Connected: Intro

Connected is the first game idea that I developed into a prototype. By day I am a Sr Network Engineer and have been in the field for 23 years. I felt that I could take all of that expertise and build it onto a board game. So in the summer of COVID I started putting down my ideas and developing the game in a notebook and in my head.

So what is Connected exactly? Connected is meant to help explain the infrastructure of the internet while delivering a card driven mid weight euro style game. Or at least this is what I would say if asked in an elevator at Gencon. I wanted to make a game that was strategy heavy and related to my years of experience at my job.

"Don't you want to rule the world?"

I played a few games that are strategy based and use cards as the man mechanic. I really thought that that basic mechanic would fit well with the concept I was going for. One of the biggest reasons I wanted to use cads is that flavor text on cards can help explain motivations for doing actions in the game. My wife likes to recant a story of when she was asked about a playing a war game and was asked "Don't you want to rule the world?" her reply was simply "no". That is not how I want to present this game to people. I would love for this to be a game that my wife enjoys as well as my colleagues from work.

I started on working on a prototype almost right away, I was drawing a map with tons of interconnected lines to cities throughout North America. I started with just North America because its the network I am most familiar with. I was working on a large project at the time connecting sites together from the Caribbean to the Midwest. The project was quite a challenge and involved a lot of coordination and maps. This was super inspiring to me.

At the time I started to noodle this design I started listening to Gabe Barrett's Board Game Design Lab podcast. That has been so very helpful in framing my ideas and refining some of the details of the game. Now that being said there is a lot more work to be done on this project and I look forward to keep you all in the loop on the process of design and testing. The next post on Connected is going to feature the core mechanic of the game, the player decks.