Paranormal Detectives - A Game Made To Order

On a hot summer day, fans, designers, and publishers of board games meet at a holiday resort by a lake in Poland in order to take part in the V Board Games Lab. Once on-site, they are divided into groups supervised by trainers — representatives of Polish publishing houses and authors of board games. Their task: to design a board game during this 72-hour game jam!

- Marcin, Szymon, and Adrian

Two IT specialists, an educational game designer, and a police detective make up our group. It isn’t easy, as we have never met before, much less worked together. So we start talking about our interests both in games and in life, and it turns out we make up a pretty cool team. Despite the differences in our life and work experiences, we find a common language. After all, we were brought together by our passion for board games.

The two game mechanics drawn for our group are storytell ing and card drafting. We were afraid of storytelling because the mechanics are difficult to implement. We said our prayers and got to work. It turns out that we already know a few good party games that use storytelling as a device or reoccurring theme: Concept, Black Stories, and Charades. But it’s still a long way before we begin to see a light in the tunnel.

We wait to find out what the theme of our game will be, but it turns out to be fairly well-suited for the mechanics of storytell ing. The theme is “Phantom Fears,” but we sti l l don’t have an idea of how to combine theme and mechanics.