 |
  Author's
Notes
(please click on any image to see it larger)
Genesis
Once upon a time there was a Venetian politics game simmering gently
in my games design cupboard. It was to be a monumental resource management
and politics game (most game designers have at least one of these; military
game designers have their own version, the 'generic battle system' game).
A small segment of it was a Grand Council, represented by a pyramid of
spaces, 7 at the base and 1 at the top. Players would alternate placing
pieces and by promoting from two adjacent pieces, could reach higher up
the pyramid and therefore gain more points in the council than their opponents.
The Venetian politics game never happened, because Borgias, Medicis
and Doges were becoming popular topics. Besides the challenge would be
to design something better than Canal Grande, and that's shooting at the
Moon.
The very theoretical basics of a game system still existed though, and
over a spicy meal after a games session at Essen Spiel '02, SSG decided
to develop it further. Baby TSoK
was born.
Meta game design
I have found there are two main ways I come up with game design ideas.
Either I have a mathematical or logical construct, upon which a theme
will eventually be grown or grafted, or a theme I would like to explore,
which will suggest a style of mechanics. Tara, Seat of Kings was certainly
one of the former, a game system with a theme.
What's the point?
TSoK was to be Surprised Stare Games' first board game. The objective
was to design a 'German style' game of medium length (more than ½
hour but less than 2 hours), aimed at the serious gamer. Target complexity
was more Puerto Rico than Alhambra. However as with our earlier games,
we wanted a twist, because as a company strategy, we always try to be
innovative. I wanted the game to have some luck, but to permit skilful
and thought-provoking strategy too.
The main features of Tara, Seat of Kings were to be:
- Aim: To promote your pieces to the single top space at the
pinnacle of two boards or regions.
- Tactics: Play of pieces on a simple hierarchical grid.
- Strategies: Choice of cards to play; income-generation; domination
of particular regions; concentration vs dispersal; raiding not conquest.
- Luck elements: Draw of cards from varied deck.
- Resource management: Limited cards, limited money, limited
pieces
I particularly wanted the game to be a 'raiding strategy' game, rather
than a traditional 'conquest strategy' game. This might help to explain
the somewhat quirky position you get in, once you have a King in one region.
Getting on top of the theme
Our first game, Coppertwaddle, had a Medieval theme, so our initial
instinct was to repeat ourselves; as a minimum we came up with a working
title and a semi-working theme. This was "King of the Castle",
which captured the basic idea of scrambling to the top, climbing over
your opponents. As we were looking for a dual language, English and German
game, we were pleased that our translator found a nifty German title too:
"Wer wird König?" (literally 'Who would be king?"),
which is constructed in the same fashion as the German version of "Who
wants to be a millionaire?" - always good to have a TV tie-in.
The KotC theme lasted for the whole of 2003, long enough to get its
acronym. No-one was terribly thrilled by it though, especially when we
started to consider potential artwork. Inspiration was in very short supply.
We wanted a theme that wasn't over-used, but would both give the game
a historical flavour and give Tony, our artist, a chance to spend hours
and hours in his studio.
Ancient Ireland was a productive theme, because there just happened to
be four regions, Connacht, Leinster, Munster and Ulster, and we coincidentally
had 4 provinces in KotC. Couple that with the opportunities for Celtic
knot work and Tony was sold. After considerable agonising, we were able
to identify names for the five ranks, roughly going with the grain of
early Irish society, Farmers, Herdsmen, Warriors, Chieftains and Kings.
Bearing in mind that Tara, Seat of Kings is not an historical game, I
will not attempt any justification or defence of the choices.
Cattle were very important in early Christian Irish society, which is
why we have Herdsmen not Shepherds. A lack of coins in common usage at
this period was a bit of a problem, so technically Tara, Seat of Kings
doesn't have money, it has 'cumals', the equivalent of three cows or one
slave.
Heft factor
When I design new games, I'm notorious for using badly hand-drawn sketches
and very 'representational' components. I am myself fairly indifferent
to the visual look of the thing at playtesting stage, but in an era of
InDesign, Photoshop and Quark Xpress, there is an increasing expectation
amongst play testers that the game will look presentable, as well as play
properly. Also it is relatively easy nowadays to get hold of the buckets
of wooden pieces and cardboard tiles with which German style games are
populated. We stock up each year at the Essen Spiel with ridiculous quantities
of weird shaped bits and pieces that just might come in useful for some
not-yet-dreamed of agglomeration of game mechanics. We even used a figure
of a blue top-hatted rotund man in one of our board game designs once,
but that's a story for another day.
