The Neighborhood of 5 to 80
I love a lot of things about my job. I love meeting people at conventions and sharing our games with them. I love interacting with folks here on BoardGameGeek. I love working with some of my very best friends every day. There's a lot to love about this job I have. Perhaps the thing I love the most about it is the opportunity to do game development. In many ways, despite the fact that I am a credited designer on Galactic Cruise and its expansions, I consider my real job to be that of a developer—someone who takes a game from a prototype to the finish line.
Even with Galactic Cruise, the initial concept was dreamt up by T.K. King, and when I stepped into the very first playtest of the game, there was already a product there (albeit an extremely different, rough-around-the-edges product). So what I offered from the very beginning was a fresh perspective, a sounding board for ideas, and a willingness to work through the rough to find the diamond. It's a great thrill!
For those who like to keep up with us via our newsletter or website, you know that we always include a Kinson Key Games timeline to show what we are working on. Currently, it looks like this:
Of all these games in the pipeline, from Excursions on down, I am not credited as a designer on any of them, nor are T.K. King or Dennis Northcott. Instead these are all games that came to us from outside designers that the Kinson Key Games team is now developing. What we have found is that we are all quite skilled at finding games that are partway to excellence and then helping to guide the game to the finish line. Some of the games that we have signed were only about 30% there; others were something like 70%, or maybe even more. Even some of the games that I am actually designing in the background are games that began as one of T.K.'s ideas, even if he left the game at only about 5% maturity.
This is what I mean when I say "the neighborhood of 5 to 80." If a game is anywhere between 5%* and 80% to completion, that's where the team and I tend to really shine.
*To be absolutely clear, if a game is 5% to completion and we're developing it, that is because it was a brainchild of ours or someone close to us. Please do not pitch games to any publisher that are only 5% to the finish line. Thanks for coming to my TedTalk!
It's truly a wonderful thing to see the original DNA of a game merge with the DNA that we infuse into it, creating a product that is better than the sum of its parts—much like how I see only the best parts of myself and my wife in our children. For example, we always knew we wanted to have a Galactic Cruise related product that offered players a quicker, smaller, easier-on-the-wallet experience but could not see the way forward; every game we tried to design just fell flat. When Ben Rosset presented us with what is now Excursions, he accomplished what we originally could not, and then in turn we were able to fine-tune his design into something even better. He brought it 60%-70% there, and we were able to pick it up to bring it toward the 100% mark.
It's super interesting to me how much my perspective has changed since I began this journey. When I dived into this industry a few years ago, I just assumed that we would only publish in-house designs. To be where we are now, where none of our upcoming games (at the moment, at least) are in-house designs, is certainly different than what I'd assumed, but I wouldn't have it any other way! Of course, I fully expect to see my name, and T.K.'s name, and Dennis's name on the fronts of boxes again in the "designed by" space in the future, but for now, deep development is the place to be for us.
