by Steve Dee John Lennon is usually attributed to the quote that "Life is what happens while you're busy making other plans", although it turns out it's actually from a Mary Worth comic. Maybe cool quotes are what happens...

by Steve Dee

John Lennon is usually attributed to the quote that "Life is what happens while you're busy making other plans", although it turns out it's actually from a Mary Worth comic. Maybe cool quotes are what happens while people think you're John Lennon.

A lot of people push back against the idea of game design being an art form. They prefer to think of it as something more akin to engineering a tool or solving a mathematical or technical problem, even if the problem being solved is the need to puzzle and entertain. It might even be seen as a business problem: the pursuit of something that others will find engaging enough as an experience that they wish to buy it. I like to think of it as an art form for lots of reasons, and one of those is that whether I'm writing fiction or scripts, creating lore, or writing songs, the creative process always runs the same way.

And one thing that is part of that process, all the time, is the sudden diversion onto another idea — the art you make while you're busy making other plans.

My name is Steve Dee and I'm the creator of The Score along with my incredible artist Matt Roberts. The Score is actually a culmination of two of my lifelong game-design dreams, yet it came to me in a flash and was developed almost as quickly, in the middle of doing other things.

Party Time

One of those two game-design dreams was to make a party game that was also much like a role-playing game or a storytelling game. As a young gamer, party games were my greatest love. I started with traditional things like Monopoly and Mouse Trap, of course, but I found they were often too competitive, too cutthroat, and too mathematical or engineered perhaps.

For me, party games like Pictionary, Balderdash, Taboo, Articulate!, Outburst! and plain old Charades solved those issues. Even when they involved competition, they produced laughter and silliness and creativity, and those things mattered more than who won. They were also simple to learn and to teach, and they didn't last forever, and it didn't matter if you made mistakes.

Meanwhile I was playing tabletop RPGs for much the same reason. However those were decidedly crunchier, and not at all easy to learn or to teach. They lasted forever — or if you made a mistake, they could last a very short time indeed when your character died, because this was the old days of D&D when you had 6 hit points and the average orc would do 1d8 damage. As I went out into the world trying to get people to play long and complicated and involved role-playing games with me, I dreamt of the idea of bringing the RPG experience down to a party game level — something you could teach in a moment and play in fifteen minutes, but that still had characters, adventure, improvised dramatics, and a satisfying narrative.

There were close runs, of course. The Ghostbusters RPG was extremely good at this. Games got simpler and simpler over the years. Fiasco and other RPGs brought things down to just a few cards and dice. We also got some wonderful storytelling board games like Rory's Story Cubes and Once Upon A Time, another game I fell madly in love with. The same goes for Grave Robbers from Outer Space and all its sequels, which deftly used cinematic tropes to produce great stories, over the framework of simple and silly mechanisms. There was clearly a demand for story-rich gaming, and it didn't need to be as long or complicated as a game of D&D or Gloomhaven.

Run, Zombies, Run

Fast forward about ten years and I was applying for work on Zombies, Run!, a phone exercise app that used narrative beats to inspire you to go jogging — by pretending that zombies are chasing you. I didn't get that job, but it reminded me of how much people like narrative in their games.

Around the same time, I began running game design sessions for schools, corporations, and events in which we would get groups of people with no experience making their first board game in two or three hours flat. I also ran this activity at game conventions and for practiced designers, and it worked for them as well as it did for the newcomers. Some designers started wanting to do it every year at the conventions because being low on time shuts down the part of your brain that says no when it's embarrassed or shy or not sure what to do. You just have to say something and do something, and designers kept telling me that this helped them listen to their inner voice and say yes without fear.

And all of a sudden I realized that was the key to making a party game RPG: a time limit. Specifically, something like the hot-potato mechanism in Pass The Bomb or Say Anything where you just HAVE to shout things out. Shouting out random things is what makes Pictionary and Charades so much fun. The same goes for things like Wavelength or That Sound Game or When I Dream.

Even better, Pass the Bomb had a perfect mechanism for a zombie game: If you were talking when the bomb went off, you would get eaten. Then you could still be in the game, but instead of describing how you were running from or fighting zombies, you'd describe chasing the others and threatening to eat their brains. Of course zombies couldn't get more dead, so instantly the game had a narrative arc to it: Early on, with nobody a zombie, anyone could get bitten, but as the game progressed and most people turned evil, the bomb is less and less in the hands of the remaining heroes, so they are less likely to get bitten. Eventually you'd either reach a final time limit or everyone would be dead.

I immediately went to work on a game I decided to call "The Walking Deck" because the show The Walking Dead was still very big at the time. Everyone said it was way too close to copyright infringement, though, so after a few playtests we tried "The Restless Deck". We hoped that was clear it was about zombies, but some players were not sure, so we tried a whole bunch of other names, while we also worked on the mechanisms.


The basic mechanism was a little like Once Upon A Time, only without choosing a card from your hand. You'd just grab a card from the deck and get two options, one at the top and one at the bottom, to give you inspiration. We soon found the choice slowed people down, so we went to just one thing on the card. That way the game wasn't about reading, but just reacting. Whatever came up...happened.

