by Kaleb Wentzel-Fisher

The creation of Power Vacuum is a bit of a cliché.

"I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work," - Thomas Edison

It’s a story about how I struggled for years to design a game, ultimately gave up, but then with a stroke of inspiration came up with something in just a few days that worked. Weeks later the game was signed by Keen Bean Studio and just six months later we had a successful crowdfunding campaign. For all the work you put into something, even if the thing fails, the “work” is never lost - and that’s really the lesson I learned during this process.


With the retail edition of Power Vacuum coming out this fall from 25th Century Games, I thought it would be a good time to revist the making of my debut game.

The Back Story

I had been working on an overly complicated crime game (Crime Spree) for about four years. I saw the light at the end of the tunnel. The game was done, I had advertised, got my email list, spent thousands of euros, and launched a Kickstarter. I was close to funding but pulled the plug last minute, afraid to have only sold a handful of copies while the rest would live on in a storage unit somewhere. I was bummed out but decided to take the advice that all other designers had already told me - start on something small.

I decided to use just a deck of playing cards and a handful of pieces giving myself some restrictions. I have a background in filmmaking and was inspired by Dogma 95, a film movement where filmmakers have strict constraints on what they can use to make their film. I was tooling around with a stock market trading game while on a bike trip through Denmark with my brother when I was reminded of something.

A few weeks before my buddy Mal (designer of Roll Camera!) had me playtest a game he was working on inspired by the 2017 film The Death of Stalin. He wanted a quick card game of shifting alliances that felt like backroom politics. He loves puns and wanted to call it “Power Vacuum”, making the characters soviet appliances all vying for power after the supreme vacuum had died. As designers do, he was also struggling on getting the game to work and had shelved the idea. After a failed playtest together on June 13th, he mentioned that if I could ever crack the game he would sign it. On August 28th I sent him this.


Mal was pretty surprised after a few TTS sessions. He said, “Why don’t you come down to Ravensburg, we can climb a mountain, play some board games, and play Power Vacuum in person." I’m pretty sure that’s when I convinced him to sign the game.




The Initial Design

I had been implementing trick-taking as a base for my stock trading game and it hit me… instead of investing in “companies,” why not invest in other players? Secret agenda? Shifting alliances? I had the workings of Power Vacuum.



The initial game was nearly identical to Power Vacuum as it is today with a few small tweaks and one big component that went through many iterations. That component is now the power board at the center of the game.

It started as a deck of cards (because of my self-imposed restriction of just using a deck of cards). When a player played the lowest card in a trick (regardless of suit) they would take the action on the top card of the deck. The options included things like “move a power from you to another player” or “move a power from another player to another player”. It worked really well because players were familiar with the different cards and they only got recycled when they got used up. You could try to remember what had already been used to plan for future turns. But this also lacked a bit of agency by the players. Even when you had the low card to do something, the deck might not be offering the action you wanted to take. It was time for some experimentation.

Playtesting

I was feeling great about Power Vacuum. After years of slogging through my other game, I finally had a game that worked and people had a lot of fun playing. Like I said before, the deck felt a bit stale and it was when we played a game with our friend Kevin Privalle (co-designer of Almighty) that he suggested using dice instead of cards. It was much more unpredictable but I added a catch that a player had the choice of re-rolling the dice - it gave you a bit more agency. Do I keep the power transfer the same way this round or roll the dice and see what happens?


The game worked great. We got to make some cool dice and people enjoyed the unpredictable nature of the rolls. We kept this aspect of the design the same for a while we tended to other small tweaks. I came up with the idea of a hidden suit that was a “trump killer”: Spies. This helped both in offsetting a trump-heavy hand but also made the game more thematic. The fact that we had the suits visible on the backs of the cards made it an easy addition. There were “Spies hiding in plain sight!” We ended up with a small distribution of them, and only middle cards (3-6) to not make them overpowered, just one per suit.


Mal and I would play a two player version of the game almost every morning online over coffee. It was great exercise to play the game over and over again to find the weak points. He would give me pointers on what was working well and areas to improve. I’d go back, tweak, and redesign a few things and we would play again and again. These were things like hand size, initial power per character, etc. We worked out the system for revealing your agenda early and scoring more points or keeping it hidden and going for a risky reveal instead. It was really important that we always kept the theme in mind. But we also had days where we strayed pretty far out just because we could. There was even an area control idea that got tossed around at one point.


The Art

The artwork came together quite quickly too - this was at the same time as all of our play-testing (as you can see in the images). Things were moving really fast and SPIEL Essen was right around the corner. Mal wanted to preview Power Vacuum but wanted the game to be presentable and on brand. Keen Bean Studio is largely identified through Mal’s artwork. We began sending inspiration images back and forth. Here's what he had to say about it.


Mal: I started Keen Bean Studio fully intending to design, illustrate and publish all my own games. But as Kaleb mentioned, although I came up with the concept for Power Vacuum, I couldn't manage to crack the game itself, and shelved it. I was simultaneously in the middle of a protracted, years-long struggle with the design for my forthcoming game Almighty, so I was thrilled when Kaleb approached me with Power Vacuum. Having a smaller game to illustrate and publish while wrestling with Almighty's design was just the thing that could tide me over. Thanks again, Kaleb, you saved Keen Bean Studio!

