by Pablo Jiménez

Editor's note - an artist diary for Kano was published at the same time, which you can read HERE.

Part 1: Early Concepts and Thematic Shift

I remember the first time we met with Pablo Jiménez. He had a simple but incredibly fun and efficient mechanic to capture colorful gems. They were just placed on the board and some scoring would happen. General patterns that we would share or not. The first exciting thing was to repeat a well-known movement from games like Candy Crush: switching to adjacent gems. And it was a fantastic start.

But the problem was that all the gems were left on the table, with the bag getting empty, and when the objectives were common, the luck of the draw was driving too much of your score. But we agreed that there was something there and that we would work on this game together. This was the start of a long adventure. We tried many ways to make the combinations interesting and varied—pick up contracts, perform specific ones—but nothing really clicked.


He took the best part of a year and nothing significant had happened. At the same time, the mechanic was still quite fascinating and we decided that "Gems of Saqqara" was something we were so excited about we could not give it up.

And this is when it came to its first massive turn: One friend who’d been looking. At the prototype maze a version drawing on their passion for Japanese culture and the school of painting that used ink and gold. Gems were replaced by paint pots and a tatami mat was use to show them. It was rolled out to serve as a board. Extremely cute handmade pots were produced. The game had a direction, and unbeknownst to us, our main problem was essentially solved because from there it would be a smaller leap to be making a Kano-style painting.


Some people believe that substance is superior to form. I believe the form gives a guide for substance. Playing with pots, trying to solve a mathematical abstract problem, I realized I was going nowhere. There was no real soul in the game, and so it stayed for another year, always in the back of my mind while other projects based on themes were making progress.

Part 2: Refining the Mechanic and Balancing

It was Christmas vacation time and we, of course, played games at home. After a frustrating experience playing another game, I realized the problem: the game was promising an experience, creating an exciting picture, but it was just purely an optimization problem with bits and pieces placed in position without ever trying to deliver the promised experience. It was like building a town just by putting together cubes and numbers in the way that caused a high number of points.

That’s when it hit me: if the paint pots combinations were representing a painting, then we should actually see your painting in the end. I reset my computer and printer and, after eight hours spread over ne and a half days, I had built the first version of what would become Kano. It didn’t work yet, but I knew all the right paths and started to share them with Pablo.


I created fixed objectives and scoring rules. I had to go quickly because our best friends and board game fans were coming over to spend a few days with us for New Year’s Eve. The size of the board was made smaller to make the experience around 30-minutes instead of 45 and, more importantly, create some space constraints. Removing eight squares made a big difference. I found a discarded plastic tray that would hold all the pieces in place and in order. It was so convenient that we later insisted that it should be part of the final game.


When our friends came and the testing began, I quickly observed that whilst the game was designed as a race to score points faster, they would play it just for the enjoyment of completing the puzzle and creating a picture. The masterpieces in particular were played more than anything. I realized it was needed as a guide to first plays, something clear and simple to do while learning how to play the game. I also quickly had to make sure they were balanced and did not score too many points. Interestingly enough, even in the final version, despite not being the highest scoring option on average the masterpiece remain the favorite of new players.

Our friends love for the game was real, and we played many times. They were eager to get their hands on a final copy. There was so much to do and we were far from finished.

The great news was that at this stage Matagot was ready to commit and find an artist to illustrate the game. It was through a board game miracle, with the help of a friend publisher recommendation they eventually got in touch with Jun Sato.


With this news came another one, and that is that the beautiful pots could not be manufactured at costs that would keep the game accessible. There were simply too many of them. So once again, it was form that pushed substance. This constraint gave us a choice: get rid of the beautiful pots, or have a fully functional game with fewer pots. Of course, we chose the latter, and this is how we made the calculation that if at any point in time every player had a maximum of five of them on the board, we could reduce significantly the total amount: 16 on the mat and 20 on the player boards made 36.
And since we have five colors, our target was 40 pots.


That seemed correct, but after a lot of testing, we realized that it didn’t quite flow properly. Too many pots could be stuck of the same color and the balance of colors was off in the central board. And since we really wanted that pool of five available colors to represent inspiration and therefore create interesting puzzles and constraints we removed one more from the bag, and this led to the limit of four on the board and seven of each color. Now players could not just wait for the color they wanted they had to change their plans, it just didn’t work if they stuck to the one or two pots of the color they hoped for.

