Captain for a Day Design Notes

In 2002 I started publishing some of my games in very low quantities. I called my business Black & White Games. It was partly because I printed all the cards in black and white to keep costs down, but also a joke among my gaming friends, since I was always the player who suffered most from color blindness. 

So I made an edition of King for a Day in black and white. I sold a very few copies through Fair Play Games, my friend's online game store. Even then it felt like a ton of games were coming out every year, so it was a good learning experience to see how my looked, buried in the avalanche on the list of products on that website.

Every few years I'd revisit the design, improve it a little, then do a new edition. In 2007 or so I made a print-and-play version. I sold it on a CD along with some other games. It had a good review on Boardgame Geek. The player had discovered the fun we had with the game. He put it this way:

“In short. Constant fun, constant challenge, constant choice. Fully engaging. This is a well thought out game and it's a shame that its not been produced by a full blooded games company, as the game play deserves full production quality components.”

I went back at it again in 2011 to make a version on The Game Crafter. That was a memorable project because by then my kids were turning into young gamers, and we were able to enjoy playing it as a family. My daughter was an aspiring artist, so she helped me color some of the images.

Again, it received some praise from reviewers:

"King for a Day was a wonderful surprise. When I first reviewed the rules and looked at the cards, I figured the game would be light enough to play with just about everyone but not terribly loved by the Gamer Geek crowd. How wrong I was! Turns out everyone, from Child Geek to Gamer Geek, enjoyed the game and was ready for more."

All this time I had still been sending it to publishers. While the game got some praise, it was always rejected as being a bad time or a bad fit for the publisher.

Starting in 2016, I noticed a shift in gamer tastes that required me to make serious changes to what felt like an essential part of the game. Feedback from another designer, then an experience at an UnPub event made me bite the bullet. 

It took another six years before other changes worked their way in. Then everything came together into the wonderful mix that it is now. I'll delve into that part of the journey in my next post.

Changing a Core Element

For most of its history, a game of King for a Day started by players getting a sheet of paper--called their scroll--and something to write with. They'd write a funny king/queen name for themselves at the top. Each round, when it became time for the king/queen to give out a deal, the players would write their offers on the paper, handing it to the ruler of the round, who had to then pick their favorite offer.

Writing on the scroll was a central unique element of King for a Day in my mind. It gave room for players to write funny notes or dream up promises not even related to the game. Some early playtesters used to promise silly resources not even in the game, like an increasing number of servant monkeys. The room for creativity and surprise was good for laughs, and I always want players to laugh, even my strategy games. 

But in 2016 I brought King for a Day to a playtest session. A friend of mine who was pretty successful as a designer and publisher listened to each prototype I had. He commented that writing an offer to the king seemed really outdated. Not impressed with my elevator pitch, he passed on what I thought was my most promising design at the time. That experience made me feel the game had run its course. I didn't work on it much for about a year.

In late 2017 I attended an UnPub event in Grand Rapids, Michigan. I did decide to lead a session of King for a Day. Once again, the game worked its magic. Players had fun with it, but one tester commented that it shouldn't include writing.

That feedback stuck with me, and when I next came back to King for a Day with a serious intent to improve it, I tried it once without that central mechanism. Writing essentially made the deal-making part of the game a very open-ended, one-shot blind bid. I tried the game as an open auction, with players freely increasing or changing the resources they'd offer the ruler. It felt so different, and I felt it took away something I had loved about King for a Day. But the obvious fact was no one else cared.

It still had the twist that the ruler of the round didn't have to pick the highest offer. That player could choose anyone. The fun powers players were competing for, plus that fact that the chooser still had a free choice, really was the heartbeat of King for a Day. The game worked as well, and for those hated writing even the shortest of notes, it worked so much better.

Changing the Theme

The other big change I experimented with was the theme. I always used the benign fairy tale backstory of King for a Day. It didn't come out in any huge way on the cards, but it set the lighthearted tone I wanted. That reflected my own feelings toward theme in strategy games. I came from the abstract strategy and eurogame side of things. Theme didn't have to matter much. It was the mechanisms plus the players that made me love games.

But when the world shut down from 2020-2021, I immersed myself in a lot of online conversations on The Dice Tower and Board Game Design Lab Facebook groups. I had to admit theme was very often what set a game apart. It could catch attention, even if everything else in the game was standard fare. I realized, even for adult players who otherwise didn't seem drawn to fantasy, make-believe, and "let's pretend", theme could make a game more fun for them.

I first transported the King for a Day system into a setting I had always loved--the Old West. It became I'm Sheriff Now. Everything ported over quite easily. The deal cards and adventures allowed me to introduce some funny townfolk and outlaws. The cowboy drawl emerged as we played. 

Ultimately I dropped that theme because the resource management was a stretch for game about becoming a small town sheriff. But my eyes had been open to possibilities, and I could tell from playtests that the game was not dead yet.

I was making a lot of print-and-play games from 2021 - 2023. I even paid for art and posted a PnP version of King for a Day in those years. As I learned more about what PnP gamers want, I realized that 70+ cards with only 4 different images wasn't going to sell many copies. I started experimenting with dice instead of cards.

I also kept changing the theme. Moving from the Old West, I went back to another fairy tale setting. It focused more on the people's of the fantasy world, giving each group a leader and special powers. It was fun, but nothing special.

Several years before I had read a list of great IPs that were going into the public domain. I noticed Peter Pan and Neverland were on the list, because of Barrie's novel, Peter and Wendy, turning 100 years old (if I remember right). I made a mental note of that, not because I was hungry to take advantage of a big IP, but because the story was near and dear to my heart. I wondered if sometime I might have an idea (game or otherwise) for Barrie's world.

