ROADBLOCKS GAME TV

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.

ROADBLOCKS GAME 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.

Roadblocks game