How We Came Up With Jelmata

Jelmata started as a variant of Cell Division. We'd already built one game around cells on a grid, and we wanted to try something different with the same basic pieces. The question that kept coming back was: what if the game wasn't about how many cells you had, but about how they were connected?

Once you start from that premise, the whole game becomes a search for the right scoring rule. A lot of rules feel plausible on paper. Most of them collapse the moment you actually play them. Here are the ones we tried.

The first thing we tried was the most obvious one: add up the sizes of your connected components. Five cells over here, three over there — that's eight points.

The problem is that this is just a fancy way of counting cells. Whether your stones are in one big blob or scattered across twelve singletons, the score is the same. Connections don't actually matter. The “connected component” language was doing nothing. It played exactly like a majority game and it wasn't very fun.

Next we tried something more exotic: for each connected component, count the number of internal connections between its cells, then multiply those numbers across components. A group of four cells in an L-shape has three internal edges. A group of four in a square has four. So the square is worth more than the L, even though they're the same size.

This one actually had interesting strategy. The problem was that nobody could tell at a glance what their score was. You had to squint at each blob, count the edges between adjacent cells, multiply it out, and then do the same for the opponent. The rule rewarded the right thing — tight, well-connected shapes — but the mental overhead was too high for a casual board game.

We swung the other way and tried the simplest connection-based rule we could think of: your score is the size of your biggest group. Everything else on the board is flavor.

This wasn't bad. It was easy to read and it made the game about building one big shape without getting cut, which is a real game. But it also made most of the board feel irrelevant. Your small groups were decoration. Every move that didn't extend the main blob was wasted. We wanted a rule where more of the board mattered more of the time.

The rule that stuck is the one Jelmata ships with today: multiply the sizes of your connected components together. Two groups of three score 9. One group of six scores 6. A group of four and a group of two score 8. Singletons multiply by one and do nothing.

It turned out to be the perfect rule for what we were after. It's easy to compute in your head — you're just multiplying small numbers. Every cell on the board matters, because every group contributes a factor. Merges can hurtyour score, which makes placement a genuine puzzle instead of a race. And the math quietly rewards balance, which gave the game a whole geometric feel we didn't have to design in directly.

If you want the deeper dive on why this rule bends the whole game away from territory games, we wrote a companion post: Why Multiplicative Scoring Changes Everything. But that's the origin story. We tried a few ideas, threw out the ones that weren't fun or weren't legible, and landed on the one that was both.