Turnip Designer Diary

Hi everyone, Turnip designer Ken Jenkins here to talk a little bit about this silly new game you can check out at Gen Con 2024.

Turnip began as most good ideas do: a contemplation of the silliest root vegetables while taking a shower. I was washing my hair and wondering why we ate so many turnip greens in the south but rarely ate the turnips themselves. I was also wondering about the etymology of the word “turnip.” Why did it sound so much like “turn up”? That’s the moment when I contemplated if I could make a game about planting turnips where people would shout “turn up” in disbelief and suspicion.

Still wrapped in a towel, I began sketching out some basic ideas in a journal. My wife asked if I was doing ok and I tried to explain about how “turnip” and “turn up” sound the same and she smiled and nodded. It was then that I wondered if I had overestimated the hilarity of that shower thought.

I used to love playing Skull, but cooled on it in the last few years largely because it could at times feel incredibly arbitrary to me. I couldn’t find any hand holds when trying to bluff or call. With that in mind, I persevered in putting together a simple bluffing game with a standard distribution of cards. Prime numbers are neat, so I figured it would be 10 cards with more lower valued cards than high; all prime values so you had marked jumps in your bidding capacity. I fiddled around with 10 cards, getting a feel for how betting would work and how many cards would feel like a big commitment. A single face down or a pair with one face up? Seemed good. 

I needed some way to encourage players to bluff but also to encourage players to call “Turn Up!” So I added some turnip tokens to the game, to keep track of if you got caught lying or not. Honesty and discernment of others’ lies would be worth points at the end of each hand. My friend Austin 3D-printed up some custom turnip tokens for me, which immediately made the game feel more real. He sketched them out with his mouse and had to print the body of the turnips most of the way, before stopping the print to drop the little stems in. Those tokens were easily the most complex piece of the prototype. 

Next I put together 5 sets of identical cards and then wrote the word TURNIP across each set in different colored sharpies. This was about as bare bones as it gets. All of my prototypes start this way. I try not to commit too much emotionally to a game before I’ve determined if it works well or not. I can see the theme but I don’t need to put it on paper until the fun happens. I took that with me to PAX Unplugged and tried it out with the Rose Gauntlet team and several of our friends. I quickly realized that having identical hands meant that card counting was pretty easy. My friend Nicole came up from Baltimore and we played too. She’s definitely not a gamer, so she did some unpredictable things that made me think hard about where the intrigue lived. Tyler, a burgeoning designer in his own right, was, I believe, the one to suggest stashing a card for its face value. That was just enough uncertainty to create tension, and a cool decision right out of the gate. It stuck. 

I kept tinkering with that basic shape, getting mixed results with my local game group. Some games were really tense and some were decided pretty quickly. I realized that this is a very group-dependent game, and everyone needs a round or two to get a feel for the value propositions and how to draw out big cards or hold them back for the right time. The poker players I introduced it to loved it right away, really enjoying that the chip pile and cards you were betting with were all one pool. But I needed ways to make things a little less opaque for folks who didn’t fully understand the nuances of bluffing high and low. 

I continued that way until the Rose Gauntlet Summit at the end of January. Isaac, Lindsey, and Josh dug into the game and really tried to stress test it. We ran up against some big margins and started playing around with the math of what things were worth at the end of the game. What if cards in hand were worth more or less? How about higher values for the Turnip tokens? Honest play is important to winning in Turnip, but bluffing/lying just enough is even more important, at least when it comes to finishing with the biggest Turnip crop. I can’t remember who suggested it, but the idea of having to pay a card after winning a harvest came up during our testing and that worked surprisingly well to pull the scores into a little closer contention. The biggest question at that point was, who would be collecting taxes on Turnip harvests? The answer had to be a turtle because a) alliteration is amazing and b) I like turtles. 

The game was pretty much finished from a mechanical standpoint after that week and the only changes were nuances in how to phrase certain steps of the process. Now came the shiny part. I got to meet Turnip artist Lyss Menold, who is also the artist for Wild Gardens, when I was hosting a bunch of our friends in Nashville for a weekend. She’s a delight and I had the impression she was a talented artist, but no first hand appreciation of her talent and speed. When she responded to the art direction of “hugely overblown adoration of Turnips” with renaissance inspired paintings, I knew we had a winner. She just kept sending art and it it was always cuter and sillier than the last. Isaac was handling the graphic design direction and so I would occasionally get an update with new characters or art pieces with more polish.

The most discussion went on surrounding the Turtle Tax Collector. He’s easily my favorite part of the production. I wouldn’t mind paying him taxes. He seems like he’d actually put them to community oriented efforts. Or eat them. Either way, he is being compensated fairly for the user experience. I knew early on that I needed differently colored card backs to make setup easy and that a player mat would be critical. I hadn’t given much thought to those also having characters, so I was pleasantly surprised when I saw the portraits for the player characters. They’re so incredibly charming. I guess what I’m trying to say is, if you’re in love at the cute factor of this art, feel free to gush about it to me, but know that I’m in the same boat. Lyss took my extremely plain game and gave it a tremendous amount of character and playfulness, and it made me appreciate even more how important that is to the process. People, pay your artists!

I kept testing the game up to the point that Isaac told me the game was with the printers and I could move on to the next project. As far as being my first published game, this went surprisingly and incredibly well. From inception to first copy, it’ll only have been 9 months. The secret is to surround yourself with brilliant people who will tell you when what you’re doing isn’t working, with the confidence that you’ll come up with a good solution. Also, have fun. Make that the overriding goal of the process. If you can delight in watching your game be played, then there’s a good chance someone else will find that same delight with their family and friends. That, to me, is what this whole hobby is for.