I sit here in my garden on a warm and sunny Saturday trying to forget the fact that yesterday I tested postive for COVID. Yesterday was also my one year wedding anniversary, the party we had planned had to unfortunately be cancelled and all the work we had put into making the garden nice we would just have to enjoy for ourselves.
Not wanting to sit around and feel too sorry for myself I have decided instead to get to work on populating this website and turn a bad situation into something productive and positive.
I guess the thought of creating a boardgame came about at the end of 2019 (great timing I know!) I was drinking coffee in a local coffee shop when I had the idea of a game where players could gain different powers, these powers I hoped would give the game replayability as the effect of each on the game would be different. This in itself was not a groundbreaking idea, I’m sure most games start this way, a simple idea, a premise and through the development become greater than the sum of their parts.
At this point I had only truely gotten back into the hobby for the last three years. I played more boardgames when I was growing up in the 90’s, the most exciting being Heroquest, I had never played a game with a real theme before, most games played in the family home were limited to ‘Monopoly, Mouse Trap and Ghost Castle’ on the whole most of my family weren’t interested in playing any games if they had a choice.
Then I discovered the blank map in the middle of the quest book and that you could create your own quests, suddenly a whole world of possibilities opened up to me. I believe I spent more time designing Heroquest campaigns than I ever did playing them. These games tended to be brutal landscapes created by my young imagination, rooms didn’t just contain traps, the whole room was a trap. Some of these designs survived the purge of my parents loft and I may share some of these on here one day.
Then three years ago at a new years eve party a few friends and I gathered together to have a few drinks, one of the group brought along a few boardgames to play. I was hesitant at first I must admit, I had been more of a console gamer during my teens and early 20’s but had since fallen out of love with them as I had with boardgames. I decided to sit out whilst everyone played ‘The Thing’ and I found myself getting drawn in inspite of myself. I had never seen a betrayer mechanic in a game before and this blew my mind, I didn’t realise games could have mechanics like these. I made sure to play the next time it was brought to the table and I found the love of boardgames had been rekindled.
I started collecting games little by little, starting with simple card games that were easy to get to the table like ‘exploding kittens’ and ‘Skull’. I would watch reviews from Shut up and sit down and search for Rodney Smith tutorials after buying games based on their recommendations.
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Back in the coffee shop I realised that it would be a good idea to get some help, I had written a few pages of ideas but was struggling with how to mesh them together to create a well rounded game. I texted Lewis and greatfully he said he would be happy to help me develop what three years later has become ‘Meteor Heroes’.
So that was the beginning of ‘Meteor Heroes’ and Never Yellow games. I will post more about the process of designing and developing a game in future posts as I hadn’t found much online when I was working through the development myself and hopefully it will help someone else avoid some of the mistakes I made.
Thanks for reading,
Adam