Looking for guidance (and playtesters) for my cocktail game

[jesse]

For the past several years I’ve been developing a tabletop game about making cocktails, where the primary playing pieces are real cocktail recipe cards that look something like these screenshots from my design software:

The game development is pretty far along – I had been planning on running a small crowdfunding campaign this summer and printing in the fall/winter until the tariff situation made budgeting that far in advance impossible.

But even though the game is nearly done, so far I’ve primarily been testing with gamers at game conventions, and I’d love the perspective of cocktail aficionados like the members of this forum, even those who don’t have much experience with contemporary boardgames.

In addition to the game itself, I’m looking for feedback on some of the abstractions and shortcuts I made for smooth gameplay and getting the total number of spirit/liqueur ingredients down to 18 unique cards.

And there’s the whole issue of creators/origins. The contemporary drinks are fairly straightforward to credit, but older ones can be murky, and I don’t want to put out any info that’s blatantly wrong to further muddy the waters. Between the Total Mixology and the Oxford Companion and dozens of other reference books I’ve tried my best, but there are a few drinks that I’m not sure how to credit usefully.

I’m based in Philadelphia, and I get up to New York fairly regularly. I’d happily buy a round for anyone who’s willing to try it out. Maybe we could find a quite corner at Long Island Bar on a weekend afternoon this summer? If anyone would be interested, please let me know.

[HHFizz]

I run a regular board game night at a local farm brewery in the Gowanus area. I can DM you more info if you like, but if you wanted a place to host some playtesting you would be welcome to join. There’s a few regular board game designers who attend as well.

Our regular game night is every Monday, but if you wanted a different day that could also work . That said Mondays are usually the most relaxed and conductive to board games. There would be plenty of additional tables if you wanted some space dedicated to non-gamers (which seems to be your goal.)

It’s more of a beer locale than cocktails (though they have some batched cocktails), but in terms of table top gaming I find beer halls/breweries to be better due to space, lighting, and table arrangements.

[federicosardi]

Hi, Jesse. It sounds great! I’m an avid board game player (competing professionally in Carcassonne and Catan) as well as bartender and researcher in cocktail history. The only problem is that I live between Uruguay and Argentina

In case I could be of any use, would love to help.
Greetings from Montevideo!

[jesse]

Nice! I’d love to bring the game through when I can work out the schedule.

[jesse]

Wow, you’re my target demographic!

I’ve been meaning to put together an online version of the prototype. I’ll let you know if I do.

If you’re interested, I’d be happy to share pdfs of the cards and rules once I finish my current set of revisions.

[HHFizz]

One of my friends is making a punch bowl themed game. Though not alcohol themed if you come down maybe y’all can compare drink making game mechanics.

[BrianH]

Seems like fun! I’d love to know more about the rules of the game and how the drinks fit into it. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how to group and categorize ingredients for my books and may be able to offer some feedback on how you handled the spirits and liqueurs.

I’m in Boston and would be happy to playtest it here if there’s a digital or printable version I can use, or if you find yourself up this way. I’ve created a couple of tabletop card games and dragooned my friends into playing them with me – shouldn’t have trouble getting a group together for this.

(I haven’t tried to publish any of mine. One of them is alcohol-related, but it’s about intoxication rates rather than cocktail recipes and I’m guessing pretty different from yours.)

[federicosardi]

Sure! Looking forward to both the pdfs and the online prototype!

[jesse]

Here’s a brief overview of the game for those who asked. It’s relatively light (a four-player version takes 15-20 minutes), but a little more of a thinky puzzle than a classic card game like Hearts or Spades.

The conceit is is all players are bartenders at the same bar, sharing the same liquor cabinet, and jockeying for access to the ingredients they need to make the cocktail recipes in their hands.

Each player has a hand of 3 cocktail recipe cards like the ones in my first post, and a stack of more recipes they need to make over the course of the game.

At the middle of the table are two 3x3 grids of ingredient cards. These are the 18 bottles used to make all 200 recipes in the game. Each player has two markers placed around the edges of the grids, giving them access to that row, column, or diagonal of ingredients. So in the example below, the orange player could make the Bamboo from my first post, because they have access to dry vermouth and fortified wine (the metacategory encompassing the dry sherry you’d need to make a Bamboo in real life). The red player has access to the bourbon, amaro, and aperitivo from the Paper Plane recipe. No player has access to both dark rum and orange liqueur, so no one could make a Mai Tai.

In addition to the colored icons for ingredients in the liquor cabinet, some recipes also have that black swirl icon next to juices, syrups, and other ingredients that require prep work. Each player starts with a limited number of “prep tokens” (think poker chips), and has to spend one for each prep symbol in a recipe they make. If you don’t have enough prep tokens, you can’t make the cocktail until you take the time to do more prep work.

On each player’s turn, they do one of four things:

• Move one of their markers to an open spot around the liquor cabinet grids
• Swap the position of any two ingredient cards within the liquor cabinet
• Get more prep tokens
• Make a cocktail from their hand, provided they have access to all of its ingredients. The player scores the point value of the cocktail (the number in the top right corner)

There are a a few more rules to it (e.g. there are “House Special” cocktails on the table that any player can make to score extra points), but that’s the gist.

