Hi there! Welcome back to the continuing history of Sinoda! In Part 1, we talked about how the game was first conceptualized and some of the changes it went through to get to the basic idea of how the game works that we have now. Then, in Part 2, we talked about how we got the name for Sinoda and its development into a game for more than two players. Now, in this here Part 3, we’ll be looking at more of the development of Sinoda, such as alternate board designs and extra rules that we considered but didn’t end up putting in the game. I guess we can also talk about the process of getting it printed now that, at the time of this writing, our first shipment of Sinoda is on its way to us!

If you’ve been following along with the story, you’ll know that we’ve got some boards printed through Gamecrafter, we’ve ordered a pile of dice from a fairly inexpensive internet supplier, and people are enjoying the game. So we’re all done, right? Game is made. But, no. This is not the case. We want to get it out to the people! We want it in stores for gamers and families to buy and play! We can’t just go around showing it to everyone we meet and get them to play it (although we do enjoy doing this). Even while we were considering this, we were still tinkering with the rules. It seems a game is never finished, because there is always more you could do with it, always other ideas you could put in, always more “what ifs” that come to mind. One of the things that we thought about was forcing engagement in the 3+ player version of the game. What if players just sit back and don’t attack, or what if they all go after one player and eliminate them first? The first idea to combat this was to change the scoring system so that players would earn bonus points for capturing pieces of every opponent. That is, a player who captured at least one of each of their opponents’ pieces would score bonus points. While playtesting this with others, we would often forget to explain this rule, or when we did, it would add a lot of time to the teaching of the game, and many players said they’d forgotten about it anyway, or remembered only at the very end of the game during scoring. We really had to think about whether we wanted the game to control the WAY people played. Are we forcing a game experience on them? If no one wanted to be the first to attack and get out there, but be all defensive, that makes the game boring. Is that the fault of the game rules, or the styles of the players? Will they just play differently to make it more interesting, or will most players opt for a style or strategy that ultimately made the game boring? At the same time, we were thinking about players who are eliminated, and does it become boring for them if the others do gang up on them and take all of their pieces, putting them out of the game and waiting while the long battle of attrition continues without them?

It turns out, we could solve both of these problems at the same time, without adding extra rules! We wanted to keep the game simple and easy to learn, so trying to solve perceived issues by adding rules always made us uneasy. We often said to each other “Or are we just adding rules we don’t need” during design to keep a check on this. Anyway, the solution was to make the game end if a player is eliminated. This way, no one is left out of the game while everyone else finishes the game. Also, it turns out, this rewards players who play aggressively to move their pieces out to capture points. A player could stay back, making small moves or just rotating pieces in order to try to prevent having any of theirs captured, but eventually the game will end, and they will not have gotten any points. It doesn’t matter that they didn’t lose any pieces, the winner is the player who has captured the most points, regardless of how many pieces they have left. This also created the situation that any player who only has a single piece left, rather than being kind of useless and unimportant (as they might in a game like Risk, for example), they become the MOST important piece on the board, because capturing them ends the game. This means that only the player in the lead actually wants to capture them, and the other players will usually protect them until they themselves get enough points to be in the lead. We also added that any player capturing six pieces ends the game, since there were six spots on the capture disc, and it also helps limit the length of the game by providing another end condition. We didn’t consider this “adding more rules”, since these were already in place in the two player game, in which the game ends when one player has no pieces, which is the same as the other player having captured six pieces. So really, all we did was use the same end condition rules regardless of player count.

Another idea was to raise the board and have holes cut out for the spaces where the pieces go. One of the issues we thought we might have using the d4s is that they might be difficult to read for people not familiar with them, as they are reading the points, not the faces. (This turned out to not be an issue, since people can read the number on top fairly easily, unlike the original d4s that had the number at the bottom (there’s a link to the history of the d4 in Part 1 of The True History of Sinoda.)) What if we put the numbers on the faces and had the points drop into the holes, so that there was a flat face on top which indicated the value of the die? Bill had a set custom-made, which had a number of shapes, rather than an actual digit, on each face. The shapes and colours on the piece indicated which pieces you were playing, rather than the colour of the entire piece. He was beginning to think about making the game accessible for people unfamiliar with our numerals and people who experienced a form of colour blindness. It also made the pieces more unique, rather than standard four-sided dice.

