STRATEGIC
THREE DIMENSIONAL
MOVEMENT, LLC.

Strategic Three Dimensional Movement, LLC. or Sxyzm (pronounced "schism") is a game development company located in the greater Minneapolis area. The Sxyzm organization shares the name with its flagship game, a simple racing board game for 2-10 players whereby players increase the number of rules through gameplay iterations.

The concept for Sxyzm originated back in high school. A group of friends would play various games and every week another rule would be added. The games would become aggressive and about beating the other players rather than achieving the objective. Similarly, Sxyzm starts as a simple racing game with a number of spaces to the finish line. On the next play through you stack on the next tier of rules. This adds spaces such as warp zones that can increase or decrease the number of moves to get to the finish. The more play throughs, the more added rules which means more variants to the game.

At the end of the day, the simple racing strategy of finishing first is obsolete. Around Tier 6, the game becomes aggressive, interactions become tense and players start yelling. Tier 7 and Tier 8 become more about preventing opponents from winning. In Tiers 11-13, players develop strategies to track and predict movements of opponents. Tiers 14-16 are about eliminating the other opponents. Tier 16 (Masters) is a two player head-to-head match where each starts with 5 game pieces and looks to eliminate or finish prior to the opponent.

From experience, two sectors of tabletop games exist: family and advanced. Family games are well known and typically have one overarching strategy. Candyland and Trouble are simple racing games where the goal is to finish first. The advanced games are more complicated and have multiple strategies. In Arkham Horror, players must manage resources and character stats while attempting to secure portals before the boss monster arrives. A combination of management, battle and racing strategies is needed to achieve victory.

Regular family game players do not explore games in the advanced sector unless other group members have explored them. This is where growing games come in. Designed to bridge this gap, Sxyzm begins as a single strategy family game (racing, single-move) and progresses into a multi-strategy advanced game (management, battle, racing, multi-move). By the end, players should be more comfortable pursing the advanced game sector.

Other games created by the Sxyzm organization have similar intent. Ecwem is a 28 suit card deck, that focuses on collection methods as well as strategy to complete the objective. In addition to the game, the deck can play other standard playing card games with small adjustments, thus giving Ecwem its own Gameplay Tiers.

As with many other fields of research and development, ideas and inspirations may arise from any direction. Sxyzm pulls in inspiration from other games within the industry and drives to simplify aspects and mechanics of the games into family friendly games. Sxyzm is working hard on developing a number of interesting and unique board games with a wide range of themes or mechanics.

Most family games exist at the two to six player count, but there are a number of families that hit counts beyond six players. These families end up not playing board games, either from resistance to buy two copies or from a rule of all must be able to play. The majority of games developed by Sxyzm have high player counts to give rise to younger enthusiasts within the market gap. There is a board gamer in all of us, while some have to find the right game, others just need a chance to play. For a better look at the games we are working on, visit the Games page above.

For activity updates and upcoming releases, join the Sxyzm Mailing List by clicking on "Mailing List" above.

Note: The games listed above are examples within industry, Sxyzm does not own rights nor is Sxyzm attempting to promote these games.