Why is it important that I say it’s the “true History” of Sinoda? Well, we did consider writing a fake history of this game as a way to add to its mystique and also give variant rule options. But, I’m getting ahead of myself here. If I’m going to write a history of a game, I should probably start at the beginning.

Toward the end of 2018, Bill and I were working on Mathemagician’s Duel, preparing its publication with final playtests and design tweaks. An exciting time, going through the final stages of having our first game published! In amongst all the other things we were working on, such as writing rules and finalizing artwork, we were also trying to figure out the whole “marketing” thing, especially the kind you could do without paying for it. We visited a lot of stores and signed up for free or nearly free local events to get the word out about our upcoming game.

Then one day, Bill tells me he was at a lunch with his former Mississauga News co-workers and saw that the restaurant, 3 Brewers, was advertising a game night. He asked the staff about it, and told them that we were into games, and they invited us to talk with the manager and arrange to come in and help out. So, we went on game night, and discovered that their “game night” was a table stacked with about 6 games, mostly thrift-store classics, that patrons could borrow and play at the table, if they noticed that they were there, or saw the small sign on the door and asked about it. Luckily, Bill and I had brought games of our own, which were fun, easy to learn, and playable on a restaurant table. We were given a table near the door and a staff discount on food, and free reign to approach and inform customers that game night was a thing, was tonight, and was cool. We offered to show people how to play a game, and once in a while, they did. This also gave us the opportunity to talk about us as a company, and tell them about and demo our upcoming Mathemagician’s Duel. Now, game night wasn’t on a weekend, so we weren’t getting a weekend crowd, but it was scheduled for Thursdays to get a bigger draw on a less busy night. Which it didn’t.

During these evenings, Bill and I played games, had other designer friends join us so we could play their games, and met some interesting people. But because it wasn’t always busy, we also had time to chat about our own games.

On the evening of April 11, 2019, Bill says, “I’ve had an idea for a game”. He gets out a piece of paper and a marker and tells me we need dice. Of course, we’re always carrying dice, so we get some out. He draws this:

The idea was that the dice are your pieces, and you change the value of the pieces to “power them up”, and different numbers would have different abilities. You’re trying to land on your opponent’s pieces to capture them. We immediately found the movement to be interesting, as you had to plot ahead to get your piece to the spot you wanted it to be, and neat patterns emerged about where you’d be safe from each enemy piece. We thought about the 6 being very powerful and making it like a dragon or something to give it some theme and allowing that piece to move over other pieces, which the others couldn’t.

We considered ideas such as having the dice fight by having both players roll another die when a piece was moved into an occupied square. Both players would add the value of their own piece to the die roll and whoever had the higher number won and captured the opposing piece. I wasn’t a big fan of this, as I saw this as a pure abstract game, and the idea of making clever maneuvers to get to a position where I could take an enemy piece, say, taking a 1 with a 5, and then losing that powerful piece because I rolled a 1 and my opponent rolled a 6… I could see that becoming frustrating. Another idea was to have a higher number automatically defeat smaller numbers, but then, I figured, everyone would just spend their turns turning their dice to the highest number, and both players would have a pile of 6s. Then there’s either a roll-off, or whoever moves their piece onto the opponent takes it. And in that case, why not start everyone at 6 and not waste the time making people use turns to increase them? And then there goes the choice and tactics of adjusting your pieces’ values.

I showed and explained the game to my son the next day, as he has a very logical and tactical mind, and he pointed out that some movement rules were very limiting and others overpowered, so he suggested getting rid of all of them and having the same rule for all of them. They move the value on top and no diagonals. Shortly after, Bill met at Dicey Business and tried it again. To save paper and to have a better look, we got out an Othello board and used that for our grid.

We played it with these minimalist rules and were getting into the strategy of it. It was simple, but also required a lot of thinking ahead and planning. You could set traps for your opponent, leaving a piece out for them to get, and then jump on their piece when they did take yours. When we added the rule that you don’t just get 1 point for capturing a piece, and the goal wasn’t just to capture all of your opponent’s pieces, but rather, their movement value was also how many points they were worth, this sacrifice to gain a larger prize became an interesting tactic! One issue that kept coming up was that although we’d decided that no diagonal movement was allowed, Bill kept planning moves that required a diagonal move. To remedy that, instead of playing in the squares, we started playing on the lines, so you could only move your pieces from junction to junction. This helped. It also helped that Bill printed some boards at home for us to use.

