by Jeffrey Allers

One of my first published games was 2008's Piece o' Cake, and it is still easily my best-selling game.

The design was inspired by the "I cut, you choose" mechanism in Alan Moon and Aaron Weissblum's classic San Marco, as well as their hidden gem of a two-player card game, Canal Grande. My goal for Piece o' Cake was to make a split-and-choose game that could accommodate up to five players, in addition to creating a more casual game that was accessible to a wider audience.

When that game had run its course and was out of print, Ted Alspach and Bézier Games worked with me to bring the design back to print, this time focusing on pizza. New York Slice, with its added daily specials and new slices, was again a hit and is still in the Bézier catalogue.

Pies, before and after (Image on left: Raiko Pusst)
Detroit Slice

Shortly after the first printing of New York Slice sold out, Ted asked me whether I had any ideas for possible standalone follow-ups to the game. At the time, I did have a dice game that I quickly adapted to a pizza theme. Ted wasn't really interested in dice, but I later developed that game further, and it was published in 2021 by Piatnik as Mozzaroller.

Image: Start2Game
For the spin-off game, I went back to tiles as components — this time with a rectangular form, reminiscent of Detroit-style pizza. However, I did not want to simply implement the same central mechanism from New York Slice in which one player cuts and the others choose in turn order, with the "cutter" receiving the last piece. Instead I spent some time playing with the square tiles.


Limits Are Not Walls, They Are Windows

An architecture professor of mine once extolled the virtues of limits in design, both for the designer and for those who occupy the designed space. Limits spur creativity in the game designer, and they also focus the attention of the players within a manageable decision space.

Limits are an important part of the game design of New York Slice, particularly the limit of how the slices can be moved. In those games, you cannot change the order of the slices when you are dividing them. Without that rule, there would simply be too many choices, overwhelming the divider.

With the rectangular pizza, I also needed limits, and the most intuitive was to allow cutting it only in a straight line from one end to the other. Once it was cut, however, each individual piece could be cut in the same way: from one end to the other in a straight line — but not through other pieces.

Everyone Cuts AND Chooses

Next, I worked on a new type of cut-and-choose mechanism. New York Slice had a specific kind of rhythm to it: one player cuts, each player chooses, cutter takes the last piece, next player cuts, etc. Not only did I want a new mechanism, I also wanted a completely different playing rhythm. (For an essay on the importance of rhythm in games, see this article of mine from 2014.)

One of the ways to create this new rhythm was to allow each player to cut and choose every turn. This meant that other players had the ability to cut your choice down even further if they felt that you were being too greedy and did not leave them enough to take for themselves. If the part that you chose was still there when your turn came around again, you could keep it, and the round would be over for you.

This mechanism worked well, and I was very excited about it. However, in order to keep the game from becoming more complex than New York Slice — and to have some mechanical similarities to that game — I used the same type of majority scoring. This wasn't enough to make the game a compelling sequel to New York Slice, however, and Bézier rightfully passed on the game.


Divided Kingdom

Convinced I still had discovered a new and interesting central mechanism, I decided to try a different theme that would allow me more freedom in devising different scoring mechanisms. I noticed how much fun players have in other games when they create their own cities, so I made the tiles into different types of buildings, complete with walls and gates. Now players were not simply collecting sets, but also puzzling together their own kingdoms to score for combinations of buildings and features.

In my playtests, however, all the elements were not easy to see, and the scoring felt tacked-on and was too similar to other tile-based city-building games. I needed a scoring mechanism that felt seamless with the rest of the game, and to do that, I also thought of a theme that would fit the central mechanisms better.


Loot Dispute

The theme I came up with was that of fantasy adventurers who had entered a dungeon full of a variety of treasures. They had defeated the creatures that guarded these treasures, and now they could claim their reward. Human (or dwarf, elf, etc.) nature gets in the way, however, and it becomes a competition to claim the most valuable collection of loot.

This opened more doors for the game design. The different buildings (or pizza slices) became different types of treasure, and instead of being confined to the same rectangular shape, each "treasure chamber" had a different configuration of treasure cards, providing new challenges for dividing them.

It was then that I also created a new scoring mechanism: The loot needed to be sold to merchants, each of whom were looking for different combinations of treasure. Random merchant cards were available to choose from each round, and the earlier you were able to claim your treasure for the round, the better choice you would have of the merchants! Each of your treasures was sorted according to type, and each merchant had to also be assigned to one of your treasure types.

At the beginning of a game, your merchants give you goals for what treasure to collect in future rounds, whereas merchants collected in the last rounds will need to fit well with unsold treasure groups you have already collected.

I finally had a scoring mechanism that flowed from the core mechanism, and playtests confirmed that I had a solid game from front to back.



Pandemic Lockdowns: Before and After

I live in Germany, but my family and I spent a school year in western North Carolina in 2019-2020. While there, I had the privilege of joining the Game Designers of North Carolina and receiving great playtesting feedback to tweak the game. Just before the pandemic began in the U.S., I was able to travel 45 minutes to Tantrum Con in South Carolina, where I met Andrew Smith from Gold Seal Games, based in Atlanta. He took the prototype back with him, and I was thrilled when he offered to publish the game, even though we were, by then, in the middle of the lockdown.

Due to the pandemic, it has been a longer road than usual to publication, but I'm pleased with Andrew's development of the theme, the art by Rick Bastos, and the humorous touches they have added.

And even though several "I cut, you choose" games have been released in recent years, I'm happy to see that Loot Dispute will still be an original addition to the genre, offering players a new mechanism, and also a new rhythm of play.

Jeffrey D. Allers