323: Library Game Kickstarter with Gene Ambaum

I play a lot of board games, a lot of card games.

I'm always buying new card games, new board games, driving my wife insane.

We have to learn new rules.

We have to learn a new game.

I really like game mechanics.

I like kind of simpler games that have one mechanic or two, and I'm always trying to go, "Oh, would that mechanic work in a game about libraries?" And so I'm always jotting down ideas about that kind of stuff.

I guess this is the third game Willow and I have made together, but the second one we've published.

The second one is still in development.

It's taking some extra work, and I don't know if it's ever gonna see the light of day.

But this one kind of settled into a problem patrons versus library staff kind of game.

So I love Five Crowns.

It's been a game that we've played since, I think, the mid-'90s with people.

It's really easy to teach people.

It's kind of a rummy style game, and-

Mm-hmm

... a different card goes wild each hand until you've played, I think it's 10 hands, 10 or 11 hands you play total.

And a different card is wild each hand, and it's a five-suited deck of cards, and I thought, "Oh, I like that." So I ended up with a five-suited deck of poker cards and just kind of started playing with that idea.

We started prototyping a couple years ago, and as Willow drew the problem patron cards and the library staff cards, I was kind of trying to work out what they did, and I settled on the problem patrons being able to break the rules in certain ways when they're played, and to grab cards from people who've played cards already or from different places in the deck, or the draw pile.

And the decks, we call the decks the stacks.

There's two draw decks that are the stacks.

And the goal of the game is to check out, and the problem patrons keep you from checking out.

And there are ultra mean ways to play with the problem patrons, and then there are nicer ways, too.

I've tried to make different rule sets and different amounts of problem patrons and librarians.

And so at the end, Willow just drew and ended up with all these great...

Like, the library staff cards are all based on Library Comic characters, but the problem patron cards, Willow just drew, and I realized in my brain the problem patrons always outnumber the staff somehow.