The boardgame born in Bristol

The old saying is that it takes a village to raise a child, but for novice game designer Alex Rowntree, it took a city to perfect his creative idea. “I never would have expected I’d end up making a card game,” he laughs.

After a stint travelling and teaching English abroad, Alex and his girlfriend Lisa Tyler returned to Bristol. Alex was teaching English as a foreign language, playing games with his students that would help with their vocabulary and inventing new games when needed. One of them stuck. “We were playing this silly animal game, like a charades game, after the pub or with friends,” Alex says. “We didn’t have any cards for it, but one year, for a Secret Santa present, I was printing and laminating these Top Trumps cards for people, and thought I could make the silly animal game into a set of cards.”

The game is based on charades, with players acting out scenarios on cards they pick up

After a couple of prototypes, things were going well – “People liked it, so I thought, ‘Why not keep going with it?'”. However, by Christmas 2016 Alex had only tested the game on friends and family. “I needed to test it with other people who could give objective feedback, and ended up putting a message on the Bristol Reddit group. I offered to come around to their house with mulled wine and snacks to say thank you for testing the game, and I was surprised by how many people took me up on the offer!”

With the first objective testing out of the way, it was clear to Alex that there were still plenty of things to be tweaked and ironed out, and rules to be adjusted, but the feedback was overwhelmingly positive. Animal Ailments had been born.

With more testing under his belt at both of Bristol’s dedicated boardgaming cafes, Chance & Counters and Replay, as well as with more willing Bristolians from the Reddit community on-hand to offer feedback, Alex, Lisa and several friends made the trip to Essen Game Fair in Germany, one of the biggest gaming expos in the world.

Armed with a load of cards they’d laminated themselves, and around 25 sets that a German friend had translated for them, they zipped themselves into animal onesies and began to play the game, selecting an animal from one pile of cards and an ailment from a second pile, and acting out the combinations of actions to raucous laughter. Soon they had attracted a crowd. “We sold them all on the first day,” Alex recalls.

The Animal Ailments team in Essen, Germany

Returning to Bristol with a win under their belts, the team took a stall at St Nick’s Christmas Market in the winter of 2017. “That was good fun – people were really cheery, we had lots of chats with people, and we managed to sell quite a lot of games because there were lots of kids pestering their parents to buy the game when they saw us playing it,” Alex says. “It was really cold but a fun thing to do, and we plan to do it again this year.”

As they began to sell the game and garner some income, Alex chanced upon a newspaper article about local animal charity Holly Hedge, who had had an influx of kittens and needed help to raise funds to afford their food and medical bills. “It fitted with the theme of our game and felt like a nice thing to support another Bristol organisation, as the game had emerged as a result of us living in Bristol,” Alex says. Now, £1 from every game of Animal Ailments will be donated to the charity – around £170 to date.

Alex Rowntree (third from left) says he never thought he’d end up creating a card game

With the game refined and already successful, Alex has launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise the £3000 he needs to get 1000 games professionally printed. “It’s the natural choice for something like this,” Alex says of this channel of investment. “There are hundreds of new games being designed each week, and it takes a successful Kickstarter to get attention: without that proof that people play it and like it, you won’t have much luck if you take it to game shops. And I’m only half-joking when I say it’ll be a good basis if I want to take it onto Dragon’s Den!

“It feels amazing to have got this far,” Alex concludes. “It’s a bit of a rollercoaster of emotions when pledges come in and then it goes a bit dead – I get paranoid and worried about whether should I abandon the project. When you’re intensely working on something that’s challenging and rewarding, it’s easy to overthink things. If you ever think you’re spending too much time in bed, try doing a kickstarter project!”

Buy Animal Ailments for £12 through the Kickstarter campaign, before it ends on March 14: www.kickstarter.com/projects/bazaarbroz/animal-ailments

Try the game out first by playing it at boardgame cafe Replay, 196 Cheltenham Road, Bristol, BS6 5RB.