippi Flood of 1927 in the African American Imagination (2014).

I very much wanted to tell the story of those African Americans in the game. One of my main fields is African American history. I’ve been teaching, reading, researching, writing, and publishing about it for over 25 years now. The strength and resilience of the black community in the face of the horrors of racism fascinated me – along with the continuities in that community and methods of resistance.

So, in 2019 I began to develop a prototype – which I’ll talk about next time.

Thanks for supporting the game! It’s been a long journey, but we’re on our way!

Off and running!
over 1 year ago – Fri, Oct 07, 2022 at 08:15:28 AM

Thank you all for your generous support as we kicked off Rising Waters this week. We are thrilled to be working with Scout on the game. For the update this week we want to answer some of the questions that have been posted on the Kickstarter comment feed, to make sure everyone has them. As a bonus we want to show you a new piece of Lamaro's art.

Rulebook:

First up, the rule book. People have been asking to see it. We are getting close to being able to share a copy of it. But we also want to make sure the game presents itself well in the rule book when we release rules. There is a lot of information packed into the rulebook for both the 1926 model (designed to run a little faster and is a little less complex for classroom play) and the full 1927 flood version.  Right now, we are trying to decide if we like a bigger rule book that includes two fully separate set sections one for 1926 and the other for 1927. Or do we go with a smaller rulebook with one set up with variances labeled. Some of this will be answered with tweaks we are making to the 1926 play. We are getting close and hope to have something to share with you all soon. If you are wondering why we call one 1926 and the other 1927 it relates to the historical moment. One of the reasons the 1927 flood was so devastating was that fall 1926 witnessed its own flooding. When Spring 1927 rolled around the 1926 flooding hadn't had a chance to fully recede. 

Solo play:

There have been lots of questions (not just on Kickstarter) about solo play for the game. The game is fully co-op with shared information. So, the game is very playable two-handed.

Individual Goals:

There have been questions about the individual goals on the player cards. This is an optional element to the game. In speaking with playtesters some wanted a fully co-op game and others wanted something that was mostly co-op but had people looking out for their needs first and then that of the rest of the community. Creating the individual goals as an optional mechanic has worked well. The game is more difficult with the optional goals. It also creates points tension related to whether you help yourself or the community. That tension is true to historic moments like the one portrayed in Rising Waters.

Board:

The board art you are seeing at the moment is our prototype art. We will be using Lamaro's art for the final board. We have a sample of it, and it is gorgeous, but we are still making a few tweaks to it. We will share it in a future post.

Community Goal Card Art:

One of the newer additions to the game are the community goal cards. From a thematic approach the goals allow you as a community to come together. For example in one card you can "Write a new blues song." You donate two blues cards and a labor card (functionally you discard them). Mechanically the card allows you to reduce a loss on the loss track. The art for the community goal cards are the same. They show the community helping each other out in a time of need. The idea for the art and the goal cards came from some of our amazing reviewers. We really like the image Lamaro created for this, we hope you do too.

Shipping: 

We will be working with the Central Association for the Blind and Visually Impaired (CABVI) for our shipping needs. We were incredibly happy with their help on our first project and look forward to partnering with them again on this project. Domestic shipping, as mentioned on the Kickstarter page, should be between $8-$12 depending on distance from point of origin. As many of you are aware the world of global shipping is ummm. . . not what it once was. That said CABVI's shipping has been affordable and efficient. For example the shipping estimate for Sydney, Australia for one copy of Rising Waters (if it was sent today) is $20 (if you don't live in Sydney it will most likely be a few dollars different). We are seeking more quotes on additional locations as well and will try to get an estimated list up and running soon. If you are concerned about backing the game due to shipping costs, and would like an estimate, feel free to reach out and we will work to get you an answer.

Thanks again for all of your support!