In 2013 I was a professor at Simon Fraser University’s School of Interactive Arts and Technology program (I’m still an adjunct professor there, now). Amongst other things, I taught a course called “Foundations of Game Design” (IAT 312) there and used both my background in video game research and my love of boardgames heavily to motivate course materials and design projects. Many of the students had never played modern boardgames, so I familiarized them with some of the concepts by having them play Dominion and Lords of Waterdeep and then asked them to design a game that combined two of the mechanics from these games, Deckbuilding and Worker Placement. There was a great variety of submissions, but one stood out to me: after I initially evaluated it as a mess that tried to do too much and didn’t even implement worker placement, the group came back with a compelling combination of theme and mechanics that felt fun and novel. I was rather impressed with the feeling and noverly of a tactical skirmish game integrated well with Eurogame mechanics and proposed developing the game further to the group. One of the students, Sébastien, was interested, and the rest is history, as they say. You can read that history in an article he wrote, which details how we kept developing and playtesting the game and some of the awards it received. We are currently very excited to be working with Rock Manor Games to publish the game, now called Seas of Havoc, via Kickstarter.
