From Knitting To Cats, A Game Design Adventure Unfolds

An idea for a board game about knitting took the fast path from idea to tabletop thanks to a link-up to an existing game. "Knitting Circle" designer Emily Vincent brought her prototype to Unpub, and a chance meeting with Casscadia Designer Randy Flynn turned into a meeting with Flatout Games, the addition of cats, and the follow-up to Calico was born.

Vincent says she was all on board when Flatout posed the question about her being okay to add cats to her knitting game:

"I'm a huge cat person, so I was like, yes, yes, let's add all the cats, I'm here, let's do this, so they sort of found the game wanted to bring it into the Calico Universe, and I was super excited to do that."

Vincent joined me, and gaming expert William Pankratz from Games by James, on this week's edition of Table Talk, WJON's bi-weekly show about board gaming. Vincent spoke to us about her just-released game, "Knitting Circle," and her upcoming release, "Pirates of the High Teas."

Vincent says "Knitting Circle" went from idea to getting a publishing deal in a little over three months. For "Pirates of the High Teas," she says it was a much longer path, about 3 years:

"It was wildly different, so this was a game that started as, it was just going to be serving afternoon tea, and it was the very first game I designed so it sort of went through all the struggles of a new game designer of how do I, I've designed a nonsense system and it's not fun, and about six to eight months in I had a playtester who said I don't understand why we're baking and like sabotaging each other this doesn't make any sense and they sugguested, what if we were like pirates."

Vincent says that at that point, she had to spend about a year figuring out how to make a pirate game and researching how to bring pirates into her game in a whimsical way.

She shared other insights into the designing and development process for both games and some fun stories, like her review of the new Wicked movie and some holiday game gift ideas.

You can join us on Table Talk every other Saturday at 8:00 a.m. after the news for more fun conversations about board gaming. On December 6th, the Dice Tower's Camila Cleghorn will be our guest to talk about what all goes on behind the scenes of the Dice Tower Cruise and more.

READ MORE FROM AUTHOR PAUL HABSTRITT