Power Vacuum also arrived at an opportune moment with regard to my company's brand. My two previous published games were Itchy Feet and Roll Camera!, both populated with my trademark "bean-people", one of which adorns the Keen Bean Studio logo itself. Almighty would also utilize bean-people. This was quickly becoming my "thing." But what if, in the future, I didn't want to draw lumpy little bean-people? I needed a project to throw people for a loop, to prove that I wasn't quite so predictable, and buy myself some future wiggle room. Power Vacuum, with its anthropomorphic kitchen appliances draped in totalitarianism, was the perfect chance to escape the pigeonhole.

Being a trick-taking card game, my first attempt at Power Vacuum's artwork was quite abstract. I tried to evoke the classic card game aesthetic, using decorative designs and simple imagery to convey big ideas. This was a failure.


These images just didn't have any life, and I was bored even making them. I quickly understood why: my background is as a filmmaker and web comic artist. These are two mediums that rely on single-image scenes, storyboards, or panels. One image at a time used to tell a story. That is where I am more equipped to imbue an image with life. Power Vacuum's cards would need to each be a little self-contained scene.

This was also a chance to use the medium of board games to say something about the disturbing and unwelcome rise of fascist sympathies and populist strongmen, both abroad and at home. But I didn't want to make a somber, on the nose game - I was inspired by the 2017 film The Death of Stalin to use satire as my weapon instead. This was around when Vladimir Putin was furiously trying to squash the internet meme of him all dolled up, and I realized that the weakest point in a strongman's armor is that they have a terrible sense of humor about themselves. This was the key to Power Vacuum's theme.


Still, making fascism funny is a fine line to walk. One wrong piece of art could sour the entire thing as tasteless and insensitive. So I needed a few guidelines for myself.

First, I didn't want to draw guns. This is a general rule for which even today I make only the rarest exceptions. I didn't really want to depict direct violence at all; I would much rather imply it. This is anyway a much more powerful visual device than the depiction of actual violence, which tends to have a desensitizing effect. So it meant I had to think outside the box a little bit. What is deadly to a kitchen appliance? Water! This provided almost endless opportunities to mix menace with absurdist humor.


My second guideline was that I would try to blur historical and political lines as much as possible. Power Vacuum is not "Soviet Russia with Toasters;" that would have been too reductive. Rather, I pulled inspiration from iron-fisted regimes across time and geography, from the USSR and Nazi Germany to Maoist China, military juntas and guerillas of Central and South America, and of course the rampant political, military and economic overreach of the USA through recent decades. It was important to me that Power Vacuum did not target a specific group or ideology, but instead the general tendency of those with power to think they're better than everyone else. There's as much Dr. Strangelove as The Great Dictator in Power Vacuum's DNA.

Third, I quickly realized that although direct puns like Money Laundering and Drill Sergeant were home runs, some of the most delightful and funny illustrations came out of simply exploring the logical implications of this nonsensical world I had created. This led to some of my personal favorite illustrations like the printer handing out flyers, the paper shredders, and the phone tapper. It's just a fun world to try to imagine.


This would come later, but I would be remiss if I didn't mention that I had a ton of community input on the artwork and subject matter. During the Kickstarter campaign I invited backers to contribute their ideas for card art to this spreadsheet. I'm a big fan of sourcing concepts from the crowd, and it's thanks to the backers that we got cards like the hot air orator and the ballot blender.

One last thing I'll mention about the art is the color scheme. Because my first game Itchy Feet was based on my web comic of the same name, the card artwork has a lot of white. And because I wanted my followup Roll Camera! to resemble Itchy Feet as an attempt to win over some of Itchy Feet's audience, Roll Camera!'s art also has a lot of white, for which it did receive some not-unfair criticism. With Power Vacuum, I wanted colors. Knowing we'd have five suits, I picked five tones from authoritarian imagery that would be clearly distinct (red, black, off-white, yellow, and sickly green) and challenged myself to illustrate the entire game using only those colors.

I broke the rule in a few places, but even so, the end result is a game that has a very stark, disciplined, strictly unified aesthetic across all its components. This was a powerful lesson in art direction: less is more.

The Final Stretch

Kaleb: We had made it to SPIEL Essen and Power Vacuum was now in the eye of the public for the first time. We were getting great feedback and players of all ages were enjoying the game. It was also great to just sit back and watch people play. This is also incredibly helpful as a designer. You see when folks are engaged, tuned out, looking at their phones or having a blast. Overall people were excited and the plan was to run a Kickstarter in just a few months and have it ready for the following SPIEL.


