YORKTON - While board games can be pricey, most are going to take a significant bite out of a 50, and a few will require you to dig for more after laying down a hundred-dollar bill, but games need not ruin a tight budget.
There are a ‘family’ of games known as print ‘n play, which are far lower in cost because there is no physical game to buy, or have shipped.
Instead, you are accessing a computer file that you then must print to play.
Many are actually free – at least the files – as you still have to print, and others are low cost, which is fair as the designer gets a few dollars for their creative efforts.
One such game is Chateau by designer Martin van Rossum, which will be launching on Kickstarter in the near future.
Chateau is being advertised as a print & play polyomino game, which I admit I had to Google.
It turns out a polyomino is the name given to plane figures created by groups of squares touching at their edges.
So what is Chateau about?
Well to start with it is not just a print ‘n play, but also a roll ‘n write, so on a turn a player rolls two dice, and all players use those numbers, marking off things on their own individual board. In that regard you can essentially print as many ‘boards’ as you want and play any number of players.
It was even suggested players around the world could each print a board and play via Zoom – which suggests a Guinness Book of World Records effort one might imagine.
Each die face relates to a particular polyomino, or special option. Players draw the polyomino on their ‘board – basically the floor plan of a famous chateau.
The first player to mark all their spaces wins.
A game such as Chateau is interesting first and foremost for its low cost and versatility in accommodating a range of player numbers.
In this case the Tetris-like mechanic of trying to best fit the various polyomino shapes onto the floor plan is also quite challenging. Because shapes can be rotated to fit the floorplan the game is highly visual and will at times leave you wondering how you missed a better placement after it’s too late.
So with Chateau just on the verge of being Kickstarted an interview via email with van Rossum seemed timely.
van Rossum is from Hellevoetsluis in the Netherlands, which is close to Rotterdam, where up until 2022 he worked as a teacher in higher education leaving that job very recently to become an entrepreneur in his family's business.
He explained he now owns a retail store and multiple web shops with a staff of 40 people, “which I have just as much love for as for my students,” adding he now combines that “with board game and escape room design. Currently my first physical escape room is being build and the first few board games have been signed with publishers. I also self-publish PnP games with Rolling Rhino Games.”
And, van Rossum generally likes the idea of PnP games.
“I would say I am a PnP player, however most of my PnP time goes into my own designs,” he said. “When we play a game with friends or family it’s either a prototype of mine or a physical game from the collection.
“I would recommend Kaikoro as a PnP game. I should mention that I am perhaps not a true PnP player, because I don't want to cut cards and take hours to create a game. I truly admire everyone who has the patience to build those bigger games. I personally stick to the one page PnPs, both in designing and buying.”
Game design was almost a natural as van Rossum noted, “I am an avid gamer, and I always loved games and coming up with games to play with my family as a kid.
“From my teaching background I know how to get a message across and how important engagement is. I used to design a lot of educational materials. When you play a lot of games but also teach a lot you learn where people struggle and when they give up on a game.
“Even though I am an avid gamer and collector, I strongly lean towards smaller and simpler games. My girlfriend likes puzzley games and my son (six years) loves racing games. I admire simplicity and elegance in design so that's also why I lean towards small scale games that still offer a crunch for adults.”
So where did the idea for Chateau come from?
“We love roll and write games in our house,” offered van Rossum. “However my son was four at the time and I had a hard time explaining scoring conditions to him. Playing the game worked fine but scoring would often be very complex. Railroad Inc. is an example of this, a game I really like but wasn't for him.
“So I wanted a polyomino puzzle game that makes it clear to all players who is winning and why you are the winner or not.
“So that led to the win condition of simply filling your board.
“At the time I was challenging myself to design a game each week. I did this for about eight weeks. So within one week I had a working game, just a square with the title: Castle Builder.
“Later I wanted to give the game a bit more depth and make sure parents were also engaged. So that’s when the blueprints of famous castles came in. Each castle gives you a new challenge, which increases the replayability, and it adds some historical flavour to the game.”
The goal was to create a family friendly game too.
“Chateau is really an attempt to bring kids and parents together in a game they can both enjoy and play in 15 minutes after dinner,” said van Rossum.
“Players can expect a very quick and simple game to learn and play, with a challenging puzzle and a lot of replayability. A fun roll and write that uses known mechanisms with a new twist. This makes the game intuitive to play but also something fresh to put on the table.”
As designer what does van Rossum see as the best aspect of Chateau?
“If you would ask my play testers, they would say the One (rolling a one),” he said.
If a one is rolled it allows the use of a ‘catapult’ where you get to mark off one space on your neighbour’s Chateau.
“This allows you to mess up their castle, especially if a lot of them come up,” said van Rossum. “And for some reason people just love to bully each other like that.
“It was my way of adding interaction, where this is sometimes lacking in roll ‘n write games.
“I personally love the unique abilities that Chateau has. These allow for different strategies to try.”
But is there something in Chateau not seen in other games?
“This is of course hard,” admitted van Rossum. “It’s a crowded market and I like to stay humble. I think the game has a unique theme, where some roll ‘n writes don't have a theme at all. You learn something about these castles -- when and where they were built -- and you have unique abilities to work with. Because of the different layout of each Chateau, the different number of squares they have, different placement of symbols and their unique ability, its basically an asymmetric game. Balancing the asymmetric parts was a lot of work.”
Watch for Chateau on Kickstarter soon.