Anyway, having symbols and colours also went along with the idea of playing as teams when playing with four or six players. There were solid shapes as well as outlines of the same shapes, so I might be playing blue solid squares, someone else might be playing outline squares, we could make teams and play squares vs. triangles, or solids vs. outlines, etc. to keep track of who was on a team.
This board was slightly more complicated, though, as it needed “feet” to keep the board raised to allow space underneath for the dice to poke through. This gave it a bit of a stability issue, and more pieces to keep track of. Another issue that came up was that it was difficult to pick up the pieces when they were close together, since the way they angled out of the holes put the edges quite close together. This made it challenging to get your fingers between them to lift them, especially for anyone who had larger fingers. This could probably be solved with adjusting the size of the holes and the spacing between them, so the pieces sit higher and with more space between them. At first, we thought this was solving a potential problem, as the smooth sides of the d4s made them tricky to pick up when they were sitting on their play sides, point up. The cost of custom boards like this and the issues with the dice meant that we didn’t pursue this as the standard board type to come with the game when we produced it, but that doesn’t been we have forgotten about it. We might bring this back in the future as a deluxe board type. If you want, you can ask to play on this board if you see us at a Sinoda event in the future. We also talked a lot about wooden boards, and have even had interest from people who do woodworking in making wooden boards for us. That’s an ongoing project, and we’ll let you know how it turns out!

The space between the pieces wasn’t only a problem for the inverted piece board, but also with our board from Gamecrafter. We went with a 9 inch diameter board, and thought it was nice and compact, great for playing on a table at a bar or restaurant, and easy to carry around. It turns out, people we played with were having trouble moving their pieces without knocking some of the other ones, because the board was TOO compact. People are all different (I’m not) and some have larger fingers than others, and bumping other pieces was a source of minor annoyance for the digitally enhanced (that doesn’t have the same meaning, does it?). So Bill increased the size of the board (without adding extra spaces) to a 10 inch board. He printed it out at home and glued it to some layers of thick card, and that’s the board we’ve ben using to demonstrate the game since. Because it was printed on a home printer, it doesn’t have the glossy varnish finish that the professional printers put on it, so after having carried it around for so long, the surface is getting a bit scratched and blemished. I’ve actually had people ask how we got the cool weathering effect on the board, thinking it was part of the design, and I tell them “by carrying it around in my bag for six months”. Up until this point, we carry our prototypes in whatever we can find. This is usually ziploc bags, or loose in my game backpack. My wife found me a zip-up carry bag at Dollarama which fits the board perfectly, along with the capture discs and dice (which are all in tiny plastic baggies). Bill also went and got one of these, because they are pretty convenient. Bill did actually design a box to carry the prototypes in, but the box design changed quite a bit to our final one. Bill’s original box idea did provide the pyramid structures that he reused on the posters that he made to advertise Sinoda’s launch.

Although this was a pretty cool-looking box, it wasn’t what we ended up doing. We decided that the box would be square, since we didn’t want a bigger box than necessary, and the board was round. Also, since we only needed to fit a flat board, 36 dice, six capture discs, and the rules, the box could also be pretty thin. We also thought we’d take a bit of a risk and not put the name of the game, or any other information, on the front cover of the box. Our idea was that if it was placed facing forward on the shelf of a store, people would see the cover with only the flower of life pattern on it, wonder what it was, and then take it off the shelf to look at it. We wanted people to get the box in their hands to examine it. Of course, all the important information was on the sides and back of the box so they could get a good idea of what Sinoda was all about. I have seen games that have NO information on the back, and the front is just a fancy logo, with no information about what the game is about or how it plays. Since I can’t open the box and look at the game, I lose interest immediately. We wanted to make sure that once they’d picked it up, people could see exactly what Sinoda was. This includes an overview of the rules, which is pretty easy, since there are only two things you can do on your turn. A challenge to getting the information on the back of the box, however, was to make sure it didn’t have so much text that people didn’t want to read it. Also, space on the box was at a premium, because we wanted to put all of the information on twice, once in English and once in French. We wanted to make Sinoda bilingual, so that it could sell in Quebec as well. Luckily, I have friends who can help with the translation and proofreading for the box and rulebook. Speaking of the rulebook, we also decided that we wanted to keep it simple, so it corresponds with how easy Sinoda is to learn. Instead of a longer rulebook, we opted to go with a single page, folded. It’s only 4 pages, with pictures for examples, and not an intimidating wall of text. A single page, folded in half, is also cheaper than a multi-page rulebook with staples or glue, so it wouldn’t add too much to the cost, especially since we wanted two of them.

