by Bert Hardeman

I have always loved playing games, and at some point, I thought: “Maybe I could design one myself.” So, I sat down one evening, whipped up a prototype, and tried it by myself. It was a terrible game. I quickly realized that game design isn’t as easy as it looks. Since I didn’t know where to start, I decided to do my homework. I read almost every article about game design on the internet and listened to countless podcasts. Still, I was waiting for that one spark—a truly original idea.

The Spark
At a convention, I played Rotterdam, a game about boats entering the port of Rotterdam. It features a unique mechanism where you call out a color, and then everyone must move on that color. I thought it was a clever system, but I wondered if I could extend it by making the routes variable. What if you could change the routes themselves? How much fun would that be?

To test this quickly, I grabbed Ticket to Ride: Europe because it already had routes and trains. My initial solo tests revealed plenty of problems; for one, the routes often required more than one “stick.” I needed a map with better-spaced cities, so I tried Iberia using the trains from Ticket to Ride. That map had its own issues, so the next step was to create my own. I started with the Netherlands, but it felt a bit too small, so I expanded it to include Belgium and Luxembourg.

The Pivot to …
I tested this version with my wife. She isn’t a fan of confrontational games and suggested a major change: only the active player should move on their turn instead of everyone. By now, the rules were: draw a random stick from a bag, play one of your three sticks, and return the used stick to the bag. You would then travel as far as possible along that color.

The biggest hurdle was the goal. If players were given random destination cities, some inevitably had better combinations than others. I tried changing the goal to a sequence of cities that everyone had to visit in order, but it felt like a difficult variant of Bingo — it all came down to whether you drew the right color stick. Even after increasing the variety to six colors, a race to random locations just didn’t feel right.

The solution?

Making the game cooperative! I re-themed it: you were now trying to prevent cats from escaping a city after breaking out of a shelter. This worked! One thing I discovered during this phase was that people hated drawing random sticks when they needed a specific color. I changed it so that when you remove a stick from the board, you keep it. Now, if you don’t have the colors you need, it’s a result of your own planning.

Back to the Race
One day, while playing around with the sticks from the cooperative prototype, I arranged them into an arena of spokes. It looked exactly like a racing track. “Let’s make this a game about chariot racing,” I thought.

To balance the movement, I initially let players choose all six colors at the start, switching one out each turn. However, this gave players too much freedom; everyone ended up on the same routes, which became overcrowded. I decided to limit players to only the next three sticks in their personal row. To avoid the “end of the line” problem, I arranged those sticks in a circle. It looked just like the spokes of a wheel—and that is how the title Spokes was born.

From Abstract to Thematic
The first playtest on Tabletop Simulator was quite positive. I initially described Spokes as an abstract racing game, but a playtester who knew about track cycling remarked that the game felt surprisingly thematic. From that moment on, I stopped calling it abstract. I tried to lean into the theme by adding movement limit, but the game was actually more fun without them. I also experimented with a “sur place” rule (standing still to gain an advantage), but since it was rarely used, I eventually scrapped it.

The competition
I entered Spokes into the Cardboard Edison competition. It was a great experience, and the game finished as a runner-up! I half-expected publishers to start begging to publish it right then and there, but that didn’t happen.

The feedback from the contest was welcome: they noted that if a group was “mean,” the game could become frustratingly cutthroat. Advanced players could block a winner simply by changing a stick in front of them. I solved this by making it mandatory to travel on the stick you just placed. You can still block people if the stars align, but it’s no longer something you can do constantly without consequence.

Finding a Home
I continued pitching to publishers, but many were hesitant, especially regarding the production cost of so many sticks. Eventually, I received an email from Mark at Radical 8 Games. Someone who had playtested the game recommended it to him. Mark watched my Cardboard Edison video, liked what he saw, and after a few weeks and testing a physical prototype, he signed the game!

Mark helped develop the game even further. He introduced the slipstreaming action, which removed the need for a clunky rule about not moving over the stick you just placed. He also streamlined the starting phase, which used to be the hardest part to teach. Finally, the artist Rusembell came on board and made the game look absolutely beautiful.

It has been a long journey from boats and cats to the velodrome, and I can’t wait for you to experience it. Have fun playing!