The updated 2016 version (new line look) now includes 80 instead of 60 challenges! The starter level of this new version shows hints about the position of some police cars.Roadblock Drawing by abluecup 7 / 194 roadblock isolated on white background Clip Art by ekostsov 5 / 144 Closed road illustration design Stock Illustrations by alexmillos 11 / 848 3d person watching a roadblock with a magnifying glass Clipart by kchungtw 4 / 132 Perfection is Roadblock to Progress Barrier Barricade Sign Stock Illustration by iqoncept 12 / 161 Barrier isolated on white background. But the lights illuminating the windows, where it all started, are still there. So I changed the setting to a bad neighborhood of an average city instead. But skyscrapers would have made the game unplayable and expensive, and setting it in the States would have meant the cars were excessively big.
The position of the red one is still given, but the player has to find the right location for the green car.īecause of the theme, I had a big city like New York in mind, having seen (too) many American police movies. This time around you need to block in 2 cars. Last year (2010) we introduced a booster pack for this game with an extra puzzle tile and 60 new challenges. And of course it’s a completely different concept, because it’s a tiling puzzle and not a sliding puzzle. So although there is also a red car in this game like there is in Rush Hour from ThinkFun (invented by Nob Yoshigahara), the object is the opposite. Sometimes there are more than 60 ways to place all the pieces on the game board, but only one will make sure that the gangster in the red car can't escape. The object is two-fold: to place all the puzzle pieces with police cars on the game board AND to place them in such a way that all escape routes for the red car are blocked off. In RoadBlock, you start a challenge by placing the buildings and the red car according to the positions shown in the booklet. For me, the biggest reward is not a formal award but the fact that people buy a second or third game because they are so pleased with the first one they bought. Although I had been a designer for many years and I had won quite a few game awards prior to this, what I was doing never became real to them until they read about it in their own newspapers. What made this special was that it changed the way my family looked at my work.
#ROADBLOCK GAME FREE TV#
This was a special experience because the news also made headlines in the Belgian media, probably because one newspaper wrote: ‘Belgian designer wins game award in the Netherlands.’ During the following few days I was interviewed by several radio stations, newspapers and a regional TV station. In 2008 “RoadBlock” won the “Game of the Year” award in the Netherlands. In this case I was lucky, although I needed a second version to figure out the right shape of all the puzzle tiles, to make enough interesting challenges.
Sometimes you can work for years before you get a concept to work, but sometimes you get lucky and your first version works. The game concept followed almost automatically. You could see shadows in the rooms beyond, because for some reason people in the Netherlands never close their curtains, like we do here in Belgium. The lights were on in some houses, illuminating the windows. I got the inspiration for the SmartGame “RoadBlock” during a bicycle ride on a dark evening on an island (called Terschelling) off the Netherlands a few years ago. Most of the games I design, start with a theme first, not with a game concept.
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