More on Yoggity and kids

The judges at Gamecon Memphis thought my game Yoggity was suited for 6-8 year old kids.  I certainly need to listen to that feedback and figure out what it means.  However, I think they're wrong, for a couple reasons.  As I said yesterday, they left out a major part of the strategy of the game, and that part of the strategy is the part that requires higher-order strategic thinking.  But a second reason might be that the game looks relatively simple on the surface, but the strategy is quite a bit deeper.

Think of chess for example - an eight-year-old could learn the rules, but a grown-up would always win.  Ditto for checkers, go, Othello - lots of games with simple rules have more complex strategy.  I think Yoggity (while admittedly not as strategically deep as chess or go) falls in the same boat - it's easy enough to learn how to play, but playing well requires some careful thinking.  I've lost a number of games of Yoggity because I made deals that ended up being bad, but I was convinced at the time that I was being very clever and helping myself out more than my opponents.

If I can get people to recognize that complexity while still appreciating the simplicity of the rules, then I think I've got a game that's a winner for a bigger audience.  People justifiably don't like games that are too simplistic, but they also don't generally like games that are byzantine, particularly if they're non-gamers.  I don't know for sure, but I suspect the Memphis judges were pretty hard-core gamers (which you'd expect for convention goers who volunteered to judge a contest).  So, maybe they were looking for something they could really sink their teeth into, rather than a lighter game like Yoggity.

A real commercial success, like Settlers of Catan, has simple rules but complex interactions, which makes it both accessible and deep.  That's what I was shooting for with Yoggity, but the Memphis judges only saw the accessible part.  So, I have to figure out how to showcase the depth, too.