The Explosion Of Shape Games

When my online store launched, I had (mostly) finished “Level 1” of my curriculum. This level generally overlaps with the skills that children learn around age 3–5. It contains early language awareness, simple activities to explore, but also the core concept of shapes.

If you visit this topic, you will notice that it contains a huge amount of games. No other topic in this level has that many games, or even a game at all. They mostly have educational material, quizzes, and fairy tales (or “bedtime stories”). It’s simply very hard to come up with a board game tailored to language, for example, when the players can’t actually read or write yet. It’s possible, and I made two or three really strong games here, but that’s where it stops. I exhausted all the options and all my inspiration.

Shapes, on the other hand, received an “explosion” of games. (Colors as well, but those two usually just go hand-in-hand in the same project.)

I kept coming up with new ideas. I kept realizing ways to make even simpler games, to involve even more shapes, to turn the games cooperative or simultaneous—which is simply far nicer to play with young and impatient kids.

Whenever I tried to be minimalist and bundle similar games into a single product, it usually didn’t work. I’d realize, halfway through, that the games are just too different and need completely different material. It would be very messy to try and smush those into a single thing.

And when this happens, I usually somewhat “freeze”. I see so many options. There are so many games to make. Where do I start? Should I even make them all? Shouldn’t I just make one and then continue to another topic, or I’ll fall behind my schedule?

This was another “big moment” in the development of my online store. I wanted to write this article to help myself put my thoughts in order, but also to show lessons learned and how this improved everything going forwards.

Lesson #1: Don’t Mix Material

I alluded to this in the introduction. I really tried to bundle games that had some overlap in material requirements. Because these games are all about shapes, right? They all need the same squares, the same circles, the same triangle. So I could just bundle them … right?

Wrong!

Every time I tried this, it fell apart because the specifics of the material were different.

On the very first day of brainstorming shape games, I ended up with a list of ~8 game ideas. They were very simple and had clear overlap, so I imagined bundling them into some “The Shape Games” product.

When I actually started creating this, however, I noticed a divide.

• Some games required cards with shapes on them. This allowed having a secret hand, playing cards onto a pile, easy shuffling, etcetera.
• Some games required the actual shapes (as tokens; cut out as their actual shape). This allows actually placing shapes onto a board, combining/connecting them to fill space, rotating the shapes and practising spatial awareness, etcetera.

I really tried to combine this somehow, or to convince myself to put both these types of games into the same product, but it just wouldn’t work.

Even though both types of material have the same shapes and same general application, they are too different at their core for this to matter. They should just be different games.

Every time I split games based on material requirements, I was annoyed at first (ugh, extra work!), but clearly liked the end result better. It’s cleaner. It’s simpler. It breaks a big project down into smaller projects, which is more digestible.

So this is where it all started. I had ~15 game ideas by now, but knew that making 15 unique game products would be extreme overkill. I could’ve sorted by difficulty or mechanic or whatever, but I ended up sorting by material requirements. That was a good choice.

This reduced it down to about ~6 products. And each of them merely has a few pages of rules (base game + expansions, or several completely different games) and a few pages of material (reused in all games).

In the end, games are defined by their rules and material. The rules are “cheap”. Writing them down takes little effort, most of my games fit on a single page, you don’t even have to print it. The material is “costly”. You have to print it, cut out, prepare it, store it somewhere, etcetera. So yes, it makes sense to minimize that and categorize games based on that.

But still the amount of work was overwhelming and froze me. Including even more ideas, our list was back up to 10 unique games (or game bundles) again.

Lesson #2: Rules Define Material

All creative ideas start with just a single, notoriously vague “spark”. Each shape game idea (with a few exceptions) started as nothing more than one line that says “what if we do X, but like Y, and the twist is Z?” And then my brain would get all excited, think I’m very clever and this game will be awesome, and … then I realize this is not a game at all. Not yet.

It’s a very vague direction. It’s the first seed. We still need to execute it. We need to make it specific.

For some reason, my brain tends to start with material. It wants to start with “so we need X cards with Y, and we need a playing board like Z, bla bla”

But this isn’t useful! The rules define the material you need. I constantly have to remind myself of this, and then my first task for every game becomes writing down the full, specific rules, even including example illustrations if needed.

As such, I spent an entire week just creating new document after new document, and writing the “rules skeleton” for all these games. Yes, this sometimes felt very bad, because I wasn’t finishing anything. I was “opening” all these game projects, filling their document with 50% of the work (the finished, polished rules), and then moving on to the next one.

But it was necessary to actually know how much work I specifically had to do. After completing the rules, I knew exactly what material I had left to make to “finish” this game.

