Rainbow Blvd. Is on Kickstarter, and Scott is Behind It!
There are people in this hobby you meet once at a crowded table and never see again, and then there are the ones who keep turning up. Scott Morris is one of the ones who keep turning up. I’ve sat across from him at Gen Con, at BGG Con, at BGG Spring, and at PAX East, and if I tried to count the games we’ve played together, I’d lose track somewhere around the second convention. So when I saw that Rainbow Blvd. had gone live on Kickstarter with Scott developing it under Steelwing Games, I was glad in the way you’re glad when something good happens to a friend.
You can find the campaign on Kickstarter at Rainbow Blvd. - A Colorful and Clever Board Game, and I'd tell anyone who clicks through not to judge this one by its cover. If you've read my earlier post, Rainbow Blvd.: Don't Judge This One by Its Cover, you already have some of my thoughts on the game. The bright colors and the cheerful animal architects on the box suggest something light, and I keep wanting to warn people about that, because there is a real game sitting under all that cheer.
The setup is charming. You play as one of the animal architects of a town called Hopewell Springs, building rainbows out over the city. One more time you are actually making three dimensional rainbows as you play the game, which is the kind of thing that makes people walking past a convention table stop and lean in. The game plays out over a series of days, and each day you take on city plans that reward you for building particular rainbow segments and arcs. Take on too many and you’ll lose prestige for the work you couldn’t finish, which is a lesson I seem to need to learn again in most areas of my life. Six local color companies want their own hues used whenever possible and will pay you in prestige for doing so, and private contracts sit off to the side for anyone willing to chase them. Underneath it you have action selection, hand management, set collection, and a time track that makes you think hard about when to move rather than just what to do. It plays 1 to 4, with a fifth seat if you add the expansion.
What stays with me is the timing. There’s a quiet philosophy in a game where the question is less about what you can do and more about when you should do it. Most of us spend our days answering the first question and ignoring the second. Rainbow Blvd. won’t let you ignore it. You can score whenever the moment is right, which sounds generous until you realize it means the responsibility for recognizing that moment sits entirely with you.
Which brings me back to Scott, because I think the game sounds like him. Anyone who has spent time at a table with him knows he’s fun in the uncomplicated way, quick to laugh, quick to explain a rule twice without making you feel slow for needing it, and always somehow aware of who at the table hasn’t had a good turn in a while. He has been a part of this hobby’s scene for a long time, on the content side, on the publishing side, and simply as a person who shows up and plays. When I think about conventions, the big halls and the rooms full of hot games and the late nights at hotel tables, he’s one of the faces I picture. Some people treat the hobby as a market. Scott has always treated it more like a neighborhood, and you can tell when someone thinks of it that way, because they keep inviting more people over to play.
Rainbows, it turns out, have a history with us. Not long after I first met Scott, we were both working a booth for Passport Games at BGG Con, and somewhere in the lull between demos we picked up a game called HOP! and decided its rules weren’t quite enough for us. The ring in that game is a rainbow, with little clouds on either end, and before long the two of us had invented a ring tossing game of our own, complete with rules we made up and argued over as we went. I remember the laughing more than the scoring. Two grown men in a convention hall, tossing a rainbow back and forth and carrying on like it was recess and the bell hadn’t rung yet. People walked past and looked at us, and neither of us cared even a little. If you want to know who Scott Morris is, that’s him, right there, a grown man on the playground with a rainbow in his hand and every intention of getting you to play too.
Aristotle thought the best kind of friendship grows out of shared activity, people doing good things side by side until the doing and the friendship become hard to pull apart. I didn’t expect to find that idea at a folding table in a convention center, but I have, over and over, and a fair number of those times Scott was sitting across from me.
As I write this the campaign has blown well past its goal with a few weeks still left to run. If a cozy, colorful game with more teeth than it lets on sounds like your kind of thing, go take a look. And if you see Scott at a con, sit down for a game. Bring a little patience for the rainbows, because they wobble, and he’ll be the one grinning while you fix yours.
