Over the last 15 years of developing and publishing board games, Czech Games Edition has learned a lot and made many incremental improvements to how we make games. It’s been an ongoing process of experimentation, iteration, and refinement that continues with each game we release. With Little Alchemists being the first game that CGE has developed specifically for younger kids and families, however, we had to approach things a bit differently.
The original Alchemists was released back in 2014, and it was a very different time for CGE. Since then, we’ve gained more knowledge about making games, and there have been advances in technology that have allowed us to update and improve our internal prototyping equipment in the office. We’ve also purchased our own manufacturing facility in the Czech Republic, which you can read more about here.
Designing with young players in mind
Even though we’ve developed a rhythm and approach to how we publish games, sometimes a project requires us to pivot and expand our understanding in interesting ways. Making a game specifically for kids and families proved a unique challenge, as we discovered very quickly that children have very different needs from adult gamers.
When you produce and play heavy euro games for a living, you get used to a certain expected level of complexity. We learned that everything needs to be easier on the whole, when you’re making games for kids. From handling and manipulating components, to the number of icons and steps players have to take to complete actions — it all needs to be more streamlined compared to the heavier weight euros we typically produce. It also turns out that children have shorter arms than adults (go figure). After lots of testing, we decided to remove the common discard pile of ingredients and ensure everyone has their own, so they don’t have to reach as far or as often.
Little Alchemists, like the original game, utilizes player screens, and we soon realized that they need to be easy to build and work with when younger gamers are using them. Also, all of the components need to be a lot sturdier so they can last longer. We originally were using cards for the ingredients in Little Alchemists, but they’re more prone to getting bent or damaged, so we opted to switch things over to tougher cardboard tiles — which are sturdier and easier to take from the table for folks with little fingers). We also added cutout “windows” to the player screens, to make it easier for players to place their ingredients in there and have them stay put.
Prototypes and testing
With Little Alchemists, the whole development and testing process was quite different from what we usually do. Finding playtesters is normally quite easy — we have a large adult playtesting base and also hold several bigger annual playtesting events internally. But we needed to find actual kiddos to play the game. Fortunately, CGE is a family oriented company and we have a lot of team members with young children, which was helpful. We’ve also held some playtesting events in schools as well. Getting the game into the hands of younger players was quite useful, as it also showed us that we needed to adjust our expectations regarding playtesting. In short, you really need to explain how to play a particular game very differently to a young child than you do to an adult.
Adults have a higher tolerance for accepting and understanding for things that are not as clear or might be confusing to kids. We needed to experiment a lot in order to figure out what kids can recognize and work with. This also meant we had to iterate a lot more than usual and produce more prototypes to test as we made important updates.
It was also interesting to figure out what words are typically unfamiliar for children (like “theory,” for example). On the other hand, we were pleasantly surprised at what they were able to handle. Counting half points seems to be okay, though we were worried it might be difficult. And we also found that kids can remember artifact effects after someone reads them out loud (even if they aren’t able to read the text themselves.
Designing Little Alchemists was a fun new adventure for us, and we can’t wait to share it with you, your kids, and your family when it releases this summer at Gen Con!