Pack The Essentials Designer Diary with Jacqueline Verges

Posted on behalf of Jacqueline Verges, Pack The Essentials Game Designer

I grew up in a family that always loved to play board games. Many of my favorite memories over the years together were us playing games together, from playing Sequence while camping in our little pop-up camper, to learning Scrabble from my grandparents during a sleepover at their home, to hanging out in the living room with my mom, dad, and sisters playing our millionth game of Triple Yahztee. At this time, I was moderately aware of modern board games, familiar with titles like Catan, Unstable Unicorns, Azul, and Wingspan. I had just started using Kickstarter and was learning about new games coming out and just how many different types of games there actually were.

So rewind to about October of 2019, to when I had a crazy idea that it would be fun to make my parents a game as a Christmas present. Not knowing much about game design I decided it would be a good idea to take a game we enjoyed and try to see if I could improve it and turn it into something better.

My mom really liked puzzley games so I started with that. I thought about all the different games we played and decided that I wanted to work off Blokus because I liked the game, but it really had no theme to it. I was packing my suitcase to go visit my family for the weekend when my cat Leyla crawled inside and packed herself on top of all the stuff. “Now, that’s a funny theme” I thought, and thus I decided my game would be about packing cats in suitcases.

I got myself a sketch book and brought it with me on the trip and on my way home I sat on the Long Island Railroad train and got to brainstorming. One of the first things that came to me was the name, before there was even a concept of what the game was going to be I decided that “Pack the Essentials” had a nice ring to it, and that the “essentials” were going to be the cats.

To start I decided to use the square shaped board and polyomino shaped tiles that Blokus used. Now I had to think of how the game was going to play and what would make it different and not just a remake with a cat theme.

On their turn, players would add a tile to the game board to try and score points. Players’ tiles needed to touch at least one of their previous tiles and all players had to start the game on a space on the edge of the board of their choice. All players would start with the same 21 tiles, which is every shape you can make from polyomino tiles that are 1-5 pieces total. In the original game, your goal was to fit your pieces into the shared suitcase and try to score more points than your opponents by the end of the game by effectively placing your tiles.

One of the things that always annoyed me about Blokus is how when you play with multiple people, it is super easy to gang up on one player and cut off their access to other parts of the board. To prevent a player from immediately being targeted by multiple opponents blocked off too quickly, I wanted a way to allow players to remove opponents tiles to help them create new openings on the board. I decided that players would be able to “hire help” which would allow them to discard a tile from their remaining tile pool, and gain a help token. On a future turn, they could spend that help token to remove an opponent’s piece from the board and place their own somewhere that overlapped that space instead. This allowed players who got blocked in early, a chance to get back in the game and not run out of options. These hired help pieces became cow tokens that I called Mooovers.

However, removal of pieces meant a new challenge, how did players guarantee a way to keep their points after playing a tile? One of the first things I decided was that I wanted tiles to be double sided where each side was worth a different amount of points. Originally, I had a light side and a dark side to each tile. A player could always play a tile from their tile pool light side up on their turn. This would grant them 1 point per square on that tile. The dark side of the tile would be worth 3 points per square it contained. Since this was a potentially large jump in points for a single piece, it needed to come with a challenge to obtain Enter, the Pack Rats, your friendly neighborhood packing service that would help you pack your items better! The Pack Rats were a way to play tiles dark side up.

I decided that to keep each game different, the Pack Rats would be tokens that moved around the board. If you placed a tile over a space with a Pack Rat on it you collected the Pack Rat token and you could use it on a future turn to place a tile dark-side up. When a Pack Rat was used a die twice would be rolled and the results would correspond with a space on the board and that was where the Pack Rat would move to be obtainable on a future turn.

Tiles that were dark-side up were not able to be removed so it was a way to guarantee a piece stayed on the board.

I then wanted some more things to bring variation to each game play, so I decided to create some end-game goals that could be swapped out with each game so that players wouldn’t always resort to the same strategy. I called these “ To Do List Goals”.

Now that I had an idea of what I wanted my game to be, I needed to figure out how to actually make a physical copy of the game. This is where I learned about The Game Crafter and all the awesome things they could do.

I spent the months of October and November working on the art and graphic design for the game. Shout out to DesignBundles.Net for the original cats I used for the very first game. Originally I planned to have cats and dogs in the game but I couldn’t find matching art assets so I ultimately went with just cats. I spent almost every night for about 6 weeks working on the game trying to get it ready for print with enough time for it to arrive before Christmas. The hardest part of all of this was learning to make laser cut lines because I never used SVG files before. After a lot of trial and error on November 22, 2019 I ordered the first copies of the game.

In case you’re curious, this is what it included:

I gave it to my parents for Christmas and they loved it. Given it was not really play tested, like I literally just went here is an idea, let me print up a copy and call it a day, it played better than it probably should have. We had a good time playing and that likely would have been the end of my game design journey, had it not been for COVID.

