The Oregon Effect: Parallel Thinking in Game Design
Have you ever had an idea for a board game, maybe even one you’ve made a prototype for, and then a few months (or even years) later, you find another game that’s exactly like what you created?
Congrats, you’ve just fell victim to what I call The Oregon Effect!
The Oregon Effect: “There is always someone else in the world that is working on the exact same idea you are.”
I started calling this The Oregon Effect because I’m from Rhode Island (on the East Coast of the United States), and in my mind this imaginary adversary lived on the other side of the country. It was my way of acknowledging the inevitability of parallel thinking, and the need to work faster on my ideas.
Once you encounter evidence of The Oregon Effect in real life, it can be emotionally devastating! I had this happen to me when I was pitching one of my prototypes at PAX Unplugged in 2019. In my game, Hidden Masters, players control secret societies that are manipulating several different nations at war with each other, hoping to push a nation to victory without being too obvious about who they are backing. On the second day of that convention, I was told by one publisher that I should go check out A War of Whispers, which had just been released. While my game played very differently from that one, there was no denying that we had near-identical elevator pitches. I was crushed. Here I was standing with my cardboard prototype, and there they were with a slick, funded, and produced game. A game that thousands of convention-goers were enjoying!
The name and box art for this game are just perfect.
It probably took me the rest of the weekend to emotionally recover. Mostly, I was mad at myself for not moving faster with my prototype (I had been testing it for the last 2 years). Once I got over the fact that they basically took the perfect name for that style of game, I was able to refocus. I played a demo of A War of Whispers and was sure that our games offered unique experiences. In the vast board game world, there would be room for both. Maybe my game would require a retheme, but it could definitely get out there.
A player board for Hidden Masters.
So I kept pitching! A couple of publishers asked for a copy to review. Unfortunately, they all ended up passing on it, but it gave me hope that there was at least some interest.
This was the most egregious time that this happened to me, but there are other ways to experience The Oregon Effect. Sometimes you see someone posting about a game in an online forum, and your heart sinks as you see the similarities start to add up. Sometimes you go to a playtesting group and someone else has a very similar prototype to the one you brought.
An early prototype of Hidden Masters from a few years ago.
I try to remember there are both an infinite and finite number of board game ideas. Maybe there are only so many “big picture” ideas, where games fall into the same category or have the same basic mechanism. But there are a lot of “little picture” parts to each game that makes it different. Just look at deckbuilding games. They’re all basically Dominion, but they are also not Dominion.
For me, the usefulness in thinking about The Oregon Effect is in the motivation. Maybe I’ll put in an extra hour today so that my “amazing, unique idea” can get out in front of people before someone else does it. It’s just one more reason to put together a prototype as quickly as possible, to share your ideas with others, and to pitch, pitch, pitch.
Just go! Someone in Oregon already is.
