Meet Game Designer Phil Chase
Let's get to know game designer, Phil Chase, designer of SimplyFun's award-winning Digger's Garden Match and Team Digger!
Phil Chase is a lifelong educator. He has served as a middle school language and ESL teacher, team and office leader in the Michigan Department of Education, and most recently as an education consultant. As a board game aficionado, he has designed several board games including Team Digger and Digger's Garden Match by SimplyFun.
SimplyFun's Partnership with Phil Chase
SimplyFun first started working with Phil in 2009 when they met at GenCon - a tabletop game conference - and he showed the abstract version of the game that eventually became Digger's Garden Match. The following year, the game was published by SimplyFun!
How do we decide on who to partner with and what games to publish? Choosing from a range of prototypes shared by our partners, we evaluate and select which games to produce based on a range of criteria. We ask ourselves many questions like "Is it fun?" and "Does it fill a need in a particular age range, skill, or target?" From there, we work on developing the game to fit our content goals and high standards.
Q&A with Phil Chase
How did you get started in board game design?
It was almost an accident. In the year 2000, my Michigan-based friends and I were planning to attend our first GenCon game convention in Indianapolis. I lived in New York City at the time, and one day that summer I got a sudden bolt of inspiration about designing a card game where each player would try to turn lead into gold, based on a character origin story that I had heard from within my local gaming group at the time.
Over the next week, I researched alchemical theories and symbols. I designed a complete game demo, or sample working model, for my game “Theophrastus,” using Photoshop and photos I found. I printed the cards on posterboard paper that I fed into my color printer, typed up some rules about how to draw and play the cards, and made a few sample “Parchments” that represented the ingredients and points goals for each round of the game.
I brought the game demo back home to Michigan with me, having not even tested it at home. I asked my friends to take a look at the gameplay and tell me what they thought. I explained that my only goal was to make the game for fun, as a celebratory ritual before we went to GenCon. After a few rounds of testing, all of my friends told me they were having a lot of fun. Outside of a few suggested modifications, the game seemed to work as I had envisioned.
It was my group of friends who encouraged me to approach a game company with the intent to sell the design—I initially waived off their suggestion since this had never been my intent. But I’m glad they encouraged me since I was able to approach the executives of one of the major game companies at the time during the convention to ask if they wanted to see the demo, again, just for fun and with no intent of actually licensing the design. They told me that I was lucky: they were about to take a break in the back room so I could show them what I had.
When they tried a few rounds, they told me that I not only had an intriguing design they’d like to consider, but also that the size of my cards matched what they already used for some of their other games, making production easier. I was still incredulous—they were talking about actually printing “Theophrastus?” And indeed, they were! So, that was how I got my start.
What is the most challenging part of creating or designing a new game?
It depends on the stage. Very often, a starting challenge I find is that I’ve often designed a very robust board game that “does too much” in its initial version, or, as I sometimes say, “it’s a game and a half.” Then the next challenge is deciding what the “core” of the game is and to set aside any part(s) of the initial design that are not exactly relevant to that core concept. Yes, there’s work involved in building game rules and pieces from an initial concept or inspiration, but in many cases, the work to be done is in simply making peace with what you’ve had to cut. I’m often reminded of a quote from Mark Twain relating to the creative process: “Writing is easy. All you have to do is cross out the wrong words.”
What is your game design process?
Besides what I mentioned above about taking an initial concept or inspiration and translating it into a set of mechanics and pieces that hopefully do what you hope the game will do, there are a few other elements to the game design process that I have come to experience in my years designing games.
Two starting thoughts for me are, “Would I like to see a game about (X)?” and “Would my future players have fun playing a game about (X)?”
The first question covers whether I think I truly want to invest my time in the idea. The second question keeps my decisions on track with the goal of the design. I have seen—and designed—many games that worked well, but in the end, they just weren’t that fun to play.
It’s important to understand that most of the work is not in creating and perfecting the game demo itself. It’s really in playtesting and analyzing your concept, especially doing the due diligence to make sure that the changes you incorporated are not only represented in each new version but also that they do not throw off the previous round of changes or the basic game concept in the first place.
As an educator, what educational subjects and skills do you tend to lean towards when creating your games?
