by Dani Garcia

Almost five years ago, my son was born. At that time, I was starting to work full-time as a game designer — or at least trying to do so as I couldn't know whether I was going to succeed. I had just signed my first game, and I was already working on the next idea, a game that would eventually become Coming of Age. Given the theme of the game, you may have already guessed what inspired the idea.

You are corect — it was the 2001 video game Black & White, a game about indirectly controlling a god-like creature with its own ideas by giving it treats or punishments. I wanted to do something similar in a board game, with you teaching your creature the best ways to act, but with the creature making its own decisions based on its surroundings and your teachings. I thought about this idea for a while, but I couldn't manage to get a full concept of a game based on this idea, so I had to start looking for alternatives.

It may have been the sleepless nights — or more probably, the reason for those sleepless nights — but I realized you don't need fantasy to have a game about trying to teach the best ways to act to a creature making its own decisions.

In fact, adding fantasy deeply hurt the theme. What's more interesting than the journey from being a child to becoming an adult? All the new experiences, all the things you must learn, all the emotions you still can't control or understand, all the changes in your head and your body, all the new people you meet and all the passions yet to be discovered, all while exploring an unknown world.

And just like that, the game became much richer, trying to tell a much deeper story. It became a game about growing up, something we all can relate to, so I had to make sure the theme shined or this would be a missed opportunity. I borrowed from my own infancy, making a list of all the thematic elements the game needed to represent, then I had to find mechanisms that matched them.

A Game about Growing Up

When you're a small kid, you have very few things to worry about, your world is tiny, and most of your life decisions are taken by your parents, but as you grow up, you become more independent, you have a new interests and preoccupations, everything gets more complex, and you start exploring the world, further and further from home. In order to represent that mechanically, I created a board that also grows up with you as it represents your brain.


Probably inspired by The Sims, I had tracks in mind that moved up and down based on what your character is doing. I decided to start with only two of them, adding others as the game advances and you grow up. The tracks worked well to represent how what your character is doing affects their brain, while also creating this growing curve of complexity as your brain develops more tracks to manage and more goals to fulfill.


It took me several iterations to also do that with the main board, which represents the city in which you live. Following the same logic as before, you don't visit that many different places as a child — your home, the school, a nearby park... — but as you grow up, new places become interesting for you, and you become independent enough to visit them.

I made a small portion of the board available at the beginning of the game, and only as you grow up do new spaces become available, increasing the number of options available and the complexity of your decisions, which again, matched the experience I wanted to create based on the theme.


Following this idea, several other elements were made available only as the game progressed, so the whole game would create this growing experience, both literally and metaphorically.

How to Control Your "Creature"

Although I was definitely doing a Eurogame, I needed some unpredictability in order to match the theme because rationality is not a word that usually describes a child. I couldn't have an action-selection system in which you could freely choose what to do because that's not how childhood works.


I used dice to create that unpredictability, each die representing what your character wanted to do, but with the design being a Euro, I had to find luck-mitigation systems as many games with dice do.

I took that as an opportunity to add more thematic elements, adding a frustration mechanism that punished you when you forced your character to do something other than what they wanted. At the same time, this helped me add more thematic elements as frustration is a natural feeling that you must learn to deal with as you grow up; I included ways to convert that hurtful frustration into something positive when you learn to cope with it.

To make this die selection more relevant, it became the core of your whole turn, with a cascade of consequences starting from the single die selected.

Consequences

Choosing what to do with a die has consequences in your head, moving some tracks up and down to represent the changes of that decision in your brain, but that was just the start.

You also had to explore a growing world outside your head. You had to visit places and make memories, discover new hobbies, meet new people, make friends — and maybe something more than friends — as you grow up, develop new traits, or maybe adopt the ones of your friends.

And if things were not going your way, you always had your parents to ask for help.


I first tried to have a city randomly built with hexes in which you would move in order to select which of those avenues to pursue, but this city was hard to navigate and it added a lot of complexity both to set-up and to the game itself.

Several iterations later, I came up with an horizontal layout. More importantly, I ditched the idea of moving through hexes, instead linking all those decisions to the die selection at the beginning of your turn.


To make it all work, though, I added a clear order of resolution for all the elements and plenty of opportunities to get the things you need in different ways. You could find many possible moves inside that single selected die, letting you maneuver in order to accomplish as many goals as possible in a single turn, which is important because initially the game gave players fifteen turns, and through development that number has been reduced to just nine — nine turns in which you try to accomplish many things at once.


Ludonova

In 2021, I signed the game with Ludonova, and since then, we have played the game a lot — and I mean, A LOT.

We tried every single strategy and analyzed every aspect of the game, so I hope this shows in the final product. It's by far the game of mine that I've played the most, yet I'm looking forward to having my copy at home. I would happily play another game today, and very hopefully, I would like to play a game of it with my son.

Dani Garcia