In December of 2008 I was a senior at university and had come
home for Christmas break. One of the planned activities was for my mother and I
to play a Jane Austen game she had found in a treasure trove, also known a as a
secondhand store.
We excitedly sat down to play it. Unfortunately, it had a
rather poor game play. It was about as thought provoking as arranging a deck of cards in
chronological order, though, it was pretty. That disappointment was minute compared to the
fact that the game had nothing to do with Jane Austen! Our critiquing quickly turned into brainstorming a new game, The Jane Game. Our largest focus was to have
everything reflect on Jane Austen’s stories, since those are what we loved and how
we connected to her. By the end of that
Christmas break we had a basic game play, which we naively thought was close to
complete! Oh, how that makes me laugh 4 years later with over 40 typed
revisions and 100s of play testers’ help. We also parted ways with the
task to write trivia questions.
At this point the game’s vision only reached as far as my
and my mother’s social circles. The following year, November 2009, that vision
changed. I decided to embark on the adventure of bringing the game to
the market, a sphere through which any Jane Austen fan could access it. It has
taken four years from that date with many ups and downs, but through that it has become a
very beautiful product that makes "a
merry, joyous party” when played among friends (Persuasion, Ch 8).
