Two by Two: Part 1 – The Flood

By Rob Bartel
June 27, 2010

A wide-eyed unicorn peered out of the dense underbrush of the inland jungle. The sandy beach spread out before her and, beyond that, a grey and choppy sea that swelled to fill the bay. And there amidst the wind-tossed waves, the strangest sort of boat approached – short and squat, deep-bellied with no sail to speak of, capped by a peaked roof. Monkeys leapt and screeched across the deck and a pair of mourning doves cooed softly to each other in the rafters, taking shelter from the rain. Nervous, the unicorn watched the ark approach. The raindrops flowed beneath her hooves and out onto the beach where the ever-rising waters swallowed up the sands. She raised her head and stomped her hooves against the loamy earth, calling out for her mate on the far side of the island, praying for an answer...

So begins Two by Two, a colorful 45-minute family strategy game for 2-4 players, coming in August 2010 from Valley Games. In it, players take turns navigating their boats along the shores of a rapidly deteriorating landscape, placing raindrops, revealing new animals, and rescuing them in pairs for endgame scoring. (Complete rules (PDF) are posted on BoardGameGeek.) Two by Two is my first published game, and as I’m sure you can imagine, I’m excited to see the finished product, read reviews, and hear reports of how its faring in the wild. In the meantime, I thought I’d share a behind-the-scenes look at the creative process behind the game.

It seems almost all cultures of the world share a myth about a great flood that swallowed up the land and drove ancestors and animals alike into boats or up to higher ground. The Old Testament tells of Noah, the giant ark he filled with two of every animal, and a rainstorm that lasted forty days and forty nights. In Canada, the Mi’kmaq people tell of a god who suffers such great sorrow that his tears flood the earth and the people are forced to take refuge in their canoes. According to Norse mythology the giant Ymir, slain by Odin, loses so much blood from his wounds that he drowns his entire homeland. Today we speak in terms of global warming, melting polar ice caps, and loss of habitat. The theme of rising waters is somehow fundamental to the human experience and continues to exert its tidal pull upon the human psyche, even now. When drawing up a list of potential themes to explore in future games, it wasn’t hard for a game about the Great Flood to float to the top.

I’ve been designing games for over a dozen years now but in a very different environment than the one in which Two by Two emerged. I work in a large team, often over a 100 members strong, designing video roleplaying games that can last up to 200 hours and contain more text than all the books of the Encyclopedia Britannica combined. The games tell some fascinating stories and introduce all manner of memorable characters, heroes and villains alike, but from a mechanics standpoint, these games are invariably combat-centric, with lots of blood and gore, be it from magic swords, plasma rifles, or a mighty kung fu fist. All told, it’s daunting work and development can stretch on for years, with budgets climbing well into the millions. If the game isn’t a resounding success and doesn’t sell millions of copies, it sinks beneath the waves and is quickly forgotten, often pulling its development studio below the waves with it. I’ve been fortunate in that most of my video games have found their way to that higher ground, but when I have the opportunity to work on a board or card game, I seize upon it as a way to step back, do my own thing, and relax.

While Two by Two will be the first of my board and card games to be published it was not the first to be designed. When I came up with it in 2007, it was actually the latest in a long string of attempts to break out of a nasty sophomore’s slump. My first game – a four-player, 90-minute brainburner set in the Age of Sail that I had designed the previous fall – had gone on to place highly in a number of international design competitions and ultimately won a special prize at the 2007 Hippodice competition in Germany for Best Full-Length Game. In between that game and what became Two by Two, I had designed games about life in rural Tuscany, religious strife in a German village, the evolution of plants and animals on the Galapagos islands, real estate in the Land of the Dead, and more. All of them were interesting in their own right and had some innovative mechanisms, but each of them lacked that special spark of fun that truly brings a game to life.

From the very beginning, Two by Two was different. The initial prototype was huge and ungainly, filling the entire table with 1.5” poker chips, the names of the animals painstakingly spelled out on masking tape with brightly coloured markers. The mix of species was slightly different as I later changed them to match the animal art I had available, but the count was the same: six each of a dozen species, plus a lonely pair of unicorns. Only the stinky fishbones were missing, added later to introduce a measure of uncertainty to the endgame. The island already had its shape, save for the sandy beaches that now interrupt the water’s edge. The placement of water tokens and the movement of the ships was already in place, as was the basic premise of the advanced scoring rules (although the numbers got rebalanced a few times along the way). Like all Noah’s Ark games, however, it began life as a memory game where players were supposed to match face-up animals along the waterfront with face-down animals deeper inland – but from the very first playtest, that’s not how it worked out.

On any given turn, there was little need for the player to take a reckless stab in the dark and gamble on an unknown animal token in that vast terra incognita inland – the nearby animals almost always had a face-up counterpart already waiting for them elsewhere along the water’s edge. What’s more, claiming those distant animals often involved taking them out from under the noses of your opponents, which led to some juicy tension and competition between players. Likewise, the placement of water tokens almost always invoked groans, triumphant laughs, and worried frowns as players weighed the benefits of scoring points vs. revealing more animals, some of which may actually end up helping your opponents more than they help you. After a series of failed and forgotten attempts, I had finally stumbled upon that precious spark of fun as if by accident. And if there’s anything I learned in my dozen years of video game design, it’s that fun is like a swollen river – once you find yourself in its midst, there’s no sense swimming against the current. It’s better to just drop everything that might be weighing you down and follow the fun wherever it may lead.

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