The bag empties and there's no one else to blame

Scott Almes lives in Pittsburgh with his wife Beth. By day, he's an engineering manager in the railway industry. He designs products for trains, those things that have to work in snow, under heavy loads, and with regulations, or they'll blow up in a bad way. In the evening, he makes board games. Late at night, he writes stories. He describes himself this way, with those three distinct times of day, and in the middle of it all, one word keeps coming back: tinkerer. Someone who takes things apart and puts them back together to see how they work on the inside.

Tiny Epic Kingdoms was born from a tinkerer's concrete problem. Almes loved 4X games, those huge exploration and conquest games, but couldn't take them with him when he traveled. The boxes wouldn't fit in his suitcase. He posed the question like someone who designs constraints for a living. "I asked myself: what's the biggest type of game out there? 4X. What would it take to make a micro 4X?", he recounted in 2014. The answer came in the form of a playing card box. January 2014, Kickstarter with Gamelyn Games, fifteen thousand dollars goal. It closed with 8,979 backers and 286,972 dollars. Nineteen times the goal. From then on, ten years of Tiny Epic, a true 4X big box (Heroes of Land, Air & Sea), a series of solo games for Button Shy, and a catalog that continues to produce.

When asked for design advice, Almes responds with a phrase that explains his entire mindset: "cut thirty percent of your game's mechanics, and reduce luck". It's a method of subtraction. The more you remove, the more the game focuses on the decision that matters. Conservas is the same mindset applied to a new constraint. Salt & Pepper Games, a Spanish publisher from Madrid, asks him for a solo game. Not just any solo game. Almes responds with an ecological-economic sim, the kind that usually takes three hours and a large shelf-sized box, and he fits it into twenty minutes, a small box, a bag of fish. The player embodies a small cannery on the Spanish coast: not an industry, but a traditional shop. The Gamefound campaign starts on February 7, 2024. It funds in less than twenty-four minutes.

It's not yet available in Italian. It's a language-dependent title, we're importing it directly. If you want to see what else Almes has in the catalog, you'll get an idea of how much this brain produces.

Conservas is a bag builder. You have a bag full of fish and water tokens. Each round, you draw a handful blind for each boat you own. You decide what to do with them. On many bag-building tables, the discussion ends here: optimize the bag, win. Almes added a third place where fish can end up, and the entire game revolves around that.

It's a small twist. It changes everything. Because it forces you to do something that economic games usually steer you away from: giving up immediate gain for future gain. Not as a tactical choice between two equivalent options, but as a moral choice. The fish you leave in the sea is not a parked resource. It's a fish you chose not to take. That's the difference.

And it's not subtext. Salt & Pepper wrote it on the box: "if you harm the ocean through overfishing, you will fail in your mission". It's not an allegory that a critic pulls out of a hat. It's the declared rule.

First-time players almost always do the same thing. They buy many boats immediately. They catch everything that comes out. They sell. It works perfectly for two rounds. In the third, they start to notice that more water than fish comes out of the bag. In the fourth, they are almost only drawing water. The bag is empty. They worked well, earned a lot. They lost. And they know exactly why.

The second game is already a different game.

In 2021, four researchers from the University of Bern published a study in Scientific Reports that, when read, sounds like the setup of Conservas. They presented participants with a resource extraction dilemma: fish from a limited reserve, receive a warning at a certain point, decide whether to change behavior. They discovered something uncomfortable. The difference between those who slowed down after the warning and those who sped up was not cognitive. It was emotional. It was the presence, or absence, of a single feeling: guilt.

Psychology

Eco-guilt and resource depletion warnings Without guilt, the warning about resource depletion doesn't work. In fact, in some cases, it worsens behavior. With guilt, people slow down on their own. The rule is not needed. The feeling is needed. Conservas doesn't tell you you're overfishing. A card doesn't tell you, a bold rule doesn't tell you. It makes you feel it. The bag visibly empties, under your hands, and at some point, you're drawing water. There's no one to blame. You're alone. It's your fault. And that feeling, in the lab, is exactly what makes people change their behavior. Baumgartner, Lobmaier, Ruffieux & Knoch · Scientific Reports, 2021

Almes designed a game that makes you make mistakes quickly, on your own, in twenty minutes, in a safe environment. The loss costs nothing: it's a solo game, no one sees you, you can put the box away and no one will ever know what happened. The empty bag, however, you remember. The second game is a different person playing. One who has learned something that wasn't in the rules.

Conservas is not a fishing game. It's a pocket simulator of sustainable remorse.

Preserves Scott Almes Salt & Pepper Games Bag building Solitaire Mechanism Frogames