Last night I had a ton of crazy dreams. One of those dreams was about 10MtM and why I am doing what I am doing. I love gaming and the board game community. There is nothing I want more than to see one of my games being played at a convention or a friendly game store by a group of people. That brings me to this blog, why I work the way I work, and so on.
As you know, over the past few years I have been in the good fight against cancer. Chemo sessions, as you may know, are long and boring. They are time killers that drain you of everything you have and replace all of that with poison. I have had good days with chemo, bad days, and worse. The were days that I blacked out, days where I could no longer take it, and days where I thought that this would be the rest of my life. Playing board and card games with Meghan, my wife, really helped me get through even the worst of days. It was something that saved my sanity and kept my spirits up when I couldn't see an end to all of the treatment, poking, and hospital trips.
Now, this came with two caveats. The first being is all the nurses thought we were strange. There we were, two adults alone in a room playing strange games and laughing hysterically. I guess part of that comes from all the dark jokes we made about the cancer and my lack of good luck, but strange we were. I say this, but all the nurses love(d) us. The second caveat is the lack of space. Those rooms have little room to maneuver when you are hooked up by rubber tubing to a giant, mobile stripper pole. This means that table space is very limited, so limited that most rooms had nothing bigger than a lunch tray.
The lack of playing space really narrowed down our selection of games to play. The chemo, some days more than others, also wore me down to were I could only pay attention to shorter games. We played a lot of roll & write games like Balloons, Rolling Japan, & Rolling America. We also played a lot of micro and mini games. Perplext games Pack O Game was brought along more than once and so were a lot of smaller Asian games like Mini Park. I became a master of Mini Park during chemo.
During the times I was not at the hospital and feeling in a good state of mind I was working on a few games, 10MtM was one of them. These games all shared two common themes, they play at an hour or less and they take up as little space as possible. Space and time became very important to me at chemotherapy. I didn't want to feel sick or tired. Cancer is a horrible situation in many ways, it is all consuming. When I started working on 10MtM and other games, working titles Grave Mistakes and King's Standard, I wanted them to fit within the time and space parameters. I know I am not the only, or last, gamer to go through chemo and I wanted to create games that are not only fun to play on game night, but so someone else in my position could else find an escape while in the hospital.
If I didn't have a wonderful spouse and these few small games to keep me focused on the positive, I don't know where I would be right now.
When browsing board games some of us tend to look past box size and ignore play time markers, which is fine there is a time and a place for every game. For me size and time became so insanely important, these are seemingly minor details that became much more to me. This is my motivation, my drive for these games.
Even now, while I continue chemo treatment, I am working on 10MtM and a new one page tabletop RPG, I am so far calling it God Less. The idea is little table space needed and minimal components required so my games can be something that can be played virtually anywhere and in any situation. My RPG is so far using just a d4, a d6, and a singular page of rules (which will eventually be posted here on my blog).
I felt this was important to get out there, important for me to say.
That is all for right now. I am going to work some more on 10MtM and God Less. Tomorrow I go to chemo and I will be taking my Game Dev notebook with me so I can tinker on these games as well as outline a couple of ideas I have as well.
Cheers,
Phil
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