I have to admit, I’ve been a little distracted from Do You Punch the Guy lately. See, in addition to video games, I REALLY like making board games, and recently I ran across THIS:
The Game Crafter (A cool site I used over a decade ago to publish games like Mad Scientist! and I currently use to publish Igloo Battles) is putting on a game design contest that is animal themed. Now I just so happen to have an animal themed game sitting around halfway ready to be published that I have been wanting to work on called Elephant in the Room (hence the title of the article).
Elephant in the room is a reverse Worker Placement game (something I’ve never seen before) for 2-4 players where you take turns placing elephants in a board of a China shop and then you take turns trying to gather resources and purchase fine China without pissing off the elephants and causing them to wreak havoc and break all the nice dishware.
The game is filled with bad half-puns (male elephants are called bulls, so “bull in a China shop, you have to dig deep to find that one), silly themes and is surprisingly strategic despite having a rather small amount of mechanics. I’m hopeful that I stand a chance at winning the contest. The hardest part has been meeting the art needs without breaking the bank. The theme of elephants in a China shop is….obviously….unique, and finding a top-down map of a China shop has proven….damn near impossible.
I’m currently in the process of trying to weasel my way into something affordable with dungeon map creation software licenses and a little hope and a prayer.
I don’t have renders of all the cards yet, but here are the rules if you want to have a sneak peek. Anyway, back to work. the game design contest ends in April and I still have a lot of graphic design to do (yuck!).
Have Fun!
-Shoe