Circular Reasoning

Co-Creator, Designer

Originally a student project for a game design class, I wanted to see how far I could take it professionally. Evidently, getting featured at IndieCade 2014 and picked up for publishing is about as professional as you can get.

The assignment this came from specified that the game had to be abstract with “perfect information”, so no randomness like dice rolls and no hidden elements like holding cards the other players don’t see. Everything is laid out infront of you and the rules apply equally to everyone at all times.

The game is a bit simpler than chess, and a bit more complex than checkers. The goal of the game is to get all your pieces, a Circle, Triangle, and Square, into the center of the board. Each piece can only move a certain number of spaces at a time, and the only way to get to the center is by going through gateways in-between the inner layers. After everyone’s had a turn, these gateways rotate around the board depending on the number of pieces on each level, so for example if there are 3 pieces in the outer layer, 2 pieces in the middle layer, and no pieces in the inner layer, the outer gate would move 3 spaces clockwise, the middle gate would move 2 spaces, and the inner gate wouldn’t move at all.

Accessibility was a huge part of the design from the get-go. When I was originally prototyping the game in class, I found out that one of the classmates was colorblind and couldn’t distinguish his pieces from the others. Because of this, I made sure that every iteration going forward was accessible for color-blindness by adding different patterns to each set of pieces (outline patterns, X patterns, etc…). There was also some discussion on making each set of tokens have a different texture to them, but that was probably overkill for us at the time.

After submitting the game to IndieCade and getting accepted to showcase it, my partner and I were interested in potentially doing a kickstarter to print out a few copies and began searching for board game manufacturers that could help us. That’s where we met AdMagic, who just so happened to start a board game publishing division around the same time we were looking to manufacture. So, one thing led to another, and Circular Reasoning was being published by Breaking Games.

Fun Facts!

• The alternative name was “Clock Blockers” due to the blocking mechanic in the game. This was deemed not “family friendly” enough.

• There used to be an “X” piece that only moved one space at a time. The piece was removed as you could get infinitely stuck if you had only one “X” piece on a layer.

• How you write your rules is so goddamn important. We went through dozens of iterations on how to write out the rules because there will inevitably be something you didn’t explain adequately.