W. Eric Martin: Company profile—Goadrich Games / Review—Gene Pool

If you wanted to create an encyclopedia of the types of game players, you’re unlikely to find a better example of the “new Eurogame fan to game designer” archetype than Mark Goadrich.

Goadrich grew up playing chess, cribbage, euchre, and the standard assortment of abstract and party games with his family. “It wasn’t until graduate school when a friend showed me Ricochet Robots, quickly followed by Settlers, that I was hooked on the Euro game craze,” he says.

Like most newcomers to the world of designer games, Goadrich started with the classic gateway games, then moved on to more involved titles. Gateway games are sometimes derided as being “dumbed down” for stupid people, but Goadrich—who will soon receive his Ph.D. in computer science—has a hard time buying that argument. “By working up from light to heavy games,” he says, “I’m trying to follow the way most fields of education are hierarchically organized, starting with the fundamentals and then building to the more complex advanced material.”

“Games like No Thanks, Bohnanza, For Sale, and King Me are great introductory games,” he explains. “They deal with one major mechanic per game and are very quick and elegant, like a powerful short story. It’s helpful to have some experience with these one-shot mechanics before mixing them together and jumping into Power Grid, Reef Encounter, or Scepter of Zavandor—great novel-length epics, but very intimidating if you have little gaming context. Of course, you can stop anywhere you like. I love the simple and elegant 30-minute fillers, but I’m also learning there’s a lot to offer with a well-designed two-hour game that I never would have had the patience for had I not played the earlier fillers and Spiel de Jahres winners.”

After playing Carcassonne in 2003, Goadrich awoke the following morning with a new game erupting from his head like Athena, and game design has been his hobby ever since. “I took a risk and went to Protospiel 2004 with a friend and a few prototypes in hand, not knowing what to expect,” he says. “I’ve been back ever since because of the people I’ve met and the amount of knowledge about game design you can gain just by playing other prototypes.”

Given his educational background, hearing Goadrich talk about game design won’t come as a surprise. “In my mind, designing games is a lot like computer programming,” he says. “There’s iteration, game states, inputs and outputs, although compilation time is much longer.... Seeing a game come to life is fascinating for me, where playtesting is an evolutionary process full of punctuated equilibrium, and the driving force of the game evolution are the elusive goals of fun and game balance. None of my games have stayed the same once they jumped out of my head and into a prototype form, and that’s a good thing.”

“The goal for Goadrich Games is to put out high-quality, small print-runs for my game designs while staying on a small budget; any game I publish in this format will probably have no more than 200 copies total,” he says.

Gene Pool, his first published title, sold out its 200-copy print run in October 2006, and Goadrich is now hoping to find a publisher to pick up the game and deliver it to a broader audience. “While taking a game from idea to actually assembling 200 copies made me very proud, I find the game design side much more intriguing,” he says.

As for future plans, Goadrich says, “I do have a few other prototypes nearing completion: one about elections on a small island (which some playtesters have called “Die Macher in half-an-hour"), and a set-collecting resource-management game about the black market antiquity trade (which used to be about collecting African violets). I hope to have both wrapped up by 2007 and either make the rounds with publishers or have them come out in another small edition from Goadrich Games; both prototypes have around 100 cards, a few plastic cubes and a scoreboard, making them very suitable for a small print-run.”

Gene Pool

Mark Goadrich’s first self-published game, Gene Pool, is a simple and clever two-player card game in which you try to manipulate a sequence of genes to match combinations on your scoring cards.

“Gene Pool isn’t the first game I’ve designed, but it is the first one which felt ready to be published,” says Goadrich. “The idea for Gene Pool came on an afternoon drive from Minneapolis to Madison from my wife’s suggestion to design a game about viruses. While thinking about a larger virus game with CDC, biohazards, etc, what struck me was the way that viruses can take over cells and rewrite your DNA while your body tries to fight back. This was the inspiration for having two players both modify a common sequence of DNA, which turned out to be a great little puzzle on its own and became Gene Pool.”

The DNA sequence in Gene Pool mimics the one in the human body. The game includes two types of Base Pair cards: one with Adenine/Thymine and the other with Guanine/Cytosine. The cards have giant letters (A or T, G or C) in opposite corners. You start the game by shuffling and inverting three of each type of Base Pair, then laying them out in a row. Reading the row from left to right creates a gene sequence, say, GCAGTT; reading the row upside-down inverts that sequence: AACTGC.

During the game, players take actions to alter this gene sequence. You can insert a Base Pair card from your hand into the middle of the sequence and snip a gene off either end; you can add a Base Pair to either end and delete from the middle; you can mutate one Base Pair card into another by playing one from your hand; or you can invert a section of the sequence, rotating one to five cards around an axis. “The insertion, deletion, mutation and inversion actions are taken directly from how DNA really changes and mutates in our cells over time,” says Goadrich.

Each player starts with one of each Base Pair in hand, along with a Gene Research card worth 1 year. Gene Research cards have a sequence of four or five genes associated with a particular disease; cards with four genes are worth 1 year, cards with five genes worth 2 years. If at the end of your turn, part of the gene sequence in either direction matches a Gene Research card you hold, you can claim that claim; whoever claims 9 years’ worth of cards first wins the game.

Two other actions available to players are drawing a Base Pair card, which allows you to prepare for future turns, and drawing a Gene Research card, which seems like a desperation move because you automatically draw one if you have none in hand at the end of your turn.

Gene Pool is easy to learn and play; the listed playing time is 30 minutes, but my games rarely took more than 10. Luck of the draw can be a factor, especially when you’re playing for the first time and don’t know the Gene Research deck. Once you’ve played a few times, you can sometimes guess what your opponent is trying to create and thwart him while simultaneously working toward your own goals. You can try to hoard one type of Base Pairs, but this tactic usually doesn’t frustrate an opponent for long.

Aside from the appealing game play, Gene Pool also raises the bar for what buyers can expect from a self-published game. While the tuckbox is clearly a cut-and-glue job, the cards and rules are full-color and extremely attractive. “Gene Pool is all hand-assembled by myself and my wife, without whom this game could never have been made,” says Goadrich. “We decided that if we were going to make some copies, we’d make them as professional-looking as possible but at the same time not go into debt doing so, thus the appeal of the postcard printing and die-press punching option.”

Goadrich has detailed his game production experience on the Board Games Designer’s Forum, and his posts are recommended for anyone interested in self-publication. “It’s much more work that I thought it would be when I started getting serious about self-publishing, and I’ve made mistakes and learned lessons from this that will make the next attempt much easier, such as to never use the die-press machine again,” he says. “Over the 200 games, we’ll have made over 2,600 punches. Next time it’s off to a card-finishing place that will cut out the cards for us.”

Ideally, another publisher will pick up Gene Pool and republish it for a wider audience. The game has a built-in educational appeal, but unlike many games designed for didactic purposes, Gene Pool is actually fun. Who knew such a thing was possible?

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