by Angrist
davypi wrote:
Angrist wrote:
Shadi Torbey is one of my favorite designers
:what: What else has he designed?
I mean, I've got nothing against the guy, but I usually like to see four or five games from somebody before I put them on my "favorite" list.
The quality and originality of any given game is the most important thing, not the quantity of games that a designer makes, even if that is a contributing factor overall.
What Shadi Torbey did by creating Onirim was totally original. He found a gap in the existing market, and instead of attempting to follow the status quo with all the medieval-themed farming style euro games that are popular, for example, he made his own niche and did something refreshing with a unique theme and rules, aiming for the solitaire player rather than the multiplayer crowd.
It's obvious that Torbey will be designing more games in the series in a similar vein to Onirim. He has made two games so far, and said in a video interview on Youtube that he is working on the third and fourth games already.
If you judge a new designer's potential by his first game, then what Shadi Torbey did was absolutely fantastic. For me it's more important to be original and make one or two good games than dozens of mediocre ones, the likes of which you find in bookstores. Even for the other game designers I like who have made many games there have always been one or two specifically from among them that represented their best efforts, with the rest of their designs paling in comparison.
Onirim is a gem. It's such a promising start for a game designer's first efforts. You can't fault the game in any way, and in my opinion it's alot better than most of the larger-scale board games out there. Onirim's small scale and short playing time do not make it an inferior game to most of the games listed in the top 100 here on this site.