Mattgammon

Note: this project is still in development.

Mattgammon is the tentative name for a drinking board game I've been designing since college. The game's development has ocurred in many short bursts over a period of more than three years, during which time the exact rules, appearance, and content of the game has changed many times.

The basic goal of the game is to navigate your game piece from the starting space to the end space by rolling dice. If you land on a space with a number on it, you must drink that many sips. At the end of your turn, you draw a card from the deck. Cards come in a huge variety and, among other things, can compel you to complete dares or challenges, share secrets, judge your fellow players on a variety of metrics, and even change the rules of the game.

Since I finished the very first prototype and convinced my friends to play it with me, it's become a favorite weekend activity for my friends and I. After about two years of working on it as a side project, I had received so much positive feedback on the game that I began to develop it more seriously, with an eventual commercial release in mind. At present, the game is still deep in development and will likely require a lot more fine-tuning and playtesting before it ever hits store shelves, but it is still playable in its unfinished form. If you are interested in helping to playtest the game or joining the mailing list, I encourage you to sign up at mattgammon.net.

Mattgammon v3.1

The first version of the game I advertised publicly was version 3.1, which I had an actual game board manufactured for instead of using cardboard or foam core. This version of the game was one of the first to include a spinner, adding another layer of chaos to the gameplay. It also added multicolored game pieces with googly eyes that received extremely positive reactions from playtesters.

This version of the game, as well as most earlier versions of the game, came with three separate decks, each designed to be most enjoyable to play at different levels of inebriation. The green deck was best for groups of acquaintances and players who were still mostly sober, the yellow deck was more fun if you were a little tipsy, and the red deck was designed to be a bit edgier for players who had already had quite a bit to drink.

Old Prototypes

On the left is version 1 of the game board, which is simply scrawled on a cardboard box with a sharpie. On the right is version 2, which looked a lot nicer and was a lot simpler. Neither version had a start or an end – v1 offered no guidance for when you should stop playing the game, while v2 added black "challenge" spaces to the center of the board that were accompanied by "challenge cards." If a player landed on a challenge space, they had the opportunity to draw a challenge card, and if they completed the challenge on the card, they earned a "victory point" – the first player to reach three victory points won the round.

Left is the first ever set of rules for the game, written by hand by me on a notepad. The center and left images are now-defunct v1/v2 game accessories called the "graveyards." Whenever a player rolled a die to move, they had to roll onto the graveyard. An additional modifier would be added to their turn depending on which box the die landed in. I dropped this entirely in version 3 because it added so little to the game and replaced it with the spinner, which playtesters seemed to like considerably more. People just really like spinning the thing, I guess.

The Cards

I don't know the exact number of cards I've been through in the process of developing this game, but it's probably in the hundreds. On account of how discerning I've been regarding the quality of the cards, very few of the cards from the original deck remain in the most recent version of the deck. Below is a sample of a few cards from around version 3.1, when the deck still had five different card types.

All Mattgammon decks were divided into the five types shown here from the very first prototype until v4, when I realized the stratification added nothing but unnecessary complexity to the game. Judgement, Question, and Task cards also had penalties (marked in the red band on the bottom of each card) that players could choose to take instead of playing the card as written.

While I was working with three different decks designed for different intoxication levels, the card back designs went through a lot of changes. More recently, I've decided to remove most of the actual graphic design from my prototypes while I reassess the tone and "look" of the game, but I've provided what I believe is all of the older versions I designed after I switched the decks to poker-sized cards.

The most recent version of the deck is also designed to be the only deck shipped with the game, rather than the three different decks for different intoxication levels I used in earlier versions. I'm still strongly considering releasing more intense or more specially themed decks as stand-alone expansions. For now, though, I'm working with the assumption that the deck will ship with one large deck rather than three smaller decks.

Mattgammon is an ongoing project, so once I've worked out some of the kinks with v4 of the game I'll update this page with new information on the development process.