And here’s a low-quality pdf of the current cocktail cards. The first 100 are “simple” recipes that use fewer ingredients and are worth fewer points, and the second 100 are “complex” recipes.

I need to do a thorough audit of the origins and quadruple-check the recipes themselves for accuracy. I just noticed yesterday that the card I had been calling Tuxedo #1 is more often called a Tuxedo #4 (or Tussetto), which led me down a Tuxedo rabbit hole that left me more confused than when I started.

Anyway, I’d love any feedback or criticism of the ingredient categorization/names I went with, or cocktail recipe choices I made, or anything else you feel like sharing. It’s been tricky to balance the needs of the game with the accuracy of cocktails/recipes, and I don’t want to put out a game that’s lacking on the cocktail rigor.

[HHFizz]

Some initial thoughts on drink attributions.

As I understand it the Gimlet’s history is a little muddy, but was most likely not invented by the British Navy. Bar Vademecum has a three part series on it that’s pretty interesting.

Search Results for “gimlet” – Bar-Vademecum

Martini is a tricky one to find one singular attribution, but Knickerbocker Hotel was not completed until 1906 and I think most people have discounted connections to the drink as legend.

On a side note John Jacob Astor IV (who built the hotel) also built the St. Regis and the “Astoria” part of the Waldorf-Astoria so he does have a connection to a few cocktails.

Martha King Niblo was well known for her cobblers, but I don’t think it’s ever been confirmed she created the drink. @Splificator is likely the better judge of this than me.

[jesse]

Yeah, that generation of drinks of lost/unknowable origin (Martini, Manhattan, etc) are going to be problematic for me no matter how I handle them.

I’m hoping to find a one-line attribution that will at least give the players of the game some context of the cocktail’s place in history without being demonstrably false (like the Knickerbocker Hotel example you called out). It may not be possible for all of them. But ideally I can find something slightly more precise than “United States (19th Century)”

[HHFizz]

Personally I would leave the base recipe on the cards but would put the drink’s general history with additional drink making tips into a separate area.

Many games do this in the back of the rulebook with Twilight Struggle being one example. In your case I think you could create a separate section altogether that also functions as a stand alone cocktail book. Not familiar with the legality of that using more recent recipes, but if possible it’s also a marketing point for your game. If too expensive for printed format perhaps digital version or Kickstarter stretch goal.

For the cards themselves I would personally recommend the following changes.

a) Replace the relatively strict attribution format of “Creator, Locale, Year/General Decade” with a line of flavor text that gives you more flexibility of what to put down and perhaps paints a picture of the bar/locale/time of it’s creation.

In cases where you know the creator for certain add them and when not just use flavor text that gives as much info as you can while giving a sense of it’s history.

b) I wouldn’t worry too much about pinning drinks down to specific years on the cards, but rather divide cards into different cocktail “eras” or “locales” similar to how Derek Brown organizes the chapters in Spirits, Sugar, Water, Bitters.

For example instead of specific years “Gilded Age”, “Prohibition”, and “Cocktail Renaissance” could be used instead. Or you could create your own time periods based on cocktail history such as “Golden Age” or the “Dark Ages” same as listed here.

In addition you could also have locale be generalized into places such as Cuba, New Orleans, San Francisco, New York.

I don’t know how far in advance you’re thinking, but another advantage of doing this is it also allows you to open the possibility of expansions based on time and locale and would allow players to potentially mix cards from different sets.

[BrianH]

Haven’t had a chance to read through the entire pdf yet, but this looks very cool so far!

For what it’s worth, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to include different amounts of information in your one-line attributions, depending on the cocktail. E.g., your citations for the Cuba Libre and the Cosmopolitan don’t seem inconsistent to me, even though only one of them has a name and a precise date attached.

[jesse]

That’s my thinking right now – as precise as possible for each drink, without jumping into pure fiction/legend. I’m leaning toward putting plausible (but not fully verifiable) attributions on the cards, maybe with some sort of indicator of uncertainty or a note in the rulebook.

Luckily, those final text decisions will only be necessary if I can convince enough people that the game is worth preordering to fund a small print run. And that’s six months away in the best case scenario, so I’ll have time to figure it all out and do a proper editing/bibliography pass.

Not that any corrections at this point aren’t welcome! If you see something, please say something.

[HHFizz]

In terms of the actual game play it’s hard to comment without actually playing the game IRL.

That said I would ask is the cards in each player’s hand closed or open information? Have you tried it both ways in playtesting?

What’s the game ending condition?

[jesse]

Yeah, I get the most useful feedback on the game itself by watching testers play, so don’t worry about critiquing the gameplay until I can get it in front of your group in Gowanus or at another in-person game.

The recipes in players’ hands are hidden information, but there are also face-up “House Special” recipes on the table that any player can make (at which point they take the recipe card and another House Special is revealed). Making everyone’s hands public led to analysis paralysis as each player constantly tried to figure out all the moves everyone else was trying to make. But without some shared public recipes to compete over, the game could play like parallel solitaire without much player interaction.

The game end is triggered when the first player completes the stack of recipes they were dealt at the beginning of the game (currently 10 seems like the sweet spot for the number of cards). So by the end of the game, each player will score points for a maximum 10 cocktails from their hand plus as many House Specials as they’re able. The pace picks up near the end of the game when “Last Call” is triggered and each player gets to do twice as much on each turn.