I'll kick star this with designer notes from El Subsuelo(Spanish for the underground) a game I'm currently making for BGG's 2022 Solitaire Print and Play Contest.
A solitaire 30~45 minutes worker placement game.
The late 80's and early 90's were one of the most fertile periods for extreme metal. Thrash Metal matured into Death and Black Metal and both of them exploded into a plethora of subgenres. Contrary to what many believe, this explosion didn't happen only in Norway, Florida or any other bastion of big name scenes, but all around the globe. At the end of 1994 Mexico suffered its worst crisis in recent history, ravaging the economy and leaving millions in poverty. Under such circumstances, scenes can only survive on the shoulders of passionate individuals.
In El Subsuelo you operate a small metal bar of the same name. With help from volunteers, you'll sign small bands, run gigs and gather resources, with the aim of organizing a festival to showcase local talent. The game is meant to offer a decent strategic challenge, with an austere early game that might shift into a more flexible end game.
There are two parts to the origin story of this game. First, there is (was?) a little podcast about making one board game a month called Primer Turno. At this point the concept is kinda well-known, at the beginning of the month they pick a mechanism and a setting, and you have to make a game by the end of the month. Back in March they picked "Worker Placement" and "Concerts" as their pairing, at the time I didn't give it much thought and decided to watch from the sidelines.
It was two or three weeks later, when I was watching Helvete: historien om norsk black metal (a documentary about the origins of the Norwegian Black Metal scene), that the inspiration came. There are several layers to that story, but to some degree it's the story of a bunch of outsiders trying to do their own thing. Once I saw the idea, it was almost obvious that a game can be made about that kind of experience.
As I mention in the game's preamble, I wanted to highlight the often overlooked early days of the Mexican Extreme Metal scene. For sure not a setting that will bring crowds, but it's the kind of thing where if you don't, no one will. Thematically, I wanted to capture a sense of adversity followed by cautious optimism along with a certain combativeness such endeavor requires. To this effect, I decided to structure the game as an engine builder. As a final constraint, I wanted the game to be relatively easy to assemble.
The other part (already given) of the structure was that it has to be a worker placement game. In this kind of small scenes, it's quite common for people to volunteer out of passion and only get symbolic rewards (food, beer...). Imagine you get some guy to help you set up the sound system, and then you (want to) charge him the entrance fee. You can be sure once he's out the door, he won't be coming back. With this is mind, including worker feeding was an obvious way of incorporating those dynamics. I also like the diminishing effect they have on engine building, the way I see it, it allows you to play with some pieces of your engine for a bit longer.
In short, I want a game that explores this setting with an emotional arc that goes from "Oh No!" to "Oh Yeah!", while giving you the possibility of feeling quite clever. For now this is it, I still have to talk about engine building, combos, resources and, what presently needs more work, the end game, but I'll leave that for later.