This board game was created as part of the Colocando Conciertos jam which is part of the Primer Turno project, board game design podcast with the goal of create a game per month in 2022.

The Inspiration

The goal of the jam was create a workers placement game with a Concerts thematic. I really enjoy the music and live events, I got inspired by the Mexico City indie music festivals scene where some events/communities like Forevers Alone Fest, Perreo Millenial, NRMAL, among others has been increasing its reputation year by year and taking the city. Considering this, during the brain storming I took the following decisions I wanted to accomplish:

• The game should be enjoyable no matter the kind of music the players use to listen.

• The game might simulate the process of festivals creation and self improvement.

The Challenge

Before start putting my hands on the game the first problem a faced was that I had a very poor understanding of what does a Worker Placement game is about. After watching some videos on youtube I realized that I have played just one game with kind of that mechanic, Blue Orange Games Photosynthesis. I really recommend this video from Nights Around a Table.

After watching several videos and have playing few of them online I figure out that defining the resources would be a good start. The resources were defined trying to simulate the efforts needed to create a festival.

The next problem and a huge one was to define the values of the resources, I stated using Machination to help me simulate the economics of the game but for me was not that useful. I spend more than a week trying to simulate the game, I get very hooked because of its graphics but frustrated by its programming limitations. Here is the progress I made.

After a breakdown and a small discussion of what tools to use to fix the values, in the official discord server of the jam, I was advised to not try to use math models but actually that advise helped me to ground the idea of convert the relation between resources into a mathematical equations. Then I used a programming language I am very confident with it and was very straight forward to create a simulation. Feel free to clone it:

git clone git@bitbucket.org:motolinia/the-festmogul.git

Conclusions

What Went Wrong?

• I spend most of the time with the simulation than creating the art.

What Went Right?

• I finished the game jam playing three more workers placement games.
• Understood how to pass from resources equivalences to equations.
• Create the instructions manual was very easy by using the simulation code as reference.
• The usage of stock images was very easy and helpful to speed up the art creation.
• Learned about standard sizes on Boards.

What Can Be Improved?

• Maybe the usage of other language as python on simulation would be better to create graphics and the integration of machine learning tools.