On a chilly autumn evening back in 2012, for some reason I began thinking about the Scoville scale for pepper hotness. Those familiar with the Scoville scale know that the more Scoville Heat Units, or SHU, a pepper has, the hotter it will be when you eat it. The same is true for hot sauces.

Also, at that period of my life I had two little kids, which meant I was spending a bunch of time in my evenings able to work on game design in between changing diapers and rocking them to sleep.

I had been playing tons of games with a great gaming group. We always loved trying new games and seeing what was unique about them. Sometimes we would come across a game mechanic that just seemed off a bit and I found myself coming up with ways that it might be a little better for my gaming group. I had found myself starting to work on my own game designs.

My first design was an overly ambitious game about brewing beer called Microbrew. I was over my head and didn’t know what to do, but I learned a ton. I got all over Board Game Designer’s Forum and the designer geeklists on BoardGameGeek. I read everything I could about game design. I played everything I could play. And then we came to that chilly autumn evening.

BASIC THEME

As soon as the Scoville scale came into my head I immediately thought it could make a great game theme. I am typically a theme-first game designer, meaning I pick a theme and find the right mechanics to work with that theme.

In the case of the Scoville hotness scale, the mechanics that made the most sense was to cross-breed peppers for hotter and hotter breeds. After all, that is what the record setters do. That’s how we have the Trinidad Moruga Scorpion and the Carolina Reaper.

CROSS-BREEDING

My general knowledge of peppers at the time was that bell peppers were pretty weak in terms of SHU and they were pretty colorful. That was my starting point for the cross-breeding concept. I started with Red, Yellow, and Blue peppers and decided to use the standard color wheel for the hotness scale. This meant that red, yellow, and blue would represent the bell peppers of the game. I would call them the primary peppers.

Design Tip: I know that there are no blue bell peppers. But sometimes as a game designer, or author, or YouTuber, or other creative, you need to take a little license with the content in order to make things work. There is nothing wrong with this!

Then, following the standard color wheel ideology, the primary peppers would mix to create the secondary peppers… mostly. So, a red and a yellow would cross-breed to create an orange peppers. A blue and a yellow would cross-breed to create a green pepper. And a red and a blue would cross-breed to create a purple pepper.

I realized that I would also need a red-red, yellow-yellow, and blue-blue case as well. Remember that designer note up above? Well, I decided that red-red would breed two reds and similarly for yellows and blues. I suppose this isn’t really far from the truth.

BEYOND CROSS-BREEDING

While the cross-breeding bit is pretty neat, it wasn’t enough to make a game. I began thinking about what people actually DO with the peppers. The top two things I came up with were the obvious one of a Chili cook-off, and the secondary of a farmer’s market. This game me some more thematic areas to build mechanics around. The chili cook-off concept fell into place from the beginning. I just had to assign values to the peppers and then build out combinations for the chili recipes that would be in the Chili Cook-off.

I started putting combinations together and I realized that having only the six peppers (red, yellow, blue, green, orange, and purple) would not be enough to give good variety.

So I added brown, white, and black. This meant I had to revisit my cross-breeding and determine how to get those peppers in the game. I had a couple scenarios to fill out. One of those was a primary pepper breeding with a secondary pepper. And the other scenario was secondary peppers breeding with secondary peppers.

I determined that any combination of a primary with a secondary would create a brown pepper. I also decided that a secondary with a DIFFERENT secondary would create white, and a secondary with the SAME secondary would create black.

Then I had to do something with white, black and every other pepper. Through playtesting, it made sense that black and white should breed with the “lesser” peppers so that they create that same lesser pepper. This is because those lesser peppers actually become pretty valuable late in the game since they become difficult to cross-breed when the farmers are so far from the core of the field.

THE GHOST

At the time of designing the game, while the Trinidad Moruga Scorpion may have been the actual hottest pepper, pop culture always referenced the Ghost Pepper as the hottest. It made sense that the hottest pepper in the game should pay homage to that. So the ultimate cross-breed of a black and white pepper would yield a “Phantom” pepper.

THE FIELD

It’s easy to design a mechanic on paper, but the exciting part is actually getting your prototype on the table. However, you better be a little hard headed, because playing the prototype is also the best way to find out how all your ideas don’t actually work how you expected them to.

Moving farmers between pepper plots in the field worked as a great way to cross-breed peppers.

Once I had the cross-breeding design all set, then I turned my focus to the harvesting mechanic. But that’s another story for a chilly autumn evening.