Last week we tested the newest iteration of Cutthroat Fruit Merchant, version 2.2! The play test was a rousing success, which left me with only a few small things to consider adjusting before the next game. Hooray for small adjustments! But we also had a new play tester among our group. One of our friends brought along his Teenage Daughter to try out the game. This was a little nerve racking. Teens tend to be cruel and overly direct with their poorly formed opinions. I didn’t like high school for a reason.

Anyway, we played through the game and I guess I should have given my friend more credit when it came to raising his offspring, because of course Teenage Daughter was very polite and engaged in the game the entire time. And more importantly Teenage Daughter gave an overall positive review of the game. That’s the most we could probably hope for from a teen! But then Teenage Daughter asked a most important question. She wanted to know what I thought the age range for the game would be.

This is something I hadn’t really considered. For the most part I figured I’d designed the game for me and, by extension, people like me, which is to say people who like the same kinds of games that I do, or, more specifically, the same kinds of themes and mechanics in games. This further prompted me to think about why I like to design games in the first place, because there are countless variations of practically every kind of theme and mechanic in games that already exist. So why am I wasting my time?

Well, part of it is that I like to create. Beyond board games and blogs I also stream video games and write and play music. I’m almost always working on multiple projects at the same time and that’s part of the reason I have trouble sleeping, because my mind just keeps going and going and going. I wake up in the middle of the night and I can’t stop thinking about how one player’s move is going to affect another’s, or how to automate parts of the game so it’s easy to keep track and doesn’t put too much work on the players; I think it would be fun to write a song about pirates who were raising money to buy their captain a new peg leg, there’s definitely room for a Kickstarter joke in there; I have a new idea for an instant use card called “What do you do with a drunken sailor” that allows you to choose what another player does with one of their actions; I could totally play the bass line from YYZ if I put in the time; “I wish you would step back from that ledge, my friend,” who wrote that song?; uh oh, I’m dreaming that I’m falling again; oh, that’s good, though. That means I’m asleep, but not anymore! And it starts all over again.

But I’d be lying if I didn’t mention that pretty much every time I play a game I think, “I could improve on this…” Maybe I like a mechanic I see and think of an alternate way it could be used. More often I have some kind of problem with a mechanic being used and think that if it was only tweaked a little bit it could be more fun or be used to represent a different theme. Of course “improvement” is entirely subjective.

So I guess I like to make games because I like to create and I want a customized and/or “improved” version of something else that already exists. But that still makes it all about appeasing my own desires when it comes to playing games. I suppose you could be quite different from me and still enjoy a game that I created, but then we would have something in common anyway, so we’re not so different after all, right?

Oh, and my response to Teenage Daughter about her actual question was that I figured anyone with reasonable math skills, basic arithmetic really, should be able to play this game. So, like, young-ish teens and up?

End rant.