We took these around with us and showed it to as many people as we could to get feedback, and discovered that people enjoyed the simplicity of the rules as well as the surprising amount of thinking and strategy that goes into planning their moves. Of course, we got it out at game cafés and stores, especially our regular place to hang out, Dicey Business. We were encouraged by the feedback we were getting and continued to pursue development of “The Dice Game” as we were calling it. We even tried a four-player version to see if that would work! Being a small board, it was cramped, so we reduced the number of dice each player started with. It did open a whole new dimension to the game!

We played it like this for a short while, seeing if there was anything more we could do with it, or if we had a simple abstract strategy game that was ready to go. It did occur to us that if we tried to publish this as is, and people liked it, there was nothing stopping them from making their own set at home by putting dice on a grid. Around this time, Bill showed up to our regular Wednesday night meeting at Dicey Business with a new board that he had made and printed. This time, instead of a square grid, the board was hexes! Classic gamer stuff, since hexes tessellate, you can cover an area with them. He wasn’t sure about the size of the board… how big should it be so that the game isn’t too slow as players maneuver, but also so they have tactical freedom to plan and set up their moves?

People who played this version said they liked it better, because of the extra room to maneuver, and it became more practical to turn dice up to a value of 4, which didn’t often happen on the small grid. This led to new conversations, such as discussing the asymmetry of the board, and how many dice do you start with? Anyone who has played a game on a hex board knows about the issue with the half-hexes along the sides. This is less of a problem here, because the pieces are not IN the hexes, but it still means the board is different depending which way you orient it. How do we deal with that? Is there one way to turn it for setup that is better than the other? Do we include two variants for setup, depending on how you turn the board? We were playing with 5 dice per side, but was that optimal? And again, how about set up? Where do the dice start? We also started thinking about theme. Hexagons… is it a beehive? Are you capturing lands or resources or something? When you get an idea for how a game works, there are soooo many possibilities for themes and slight variations to try, that it can be overwhelming because you want to try them all. But, realistically, you can’t. You need to pick a direction to go in and try it out. Sometimes, your idea turns out to not be that great, or another idea takes over and inserting something new takes it in a different direction, but when there are competing ideas that both seem really cool, but can’t both be in the game, one of them has to go in the file to be used later somewhere else. Anyway, we had a lot of conversations about where this could go.

Then one day, Bill shows up at Dicey excited about another board design (Bill’s always looking at how things look or what graphic changes could be made to stuff). He starts telling me about the “flower of life“, and how all these different cultures use it in their artwork and spiritually because there are so many patterns within it. He thinks we could use it as a board for our dice game. I could explain that part, but there are a LOT of other websites that will do that if you Google it. Some are more historical/factual about different cultures’ usage and beliefs about this pattern, and others might be a bit more “woo woo” about what this means, but I leave your research and beliefs to your own discretion.

Because we were playing with the pieces on the lines currently, Bill suggested we do so but on this new pattern. What made the grid and especially the hex movement so interesting and tactical was that the places you could get to on a piece’s turn were limited and different depending on what value the piece had. This is why it was important to carefully plan ahead and choose a useful value for your piece to set up future moves. On this board, I pointed out that with all the connectivity, you can get to the same place with any value. But, I noticed that if we used this board but played in the triangular gaps between the lines, it was exactly the same as playing on our hex board using the lines. This reminded me a bit of Pirate vs. Pirate from Out of the Box Publishing. It’s a cute game with art by John Kovalic in which players try to steal treasure from the centre of the board and bring it back to their own boats, while also attacking enemy pirates by finishing their move in their space. The board is triangular, and the spaces are triangular, so when you roll the dice to see how far you can move, there are some spots that the rolled number just can’t get you into. Anyway, we thought it looked pretty cool, so we gave it a try. Bill printed out a couple of boards, and I glued one to a piece of cardboard to give it more structure. We started by lining up the pieces across from each other on opposite sides of the board.

