And then came the Crunch...

Here we are at the most nerve wracking, most stressful, most exhausting...and yet most exciting part of the game experience: Crunch time. We find ourselves in the last weekend before submission, and we have LOTS to do.

We all planned to meet at Phillip's house for construction. We still needed to finish designing, printing, and cutting cards and magnetic doll pieces. The board and box were designed and printed but needed assembly, rules still needed editing and formatting, and while models and molds were complete, we still needed to cast and paint over 200 plastic game bits.

We were in for a long night...but that was okay. We ordered pizza, put on some How I Met Your Mother, and worked. This team gets along well, so it was as much a party as it was work. Macauley even made a theme song: "Ain't no party like a board game party 'cause a board game party is...MANDATORY."

For the most part, everything went well...except. Our buildings were just too big. We cast a few sets of them, but soon realized it would take a prohibitive amount of material to finish!

We would need to redesign the buildings, and so we did, but it was disappointing. The big buildings we made looked great, and felt right on the board, but it just wasn't possible to follow through with the rest of them.

It was shortly after this revelation, and somewhere around 5:00am, that the night (or morning) devolved to scotch and brownies.

Cheers! To board games and crunch time!