When COVID hit at the beginning of 2020, I found myself with a lot of time on my hands and knew I needed a hobby. I had always loved writing and had recently taken to playing more board games with my then boyfriend, now husband Levi. So I decided to start a board game review blog, called Pudgy Cat Games. For a few months I focused on reviewing games I already owned. I had recently discovered Root and was starting to get Kickstarter deliveries in. Throughout the process of developing my blog and social media sites, I learned about this whole community of board gamers. I started connecting with game designers and publishers. I learned about the Board Game Design Lab podcasts, and I fell down a rabbit hole of all things board games.

That summer I learned about a board game design contest, and thought about how much I enjoyed making Pack the Essentials and wondered if I could continue to make it better. I learned how to set up a Tabletopia version of the game, and started testing it with friends and family and on board game design playtest digital meetups. I wound up pitching it in Ravensburger’s Game Inventor Days, where very much to my surprise they were interested in it. They wound up doing more testing on it and one of the key pieces of feedback I received was that kids thought the Mooovers were too mean and they didn’t enjoy having their pieces removed. ….And that is where the current version of Pack the Essentials started.

I thought long and hard about how to address the problem of “take that” elements with not wanting a player to be stuck early on and ultimately I decided it just wouldn’t work on a single game board, so I decided to move to each player having their own suitcase. However, without a shared board, there was no longer any player interaction as players were simply selecting pieces from their own tile pool and placing them into their own suitcase, so the game felt much more like a very poor multi-player solitaire.

Now, this was all happening about a year and a half after I originally designed the game for my parents and I had become a lot more familiar with different design mechanisms. I knew ultimately that I wanted Pack the Essentials to be playable by families, so I used my mom as a reference point for a lot of decisions that I made. My mom likes games that are thinky and have some strategy, but ultimately you have only one or two choices that you need to make each turn. Think games like Azul, Sagrada, and That’s Pretty Clever.

I wanted the game to have some randomness but I wanted a way to mitigate that with strategy so players had to make choices that required thought, and not just luck. I also wanted some interaction where player’s choices did impact each other, but ultimately I wanted a game where players had a variety of different ways to earn points so that every decision they made in the game made them feel good and not like they were being punished for someone else’s choice. This way there would be multiple paths to victory and players could utilize different strategies to win.

I decided that since we no longer had a shared player board that we should have a shared pool of tiles instead. I kept the four unique colored tiles but decided to move away from dark and light sides and instead make tiles with one side with clothing and one side with cats. I enjoyed drafting games and thought this could be a good way to help players wind up with unique sets of tiles for their suitcase and thus Pack the Essentials became a tile drafting and placement game. I created cards that were laid out in order featuring 4 tiles. Each round one tile was placed on each card and my original thought was to just pass the first player each round and players would just draft in clockwise order. However, I needed a way to have players decide whether to pack clothing or a cat. I decided I wanted to keep the idea that one side of the tile was worth more points, so I made the cats the valuable option. I continued to use the Pack Rat tokens as a way to flip the tiles, but as there was no longer a board to obtain them from, I needed a new way to do so.

With this I opted to create a draft to determine tile drafting order, a draft within a draft if you will. I determined that the first player that round would get to draft their draft position, rather than drafting the first tile. The earlier they decided to draft, the more tiles would be available, but if they opted to go later they would earn bonuses. I no longer had use for the Mooover tokens as players were not removing pieces, but I added in Cat Toys, that could be collected. The more you collected the more points they were worth. So going later in the draft, meant fewer tile options available, but could earn you Cat Toys or Pack Rats.

I also quickly realized that I needed a way to scale the game based on the player count. If you were playing with 4 people then everything was balanced, but if you played with less than 4 whoever was drafting later got the better bonuses but still had extra tiles to draft from. To combat this, I added an AI system where any space not claimed by a player, was claimed by a cat lady. When that space was up in draft order a D4 die was rolled and the matching draft tile was removed. It helped ensure that if you took the first draft spot you always had 4 options, and if you took the fourth draft spot you always only had one choice, regardless of player count. I kept the To Do List Goals, and just updated them to match the new game rules.

I also hired an artist from Fivrr to make me some basic art for my prototype because I now needed cats, clothing, and a cover that all sort of matched. My only request was to make the cat on the cover look like my cat Leyla. It didn’t quite work out that way, but I wound up with a bunch of cute cats that would do for a prototype.

With my four new suitcases I drew up (rather roughly) in procreate, I recreated my game assets and headed back to The Game Crafter to print up a new prototype. I know they tell you not to worry about art and stuff while designing a game, let’s just say I was bad at that. I like pretty prototypes and if I have to throw out stuff after I make it, at least it looked good on the table until then.

