In Vino Morte was my first published game. I actually promised to write about it here a long time ago before I was posting regularly. So I’m finally fulfilling that. It has a somewhat unique story of how it came to be a Button Shy Wallet game.
I recently came across my first notes on the game. They are dated March 11, 2015. The very first version was a 2 player only game with two cards, one wine and one poison. One player would choose who got which card face down and the other would choose to swap cards or not. Then they drink and whoever had poison loses. It was inspired by the battle of wits in The Princess Bride and the game Win, Lose, Banana. It was an absurdly simple idea.
I then made it multiplayer. You could have more players just by having more cards. The dealer chooses for everyone and then each other player gets a chance to swap with someone. In the first multiplayer rules there were 12 wine and 6 poison. At this point it was a single round and everyone who had wine won.
I never made a prototype. I never tested it. I pretty much forgot about it. About a year later Button Shy had their first wallet game contest. I got really sucked into designing for the wallet game format. I came up with a lot of ideas. I prototyped many of them and play tested some of them. I didn’t have any play test groups at the time, so I was only able to test what I could get my family to play.
I never play tested In Vino Morte for the contest. The only changes I made from my original idea were, having it be an even 9 wine and 9 poison, having multiple rounds so there is only one winner, and coming up with the name. I submitted it to the contest along with 9 other games. I didn’t think it had much of a chance. But it was a complete game, unlike some of the others I had worked on and not submitted.
None of my games made the finals. Most were underdeveloped because I was working on so many different games. However, one judge, Josh Edwards, was interested enough in In Vino Morte that he made a copy and took it to the finalist judging day to play. As far as I know Josh was the first person to ever play the game.
That made enough of an impression that Jason Tagmire, owner of Button Shy, asked to publish it as a nano game in the board game of the month club. The nano game version had 4 wine, 4 poison and a rule card. It came out in the July 2016 Board Game of the Month Club. That was my first published game and very exciting. Once I got my designer copies, I finally played it for the first time. Turns out it was pretty good. This could have been the end of the story. But the lucky breaks kept coming.
In February of 2017 Jason had some room in a print run and asked if I wanted In Vino Morte to become a wallet game. Obviously I said yes. It went to Kickstarter in November and is now delivered to backers and available on the Button Shy website. It was the first Button Shy game to sell out at Pax East this year.
I never expected much from it as a design. I thought it was too simple to even bother play testing. But there is something about it that makes it more interesting than the sum of its parts. I guess the lesson is that you really need to play a game to understand what it is. And getting published takes a lot of luck.