“You Cannot Build New Kingdom in a Day…”
Actually it took 2 weekends in January 2021. Lindsey (my wife) and I went down to Texas for a business conference. I had been to this conference the prior year, and it was Lindsey’s thing, so I decided I wanted to go only to the social events. We agreed that during the day she would attend sessions and hear from speakers and I would finally start working on that board game idea I had been talking about. Then, during the evenings we would relax, go to Top Golf, eat good food, and enjoy our time together.
Lindsey and I in Dallas where “The New Kingdom” the game, was born.
At the end of the weekend I had a fully implemented plan for what New Kingdom (then called ‘The New Kingdom’ — seems all good things drop the ‘the’ at some point) would look like. When I first started out to design New Kingdom I had a ton of ideas and concept drawings like the thumbnail for this post, but the one thing I was crystal clear about was that I wanted not just the cards but the mechanics to feel as theologically sound as possible. I wanted to capture what it was like to actually live a life of faith awaiting the New Kingdom!
As I started to think about this, two things became abundantly clear: players, thought they may compete, cannot deliberately harm one another (though they may be tempted to or do so inadvertently) and the biggest obstacle to progress would be temptations, sins, and forces of evil (which I now call dark spirits). Those were the core ideas and remain core concepts in the game.
The core mechanic was deck building simply because I had been playing a lot of those games and I really liked it at the time. Now deck building, something too often regarded as ‘confusing’ or ‘awkward’ by many of my testers, has been entirely removed as a mechanic and replaced with something closer to an auction or drafting mechanic. The point is, my starting point was just that, a starting point.
My first page of notes on “The New Kingdom” a ‘new board game concept’
When we came home to Spokane, I ordered some blank playing cards and tokens from Amazon, worked for a week, and that following weekend I spent a whole day writing card mechanics in Excel and printing them on Avery 5160 labels . I laboriously cut them to fit and stuck them to cards front and back. It took me a whole Friday evening and most of Saturday.
‘tabula rasa’ a blank slate — where all good things begin!
That Saturday night Lindsey and I stayed up until way past midnight playing the first extremely rough play through. It took 3.5 hours and was very confusing, but at the end we both said, “that was actually pretty fun, though it was way too long,” and with that the play testing was underway!
The first play through. Though a little rough, it was fun (at least to us) even then!
Since then there have been many play tests and 10 different prototypes. I heard it said recently that the hardest part of any habit is the first 2 minutes. I think it is from a popular self-help book, and I have found that to be true. Whether creating a game, writing a blog, marketing a project, or starting a business you may or may not be able to do it in a day, but it only takes a little nudge to get it going!
