Development Diaries: How a father-daughter team created new party card game Betty Two Bricks | Part 1
Recently, we were delighted to reveal our new project: Betty Two Bricks.
The Roaring Twenties-themed party card game for 2—6 players has been brewing behind-the-scenes and we’re now ready to show you what we’ve been hiding under our fedoras.
Join us on a journey back through the past year and learn how we brought Betty (and her bricks) into reality.
We came to UKGE with a dream: making our very own boardgame. Like many aspiring designers, we started with grand plans for our first game (shhh, we’re still hoping to make them real in the future).
Deciding to attend workshops aimed specifically at potential designers and publishers, we came to ‘Games Design with Manufacturing in Mind’ led by premier board game manufacturer Panda. The workshop brought up great points about what you need to consider when making games – incredibly useful but it did give us a pause on our grand plans.
Panda’s workshop was a good look at game manufacture and went into topics such as understanding how to refine your idea to your target market, why you should reduce the cognitive load on players by using appropriate components and the costs associated with different types of components.
The second workshop we attended, led by professional game-maker James Wallis, was a thorough look into the processes of game design and started with the history of games. It covered different aspects of design such as themes and structure, types of game mechanics and finished with a fun challenge to design a new game in teams on the clock (ours ended up being a trading card game where players were teachers in a magical school trying to get the best students in their deck).
On the drive back post-Expo, our proverbial cups proverbially runnethed over with thoughts and ideas. What stood out to us was that our grand boardgame idea (again, shhh) might be a tad over-ambitious as a first game coming from a small, indie, family-run business. However, a card game seemed like a good way to begin our design journey.
The car chat drifted and rambled, as car chats do, and we at some point started making our usual in-jokes about Betty “Two Bricks” (whose origins you can discover going to Betty’s Facebook or Instagram). It struck us that Betty would make a great leading lady for a game. And her name was really quite evocative… almost hitting you in the face like a brick… so would be a great inspiration for the theme.
With theme established (and many jokes about bricks later), we started casually sketching out how the game would play. As long-time enjoyers of Exploding Kittens and Agatha Christie's Death on the Cards, we wanted Betty to also be a fun, quick, [more than] slightly chaotic party card game.
After getting back home, we wrote out the rules and general card ideas on a side of A4, the more mathematical amongst us sketching out a table to work out the number of cards we’d need. Cutting up paper into shapes that vaguely resembled cards, we penned some quick descriptions and used the freely stolen card sleeves (thanks Panda!) to play and test the first prototype.
Keep your peepers peeled for Development Diary 2 where we’ll uncover the design of the first prototype and how it evolved thanks to playtesting.
Betty Two Bricks is launching at the UK Games Expo on 31 May 2024. Find us there at Stand 2-49! Find out more about the game here.