Who invented this Game (and Why?)

Hi, I am Martin Day the inventor of So Grounded! I have no history of devising games and I'm not even a game player myself. So where did the idea for So Grounded! come from? But I have been a teenager myself but more to the point I had teenage children. Of two of them, my daughter is an off the scale extrovert. Which means she not only loved parties but would also tell me some off the tales of what went on at them! Whenever my wife and I went away, she hated to be in on her own and so would invite friends around, and to stay - in numbers. She claimed she never had parties, just 'gatherings' (although I have come to believe that they are one and the same). She was very good at cleaning up afterwards and it would seem that nothing had happened until we would inevitably notice that all the cleaning products had been used up and the odd things had been put away in the wrong place. So already you can see where the main premise of the game came from.

Is fact stranger than fiction?

Here are just a few of the things that happened in, or close to, my experience that I have incorporated into the Game:

My daughter strung packing tape across the bottom of the stairs to stop her party goers from going up there. But they just wound the tape around the barristers which ripped the paintwork up. So my daughter actually repainted the banisters before we got home - For over a year I couldn't work out why the paintwork felt so lumpy.

The photograph I used on the front of the prototype game box (see The Game page) is lifted from Facebook and features my daughter with a group of friends raising a toast to the camera. They are sitting is a child's paddling pool in their underwear. If you look carefully you will notice that the pool is in a bedroom (thankfully not in my house!). How did they empty it afterwards? ... I never found out.

While I was telling one of my daughter's friends about the game, the friend said, "Remember that party when there were so many people at my house that there was a police helicopter circling overhead? You should have that in your game". "It is." I replied.

 

Martin Day guesting with The Prognosis

More about Martin Day

I may not be a games nut, but the mind behind So Grounded! has some unique credentials. I currently work as a life coach and am involved in philanthropic work. I have found enough time between these endeavours to create not only the So Grounded! game, but a prototype card game, publish a book of short stories called 'The Animal Parables' (available from Amazon in the UK and US), and write the lyrics, melodies and book for an original dramatic/comedy musical called 'Sharp to the Flat'. I am currently still working on the later to bring it to the stage.

In the past I have worked in IT, been a children's worker, a church worker, glassblower, midge farmer and ran my own sumo fat-suit wresting party business.

Other creative exploits in my past are 'Pod the Alien', a puppet character I created, and wrote scripts for and used for teaching. I have written songs since my teenage years both solo and with the the 80s/90s rock band 'Salt Solution' performing as the lead singer. Latterly, I have co-written a couple of songs with The Prognosis, a prog rock band from Dorking in the UK with track featured on their debut EP 'Beneath Box Hill' and album Still Waters. I also dabble in video editing and building web sites.

I live (and always have done) in Woking Surrey just outside London, UK with my wife. I have two adult children. To find out more about my creative endeavours visit www.ShallowDeep.com.

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