The crowdfunding campaign for my first game, First Monday in October, went live this morning. In case any OG readers are interested, it’s available at www.firstmondaygame.com.

For those of you that have been around for a while, you may recall the Designer Diary that I published here way back in August of 2020 — Designer Diary. As I said then, “I always swore that I’d never design a board game …  I think we’ve landed (and I say we because so many people contributed to this design along the way) in a place that I was always aiming for without realizing it.  The game has become one of those “knife fight in a phone booth” games where you feel pulled in many directions, always have more that you want to do than you can do (yes, I’m looking at you Princes of Florence), and where things are routinely decided by razor-thin margins.”

A few months after that, I published a follow-up about one of my favorite mechanisms in the game — The Case Effects. “I think what I love about the case effects is strangely enough related to my love of 1999 Knizia classic Ra. This may seem like a stretch, but in Ra, one player will find themselves with a couple pharaoh tiles, while another player has a few river tiles, and a third player has some different monuments. Once that happens, each new tile has a very different value or meaning to each player depending on how it gels with what they already have. In other words, the board state quickly develops so that each player’s incentives and motivations diverge, which creates a natural form of conflict or tension that feels interesting, without feeling too combative or punitive. I feel that I’ve lucked into a game mechanism in First Monday in October that captures that feeling, with a mere shadow of Knizia’s brilliance of course, but reminiscent nonetheless.”

After a few delays, you may have seen a subsequent write-up here called: “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Publication” As I described then, “in mid-2022, I happened to play it with the brilliant Brian Mayer, designer of Freedom: The Underground Railroad, and he had a curious idea that stuck in my brain… The question Brian posed is what would happen if instead every player got to perform one powerful action for free each round … The new version, which I’ve informally dubbed the supreme version, confronts players each round with a fascinating six-way decision (instead of repeated two-way decisions) … And just like in the titular Sondheim musical, the journey has changed the destination, but a happy ending prevails.  I can’t wait for people to get their hands on this game, and have the opportunity to shape the composition and judicial philosophy of the Court for themselves!”

The full rules are now available in the BGG Files section here.

Thank you to the hundreds of people that helped the game get to this point! From those very first conventions in early 2019 to the proofreaders, playtesters, developer, graphic designer, video producer, enthusiastic encouragers, and everyone else who helped roll this boulder up this hill so we could get to this point and share this game with anyone that might enjoy a medium-heavy theme-first strategy game variously inspired by 17 unlikely games.

This is the next in the series of articles highlighting games designed by Opinionated Gamers writers, this time by Larry Levy.

Game Summary
This article represents the “coming out party” for my game Double Exposure.  Even though I first created it over 10 years ago, I haven’t discussed it publicly and, in fact, just posted it to the Geek earlier this month.  My plan all along was to introduce it through a Opinionated Gamers article but, as it so often does, real life got in the way.  Oh well, better late than never, I suppose, so it’s finally time to give this game of mine some much needed, uh, exposure.

Double Exposure is a 2 player game that can be played with a deck of ordinary playing cards.  Each player is trying to achieve a scoring combination in the cards they’ve gathered before the other player does.  Cards are gained through trick-taking, although the rules for this are different than for most trick-taking games.  It is very close to a game of perfect information.  In fact, at the beginning of the game, each player exposes their hand to their opponent—hence, the name.

Double Exposure is a tense, thinky game for two skilled players.  The rules are fairly short, but playing it well requires a lot of planning and look-ahead.  All of the information you need is available to you at the start of the game.  Will you be able to reach your goal, while keeping your opponent from reaching theirs first?

First, let me give you the rules, including a “duplicate” variant (to eliminate the luck of the initial deal) and a solitaire version.  Then, I’ll discuss some of the features of the game, along with a few insights of how I came to design it.
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