Summary
Rebellion Unplugged head and Joyride co-designer Duncan Molloy talks to BoardGameWire about the controversy surrounding Joyride: Survival of the Fastest. Powerboats designer Corné van Moorsel is seeking royalties from publisher Rebellion Un plugged over claims of plagiarism.
Joyride is a new design. It iterates on some established mechanisms in a unique way. Most of the work involved in a new edition is in art direction and product design.
Joyride uses a two-move system, consisting of one move that was limited by your previous turn. Powerboats lets you keep some dice and reroll others to have more control over your speed. Powerboat’s system is less well known than Dominion and its influence is less immediately obvious.
Powerboats uses dice with the values 1-2-3, which Joyride also uses. They work very well at limiting the possibility spread of an outcome, hitting a balance between predictability and randomness. Formula D’s weighted dice achieve a similar effect with a very similar range of outcomes.
Joyride was built around wanting the other players’ position on the track to matter. Translating the feeling of customisability and player creativity that comes with wargames to a board game was a big part of that. We also spent plenty of time on things we didn’t see anywhere else – catch-up mechanics, directional-based collisions, a feeling of heft and physicality.
I was trying to wear way too many hats, reached out to a lot of people, and, in this instance, did a poor job of following up. I would hope this incident alone would not sully designers’ views of Rebellion Unplugged. We are not infallible but we are professionals with a love and respect for this industry, its history, our peers and our audience.
Joyride is very much its own game, and I remain very proud of it. I regret not giving Powerboats, and some of our other influences, an acknowledgement in the rulebook. We will be putting together an acknowledgements policy on all our games going forward.