We also spent time trying to make a random timer device, or figure out whether we could somehow get the machine inside Pass the Bomb and cut it out of the bomb — then my friend just googled "random timer" and it turns out there's an app for that. Slowly this was coming together.

We then tried to build the whole thing into a digital version so that the random timer and the cards would just come up on your phone, while also randomly passing the story control around like a kind of improv Space Team. We got some interns from the university involved who swore they could code us a web version, and we started testing it.


Reality Bites Back

So why do I keep talking about zombies? Because sometimes the game you think you're making isn't the one you end up making. Sometimes the best laid plans of mice and game designers gang aft agley.

The students helping us with the mod had to move on, with some bugs left in the code, so it was no longer running. Meanwhile, playtests with the cards found things not quite yet working. At this point we were trying to copy zombie movie discussions in which people are constantly wondering whether zombies are a punishment from God or science gone mad or who is going to betray them or what the ethical thing to do is. But putting that on cards created things people found too cerebral for the pace at which the game was now running. Nobody wanted to spend ten seconds arguing about humanity's hatred for the Other while playing a high-speed party game.

But at the same time, I wanted to keep some of those elements. We began a long process of trying to figure out which cards to include. At the same time, we knew now that zombie cards were being drawn a lot less than cards for human survivors, so our original plan to have two decks the same size was scrapped. Everything now came down to what the actual product would include if we went to market. Could we ask players to download a timer app? If so, could it be just one hundred cards...or seventy? If not, how many cards would we need to justify adding some random timer device, which would raise the price and our manufacturing issues dramatically. It would also get in the way of making the game look simple and easy. We were going to need to do a lot of research on our potential audience, cost points, and sales points. That's okay as it's part of the process, but it takes a long time.

It's also – cards on the table – a place I often get stuck. I have ADHD and autism, and as hard as I try to fix on one game, I find it easy to bounce away when things slow down and the process becomes more systematic. Just like those board games I don't like: I'd rather be being creative and shouting! And life had other plans to distract me...because just as I was struggling to get through playtesting the zombie game, Button Shy announced a new competition: an 18-card role-playing game.

The Other White Whale

Despite loving board games just as much as RPGs, I've actually spent most of my design career working in the tabletop RPG industry. I've worked for Warhammer and Vampire: The Requiem and Cortex, and for the latter helped expand their heist rules from the Leverage RPG into a more general action-adventure based system. Working on Leverage was amazing as heist and caper stories are my absolute favorite genre of fiction. Naturally, during this time, I bought and read a lot of heist RPGs — but I had a problem with all of them.

See, the thing I like most about heist stories is that the characters in the story operate with more information than the audience. When Sol falls over in Ocean's Eleven, we the audience think he's sick. Later, we learn this was a deliberate plot and part of the plan. We've been tricked! Much like stage magic – and just as wonderful to watch.

But in RPGs, the players are both the characters AND the audience — and that makes it difficult to have this stage magic experience. It's great to roleplay your characters discovering secrets that all the players always knew, but that's not the same thing. It's great to spend a flashback explaining how you were always carrying the drone you're about to deploy, but you haven't "tricked" yourself. My white whale of game design was: Could I make a game that made me feel like that moment in a great heist movie where everything you've previously perceived suddenly changes because you realize you were tricked?

It sounded impossible on paper, but after twenty-five years in the field, I like to challenge myself.

This was the context when we got word of the 18-card RPG challenge. There were two kinds of RPGs I'd always wanted to make: a party game RPG/story game, and a proper heist RPG that fulfilled the above challenge. By starting on a party game RPG, I'd come up with something closer to a tabletop game than a true RPG, but I figured maybe for this challenge, that would be okay. RPGs aren't well defined, and Button Shy publishes no RPGs, so maybe a storytelling game would be okay. My zombie game wouldn't work because it was all about having dozens of cards coming out rapid fire, so I began to think that maybe somehow I could take the zombie game, turn it into 18 cards, and somehow catch my white whale at the same time.


Nobody was more surprised than me when this worked.

Heist Heist Baby

The zombie cards were all big bold scenes, so the first step was simply to come up with eighteen things that might happen in a heist film: climbing up and down things, breaking into safes and windows, wearing disguises, going deep undercover, driving real fast, blowing the doors off, etc. As I did so, I realized in most heist films these scenes were almost always abilities. They were things being done by experts who were good at doing those things, so in the name of 18-card economy, I could double up. My scene-generating device could also be character generation. If you're a driver, you're going to have a scene where you drive. If you've ever designed an 18-card game, you know that everything is about efficiency and getting multiple use out of cards.


Of course, it wouldn't be much of a game if you could never fail at using your abilities, so my first idea was to make the cards reversible top to bottom. (You can still see an echo of this design in the card backs.) The idea was you would randomly invert some of the cards, and during those scenes your ability just wouldn't work. However, that took a lot of work so then I had the idea of introducing "acts" in which things would switch back and forth. With just 18 cards, these would be designated by turning those cards upside down (top to bottom) to indicate when a TWIST occurred in the story. Again, you can see a hint of this in the final design – the TWIST! is still on the Act cards.