On November 14, 20212 I ordered my latest prototype that I was going to bring with me to my first ever board game convention, Pax Unplugged. I signed up for an Unpub playtesting session and figured I would see what people who were not just my friends and family thought.

This was an enlightening experience. Having never been to a board game convention before, it amazed me that strangers came over to try out an unknown unpublished designer’s game. I will be forever grateful to the people who kept my table full through the whole playtest session.

As I started playtesting the game, I learned a few things. First, players always wanted to go 3rd or 4th to get Pack Rats early on. From this, I realized it would be helpful to start everyone with a single Pack Rat so players didn’t need to always draft later in the beginning of the game in order to pack their first cat.

Next, a playtester suggested adding a game board for the tiles and the draft places, and that was a brilliant idea so when I got home I set about working that up.

I signed up to attend Pax East in spring of 2022, which is where my story with Wise Wizard Games began, though I didn’t know it at the time. I had made some updates to the game, including the new board and working on a solo mode, and I was excited to do Unpub again. At this convention, I met Derek, who was working with Wise Wizard Games at the time, in person after connecting with him online earlier that year and he saw Pack the Essentials.

After this Unpub I was feeling pretty confident in the direction the game was headed in as people had been giving me really positive feedback. I had to then decide what I wanted to do next. I knew I didn’t want to self-publish. I work full time already and the thought of managing marketing, production, and fulfillment was not for me. I like designing and wanted to focus on that. I made the decision that year to attend Gen Con to try and pitch Pack the Essentials to publishers.

Derek knew I was looking to do this and thought it would be a good idea to connect with Debbie because he thought she might be excited about a cat game and when we met it was clear we were a purrrfect fit.

As a brand new designer, I was ecstatic that Debbie liked Pack the Essentials and thought it would be a good fit for their new family friendly game line. I had played a lot of Hero Realms digitally over the pandemic and thought it would be super cool to work with a publisher that made a game I really enjoyed. My only request for Pack the Essentials was that the theme remain and that Leyla got featured on the box. I had put a lot of work into tying the theme into the different parts of the game and I was passionate about making a game about packing cats in a suitcase. Debbie matched my enthusiasm for this and said it would be possible. So, I signed the game with Wise Wizard Games!

A few short months after that, Leyla, passed away suddenly from an undiagnosable heart condition. Levi and I were heartbroken. She was only 7 at the time and she was like a child to us. We adopted her when she was two years old and we went to the shelter on $10 cat adoption day. We walked by her window and she knocked on the glass to get our attention. I looked at Levi and said, “She wants to be our cat”. We went in to say hi and she immediately came and sat on top of Levi. The rest is history.

She traveled across the country when we moved back to the East Coast from California. She slept cuddled with me like a stuffed animal every night. And she was the greatest player of pompom fetch there ever was. She retrieved the pompoms and everything. The pink pompom in the game is a nod to her favorite toy. She loved every human she ever met and was the most friendly fur kid we could have asked for. I cannot put into words what it means to now bring this game to life and give her memory the honor it deserves. I wish she could be here for the release of the game with her little self on the box and to try and whack her player piece off the table (she really loved messing up everything as soon as I staged a game photo for a picture), but I truly hope that she brings as much joy to the yellow player as she did to us for the 5 years we had together.

Over the next two years, I worked with Danielle as we got Pack the Essentials ready for it’s release as one of the first games in Wacky Wizard Game’s imprint line. I am so appreciative that I got to help with the game development. I know a lot of times once a game is signed over to a publisher the designer is no longer involved, but it has been a blast getting to continue to work on Pack the Essentials and help shape the final product. I appreciate the learning experience I have gotten through this and I am super grateful for Wise Wizard Games for letting me be part of everything.

Danielle and I worked a lot on developing a Solo mode for the game with the goal of making it feel similar to the multi-player version. We wanted the AI to be simple to upkeep but also provide enough challenge and replayability that solo gamers have an equally fun time with Pack the Essentials. As an avid solo gamer myself, I am really proud of what we accomplished and I hope solo gamers will enjoy it a lot.

Each time a new milestone has been met, I am filled with joy from playtesting the almost final version with Danielle at Unpub in 2023, to getting to see the final art for the first time (and my surprise that my new kitten made it onto the box. His name is Solo (after solo board gaming) and he is now a 16lb floof that is half the length of my body.), to playing the final version with friends at Pax Unplugged this past December. Solo does a good job carrying on the Pack the Essentials torch, and will happily pose in any suitcase you offer him.

Getting the final copy of Pack the Essentials in the mail last week was one of the most surreal moments of my life. I want to thank everyone who has had a hand in making this dream a reality for me.

I appreciate everyone at Wise Wizard Games, all the playtesters, my supportive friends and family, my fellow gamers who encouraged me to keep going, and of course my cats. Thanks for being on this journey with me and I can’t wait to see what you think!

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