Lessons from Rabbit Rhymes

My game Rabbit Rhymes started its life as a simple, tiny idea. The final product I wanted to make for my Level 1 (pre-reader) topic about “rhyming”. I had already drawn all those images, even created a bundle of “rhyme pair cards”, and I thought: I can simply use that for a small game.

The original idea I wrote down was just a few short lines: “On your turn, start a new pair or finish one. If you finished a pair and RHYME, your bunny moves in ONE WAY. If you don’t, your bunny moves in SOME OTHER WAY.”

This seemed sensible enough. It meant you had to not just recognize if something rhymed, but strategically use that. Rhyme when you wanted that kind of movement (for your bunny). Don’t rhyme when you wanted to move in some other way.

Simple enough, right?

I wrote down the requirements:

• Some bunny pawns.
• One or more “maps” on which those bunnies race to the finish.
• The rulebook, of course.
• Some extra rhyme pairs (not in the standard bundle) for expansions and variety.

With my experience, I knew this would be a single day of work. I’d need to work really hard and not hit any snags (say, 8–10 hours), but it was doable. So I woke up early, started work, and … stopped myself rather quickly.

I had solidified the rulebook now. It means that the complete rules are written down and set in stone, though we’re still missing the images/examples. I was quite satisfied with the rules, as the base game easily fit on a single page, and it worked.

So why did it feel wrong? Why did it feel like I was missing something or making the wrong game?

The answer came when I was about to “push through” and start designing the maps. I looked at the page and thought “hmm, this might not be enough space for up to 5 bunnies to hop around. Especially if they can move in different ways, taking large leaps, and young kids have tiny hands! How to make the map bigger? The pawns bigger? But that would make the game longer, and kids at this age aren’t supposed to sit still for so long …”

And then I realized.

In my original plan for my educational games, I had written down a few “guidelines” or “principles”. One of them was that the games should be physical, if at all possible. They should allow kids to move around, to wiggle while playing, to not be forced to sit on a chair and hold tiny cards in cramped hands.

It seemed I had forgotten this principle lately! I had started designing more traditional games again, ignoring the age of the intended players.

The solution was “obvious” to me now: we do away with the board. Instead, the entire room becomes the map. It wasn’t called “Rabbit Rhymes” for nothing. I wanted that jumping/hopping theme in the game anyway, and this was a much better way to do it.

Instead of playing with small bunny pawns on a single printed page,

• You—the player—are the bunny!
• I decided to add these huge “locations” to cut out. Instead of a tiny spot on a map, it’s now a big spot on which the players can stand. (Or they can stand near it/close to it, just to indicate where they are.)
• Additionally, I made huge “fences”. (Just fold a paper in half and place it upright, but still, the idea is there I think.) Those are placed between your locations.
• Now you are actually moving through the space as you play this game.
  • “Jumping” a fence simply means that you land on the first space behind it (from where you are). So, you might jump a fence that’s quite a distance away actually.
  • Otherwise you must be clever with your layout + lucky with your room shape to make sure jumping fences is worthwhile. And if it isn’t, the game mostly stops being a game.

Of course, this ruined my previous ruleset completely. The old game about “starting and finishing pairs” relied on having a table and a hand of cards. On being able to see the pairs others had started and add your card to that.

Well—that’s hard to do when players are spaced out across a room!

But this was the point, which happens in every creative project, where you suddenly realize that multiple slumbering problems could be killed with one stone now.

• I had an “expansion” where some maps had icons inside the spots on the map. This allowed a variant where your bunny simply hopped to an icon that rhymed.
• Well … now that we have these huge locations that are randomly distributed, we can just put images on the locations.
• On your turn, it’s about matching your location. (Or, if there are older cards there from previous players, you may also match one of those. But by giving locations their own default images, you can always try and match it, even at the very start of the game.)
  • If you rhyme, you may hop over a fence (which is faster).
  • If not, you just take one step to the next location.

Unfortunately, this ruined probably the most interesting bit of the old game idea. The thing that made Rabbit Rhymes “semi-cooperative”:

• When you started a pair (that is, simply placed an image in empty space), you claimed it with one of your bunnies too.
• Because when someone else finishes your pair (adding the second card to it; that rhymes or doesn’t rhyme), their action triggers for both of you.
• In other words, you’re helping/hindering others all the time by choosing to rhyme/not rhyme too.

It would be really messy to start placing tiny bunny pawns on the floor now. And at the start of the game, locations are not “claimed” at all, and inserting that would be needlessly messy too.

I felt deflated again, but I reminded myself of the mantra “make it physical, tangible, practical”. Then I realized the obvious: it was quite likely that players might share a location at certain points. They just happened to hop the same way.

Isn’t that an ideal situation for that semi-cooperative element?

• If you visit a location that has cards (from previous players), you’re allowed to take those with you.
• If you finish a pair and someone else is with you, they get to hop too (but not to the same place as you).

Now I felt like I had the strongest version of the game. It wasn’t about getting lucky that you happened to have rhyming cards, or landed on the right spots. It was about strategically rhyming or not rhyming, and planning an optimal path through the room like that in advance. All of that with less than one page of rules and no text/reading needed.

There was one final expansion that added special “action cards”. They are both an EXTRA incentive to rhyme (because their action only triggers on rhyme pairs), as well as a way to add extra strategy because you move around differently. The rules of this one could simply be copied as-is, but I had to modify some of those “actions”. For example, now that “claiming/starting pairs” was not even a thing anymore, any action related to it had to go. For the most part, these actions just provide fun little twists, such as matching based on alliteration instead, of getting to remove a fence, etcetera.

I’m writing this article to show some of the process behind games like this. In fact, most ideas start of slightly vague, fuzzy, overly complicated, not really what we’re looking for yet. But through making them, and then revising some things, we get to a much more interesting point.

Games can usually be made simpler, and better, and more physical, and more cooperative. This was yet another lesson that I shouldn’t get tunnel vision and keep an open mind about how to implement a vague idea I have.

The final “Rabbit Rhymes” is a really simple physical game that has kids running/hopping around and practicing their language/rhyming a lot. It can be played in any space, is different every time, and the rules became much simpler because of this change.

My original idea for the game was still good, though, it just wasn’t for the right age range. And so I made a backup of that file and moved it to somewhere in Level 2 Language. Just as there are adventages to a more physical game, there are advantages to having a board and cards and what you can do with them.

Besides that, I also write this article because—as I write this—I couldn’t muster the motivation to immediately finish this revised version ;) It’s always tough to work for a few hours or days, and then realize … you have to throw away that work and start from scratch again. It always takes me a day—basically one good night’s sleep—to reset from that and get going again.

Instead, I used the rest of the day to create one of the other final products in Language Level 1. (That is, I had the absured idea to try and make an escape room around … phonemes. Yeah, we’ll see how that turns out. I already created escape rooms around colors, shapes, rhyming, so I’m somewhat confident it can be done.)

Hopefully this was interesting to read,

Tiamo