Oliver Kiley, a budding board game designer, is currently designing a board game called “Hegemonic.” The game, which has recently been hovering in the top ten on boardgamegeek.com’s list of Hot Games, reached number one after Kiley posted a number of promotional photos and a prominent board game reviewer gave the game a high rating.
The name “Hegemonic” comes from “hegemony,” meaning dominant political or societal force. The game is a “space-empire type game.”
“Each player represents a faction or political house from some future society and you’re all vying for control over new galaxies,” explained Kiley. Each turn, players earn points depending on how much of the galaxy they control. Over the course of the game, points are accumulated and can be used to build up bases and forces in different areas to attack other players. “It’s kind of like ‘Risk’ in that sense. It’s also a little bit more of an abstract kind of game, too, like chess or ‘Go,’” he said.
Kiley has been working on this particular game for almost two years, but his game-designing career started when he was still in college. His previous projects include “Mythos,” a mythology-centered game, and “Shifters,” a game which allows players to mix animal attributes into a single character and then battle other players. Of all his games, “Hegemonic” is nearest to completion and potential publication.
There are many reasons Kiley decided to stick with this game. “There’s a decent number of games that kind of fit within this same genre,” Kiley said. “But… I had my own ideas and my own take on how I wanted that to work out… I wanted this game to be a little more abstract [than other similar options] but at the same time [to] have more genuine tough choices and different strategies that players could use to win.” When he finished the first few prototypes, he felt really motivated to finish the game. “I really got the feeling that the game was doing what I wanted it to do,” Kiley added. It couldn’t have hurt that both he and his friends enjoyed playing the game.
Kiley started the project by sketching out his ideas in a notebook in the fall of 2010. In addition to the theme of the game, Kiley made sure to think about the experience for gamers. Part of it was “figuring out … the goals I have for the kind of the play experience and the kinds of interaction that I want to create between players, then starting to think through different ideas for the mechanics about how you could actually have the play of the game meet that kind of experience that you’re trying to create,” Kiley explained. Paying attention to small details – the size of the game’s board, the types of actions that pieces can make – can make a huge difference in the playability of the game.
In early 2011, when the first playable prototypes were made, Kiley began working out the mechanics of the game by playing it by himself and with family. Early prototypes of “Hegemonic” were “very functional.” Using foam core and his skills with graphic design, Kiley built them himself. A few months ago, he started working on nicer prototypes. “There are a number of … small companies around that you can order custom cards from and you can get board pieces [and] tokens made,” he said. Once he created a more finished game, Kiley turned to boardgamegeeks.com to find beta testers and refine the game. Over the last six months, copies of the game have been sent to groups of gamers around the country, and even a few internationally, who will help beta test the game.
Kiley’s next step is finding a publisher for the game. “It’s like the book industry or even the music recording industry,” he said. “Now that I’ve got the game in pretty much a final state, I’m just now starting the process of finding a publisher to actually publish it.” The feedback that Kiley has gotten is a good sign that publishers will be interested, and contacts from boardgamegeeks.com could even help Kiley get a deal. While there are options for self-publishing, most require a lot of work. Kiley hopes to find a publisher soon.
Meanwhile, his wife Courtney Kiley, a Community High School science teacher, couldn’t be more proud. She said, “It is exciting and I am so proud of him. I think it is so cool to get anything published. I don’t really care about the money, if there is going to be any. I just am so impressed that he has the confidence and smarts to do something like this. Creating and actually publishing a game is not something that I could do. ”
To view “Hegemonic”’s page on boardgamegeeks.com, which includes photos of the game, follow this link.