This also marked the switchover to d4s. That wasn’t immediate, but I don’t have any pictures of d6s on this board. We thought that it would look cooler if the piece shape matched the space shape on the board. Also, we figured, people didn’t often change their pieces to 5s or 6s when using the d6, because there wasn’t always room to move that far, it took many turns to get them up that high, and if they were captured, that’s a lot of points for your opponent! So yeah, let’s go with d4s. But… where do we get that many d4s? Sure, we have a few, as I’ve collected some sets of dice since starting to play Dungeons and Dragons when I was 9 years old, but they weren’t all the same colour. This brings us to the story of Bill going into Dragon World in Brampton. It’s a great little game store, and the owner’s wife has her own business making dice: Little Dragon Corp. So there are a lot of great dice sets in the store, but there’s also a large fish tank full of dice, which they sell by the scoop. Yup, there’s a cup, and you just scoop a cupful of dice and pay for the whole cupful, regardless of what you get. But Bill’s looking for d4s, and trying to find a bunch of the same type. He’s digging through, pushing piles of dice aside, and you can probably image what that sounds like. He’s aware that there are people sitting at a table right behind him, playing Magic: the Gathering or Pokémon, so he pauses his treasure hunt to ask if the noise is bothering them. “No”, they reply, “it’s fine”. But Bill told me “It was bothering them. They were just too polite to say so.” Bill gathers up what he can find, buys dice and heads out.

Okay, here’s a brief interlude about dice. Specifically d4s. Why is it, that older d4s, particularly those that I used back in the day when I started playing Dungeons and Dragons back in the 1980s, put the number at the base of the dice? Every game that used them needed a page about how to read a d4, because instead of having a flat upper surface from which you read the number result, there was a point on top and three sides. I get that they wanted to use a tetrahedron so that the D&D dice set consisted of the platonic solids (except the d10, which isn’t), and only recently have some companies developed d4s that show the number on the top surface. But the standard of having the resulting number be on the bottom of each die did make it difficult to read for new people to the hobby, as it wasn’t particularly intuitive. But then years later, we start seeing these d4s with the numbers around each point instead. It’s much easier to see at a glance that the same number is on each face near the point. When you rolled one of the earlier d4s, you were generally looking at only the face that was most oriented toward you, and it wasn’t easy to see that the bottom number was the same on all sides. Why did it take this long to figure out a way to make a d4 that was easier to read? Anyway, here’s an interesting webpage about the different d4 styles.

Back to the story. Bill found enough d4s for us to have a couple of sets, I think, but we reverted to the old tried and true method of getting supplies: websites for sales places in China. Between us, we ordered a pile of sets of d4s in various colours and started playing with d4s on the flower of life board, as pictured a few paragraphs back. It had a bit of a checkers or chess-inspired feel to the set up, but one thing we discovered was that it took a while to get the pieces close enough to start getting any action. So many of the moves were about slowly getting closer to your opponent, or taking the time to increase the value of your pieces so you could move faster later. We quickly decided to do something different, and tried a few different ideas for setting up. I thought to be different, instead of having the pieces in a line across the back row, why not set them up in a circle? Some pieces would start closer and others further away. Bill also took the outer ring of spaces away from the board, making it smaller. Now the players started pretty close together, meaning there could be danger and action right from the start. Also, it made it look different from most other abstract games, which was a bonus.

Our little dice game was really taking on a unique look and feel, but keeping the interesting strategy that players enjoyed about it. We are always thinking about player counts, and although this was originally a two-player game, we did experiment with adding more back when it was d6s on a grid. But could we do that with the new configuration? Even though the flower of life is made by overlapping circles, it still has 6 flat sides, making it a hexagon (geometry!). This meant it had “corners”, and we could put a third player starting position on the board. On the small board though, that meant that players would have pieces starting in contact with each other, ready to be captured on the first move. Playing like this was a bit like when the cannon starts the Hunger Games… a lot of immediate casualties, then everyone settling in to strategize with the space that opened up with their remaining pieces.

Well, there’s a lot more history and information to go to get you caught up on where we’re at, but you’ve read a lot already! Let’s call this the end of Part 1! If you want to find out how we came up with the name for Sinoda, and hear about getting boards made, keep checking here for Part 2 of the story of Sinoda! We’ll also announce when it goes live on our social media, so be sure to follow our Instagram and/or Facebook to stay up to date with our continuing story!