I often check climate news against Daybreak’s simple model to see how things are progressing in the real world. It’s imperfect to be sure, but it does help bring a sense of scale and a framework for understanding all the disparate pieces of news. Daybreak has two opposing dynamics that gave the game its core tension. First, it shows how the accumulation of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere leads…
Matt Leacock: The design of The Four Doors followed a long, meandering route. It was the result of four different designers working alongside four different publishers to produce no fewer than five different games. I thought it’d be fun and enlightening to show just how much time, energy, and iteration can go into what (on the surface) might look like a fairly straightforward card game. Please…
Lisa with an early prototype of Animal Rescue Team on May 7, 2019 Origins The idea for Animal Rescue Team began in a conversation with my family as we walked our family dog, Fintan around the block (1). We were brainstorming different possibilities for rescue games because the license for one of my games had run out and I had the opportunity to revisit it. Unless you were really into 1960s-era…
Origins The Lord of the Rings: Fate of the Fellowship has been a long time coming. Its roots can be found in my earliest attempts at game design and my love of Tolkien. My Uncle Pat introduced me to the works of Tolkien when I was a young teenager. This was the same uncle who designed games in his spare time, inspiring me, at a young age, to do the same (1). He gave me a tattered edition of The…
The migration continues! I’ve moved from X to bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/mattleacock.bsky.social I also pen a newsletter, Leacock’s Lab, which I send out about every 1–3 months. You can sign up for that and see older posts on Substack: https://mattleacock.substack.com/ I’ll keep this blog up in case I have the itch to write anything longer. If there’s anything in particular you’d like to…
After many months of hemming and hawing, I’m finally taking the plunge and setting up a newsletter for my games since this blog isn’t usually timely enough and many folks are drifting from social media. I plan on posting about every other month. Subscribe now using the box below to start receiving updates!
After several years of design and development, Forbidden Jungle is finally here! In this diary, I’ll recount the search for the setting, some of the design challenges I faced, and look to what’s next. The Setting The adventurers lift off from Forbidden Island in their helicopter to later escape in a rebuilt airship in Forbidden Desert, then power a rocket to lift off in Forbidden Sky. When I began…
CMYK posted a new version of the How to Play video for Daybreak. I’m really happy with how it turned out!
An early prototype of Daybreak Matteo and I have been busy documenting the journey we took while designing Daybreak . Here are all the entries we have published and planned to date: Why We Made Daybreak Antagonists and Impacts Models and Resources Players and Powers Winning and Losing We enjoyed looking through the hundreds of photos, dozens of kits, and our 500+ page design journal when putting…
After more than two years of design, Daybreak is now live on Backerkit. Check it out!
We’ll be crowdfunding Daybreak on BackerKit starting on 20 September 2022. Sign up to be notified when the project goes live! Daybreak is a cooperative boardgame about stopping climate change. It presents an optimistic vision of the near future, where you and your friends get to build the mind-blowing technologies and resilient societies we need to decarbonize the world. I designed it with Matteo…
No small part of game design involves figuring out how to best explain your game. An old adage of software design was, “write the manual first” as this forces you to think about how the end user will experience your product. This carries over into game design as well: if, when writing the rules or teaching a game you find that you can’t explain it, it’s time to have a hard look at the underlying…
Donna and Colleen at the end of a testing session of Daybreak. In August 2019 a climate scientist named Declan Finney emailed me, explaining in great detail the gravity of the climate crisis and offering to help re-theme Pandemic to fit the topic. The idea was to help people better understand the situation and what could be done by wrapping it up into a game. This was a bit of a kick in the pants…
If you’re like me and isolating due to Covid, you’ve probably had to find new ways to play boardgames with friends. I’ve been playing boardgames online now with two groups of friends and one of our most frequent stops is Board Game Arena . So I was happy to learn that Forbidden Island is now available to play on the platform, starting today. If you haven’t checked out BGA, have a look. They have…
It’s startling to revisit this excerpt from The Game Designers showing the Lucca and SPIEL game fairs with their massive crowds. SPIEL drew close to 200,000 attendees from around the world in 2019 and Lucca—the city—fills to the brim of its medieval walls with people, elbow-to-elbow. We were carried away by the crowds. Seems like so long ago already. This clip is from The Game Designers , a…
The Pandemic Survival 2020 tournament season may have been canceled this year due to the need for physical distancing, but that doesn’t mean that we all can’t enjoy it together over Zoom! That’s what Rodger van den Braak and thirteen other former contestants did last month. I hosted a tournament myself last weekend to try it out—and it worked so well that I’ve written up rules and tips for all of…
The keynote I gave at TableTop Network just went up today. If you're interested in the importance of emotion in game design and empathy as a design skill, check it out: What’s the difference between a good and a great game? Often it’s the depth of the emotional response that it generates. But how do you know when your game is effective? Learn more about the importance of emotion in game design,…
It’s been longer than a quarter. Has it really been six months?! Here’s a summary of what’s been going on since I last posted. In The News As you might imagine, the Covid-19 outbreak has generated a lot of media interest in Pandemic . Here are a few interviews and articles that I participated in recently. The Washington Post ran a story on the popularity of games centering on the “proliferation of…
ERA: Medieval Age was released this year at Gen Con and will hit stores later this August. The game has a long history, which started nearly twelve years ago. Here’s a look at how the game came to be. Origins of ERA Back in October of 2007, my friends Chris and Kim Farrell threw down the gauntlet and challenged the members of our gaming group to a contest in the spirit of Nanowrimo —the National…
For some reason, I love pegboards. I think it has something to do with the satisfying way that a wooden peg bites into a wooden board—they feel great to handle. I was fascinated with cribbage boards as a kid and remember being disappointed when I learned that they were only glorified scoring tracks. My game, Chariot Race grew out of a desire to make a simple race game out of a similar pegboard.…