If we can simply just get people to play it,” says board game creator Ralph Dixson, “they will buy it.”
Next to Dixson, spread out on a table at the Boardwalk game store near Haywood Mall, is a freshly un-shrinkwrapped copy of his first board game, Chaotic Connections. The board features a map of the United States, with 32 cities connected by ribbons of dotted lines.
“You are dealt four cities at random,” Dixson explains, “and the object is to be the first person to connect your four cities.” As anybody who has attempted a cross-country road trip will concede it’s never quite that simple. Your opponents have many tools they can use to disrupt your journey. As you’re trying to build your roads, other players might draw cards that allow them to place detours or “Road Closed” signs in your path, tear up the high ways you’ve built, or simply move one of your playing pieces to another city.
“You may have to go from Dallas to Kansas City by way of Denver,” Dixson says. “Or you may start in Kansas City and somebody moves you to Miami.”
The basic rules are simple, but there are many strategic nuances to master. “The more experienced the player is, the more strategy comes into it, but it essentially adjusts to the level of the player,” notes Dixson. “So 9-, 10-, 11-year olds can play this and it’s a blast.”
The process that led to Dixson – a proud “board game geek” who gravitates toward strategy games like Risk and Axis and Allies – and his partner Glynetta McAninch producing the game began with Dixson’s ruminations on cross-country sightseeing. “It was several years ago that I feel like the Lord gave me inspiration for that,” says Dixson, who grew up in Beaumont, Texas, and, after earning his BA and Master of Divinity degrees, settled in the Upstate, where he is now Dean of Students at Holmes Bible College. “I was thinking one day about various places that you can go to, and sights to see in the different cities. For example, I’ve been to Seattle and seen the Space Needle. I’ve been to St. Louis and seen the Arch. I tried to somehow tie that together.”
The partners then had to decide whether to license the game to another company, or publish it themselves. “At present, we are going the direction of self-publishing,” Dixson says. “You can make more money that way, but it is a much more difficult road.”
Dixson and McAninch needed to assemble the team to design, manufacture, and market the game themselves, and they found many of the people they needed close by. “We were looking for as many people as we could find locally to help us,” Dixson remembers. “That allowed us to have a little more control.” They found it was “more personable” to collaborate in person than by telephone or e-mail.
One person they found nearby was Zach Franzen, a Greenville illustrator whose previous clients have included The Weekly Standard magazine, Marvel Comics, and Disney-Hyperion Press. Although he admits he does not generally like board games – “it just seems like life has enough rules and logistics already,” he says – after meeting with Dixson and McAninch and playing a prototype game, he found Chaotic Connections to be “a great deal of fun,” and set to work designing the cover art, the board, and the game cards.
He got so involved in the project, in fact, that he included a caricature of himself on the cover. “Models were scarce,” he jokes.
“I think it’s an absolute riot,” laughs Dixson. “We would like to put Zach’s picture in all 50 states.”
For now, many of the initial run of 3,300 boxes containing Franzen’s picture are resting in Dixson’s Travelers Rest garage, waiting to be shipped to stores and board game fans nationwide. “We’ve discovered we need a bigger garage,” jokes Dixson. Martha Winebarger, of Greenville Marketing Lab, has devised a strategy to create buzz for the game using social media and word-of-mouth.
“We’re trying to get it viral,” says Winebarger. So far, Chaotic Connections has its own website and blog (www.chaoticconnections.com), and its Facebook page at www.facebook.com/ChaoticConnections. “Within two weeks, there were up to 200 Facebook fans,” she says, many of whom sampled the game when Dixson and company launched it at GenCon Indy, a gaming convention held in Indianapolis in early August. Soon after returning from Indianapolis, Dixson started hearing from retailers across the country who wanted to carry the game. The team also plans to show the game at the Upstate Women’s Show in late August, and hopes to travel to the New York Toy Fair next February.
So far, the local response has been encouraging. “It’s brand new, so that’s always harder,” explains John Emery, the owner of Boardwalk. “People respond better to things they know about. All new games take kind of a while to get to a critical mass.” But getting there is half the fun, as Dixson’s team has learned – even if the journey is a little chaotic.