Well the winners of the 12th edition of BGG’s Roll and Write competition were announced this week and the stand out winner was Legends of StormCity, which took 1st place in 8 categories and will be launching on Kickstarter soon. As for Roll Into Town there was no silverware but there was plenty of lessons learned from the competition.
Firstly, Roll Into Town is the first game I have seen from idea phase all the way to a completed and playable version (it’s not completely finished yet, more on that later). The competition was a welcome motivator in driving the game forward and gave me a concrete deadline for when I needed to have things completed. This helped me form a roadmap with various other deadlines inbetween. For example, the deadline for entry was the 15th of August, which meant I aimed to have the come fully completed by the end of July and use the last 2 weeks for minor adjustments and proofing the rule book.
Secondly, the advice from other designers in the contest is invaluable. From pointing out unclear things in the rules that I would miss because all the rules are anyway in my head, to specific design aspects like font or grid sizes. Roll Into Town wouldn’t have gotten to where it is now without the help of the other designers. There is also a lot to be learned from even just observing these contests and watching other designers and their processes through development.
As I said earlier Roll Into Town’s development isn’t finished. Once the contest application was closed I continued to work on it’s development and have redesigned the game sheet and a prototype, complete with custom dice and box, is in the queue (750th in the queue as of writting) on thegamecrafter and will hopefully be delivered sometime in Ocotober. Additionally I have started work on additional scenarios where some aspect of the game changes to give an additional challenge or variation to the game.
You can check out all the winners of the contest over here and the 13th edition has started officially yesterday. Perhaps you will read soon about my next game that will enter the contest but for now I will continue putting the finishing touches onto my first game before moving onto another project. I’m curious to what kind of theme you would like to see a game made about? For me I am looking forward to making a game about tourism in some way.
The Parsnip Post 
It was a successful failure!
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