Concept Doc: Fishermen’s Wives

Hook

In a small, unnamed seaside village, the wives of fishermen gather in pairs and small groups after their husbands have fallen asleep. This is the extent of their agency in a society dominated by their husbands’ machismo, pride, and fishing prowess. But their husbands do not yet know how far their wives are willing to go to reclaim power and independence…

Synopsis

Players play as the wives of fishermen in a small seaside village. They must target and kill their husbands in order to accrue inheritance. To do so they move around a board using different tokens (see below), contesting the bounds of their relationships with one another. How far would you go for love? For power? For money?

Gameplay

There are two groups of players: wives and husbands. They have diverging goals:

Each husband’s goal is to develop a monopoly on the fishing trade in the village, making it financially untenable for the other fishermen to keep living in the village and thus driving them out. However, each husband wants to cheat on his wife secretly with the other fishermen’s wives as well
The wives’ goal is to cause their husbands to mysteriously perish in fishing accidents and frame the other fishermen for the crime. They want to gain an inheritance from their husbands but they can also start affairs with other fishermen to slyly take their inheritance when they are killed off.

Mechanics:

Different wooden tiles represent different fish. Some fish are more valuable than others, and accruing valuable fish increases one’s net worth.
Different wooden tiles represent different sea monsters.
Different herb tiles can be used by wives to cast a spell on monsters, causing them to sink fishermen’s boats.
Love tokens between husband and wife represent a sound marriage, indicating that a wife is guaranteed an inheritance if her husband dies.
Cheating tokens between a husband and another wife indicate that the mistress will receive an inheritance.

Setting

Fishermen’s Wives is set in a small fishing village where the main economic driver is the fishing trade, but danger lurks in the ocean. The town is economically depressed; under the ebb and flow of the tide, you can hear the now smothered hopes and dreams of the town’s inhabitants. The village is quite isolated and sits around a small, seemingly peaceful harbor. Most of the residents have lived there for all of their lives; so have their mothers and fathers, and their forefathers before them. Other than a few schoolteachers and the old man who runs the general store, all of the residents are involved with the fishing trade. In past generations, the village has operated quietly and smoothly, each day sinking away to reveal the next. Now, there seems to be less fish in the ocean and the fishermen have had to venture farther and farther out into the depths. Sometimes, one won’t come back. The townspeople speculate for a few days, and then the gossip will move on to a more prescient issue.

Tone

Our game is dark, sultry, and sardonic. We want to use humor to highlight the inequalities woven into the social fabric of our game and thus encourage our players to confront the inequalities that they may be propagating in their own daily lives. We also want to build the hidden cloak-and-dagger underbelly of the seemingly peaceful fishing village, and we plan to do this by introducing suggestive threads—of infidelity, lust, and betrayal—to weave into the narrative space of Fishermen’s Wives.

Tone References

Books

Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Tinkers by Paul Harding

Poetry

A Graveyard by Marianne Moore
My Life had stood – a Loaded Gun (764) by Emily Dickinson
The Glass Essay by Anne Carson

Movies

- Trois Couleurs: Bleu (dir. Krzysztof Kieślowski)
- The Lighthouse (dir. Robert Eggers)
- Women Talking (dir. Sarah Polley)

Decision to Leave (dir. Park Chan-wook)

Key Design Challenges

Our first design challenge will be integrating the environment into the gameplay mechanics seamlessly. As none of us have had extensive game design experience in the past, the only examples we have to go off of are games that exist in the world as well as the game we designed for P1. Thus, it will be all the more important that we put a lot of thought into bridging the players’ experience of the environment with their experience of the actual gameplay mechanics in a way that flows easily and gracefully.

It follows that spatial design will be crucial in order to properly evoke the themes and to advance the gameplay in a meaningful way. We want our game to be as immersive as possible, bringing our players into the world of Fishermen’s Wives. With a board game, this may pose difficulties given that we may not necessarily have all the audiovisual resources a digital game might make available to its players. However, we are hoping that in both our immersive storytelling and thoughtful board design, players will leave their Fishermen’s Wives experience feeling that they were truly experiencing the secrets of life in a secluded fishing village, instead of just having “played a game.”

Key Art Challenges

One major art-related challenge that we foresee is finding a cohesive way to differentiate the characters of fishermen and fishermen’s wives from each other. We want all of the characters to read clearly as having unique and distinct personalities, but we also want to make sure this does not detract from the players’ experiences of the game.

Cohesion as a whole is a challenge we believe will be quite prescient throughout the process. There are many artistic directions our game could follow, and we recognize how important it’ll be to pick one early on in the process and stick with it, otherwise the different elements of our game run the risk of existing in disharmony with each other.

In a similar vein, we need to find an artistic balance between humor, sultriness, and tastefulness. We are big proponents of humor as a tool to make people consider social issues more deeply, which is why we want our game to have a sardonically humorous quality throughout. However, we also want our game to have other qualities such as sultriness and intrigue that operate on slightly different planes than humor. Thus, it is important that all of these different qualities thread into each other in a way that makes sense, and that starts with the artistic direction.

Who is our target audience?

Our target audience is women who crave power and have begun to rail against the male-dominated hegemonies they have been born into on account of their gender. From college-aged girls who get cat-called while walking alone at night, to fiancées whose husbands pressure them to legally take his last name, we hope that Fishermen’s Wives can act as a temporary outlet for these women and empower them as well.

However, we do not mean to limit our audience to women. We believe our game could be a useful tool for all people, both to reflect on their own participation in upholding harmful gender hegemonies as well as to help think about designing systems of empowerment that use humor as a tool for agency.

INDIVIDUAL POSTS:

https://mechanicsofmagic.com/2025/05/06/checkpoint-1-individual-9/ [IZZY]

https://mechanicsofmagic.com/2025/05/06/ingrids-individu…ost-checkpoint-1/ [INGRID]