Urban Expedite Story

The Story of Urban Expedite

So my friend and I had been designing games for a while at this point and as you know when you start, its a hobby and you don’t make a lot of money, hmm thinking that over, LOL.

So at my paying job there came an opportunity to make a board game for the company I work at. I work at a Foundry, they do not make board games normally.

So they tossed the idea at me, knowing I had been making my own board games. There was a meeting to come where I would talk with sales reps about why and what this game was intended to do. So I began brainstorming game idea’s based on our business.

The business is urban outdoor items for city’s, parks you know urban area’s. The idea for the game is not to have employee’s playing games at work. The idea is a marketing game. Our sales rep would host a meeting with clients showing them a Power Point about us and possibly a tour. To make the event stand out in their minds a little more, we would have a 10 minute team type game.

At first I had this great idea of players filling cities with benches, trash receptacles, etc. I called it Urban New City! Then I had an idea called Bollard Bash, yea what is a Bollard? Its a thing in front of movie theaters, malls, shopping centers that keep cars from driving over people or into stores. An then the idea of buying resources to make products in teams foundry competing against the other players to fill the sale! Urban Forge!

Some of these where new concept idea’s for me to add to our library of game concepts and that’s exciting! As you know there are a number of mechanic’s that make a game work. I want to design one in each of them so this was a great project to expand on that. I do like exciting, but who doesn’t!

So then the day of the meeting came and I was excited to float my idea’s to these sales reps. But the most important thing in creating something for someone is not imagination or even my idea’s that I am excited about, its listening. So I listened to them and as I did, I realized my three idea’s where not going to work. After the meeting my gears started turning and this means two things.

One, I have a new idea cooking!!

Two, I might not get much sleep tonight.

So after a day the idea of Urban Expedite began to take shape.

So side note, when I get an idea cooking or gears turning, i feel the synapses firing in my brain. Yes I actually feel this, is that normal?

I began with drawing the basic lines of the board in AutoCAD. Then import that as a png into the program GIMP. From there i found textures. But I still had a major hurdle. I am a drafter and a bit of a designer but I am not an artist. I do get a vision of what I want, but to draw it an make it look good or not embarrassing. I know my limits.

So I hired a guy that I had known for a year or so, from NerdAlley. He’s a 3D printing company and graphic artist.

So two things to complete, one was the art on the board and the other was the game pieces. For the board I felt confident I could work in pictures of our actual products as decoration. The issue was the rooms or area’s of the board!

So with the game pieces, I got lucky for we already had 3D drawings of many of our products, I just had to shrink them down and fix a few hollow items, cause I was not going to make a game board that’s twenty feet across, LOL.

The graphic artists then created the locations on the board. They look real and parts of them are. Some AI program he used took photos he had taken of our business and melded them together to give some interesting and fun art work.

With all this moving, I began working on the mechanic’s of the game.

So the games purpose is a teaching marketing game. Our sales person will visit or have architects, designers, contractors come for a tour and we will show them Power Point slides teaching them about the company and what we offer.

After that we load the game Power Point. I realized early on that if this game is going to be transported around it needed to be simple and less things to loose. So no dice, no cards.

Just boards, game pieces and a power point.

The Power Point presents questions to the players and they answer them, then the speaker advances to the next slide and players see if their answer was right or wrong. Right answers move you along the board. Wrong answers can send you back!

So The object of this game is, you have two boards, one at each table and this can include up to 10 players. If you added a 3rd board and more people you can size it up to 3 Teams at 15 players or 4 Teams at 20 players.

Each board is a team of 5 or it can be a team of 2 or 3, depending on how many people are in the conference. So its flexible.

Teams start in the office and each product travels a different route according to the chart on the board to see who gets to the Shipping, (aka finish) first.

Best if prizes are awarded so be thinking about that! I want cookies myself.

So the idea in the end is a power point with 11 questions and the game should last 10 minutes. We created questions about our company (or trivia) and each one had 3 possible answers. Most the time two of the answers where right as you want players to feel like they can win. People don’t like loosing, and if your trying to build them up as a possible client, don’t make the game to hard.

An so Urban Expedite came to be. Not everyone wants to play a game about a Foundry so I took this idea and created another game based on it. I call it Pets of Chaos. Well okay this is my 3rd name for the game. No power point but its shaping up to be a fun family game.