It was just a couple of months before the launch of the kickstarter when Mal suggested that we try and get Cole and Drew Wehrle in on a playtest. Mal had met Cole at SXSW in Austin the year before where Cole had offered to play and give feedback on works in progress we might have . I was pretty stoked when they agreed to free up some time for us. They both enjoyed the game, but Cole pointed out that at times it felt like treading water, something I had noticed in some playtests but passed over due to the fact it just didn’t happen so often.

(I think) he meant that when the dice were rolled (or kept the same), the power could just go back and forth. I transfer it one way, you transfer it right back, again and again. It didn't always happen, but when it did, the game fell into a loop. We were at a bit of a crossroads; the game was nearly done but we had this lingering feedback from one of our favorite designers. Do we accept the game as is? It’s fun and only in rare cases it can be a bit of a dud? Or should we challenge ourselves to push it further?

We decided to push it further.

The Power Board

I went back to the drawing board and thought of all the ways power could flow back and forth between players. Cole had suggested implementing some sort of cable/microchip to keep things feeling more thematic than dice. I came up with a bunch of boards and the idea was to move the characters around, connecting them via circuits.


None of these really worked and they felt about as random as the dice. There was just too much going on and too much to think about with all the different connections. And that's when it clicked - simplify it. I can’t give this advice enough; so many designers will come up with whole new systems to fix issues in games and I learned right then and there that sometimes the best way is to just strip it back.

One cable and one move.

By getting rid of all the mess and reducing it to one cable, and specifically the timing of when you move that cable, made all the difference. We hit up Cole and Drew to play one more time and just after a few minutes they said, “no notes.” We of course continued playtesting, but the new system felt so good we knew we had found what was missing. With the Kickstarter just a few months out we needed to design the board, find some cool components, and make a solo version.

We kicked around a lot of visual ideas for the power board, but one reference just kept coming back up and that was the war room in Dr. Strangelove. The absurdity in the film is something we also wanted to come across in the game. The joke that always gets me in that scene was when a fight breaks out and Peter Sellers yells "You can't fight in here, this is the war room!"




The Score Track

Who would have thought that making a score tracker could be so much fun? And just how much room there is for improvement in this space? We wanted something that was easy to see and manage but we didn’t want yet another boring run-of-the-mill score tracker. We wanted something unique and thematic that had table presence. One idea was to make a large pop-up Soviet staircase, where players moved up while scoring. Mal prototyped one out of cardboard that was pretty amazing.


While in SPIEL Essen I found a small meeple-like player piece that had a post that you could stack little rings on. I think both Mal and I looked at each other at the same time and thought “stackable scoring statues”. We workshopped it a bit and came up with making swappable statue pieces that counted as 10s so that when you hit 40 points you had a complete statue made up of 4 pieces. It was hilarious and super fun to work on. Getting the scale right was a challenge but having a 3D printer helped a ton.


The Solo Mode

Yes, it’s true that many publishers will demand a solo version of a game and many of these solo versions feel very tacked-on. I knew from the start Mal needed a solo version and in a weird way the solo game sort of fell into my lap. There aren’t a lot of solo trick-takers due to the fact it’s hard to get a bot opponent to play the right suit at the right time. But we had visible suits on the back and this was key.

It wasn’t enough to have the bots play the right suit; rather they needed to know what to prioritize when it came to moving power. That was easy too, just play with open agendas. I started with a single bot player but it felt stale and automated. You could tell what the bot would do and it felt like randomly flipping over cards. It was when we added a second bot the game really opened up. With open agendas the bots had something to shoot for, and by creating a flowchart of how the power should flow, they began battling the player and themselves.

When a bot manipulates the control board, it first tries to transfer power toward its own agenda, then against the player’s agenda, then against the other bot's agenda. Modifying difficulty was also really easy because of the open agendas. You adjust how much you and either bot can win each round. In this way a player could start playing the bots against each other in a very similar way to a game with real opponents. This was so important for me personally as so many solo games kind of feel like flipping a coin. There were now some good decisions and risks to take.

The Finish Line

We had made it to the Kickstarter and were blown away by the response. I couldn’t believe how much we accomplished in such a short amount of time. From the conception of the game to a physical copy in a customer’s hands was just over a year. It was really one of the most amazing artistic projects I have ever worked on and I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Mal. It's rare you get to work with someone who just gets it.

The biggest advice I can give is to just work on stuff; it’s never a waste of time even if the thing goes nowhere. You’ll find a use for what you learned somewhere else down the road, good or bad. I hear all the time from designers that say trying to work on some big unmanageable game at the beginning was a mistake and that you should start small, which I agree with to a point. I just find it funny that so many designers actually started on some big unmanageable game and had to learn the hard way. Maybe it’s a necessary step?




Mal (postscript): at the 2025 UK Games Expo, I ran into Cole and Drew again, and I thanked them for their role in Power Vacuum's success. The game had been a smash on Kickstarter, reviewers like Shut Up & Sit Down were having a great time with it, and I wondered aloud: why? Why was Power Vacuum doing so well, right when the market was being flooded with trick-taking games?

"Most trick-takers aren't about anything," Cole replied. "Power Vacuum is about something."

Which is maybe my favorite one-line review of anything I've ever made.