This board game was created as part of the Colocando Conciertos jam, which is associated with the Primer Turno project, a board game design podcast with the goal of creating a new game each month in 2022.

The Inspiration

The goal of the jam was to create a worker placement game with a concert theme. Being a fan of music and live events, I drew inspiration from the indie music festival scene in Mexico City, where events like Forevers Alone Fest, Perreo Millenial, and NRMAL have gained reputation over the years.

With this inspiration in mind, I aimed to:

• Make the game enjoyable regardless of the type of music players listen to.
• Simulate the process of festival creation and self-improvement.

The Challenge

Before diving into the game, the first problem I faced was my limited understanding of what a worker placement game really is. After watching some YouTube videos, I realized I had only played one game that used this mechanic: Blue Orange Games’ Photosynthesis. I highly recommend this video from Nights Around a Table to anyone learning about the mechanic.

After playing a few more worker placement games online, I decided that defining the game’s resources would be a good starting point. These resources were designed to simulate the real-life efforts required to create a music festival.

The next challenge—one of the biggest—was assigning values to these resources. Initially, I tried using Machinations to simulate the game’s economy, but I found its programming limitations frustrating despite its appealing graphics. After spending over a week on simulations, this was the progress I made:

After some setbacks and discussions on the jam’s official Discord server, I was advised not to rely too heavily on mathematical models. Ironically, this advice helped me solidify my approach of converting the relationships between resources into mathematical equations. I then switched to a programming language I was more comfortable with, which made the simulation straightforward. Feel free to clone it:

git clone https://github.com/javier-games/jam-festmogul.git

Conclusions

What Went Wrong?

• I spent too much time on simulations and not enough on creating artwork or playtesting the game.

What Went Right?

• I completed the game jam and learned more about the worker placement mechanic by playing similar games.
• I successfully translated resource equivalences into mathematical equations.
• Creating the instruction manual was easy using the simulation code as a reference.
• Using stock images sped up the art creation process.
• I learned about standard board sizes, which was helpful in the design.

What Can Be Improved?

• Using a more flexible language like Python for the simulation would allow for better graphics and integration with machine learning tools. Unfortunately, there wasn’t enough time to iterate on that during the jam.