A Game for All

I've been playing table top games since I was a kid -- starting with playing card games like Canasta around the dinner table, and gradually making my way to the likes of Catan, Betrayal at the House on the Hill, Forbidden Desert, Relic and more.

While I had (and still do have!) lots of friends who enjoyed playing the more complex & strategic board games, they remained a bit inaccessible to my family; we'd usually play a round of Canasta or Scrabble instead. This isn't a negative by any means! I just felt like there was a certain level of complexity strategy that games like Catan attained, which would turn away beginners or even just less avid table top gamers, creating an unintentional sort of rift between these communities. This is not to say that my family hasn't eventually come to understand and play more complex board games -- they have -- but there is always a hesitance to start a brand new game, which is something me and my friends will do on a fairly regular basis.

All of this is to say that on top of wanting to make a board game of my own, I also considered a sort of "layered" complexity to be important. My thinking was: by layering the complexity, players could start out with the baseline rules using little more than the playing cards; games would be shorter than 10 minutes, and could be played in an [insert public transport here]. As players got more advanced and wanted to have more degrees of freedom (or simply more of a challenge), there would be new layers to introduce which wouldn't necessarily add new pieces to the game (although some would) -- but add a fundamental shift in how a player goes about winning the game.

The game's name is rather apt -- The Sum of its Parts. A monster-building game which begins with some simple card-drafting.