That meant you would know when a new act was about to begin, but it was the only option without adding more cards. I have a friend who says most 18-card games would be better with a few more cards, and I think he's right. A design constraint is a great way to get new ideas, but it's rarely the best way to make things the best they can be. I entered the competition and made the short list, but there was that theme again: I was already working on it being something else.

And like I said, apart from a few tiny tweaks, it came together quickly. Adding act cards meant you could easily remember what stage you were in and you could then hand the cards out to the players to track who had spoken the most. That meant everyone got about the same screen time. The only real problem we had in playtesting was not enough people knew what parkour was, so we changed it to "traversing". Since the mechanisms are 90% the cards, we had to get it right. Luckily I'd been preparing for this with the zombie game, so my skills were honed.


And playtesting revealed it really did solve the problem: It is a game that can trick you. A local RPG convention just happened to pop up (and then disappear immediately after, how suspicious...) and during the first playing the game worked like a charm. We were breaking into a mob boss' house to get revenge, and the cards were being very cruel. The bad guy blew our cover, took our guns, shot up our hitter, and called the local police to tell them armed intruders were in his house. The last card was revealed, and it was Signals...and we knew the whole point of the job was to trick the bad guys into revealing their position to the feds who had no jurisdiction to act — but now they could come walking in to respond to a call for help. No drama points, no flashbacks, it was always what we must have meant. That probably doesn't mean much to anyone but me, but I was happy.

What did mean a lot to other people is that we found it succeeding hugely at the party game part. That seemed to be working effortlessly, working so well I wasn't bothered when it didn't get chosen by Button Shy. I already knew I had to print it. It was everything I'd ever wanted: shared storytelling like Once Upon A Time but fully collaborative — and a roleplaying game for everyone, one you could teach in a moment and play in fifteen minutes, one that didn't last forever and where it didn't matter if you made mistakes.

And everyone seemed to agree. We took it to PAX Aus where we were honored to be part of the showcase. Over four days, we ran over 150 games for over five hundred people of different ages and backgrounds and abilities, and only one person struggled with it. It didn't feel anything like an RPG, but it let people have all that wonder and creativity. We decided it belonged on BGG not RPGgeek (like Once Upon A Time) because it was proving that accessible. When I explained to the mods why I thought it was a board game, they were confused because it couldn't possibly be an RPG the way I described it...


The Final Piece

So it all began with serendipity, but it came together like the perfect storm. My great friend and colleague Matt Roberts and I had been talking just weeks before The Score started working about how much we wanted to see more interesting designs in games — and how much we loved some of the great design aesthetics of classic Hollywood. We talked about how the UPA revival had influenced Burgle Bros. as well as an artist we both adored: Saul Bass. We swore if we found a game that fit that look we'd leap on it.

Saul never really did a poster for a heist pic, but the 1960s was the true birth of the heist. The success of the legendary Rififi (1955) in France ran into an American audience hungry for crime films but tiring of the grimness of the post-war era noir. The 1960s saw things like Ocean's 11, The Pink Panther, Topkapi, The Thomas Crown Affair, The Italian Job, Seven Thieves, The League of Gentlemen, Second Breath, How To Steal A Million, and Gambit. Of course we wanted the art to be timeless and also suggest any kind of crew in any part of the world, so I suggested silhouettes and of course we turned to Saul.

Matt is a maestro. He also came up with the idea of making the box a pull-out file after we realized we couldn't fit the cards into tiny suitcases. He also solved the one last problem we were running into: Every now and then players wanted to reach for jargon and technical discourse to sound extra cool. Matt's solution was to slide a whole bunch of that in the background on the backs. It's a running text of several hundred words, and he took on the task of making it all visible and making every card different. You can if you lay out every card, track the whole paragraph. This also means the cards are marked if you want to run your own con...


The rest ran like clockwork. It made it look easy, which is how hard work always goes. Hit every convention we could, power up the mailing list, bust our ass trying to make a beautiful, exciting Kickstarter that will cover all costs even with a cheap product, and scrape together every cent we could spare for advertising. Luckily we'd done this twice before and had the swing of it. We hit our goal, knocked out the stretch goals, and fulfilled to every backer with 180 days. That's how you pull off a heist.

When folks asked me for a designer diary, I pushed back because I didn't know what to say. Apart from a few small nudges, the game had come together swiftly, worked strongly almost straight away, had the wide appeal we wanted, and had sold confidently — but the lesson was everything else that got us there: the serendipity of stumbling onto the real game you're trying to make and the wisdom to switch horses midstream; the lifelong study of storytelling and party games; the dozens of failed designs and the few that worked; and the twenty-five years in the industry honing my skills and the five years pounding the convention scene building two successful Kickstarters that we could bank on. The designer diary for The Score makes it all look so easy; but that's because the designer diary is really my life before I started.

Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration, but a lot of people think it goes in that order. Most of the time, the perspiration comes first, and most of the time you're chasing something else along the way — but if you're smart and flexible, you can be ready when opportunity knocks and hands you the heist of a lifetime.

Steve Dee

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