Great question. A lot of inspiration for the main idea of the games I design for kids and around learning concepts is what I know students have traditionally struggled with in school. I used to call these “gateway” concepts, meaning that if the student could master them and pass the “gate,” the student could progress to a higher set of skills. Conversely, a student would have to keep trying and wait at the “gate” until they finally grasped what was being taught. In math, fractions and basic division are examples of this, as are many geometrical concepts, and recognizing progressive patterns. In language acquisition, early sight-symbol correspondence is an example, as are vowel and consonant combinations, and learning many sight-reading words.
My memories of being a middle-school teacher also bring into focus the need for how kids need opportunities to learn how to work together as a team. These are more of the “soft skills” of education, and in a separate blog post, I wrote about the various areas within Social and Emotional Learning (SEL). What I recognized early on is that it wasn’t enough just to tell my students to work together; I had to model to them how to work together, and then intentionally engineer experiences where they worked together for a goal. So, with Team Digger, my design was purposefully centered around group decision-making and open discussion between players to “beat the game,” instead of each other.
Who or what are some of your inspirations?
I don’t have a lot of game designers who necessarily have inspired me—I think anyone who has what they feel is a design that would make a fun board game and has the drive to build, playtest, and promote it is an inspiration already. One inspiring fact I learned long ago about Klaus Teuber, the inventor of Settlers of Catan, was that he worked in the dental industry for almost two decades before he hit upon his game design. So, I’d like to say: anyone can try their hand at game design, at any age. Just let the ideas lead you!
As I mentioned above, sometimes I have found inspiration in memories of my teaching days, especially thinking back to the “aha!” moments that my students experienced. Watching them express joy after learning a particularly challenging concept is not something I’ll ever forget. Sometimes board games come to me because I remember what made one of my students light up with excitement—if I can design something that generates that same memory, it’s worth working on.
What inspired the design of Team Digger and Digger’s Garden Match?
Many people ask me if I designed Digger’s Garden Match around a dog I had at the time. He was a beagle-basset mix named Jake, and the dog looks a lot like Jake did, with the same coloring. In fact, Jake was never an outside dog, and he was never known to dig! So, no, actually, when I approached the co-founder of SimplyFun with my original design for the game, it was an abstract game of rotating hexagons where sides showed various shapes with point values—there was nothing about it that was themed around a dog, and it was a mechanic that was aimed at an older audience. The inspiration for that? Simply staring at hexagons and imagining how they rotate and fit together in space!
For Team Digger, I confess that the Digger character did inspire me. Maybe it was even the plush Digger toy itself! I imagined the reasons why Digger liked to dig. Why was he in the garden in the first place? Were there other places in his yard that he liked to go? If he spent time digging, was he hiding something—or trying to recover it? From there, I thought about how kids might work and talk together to achieve a stated goal. That’s when I thought about the “programming” aspect of the game, where kids have to plan out moves to make Digger move, dig, and then find his bones.
How long did it take you to design the above games?
The abstract concept of rotating hexagons and matching shapes for points, which eventually became Digger’s Garden Match, was thought up in a single afternoon. After that, it was a matter of using Photoshop to measure out all of the hexagons, add shapes to them, and then mark on a planning sheet I made the various combinations and rotations. I produced the game demo in a weekend, but I must have taken three or four months to test the game—what I recall being concerned about is that one or more hexes weren’t going to be “playable” because of how the rotation combinations were designed. After I tested it enough and revised a few of the hexes, I had a playable demo that I took to a GenCon game convention, several years later than the one I went to where I sold my first game idea!
Team Digger’s inspiration hit me in an evening, but then it took a little more time to produce since I knew I wanted it to be based on a 5x5 grid with some obstacles and terrain. The cards were the easy part; I just needed to figure out a distribution of movement options that worked to make sure Digger could get around the backyard to find the bones, as well as some other special objects I included for fun. I remember taking a few months to playtest it with friends as well—but I also needed to hear from kids to see what they thought. So, I got permission to try the game out from some of my friends and acquaintances who were parents of elementary-age children. That took more time, but it was worth it.
Anything else you’d like to share?
I’d like to say that I love working with SimplyFun—I’ve been lucky to have close relationships with people at other board game companies, but the staff at SimplyFun work hard to bring parents and educators only the best and most entertaining designs possible. Plus, seeing photos of kids playing my games is worth more than gold to me. I’m also thrilled that both of my games have won so many awards. That is the true reward of my creative work!
Ready to play and learn even more about Phil Chase's Game Designs? Check out:
Learn Early Coding in Team Digger!
Behind the Scenes with Team Digger!