Here’s the printing proof of the box lid. The bits at the side fold over the carboard of the box to make the sides of the lid, where we have important information, such as the name of the game, our logo, and a catchphrase. Of course, there are legal requirements, like the manufacturer, our official address, and the small parts warning because of the d4s. As a courtesy to consumers, we added the additional warning about not stepping on the d4s, in order to protect your feet. One of the things we quickly realized is that because of the way the box cover is designed, with what is essentially the Sinoda board the same size as the Sinoda board inside, people could actually use the lid as a board! Bill made sure to fade the outside ring of the pattern so that if you want to play a two-player game, you just play on the lighter spaces, and for more players, you use all of the spaces, including the faded outer ring. It’s like getting two boards, so you can play two games at the same time. Added value!

Laying out the rulebook had a bit of an oddness to it, because the pictures we used in the rulebook were of our smaller prototype board from Gamecrafter, along with differently-coloured dice, since we changed the shades of the dice for our actual production. Our plan was to send in the files to the printer, and when they sent back the pre-production sample, we would get that photographed, then substitute the pictures into the rulebook and back of the box, then resubmit those files as our final proof for production. Not wanting to delay, we had a fairly short window from when our pre-production sample arrived and when we wanted to send back the new files to begin production. After the sample arrived, we kept in in bubble wrap and we were extra-protective of it, making sure that it didn’t get damaged or stained before it was photographed. Even so, we knew there would be minor differences, which is, we learned, probably why everything says “contents may vary from those pictured”. If you are trying to print the packaging before the contents are finished, it’s not going to be 100% the same! Even so, many of the dice were painstakingly colour corrected in the images to closer match the shads we were going for.

Check out these great shots we had done for Sinoda by Gianni Arrigo, with prop styling by Savina Monopoli. You can see more of Gianni’s photography work here.

Speaking of dice colours, one of the things Bill brought up and was adamant on, was that we chose shades of colour that contrasted enough that players with altered colour perception, such as the many varieties of colour blindness, could still play without becoming frustrated with not being able to distinguish players’ pieces from one another. Bill researched and found tools to help compare the shades of the colours we wanted to use to make sure that they contrasted well enough. And where the colours were close, we further distinguished them from each other by making one set of the similar colours have black numbers and the other have white numbers. In the future, if Sinoda is popular enough to warrant more printings and editions, we’re planning on varying the dice further with symbols on each set, or even entirely different shapes!

So, with everything finalized and files all at the printer, we’re now playing the waiting game! Of course, we’re not just sitting around and waiting. We’re going to events and playing lots of Sinoda. We’re taking preorders at events and through our website, so people can reserve their copy for when they arrive. As an added bonus for preorders, we’re giving people the opportunity to get a limited edition set of black and white dice for Sinoda that’s not included in the box and won’t be sold again after release (if we have any left, you can only get them from us in person). I appreciate you reading this far, but if I listed and explained all the events we’ve been to recently, this blog would triple in length! If you want to keep up with where we’re hanging out to play Sinoda, make sure you’re keeping an eye on our Instagram and Facebook. Oh! And we also have our Beat Me At My Own Game Challenge going for Sinoda. If you can defeat either one of us at Sinoda in a head-to-head two-player match, you’ll earn an exclusive sticker that you can ONLY get by beating us! Come find us and challenge us to become one of the elite few who can boast ownership of this sticker!

Check out the stickers you will earn if you can beat us at a game of Sinoda.
Look at our events page and our social media (Instagram and Facebook) to find out where we are going to be. And of course, we’re at Dicey Business every Wednesday evening.

Good luck!

And that’s it for Part 3 of the True History of Sinoda! Part 4 will be all about Sinoda’s release, including the release parties and events, and delivering preorders. You can be a part of the History of Sinoda by making sure you’re at these events. We hope to see you there!