For example, I originally imagined a specific look for the cards in the “Strateshape” game. This vision was so strong that I wanted to start with that. When I woke up that morning, I wanted to start creating the cards ( = “the material”), instead of the rules. But I’m glad I didn’t. Because once I wrote down the rules—once I had to really pin down exactly how it worked and what you can/can’t do—it immediately became obvious that my original vision wouldn’t work. It would be messy, too small, leave too little options on your turn. If I had made the cards first, I would have lost a day (and any semblance of a good mood) redoing the cards after realizing my first design was incompatible with the rules.

So, after a week, I had ~10 documents with just the rules (mostly) set in stone. And I realized something else.

In most cases, making the material is the boring part. There’s no creativity there anymore. I figured out the game, I’ve chosen what material to make, and now … now I just need to make it. Sometimes this just means copying a few shapes and recoloring them, which isn’t too bad. But at other times we have complex card designs, or the need for many illustrations or clever layouts, and it just breaks me. If I know that I have to create boring material for the rest of the day, I’d rather not even get out of bed!

And so I split it.

In the morning, when I am most creative and full of energy/inspiration, I do the creative bit. That’s when I made big decisions for the games and finished rules.

Usually, in the evening, I have a few hours left where I’m kind of tired already but not yet ready to sleep. I can’t be creative—any time I work on something new, I’ll just introduce loads of mistakes and cliché ideas—but I can do this kind of “just get it over with” administrative work. I can copy-paste card designs and tweak them in the right way for an hour, bringing a game nearer to 100% completion.

But this experience made me certain that I should stick to the same standardized, minimalist design for most of the webshop’s games. Because anything more complex, with unique fonts, color schemes, illustrations, and so forth all the time, would just take too much time and effort.

Which brings me to …

Lesson #3: Substance Over Looks

Obviously, the theme/design of a game and its rules go hand in hand. A well-designed card makes a game easier to play and rules easier to understood. And, as I just stated, well-designed rules inform a good design of the cards/board/pieces.

I’ve learned not to separate these. To let them inform each other, grow alongside each other. That a good-looking game draws people in and actually makes them want to give it a try for the first time.

Buuuuuut if I’d have to give priority to something, it’d have to be substance. Especially with games that are marketed as being “educational”.

I just don’t have the time and money to make every game look stunning and unique.

Creating this explosion of shape games took me about a month of full-time work. (Admittedly, I switched to some other tasks too, and sometimes worked much shorter days to prevent burn-out.) Imagine how long it would’ve taken if I had …

• Picked a unique theme and style for each.
• Which requires unique fonts, new drawings, many iterations to improve card/board design
• And designed the rulebook to match

I would’ve only made shape and color games this entire year, instead of the entirety of Level 1 products!

In the end, what matters is the game. If it looks ugly, I can always improve that later. But if all I have are good looks, and not an actual game, then I have … nothing. Nothing to sell; no educational value.

And so, as I continued working on the games, I converged on a general style that is certainly not ugly, but also not unique and stunning. A minimalist style, reusing the same fonts and illustrations most of the time, and some general icons/patterns/details that reappear all across my webshop and its products.

With a “standardized” style in place, creating games became much faster and easier. It was easier to motivate myself to start the next one, because I knew I could copy-paste my template and get at least close to a final game within a few hours. Creating custom bits of material became the “finishing touch” that I’d have to do at some point in the future, when I had the energy.

The downside, of course, is that the games can look somewhat bland or the same. I know that some of them would sell much better if they looked amazing. I know that it would raise the expected quality and excitement for these games. And I know I can do this—I’ve made some absolutely gorgeous games on Pandaqi, for free, generated right on the website. But practical constraints simply made me decide to reserve the “stunning look” for the rare standout game that deserves it.

Once I could convince myself to reuse the same style, and just make it look “not ugly”, I was able to make good progress on the shape games once more. Another week passed and I was able to finalize material (and any marketing images/other illustrations) for most games.

Lesson #4: Order Is Important, Until It’s Not

As I did this, I kept asking myself “what’s the best order in which to make these projects?” When you have a mountain of work to do, and all of it feels “at the same level” or “equally important”, it’s incredibly hard to choose what to do.

I would always recommend sorting your tasks. Even if this requires some pretty flimsy excuses, find a way to make them not equal. Find a way to convince yourself one thing has higher priority than the other thing, so you know what task you should pick first thing tomorrow morning.

In my case, it became “bundles first”. This happened somewhat naturally, and then I just made it a conscious decision.

Why? Well, I could say that it’s “more bang for my buck”. The game bundles do 4–6 games with the same material, and each game is only one page of rules, so you get more results in less time. I could also say that the standalone games are bigger and better and should get a premium treatment, using lessons learned from the others.

