A Brief History:

Lem-Tori’s creation was the result of two key ideas. The first being “how am I going to design a game that fits into a mint tin (this was for the Game Crafter’s Mint Tin challenge back in 2019)”, especially since my original idea for the challenge, Phyto-Saurs, proved to be too big (and still remains my biggest game concept). Not having much time left to think of a wholly new idea (since I did sink over a month fleshing out, drawing art, and making a rough prototype for Phyto-Saurs), I turned to my first game, EN, for inspiration. I’d only made EN six months before in April of 2019. Being my first game ever I wanted EN to be simple. Apparently at that time my definition of “simple” was making a chess-esque board (the grid was 5x5) with cards that could be played on it. And on these cards were 4 things; an element, a number, a movement type, and an arrow showing which way the card was advancing (a little detail that proved to be very important later on). Now this where the second idea, or rather question comes in; “how do I shrink EN to fit in a mint tin?” So, then the question was “what is the smallest form of chess”. For most the answer is Checkers, but for me it’s always been Tic-Tac-Toe. And with just that I had a clear idea of the game I wanted to make.  I took the board and made it 3x3. I took the concept of EN cards, removed the movement types, simplified the element icons along with the rest of layout, adjusted the deck size. And essentially, I combined two of the most elementary games in world: Rock-Paper-Scissors and Tic-Tac-Toe. But it was now more that just those two games. It was now its own thing with cards to draw and play, patterns to form with those cards, and a board with other players you had to navigate to do so. It was now Lem-Tori.

With Lem-Tori in particular, I wanted something that was clearly new but instinctively familiar. Lem-Tori is a new game where the only that was familiar up front to players was the theme of elements. But I didn’t want to stop at “oh it’s a game of elements”. I wanted players to see this odd title, then learn that the game was a combination of two very simple, very well-known games. The result of that is players feel more comfortable and confident in sitting down to play the game because they believe the understand the game. And they do, on a fundamental level. However, once they start playing, players will find a much different experience, a new type of challenge. An experience I see with new players is this moment of “...Oh…”, they have this clear realization of unique this game is and how they have to adjust how they think and see things with this game. Even seeing that from the first few times made me realize that deep down with this game (and my other games) I didn’t just want something new and different, I wanted something that encourages players to shift their perception of things.