Naivigation

Naivigation is my biggest achievement in the space of (board)games thus far. I’ll explain that in a bit, but let’s first see what the games are about.

The Naivigation projects are cooperative games where you’re trying to steer a vehicle together. Maybe one person can only steer, but not drive forward. Maybe another can only explore the surroundings. Your communication is limited to the moments when somebody plays a “Discuss” card.

As expected, this requires planning ahead, strategy, and cooperation on multiple levels. It also leads to chaos, destroyed vehicles, and not reaching your target in time.

Most of all, using extremely simple rules and material, it leads to loads of fun for both tiny and large groups of players. (With 6+ players, you split into 2 teams, each driving their own vehicle.)

What’s special?

There are enough special bits to warrant subheadings!

So it’s multiple games?

Yes! Each of them uses a different vehicle. In one game you might be sailing a ship, in another you’re driving a car, and another has you submerging in a submarine.

It’s not just a visual change. A new vehicle obviously means new terrain, new ways of moving, new challenges. Each Naivigation spin-off is clearly a different game—but they all share the same core.

This means you only need to learn it once, which is always nice. Even so, the game is simple enough to (re)learn in a few minutes.

It also means you only need to print most of the material once, which saves money and effort. This “shared material” is reusable across all Naivigation games.

Hopefully you see why it was such a big undertaking. I had to write all the code, create the graphics, implement shared systems that would fit every single idea I had for a different vehicle. And then make and test each individual game, including its special rules and graphics.

As always, to keep this manageable (for both me and the players), I used the “divide and conquer” approach on the project. The games are further subdivided into three types:

• Major Games: the 5 most common vehicles. These are a great introduction to the idea. A middle ground in terms of complexity, playtime, etcetera.
• Minor Games: less common vehicles that allow me to explore new approaches to the idea. These can be far simpler and shorter, or far more involved than the major games, but they still use the shared core/material.
• Standalones: as expected, these stand on their own and can be anything. This is reserved for really weird vehicles (like Santa’s sleigh) that are Naivigation “in spirit”, but don’t necessarily share rules.

Wait, didn’t you make Naivigation before?

Yes! For years, an older (much worse) version of Naivigation was on my website.

I invented the general idea long ago and made a car-based version at that time, in Dutch. (That’s how long ago it was. I still defaulted to my native language, Dutch, for most projects.)

When testing it, I saw that it had great potential, but I also saw my current execution was severely flawed. But that’s okay, it was only my fifth “somewhat serious” game project.

I wrote down “remake it, but much better and with different vehicles”

Many years later, I had the frameworks, the experience, the knowledge to actually do this. I dove in and worked on “version 2.0” for a long time, in between other projects. You would barely recognize version 1 anymore—it was a complete rewrite of the entire game idea.

Still, that first version wasn’t wasted. It proved its potential. It also showed me why many parts didn’t work and how to change that.

It’s completely free and minimalist

As always, I go for simple and minimalist. The material is just cards and tiles. For all games, and they’re all the same size and general design. Easy to cut, use, store.

(I might be a bit radical here, as I already dislike games that have more than three different bits inside the box, and all those plastic thingies that make a game less elegant and more bulky. But still, it’s a good ideal to have.)

As stated, shared material is reused. I save as much ink and paper as possible. On the website, you can even pick smaller card sizes or grayscale cards, which it will generate for you in a nice PDF.

The rules for the base game are kept dead simple. Any variants, expansions, cool ideas—no matter how much I love them—are neatly moved to an optional expansion. (Most of which are also shared, usable in any version.)

It was a lot of work. But I really believe this idea has a great balance between simplicity and accessibility, and depth and challenge, which is why I went all the way.

When the series released, it contained about ~8 games (all Major games and some of the others). I’m pretty sure that amount will be doubled, maybe tripled, before I call this series of games completely done. As expected, that will take 2 or 3 years.