The cost constraint led to a better gaming experience. Creativity it seems was at its best when challenged.


Part 3: Final Touches and Player Experience

From this point onwards, the theme drove almost all the rules decisions. For starters If there was a limit on the players’ board that’s because naturally the paint would dry. Dry paint would not be removed it would be made messy and cloudy, not scoring any points because it’s a mistake from the painter.

During advanced testing, somebody asked if they could paint over, and the obvious thematic answer was yes.

More testing brought up the question about claiming a picture on the following round instead of right away. Again, all the paint had been positioned on the canvas. It made no sense not to claim the picture, so the rule was obvious.

As we played more and more, and after many iterations, the initial listing of all things that could be painted started to move into something different that would become the red, white, and blue objectives. Red would be variety, White would be position on the board, and Blue was the position of paintings one next to the other. The puzzle had become quite crunchy; you constantly had to choose between speed and point efficiency. It eas impossible to complete all objectives. As we played more and more, people enjoyed the balance between the three types of objectives.


In order to reinforce the feeling of a race, we also had an intermediate scoring which pushed players to go faster right from the start. Competition was fierce and we loved it.

This is where a new problem appeared. As Matagot was getting art pieces from Jun Sato and cultural advice from Tomoko Sato, they were also running tests with a larger audience. It quickly appeared that we had created a great game for us. Not for new gamers. We had played it a lot, and enjoyed the additional challenge, we relished the frustration of never being perfect, of not finishing the painitng. So we had to go back to the drawing board. It was tough expanding so much, besides deciding what we would remove.

Another piece of advice that was provided to us was that people really enjoyed playing casually and were not so keen on the competitive aspect we enjoyed.


This led to a realization, we had a rule that gave negative point for empty squares. To ensure maximum impact of this rule the game ended at the end of the round following the round where at least one player had five or less empty squares. You read that right. It was hard. Only exceptionally good players would have a full board and complete painting at the end of a game. Frustrated casual gamers would carry on playing after game end. So the theme came to the rescue, clearly in a race to paint, someone had to cross the finish line.

Obviously, the negative scoring is also something that changed. The penalty led to ending the game one full turn after the board of any player had fewer than five squares open. Quite a lot of things to count! But players were frustrated because the painting was often incomplete. The end-frame rule was redesigned to please the casual Zen gamers. For gamers wanting competition, a bonus was awarded to whoever finished the board.


It is always a difficult decision once you’ve worked on developing balanced elements to remove them. This is where a friend, an extremely humble and talented designer, made a big difference. After playing the game a couple of times, he told me that the game had an expansion built In. The blue objectives. That framing was a perfect way to look at things. We didn’t have to abandon this design lifeline.

While the blue objectives were put it aside as an expansion that may or may not see the light of day, At first we also excluded the competitive mode, now accurately named Samurai, it seemed coherent to remove this harsher part of the game. We were getting close, but as things happened, Matagot realized—thanks to one of their contacts and a YouTuber—that the Samurai mode was truly a very short rule and that gamers who wanted to increase competition actually enjoyed it a lot, and it made its comeback into the game.


That simple rule really changes the way the game felt and I’m glad it was kept in the end, opening the game to a wider range of gamers.

That rule actually changes the game curve completely with the intermediate scoring. It also increases the balance between the red objectives and the white and Masterpieces. Everything is more balanced; mistakes are paid for faster.

To some degree the game can adapt to the audience. If no one wants to win, but rather enjoy the process of playing, it’s a simple Zen experiment with players often choosing what is pretty over what is point-efficient. If players want competition, it’s an exercise in speed and adaptability that runs with them, as fast as they can or want. Change your plans for a high pace or stick to your guns for a higher amount of points per square. But of course, keep your finger on the scoring trigger unless you want the others to decide when to score.


Jun and Tomoko Sato, who had played the game and came up with the wonderful idea of the clouds, provided incredible moral support. They adjusted some elements to be more accurate culturally but also accepted some core principles of the gameplay. The game really felt Japanese and we hope you’ll also feel like you are painting.


At this stage, we are after close to five years of a journey that started in the sands of Saqqara and ended in the cobbled streets of Kyoto.

We hope that this account of our journey was somewhat interesting and informative. Thank you for reading.

Thank you, Merci,
Angel & Pablo