Hi! Welcome back to the history of Sinoda! In this part (part 2) we’ll be looking at how Sinoda got its name! If you’re here without having read part 1 first, you should probably go back and read that first. Anyway… let’s get back into it:

Up until now, we’d been referring to this as “The Dice Game”, but knew we needed a better name than that. We threw some ideas around and even made a document for us to add names that we thought of. Bill’s original concept had to do with one of the dice being a 6 and becoming a dragon, giving it special abilities, which you might remember if you read Part 1. We were still considering attaching a theme to this game, rather than using the barebones mechanic of capturing pieces for points, and I think that was reflected in some of our ideas.

Name Ideas

We were pretty stuck for a name, until one day… let me back up a second. Before we get into that, we need to talk a bit about the game café, Dicey Business. We started hanging out at Dicey Business to discuss and play games, and they were good to us. The owner who was there the most, Kellen, was good enough to let us chill out and design and test games there, and this other guy, Adonis, would introduce us to other people. He didn’t even work there; he was a friend of the owners and his wife worked there. But when it got a bit busy, and the staff were busy making food or helping other patrons, he would help people who came in by seating them at a table, getting them menus, and explaining how the place worked. This included pointing us out and introducing us as the “future George Lucas and Tim Burton” of game design. Of course, we hadn’t even released Mathemagician’s Duel yet, so it was a bit hyperbolic, but his enthusiasm was appreciated, and many of the people he told about us did, in fact, approach us and ask what we were working on, starting some fun conversations and playtests. Adonis himself enjoyed seeing what we were working on and loved hearing our ideas.

Adonis is a big fan of our dice game, but wasn’t very good at it. So as a joke, we said we’d name it after him as a consolation, but because he couldn’t win, we’d use his name backwards. “Adonis” backwards is “Sinoda”. So we called it that, but even though it was intended as a joke, the name stuck. Anyone we introduced it just accepted the name, as they felt it was the kind of name appropriate for an abstract game that felt like it was something that had been invented in ancient times. Sometimes someone would ask what “Sinoda” meant, and we would tell them the story of Adonis, and they found the story entertaining and unexpected. The other neat things about the name Sinoda is that when it came to making a logo, Bill was able to incorporate the shape of the board into is as the “o”.

And that’s the story of how our dice game became Sinoda. Thanks, Adonis!

Anyway… back to the game and the board and stuff. We realized that to play with more than two players, we’d need to revert back to the larger board. Bill printed out both sizes, and I eventually glued them both to a piece of cardboard, back to back, to make a double-sided board. We noticed that you could fit 4 players on the board by starting two of them in opposite corners, but also two players could set up on the opposing flat sides, and they’d still be equally distant apart. It could be a four-player game! We also noticed that the hexagon has six corners (obviously, we already knew that and didn’t just discover that, but what we discovered were the ramifications with regard to the game), so we could set up a six-player game! But that would be ridiculous, I thought. We’ll come back to this later. Anyway, we decided we needed some better boards for more playing and playtesting, so Bill made some designs and sent them off to The Gamecrafter. A bit later, we had some round boards with separate capture discs!

So, there are some pictures of the boards we got! Bill and I carried these wherever we went, in case an opportunity came up to play. One of the cool things about Sinoda is how portable it is. It doesn’t take up much space and also fits nicely on a table, even when you’ve got food and drink at the table. We thought about how it could be a pretty good bar or restaurant game because of this. Most of our playtesting was done at Dicey Business and at game conventions, and we’d introduce it to anyone who looked like they might be interested. We got a lot of encouraging feedback, especially from more “casual” gamers who weren’t necessarily into the bigger, more involved hobby games. They liked that they could learn it easily, but still had to put a lot of thought and strategy into it.

From here, we considered the different player counts, knowing we could set up 3 and 4 player games and still having the players starting positions being equidistant. Then I noticed that we could do 6 players, but that seemed a bit ridiculous to me! Of course, we had to try it anyway, but I wasn’t totally convinced. I was seeing Sinoda as being more like a pure abstract like chess or checkers, but Bill likes games that are a bit more chaotic. Of course, we have to balance this with fairness and advantage in player positions. Bill spent more time at Dicey Business than I did, as although we both went there every Wednesday (and as of writing this, we still do (I used to go to Dicey every Wednesday. I still do, but I also used to (Mitch Hedberg reference!))). Bill also went on Fridays. He started reporting that he was getting larger groups of people there playing 6 player Sinoda, and they were getting into it! It was chaotic, since the board state changes so much between turns, making it more difficult to plan ahead, and sometimes impromptu alliances would form (and be viciously broken!). Having more players made for a very different feel to Sinoda with just two players, but it seemed that it was viable and fun nonetheless.

Even though we had the rules pretty well set, and some people even liked the game enough that they tried to buy our prototype boards from us, we weren’t finished yet. There were some other issues we needed to resolve, some of which turned out not to really be issues at all. Tinkering with the rules and trying new things is what we do, and there were a lot of rules that we added and then took out, and even had some ideas about different board designs! But if you want to find out about the other rules we added, discarded, altered, or considered, you’re going to have to come back for part 3! I think this is probably long enough for one blog entry. If you’ve read all the way to the end here, we appreciate it and hope you follow the rest of our journey and take interest in our design and rule decisions!