To elaborate on the significance of this, please allow me a couple paragraphs of overdramatic retrospection. Over 30 years prior, in my early 20's, I had recently graduated from college, but I was between jobs. I was living just off the campus of Michigan State University, consumed with big dreams and creativity, in a period of wondering how my life would go. I was working on a screenplay, getting into the exciting new world of digital art and video, writing music, and hoping to have a band. I wanted to do something to set the world ablaze with my imaginative ideas, but all employment prospects looked far more mundane. I applied for jobs I secretly hoped wouldn't work out. I was consumed with ideals and waiting for something that felt like a calling.

I had never watched Peter Pan movies or read the books.  My friends suggested we go see Hook when it came out. I knew nothing of the movie, but I was a Spielberg fan. I found it to be inspiring on a number of levels, so I looked up Peter and Wendy in the library where I'd often hang out. I have some great memories of those days, with light falling snow, driving downtown in the capital city, reading books and dreaming what life would be. Now obviously the book was for children, and I read it as such.  It didn't "change my life" or something huge like that. Still, the wild imagination, this boy who refused to grow up, and the ideas of dying (but from Hook, living) being an "awfully big adventure" had my mind soaring at times. 

So sometime in 2022 I started thinking about setting King for a Day in Neverland. I read Peter and Wendy again. Armed with a good understanding of the tone and world, I ported over all the resources and actions. I also made it a dice game, removing that huge deck of cards for the first time. I was also trying to expand the player count, so I made some two-player rules. I taught it to my wife (almost always my first playtester for any game) and we immediately knew it was something special.

The more it transformed into a pirate game in the magical world of Neverland, the more players were having fun with it. I knew, even with all the changes in gaming over the past 20 years, the game had something special. I paid for art from a young artist on Fiverr. She goes by Rad_Sonja. Her work was perfect. I obviously loved the title image, since it ends up all over my social media page and this website. The character art was so much better than I had imagined. She brought the six "Lost Kids" I made up to life. Bebes, with her Never Bird partner, is my favorite. 

So that brings us up to date on nearly every captivating aspect of the game...except for the solo rules. That was an unexpected twist, and I'll wrap things up by looking at that next.

When I connected with Benny Sperling and we decided to do a print-and-play version of Captain for a Day, we knew it had to have a solo mode. A lot of print-and-play gamers want to be able to play alone.

But how do you make a one-player version of a game when its central feature is the moments of agonizingly fun, head-to-head negotiation?

I started making some notes about options in late 2023. By that time, the Lost Kid characters I created had come to life for me. Obviously the Neverland setting could be a backdrop for any number of fun adventures. It seemed like it would be easy to tell a story over the course of several scenarios, each changing the rules somewhat. 

And story-based games had been a passion of mine. I jumped back into game design seriously about five years prior, with the main spark being a desire to make a unique story game. I dove into as many such games as I could. I was drawn back to my early interest in RPGs, plus several board games with story elements. In 2020 I started making some solo games, selling them on DriveThruRPG. 

My solo dungeon crawl for the Hero Kids system, Escape From Skull Isle,  has been one of my best sellers. My abstract system for DRMR15 took the concept of a dungeon crawl into  a surreal landscape of dreams. It uses an image search engine and a deck of cards to combine puzzly decisions with character development. I specifically tried not to see how others approached solo RPGs at that time. I wasn't sure if they were novel, but I knew I didn't want them to intentionally be derivative of other games. 

So I did the same with the Captain for a Day solo adventure. I proceeded by just making a game I would have fun playing. Being solo, I could do just that, without anyone else's thoughts interfering, quite far into the design process. That was a risk, of course. I knew that I could immerse myself into the game and I'd understand all the aspects, but it might end up too complicated or opaque for others to enjoy.

The hardest part at first was just finding a way to simulate the offers and bidding of the regular game. I decided to go for the feel of the two-player game, where each player only gets to make one offer for the deal of the round. I simulated it through dice rolls, then eventually decided on card draws.

Besides a fun story, a big goal was to provide a satisfying single-player module without adding many rules or components to the standard game. It turns out the scenarios only require two pages of cards, once the base game is printed and constructed. Some will choose to print the scenario sheets too, but I always just display them on my tablet. As for rule changes, I changed my mind as I went along. There are very few changes in scenario 1. By scenario 5, it will feel like a different game altogether! 

Once I completed scenario 3, which throws the hero into a search for a kidnapped main character, I knew I was onto something. Captain for a Day could in fact be translated to an adventure game. 

I asked my wife to give it a try. It was rough, but we could see the potential of the system. After more refining, I introduced it to my friend Russ Price. Russ has a great mind for strategy, and decades of experience with games of many types. The fact that he had fun with both my solo version and the two-player game was very encouraging. He and his wife Sandy gave me a ton of useful feedback at that stage of development. I also sent copies to people who volunteered to test it. Feedback confirmed I was on the right track.

I don't want to give away any of the story, or the specifics of how the standard Captain for a Day actions and game components morph into a narrative experience. I'll just wrap up by saying I'm excited to see how much the game is transformed by the time a player reaches the final scenario. 

Thinking back to the core idea that led to King for a Day, I would have never dreamed it would form the basis of a single-player Neverland adventure. Now that I've taken it this far, I see potential for multiple expansions on the game that it has become. I look forward to hearing what everyone thinks of it!