Emmett McMullan Photo
The game was poker — with a twist. I had just been dealt into a hand of five-card draw. My cards were the king of hearts, nine of diamonds, three of clubs, four of hearts, and six of spades.
Terrific.
I was about to discard everything but the king when I noticed something off about the cards themselves. I turned my nine a half-turn in my hand, and suddenly I was looking at a two of diamonds.
I opened my hands wider and scanned every card with more careful scrutiny. All four of the numbered cards had different numbers in their opposite corners.
The nine was also a two, the three was an eight, the four a seven, and the six a five.
I spun the cards about until I arranged four cards out of five of a pot-winning straight. I pitched the king that would’ve been my holdout card just a moment ago, and when I drew the king’s replacement I guffawed. I had traded the king of hearts for the king of diamonds. For weighing my thoroughly raised odds of drawing a good fifth card for any of the straights I could have made, I was left with the same hand: king high.
Moran.
I hope you’ll excuse the shop talk in the preceding paragraph. I was playing Spin Cards, designed by Eamon Moran, who brought it to Elm City Games on Chapel Street.
There, game designers and players in the New Haven Game Makers’ Guild tried it out as part of four hours of open play testing and game development, which happens every Wednesday night. The guild welcomes folks with every level of gamecraft knowledge, but together the regular participants bear a staggering amount of strategic and artistic know-how. While the conversation can sometimes leave anyone a bit out of their depth, the friendly folks gathered around the tables meet with the goal to learn together, and are always excited to break things down.
This past February, owners Trish Loter and Matt Fantastic celebrated with their community the second anniversary of Elm City Games. They now have a game library of over 1,000 games — everything from chess and dominoes to Dungeons & Dragons to weekly sanctioned Magic: the Gathering tournaments, and all of the latest storytelling and strategy games like Scythe and Azul. Elm City Games also operates an independent in-house game studio called Prettiest Princess Games.
Fantastic co-founded the Game Makers’ Guild with Alex Cutler, among others, just a month after Elm City Games’ grand opening in 2016. With high early interest, they hit the ground running by distributing articles on game design concepts and holding discussions to precede an evening of play-testing. Cutler “very consciously let the group go where it wanted to go, and I think people were much more interested in hanging out and playing games,” he said. Fantastic and Cutler now share “the responsibility of keeping it up and advertising and showrunning when people come in,” Cutler said.
Is there much of a strict organization? Are there by-laws?
Cutler, at left.
“It’s sort of ‘don’t be a jerk’ model,” Cutler said. “The only thing that we try to make sure is that everyone is getting a fair amount of time. You don’t want anybody to monopolize the show.” Today the guild has “about a dozen regular members,” Cutler said, enough of whom convene each week that even if Cutler and Fantastic are traveling to a convention they “know the group is still going to fire.… Any given night [they] maybe have eight to ten come through.”
Last Wednesday, the guild hosted 11 testers and designers, counting Cutler and myself. Moran went first. He was a newcomer to the guild and was curious about the group and what its take would be Spin Cards, which he and a collaborator had patented several years ago in the poker world. The deck is a novel instrument for bringing a new twist to any card game you like. It prompted an interesting discussion about the differences between the casino side of the gaming world and the side of casual cardboard.
A first reaction was that it was exceptional that Moran had a patent on anything. In the game design world, there’s thorough precedent that the features of a game — such as the act of jumping in Super Mario Brothers, or drawing and discarding a card in gin rummy — cannot be issued a patent; the argument goes that a game mechanic is no different from using red paint on a building or using the word ameliorate in a screenplay. But Moran’s good isn’t a game; it’s a game piece. He’s operating in an entirely different sector of the game design world than most guild participants.
Garrett Sendlewski, a multimedia artist and guild regular, brought out a fresh new game concept that fit on only nine cards (plus a standard 52-card pack from the dollar store). This game, titled Off With Their Heads!, hinged on the idea of modifying a traditional trick-taking game like Whist with an Alice in Wonderland twist. Sendlewski intends for the 52 cards to be disposable. Serving the title, players were tasked with decapitating face cards that came through their fingers by taking a pair of scissors and lopping off the whole corner of the card from the neck up. We played for several tricks and lots of cutting was done, accumulating severed heads and enough player questions that Sendlewski was ready to table the game for the night so he could further develop it.
Sendlewski emphasized the difference between working on a game alone for a protracted period and how things have been since he started coming to the guild. He prizes giving projects early and regular exposure to other designers.
“If you’re going to critique something, don’t say you like it,” he said. “The reason I stick so closely to this group is they will tell you what is and isn’t working.”
In designing Off With Their Heads!, Sendlewski said, “I don’t even know if it works or not, but it could work.” He tried it first at home by himself, “actually physically cutting the cards, trying to think about how I feel about that experience, then taking my own personal notes,” he said. “Then I come here and compare. Were people excited to cut a card? 100 percent! So I’m right on course.”
Sendlewski admired the guild ethic of people showing their games and staying to play other people’s games. “I appreciate that they push that, because the first thing that I learned from Matt is that what you really need to do is playtest other games. You have to remember if I’m bringing a game, yeah I’m going to show my game, but keep in mind how much time you take.”
“This is a really great space and no one is going to judge you here,” he added. “I have to hide back my views sometimes, but the funny thing is that most of the games where I thought ‘what on earth is this person thinking?’ have been some of the coolest games I’ve seen.”
Cutler and Fantastic, meanwhile, continue to develop and release games with Prettiest Princess and other game companies.
“We have Before There Were Stars, which is a storytelling game that’s coming out from Smirk & Dagger,” Cutler said. It’s being released at Gen Con, the largest tabletop gaming convention in North America, attracting tens of thousands of participants. “Prettiest Princess does a lot of outside, indie, weird, artpiece games, and we haven’t formalized all the details yet, but we’re really excited to build that up.”
“When Matt and I are designing together, often times I’ll come in and do something completely out of left field, because I don’t know all of the conventions or where things are based out of, and then Matt will walk over to the shelf in the library and grab a game and say, ‘this game already did that much better. Let’s use this as an example.’ In a lot of ways, we complement each other well as designers, because of our disparate knowledge bases.”
What makes New Haven a special place for games?
“The community,” Cutler said. “I’m very happy to call everyone I’ve met at the Game Makers’ Guild my friend, and I’m constantly impressed by how great the sense of community and fellowship is at the shop here.”
Elm City Games is located at 760 Chapel St., on the second floor. They host events all week Wednesday through Sunday. The New Haven Game Makers’ Guild meets every Wednesday night between 6 p.m. and 10 p.m. and on the first Saturday of each month at noon.