It all started March 18th, 2022 When I couldn’t sleep. I had just ordered some Gun models for my son to put together for his birthday. He had been telling me about games he had been playing and what he didn’t like about them. My sleepless mind just ran with it and I developed an entire concept before I fell asleep. I had to drive 4 hours to Chicago the next day and thought about all facets of it the entire drive. I worked 12 hours, then drove 4 hours home thinking about it. By the next day, I was ready to put pen (and crayon) to paper and draw out a prototype board and initial cards to use.
My initial plan was to have concentric rings to move through for each monster or multiple per ring where the monster space connected the rings. I just quickly scribbled some circles on a sheet of paper and had my first board. Then did the same for the weapons. Crayon on the back for the type and pen on the front for the part. It started out with the first weapon being pistols and went up from there. assault weapons, sniper rifles, explosives, vehicles, then ICBM’s. We also came up with the working name of Arms Race. I liked the double meaning for developing stronger and stronger weapons before your adversary as well as the players racing to the finish.
The initial concept was to have one set of ‘random’ cards for the inner circle, then add another set for the outer circle that were increased card draws. That eventually separated into the normal and special cards with all being available throughout the game.
Once we had play tested a little, ironed out some rules, and made adjustments so the game flowed between creating weapons and fighting monsters, we were able to start actually playing it more than discussing how to make it work. Initially, it took too long to land on the monster with a D6, so I came up with the concept of the orange die and adjusted the monsters health to match. There was also only one of each weapon part, so we quickly discovered that it was too hard to get the part you needed. There needed to be multiple of each one and the universals became a nice bonus. 2 of each worked well until we had more than 4 players and more than 5 parts per weapon, then discovered we were getting stuck again. My handwriting is horrible and we had worked out most of the gameplay so I created cards in excel and printed them off, as well as a better looking board.
By this point we were playing the game at least once a day and were getting frustrated with how hard the paper ‘cards’ were to shuffle. It didn’t take much research to find out what paper stock professional cards were printed on so I bought some of it and a crafting round corner cutter so I could make my own cards. Only after receiving the card stock and attempting to print did I find out that most printers do not handle anything as thick as card stock and it would not feed properly through the printer. Not to be deterred, I looked at local printing places, but they were all very complicated and expensive for anything more than a single print. I started looking for other options and that’s when I found a website where you could custom create your own board game. They would print it all and ship it to you. I didn’t have any art for my cards so I just created the randoms and a board. My first order was placed on May 19th 2022, only 63 days after initial conception . It was an exciting day when they arrived and playing the game was so much easier with actual playing cards and a board that didn’t separate every time you moved anything. We were still using paper for the weapons and monsters but I had gotten to work pulling art from the internet. It took me 20 days, but I was ready to order the rest of the cards. my order was immediately rejected for pirated images. It had never dawned on me that it would be an issue to use images for private use. The idea to produce and sell the game had not occurred to me yet. I realized that they had to follow those rules because they don’t know who is using it for private and who is using it for distribution and they had to protect themselves from liability. I started searching for an artist, but no one wanted to work based on the possibility of future sales, eventually, maybe, on an unknown game by an unknown creator and publisher. I ordered the rest of the cards with just text so we could at least play with cards instead of paper.
While I was creating the cards to be produced, I realized that under the original concept, the content was going to make the game over $200 to produce. I was fine with that because it was my game and we loved playing it, but now I had the idea in my head to start producing it for sale and no one would want to pay that much for a game. I decided to shift the range of number of parts from 3-8 down to 2-6. I was disappointed because I still wanted the bigger, more complex weapons. my solution was to just make them an expansion. As I continued refining the content, it was still too expensive so I dropped the 3rd of each weapon part and added them to the expansions if people wanted more players. It was still too much, so I eventually made the base game only 1-4, but already had plans for 5 expansions to include the more advanced weapons. It was around this time that I had the idea for classes and created 5 for the base game and 1 for each expansion. I then realized that if the expansion was going to increase the player limit by 2, it would have to include 2 classes. The more we played, the more ideas we came up with. Eventually the classes expanded to 10 for the base game and 3 for each expansion. I shuffled some randoms to group them better for the theme of the expansion they were in. The hard monsters expansion was developed. The F&@% you expansion was developed. I was still having trouble finding an artist. I tried contacting tattoo artists, telling everyone I met that I needed an artist, commenting on posts on reddit, nothing seemed to work. I had a fully developed game with 7 expansions but couldn’t imagine trying to sell a game that was only text on the cards, no art at all. I also found out that Arms Race as a name would not be able to be trademarked. I needed to come up with a niche name, but that is not in my creative wheelhouse. I tried combining words to make a new made up word, searched keywords from the game like monster, weapon, battle, etc, in other languages to see if anything sounded good together. I didn’t want to be accused of cultural appropriation so I abandoned that path fairly quickly. I asked my two younger sons if they would like their name or a form of their name in it and both declined. Anything I thought of yeilded thousands or millions of results when I googled it until I decided to just use my name in reverse. Zero hits on google. It was decided. I still loved the working name so decided to keep it and just add them together, but Enelkbor would be the keyword.
In this time I also created 2 more expansions with different concepts and ordered cards for them. I finally found a website that I could subscribe to and they would license all art for use and unlimited reproduction for personal or commercial use. I downloaded anything that could possibly be used, but it was nowhere near everything I needed. I made adjustments to to the game to make it work with the art I had, and created the first production game. I placed the order on August 28th, 2024. Production and delivery took a couple of months but I received it on October 25th. From concept to full production in 952 days, over 2 years of which was trying to find an artist. I then created the website, a subreddit, and an official email. I will be completing and producing the expansions as fast as I can, then will start working on a version that will be more appealing to girls. It will have the same game board and rules, but with different things to build and defeat. Stay tuned!