These are flimsy arguments, yes, but they’re arguments nonetheless. It helps sort a list of 10 Shape Games to make, and then I can just wake up in the morning and grab the top thing off the stack.

I think it’s also important to realize, though, that this is not set in stone. There are absolutely times when you’ll just “feel like working on something else”. You wake up in the morning and your brain is like “woah I have a GREAT idea for THAT OTHER GAME IDEA”. You might’ve planned to do the game bundle today, sure, but forcing that will do you no good know. You’re somewhat condemned to work on the idea that is exciting your mind right now.

For example, I made Strateshape (single big game, unique design) before Shapastimes (my bundle of shape games). This was not planned, and perhaps even a dumb decision in hindsight because Strateshape took so much effort, but I woke up and suddenly had the solutions to my three problems with that game. My mind was filled with that idea, so I just worked on that.

I can never put this into rules, or principles, or some perfect formula. It’s really a flow or momentum thing. Some days you find that flow and you effortlessly work on four different projects because it feels right. Some days you don’t find the flow, and you just have to shrug and say “then we’ll just do the thing at the top of my list for at least an hour”.

Lesson #5: Not Everything Needs To Be Made

As I write this article, I ended up making ~75% of my shape games.

I was shooting for that 100% the whole time, believe me. But for every game I finished … a new idea would pop up! The list shrunk, yes, but not fast enough.

This always happens. (To me, at least.) Making stuff gives you ideas and solutions to make better stuff in the future. I knew that, if I would desperately cling to the plan to create all the shape games, it would’ve taken me faaaaaar too much time. And I would probably have one or two new ideas anyway as I wrote this article.

The difficulty here, as before, is to know which ideas to pick. And in my experience, there are two considerations.

• Is this idea so simple that I can make it really quickly? If so, do it, because it wastes almost no time, and if it’s terrible I’ll just throw it away without hurt feelings. (This is also true for ideas that are so clear or so straightforward that you have no obstacles left and can pretty quickly bang it together.)
• Is this idea very different from everything else I made? If so, do it, because its existence will add the most value.

For example, there were several shape games that felt very similar to something I made before. They were just “match shapes AGAIN” or “count corners AGAIN”, with only a minor twist. That’s just not good enough. Yes, I can make that very quickly (because I can copy 90% of that other game too), maybe it will bring me more profit of whatever, but it just feels useless. I want my online store to be minimalist too, going quantity over quality, never offering two products that are basically the same thing in a different trenchcoat.

Several of those ideas were simply discarded. (This happens so often that almost all my projects have a file called DISCARDED that’s just an endless list of killed ideas, and why they were killed. That second part is important. Or you might make the same mistake twice and/or read the idea later, think it’s amazing, and put it back in.)

Some of them were changed to be more valuable. There’s one set of shape games, for example, that includes pawns. Pawns that can walk over the board/shapes that you’re creating. This addition was new (none of the other games had pawns) and made the games far different from the others. Suddenly, players had to not only match shapes or place dominoes, they had to develop the spatial awareness to know how this changed the ways their pawn could move. A new skill, a new challenge, and thus enough value to be a new game.

This added another week or so, finishing the final games, making one more with the pawns, until all of them were finally done. As I said, a month in total.

Conclusion

As it stands, I made about 5 unique puzzle experiences, 1 escape room, and 10 games for Shapes. This is still a lot. Far more than other categories.

But that is, I have discovered, just a side effect of shapes being shapes. There’s a reason they’re pretty much the first thing taught in mathematics/logic. They’re a very simple, very visual, first step to logic and patterns. Something young kids understand, because they can see it, and because shapes are everywhere in nature. At the same time, they’re not so rigidly defined as language (for which you need to learn an entire alphabet, words, grammar, etcetera). Simply showing a square and saying “this is a square”—and repeating that for a few more shapes—is all you need to actually play all these games with young kids.

In a way, I expect most of my “educational games” to be in Level 1–3. Because to make games fun and easy to understand, they always rely on simple rules and simple patterns and simple icons (such as shapes). I currently see absolutely no reason why someone would need advanced knowledge in anything to play a game. But who knows. Maybe in three years’ time, I’ll write an article about how I made 20 games about the Roman Empire or something.

Was this a good idea? Was this a waste of time? We can never know. Maybe my selection of games will shrink one day, because customers are overwhelmed by the options. Maybe I’ll redo some of them to look “stunning”.

But this is the story of how I made a huge amount of educational (shape-related) games and the lessons I took from it.

Until next time,

Tiamo