Sometimes the Trail Changes: Meet Best in Class
When we launched Southwest Board Games, I told you our first major project was Whispers in the Hollow, a cooperative adventure full of mystery, strange happenings, and story-driven choices.
Well, it turns out trails have forks in them so for now, we’re “shelving” Whispers in the Hollow. (I’m sorry, the pun was right there!)
I want to make it clear that Whispers isn’t going away - we still love the world, the story, and what we think that game can become. But one of the things I’m learning very quickly about game design is that sometimes the project demanding your attention isn’t necessarily the one you expected to work on next. And lately, that project has been Best in Class.
Welcome to the Classroom
Best in Class is a competitive card game about building the best classroom bulletin board to catch the principal’s eye and earn the ultimate prize: Room 204, the best classroom in the school.
Players fill their boards with students, staff, supplies, projects, and all the other things that make a classroom feel wonderfully chaotic, while trying to put together the strongest combinations, score the most points, and occasionally make life just a little more difficult for everyone else at the table.
Each grading period ends with one classroom earning a Gold Star. Get enough Gold Stars, and you’re Best in Class!
It’s colorful, it’s strategic without taking itself too seriously, and - as we’ve discovered during playtesting - there’s plenty of room for clever plays, unexpected twists, and a little harmless mischief. In other words, it’s exactly our kind of game.
From Idea to Table
Best in Class has moved fast! What started as a small idea on a plane ride has already gone through rounds of card design, rules changes, balancing, redesigns, and a growing pile of prototype cards printed and cut out at home. And, most importantly, we’ve been playing it a lot.
Behind the scenes at Southwest Board Games: highly professional playtesting conditions.
Some of our most useful playtests happen right here at the dining room table with family and friends. There are rule sheets covered in notes, cards that get changed between games, things I was absolutely convinced would work until actual humans got hold of them, and plenty of moments where someone finds a strategy I did not anticipate at all.
Which, it turns out, is kind of the point.
Every game teaches us something: sometimes that means changing a card, sometimes it means changing an entire rule, and sometimes it means looking at the game you thought you were going to make first and realizing another one is ready to come off the shelf before it.
So that’s where we are on the trail right now - Whispers in the Hollow is resting for a bit, but Best in Class is officially in development.
There’s still plenty of work between this dining-room-table prototype and a finished game, and I’m excited to share more of that process here: the cards, the playtests, the things that work, the things that very much do not, and hopefully all the little decisions that eventually turn a pile of ideas into a game worth gathering around.
Class is officially in session.