KotC had coloured plastic cones as playing pieces (remember Coppit?),
which were left over from an earlier game. These had the advantage of
being easy to stack and manipulate, even with the average gamer's clumsy
fingers, but the disadvantage of - to put it bluntly - being made of plastic.
After experimentation, we decided to adopt the more conventional wooden
cylinders, which are in fact cheaper and have a much more German style
look; they also work fine in the game.
While KotC used 4 separate boards for Provinces, we moved to a single
4 region board in TSoK. A single board gave a better visual focus and
allowed us to put the whole of the island of Ireland on it.
Extensive playtesting led to the development of a fairly balanced card
set which identified the placement positions. Even at the earliest stage
of the design, you could not play pieces into the top two ranks, these
had to be filled through promotion. But we started with 6 ranks, and the
game was far too long, so we quickly decided on the now familiar 5 ranks.
In KotC they were called Peasant, Artisan, Squire, Merchant and Noble,
with the final winning rank being the King. Very logical and very medieval,
and easy to find clip art!
One of our blind
play test groups was not happy with the large number of cards, because
they were not able to track them and have their strategy influenced by
the likely remaining cards. This wasn't a problem I had expected, being
more concerned with the balance of the deck than with card counting. The
comment was bang on the nose though, so I redesigned the deck around fewer
cards. I experimented with having different size decks for different numbers
of players, but discarded that idea, because it would have made the set
up of the game much more complex. I settled on the current deck of 36
cards, which allows those with large memory banks to remember which cards
have been played, but will always have some unrevealed.
The last addition to the components was the King pieces. These were
introduced to replace using a stack of two pieces to represent the King,
which was easily confused with a fort, especially as the mechanism for
removing a King was very different from that for removing a fort. The
inclusion of two King pieces in the game is strictly unnecessary, because
you win when you occupy the two King positions not when you have two King
pieces. It seems more aesthetically pleasing to have two King pieces:
naturally these two pieces are adjacent to each other in the centre of
the board and promote to High King.
Mechanical breakdown
There were a few design problems, which either made the game too stable
or too unbalanced. Initially we had too many very powerful cards, such
as two positions in one rank, which allowed radical 'ripple upwards' promotions;
the only one of these to survive is card 9, two Farmers. The original
game didn't have money either, which meant promotion was automatic. Having
to pay to promote introduced a resource management element, and we played
around with various methods for generating income, before alighting on
the current one, which encourages spreading out across regions, as well
as winning individual ranks within a region.
I wanted to keep resources tight, both in terms of numbers of pieces
and quantity of money, so that players are forced to make difficult choices.
If you're thinking "I could have won, but I ran out of pieces!",
then you've probably made an error.
A mechanism to restrict the number of cumals available was the forced
payment of two cumals to deploy to an empty region. This payment prevents
you from taking a simple early drop into an unchallenged region by depriving
you of the means to promote quickly. Another mechanism was that if you
have equal numbers of pieces at a given rank in a region, then neither
player is paid, rather than both receiving one cumal.
The introduction of forts gives players an opportunity to adopt an element
of conquest strategy, although the game is primarily a raiding strategy
game, as explained earlier.
 Dealing
6 cards, and choosing 3 for the current round and 3 for the next, reduces
the luck factor. Without this mechanic the luck of the draw became too
great. I think this aspect of the game is the hardest and has most influence
on winning and losing. While there are some obviously powerful cards (e.g.
the 2 Farmers, the Stones of Destiny), the power of most cards depends
on the situation.
Finishing off
By the time of Essen Spiel '05 we had our finished prototype, play tested,
blind tested and ready for action. But we hadn't had time to produce it;
this took us the better part of a further year - find out from Tony and
Charlie how we did that.
We had a lot of fun at Spiel '05. We hired what they call an 'author's
prototype table', which allows game designers to present their draft products
to an unsuspecting audience. While I've always thought that the area set
aside for these tables was a bit off the beaten track, I was gratified
to find many enthusiastic players prepared to play a prototype for an
hour or so. I was also happy to find that the game scored highly in the
Fairplay ratings, reaching an average of 1.5 across 18 votes, two votes
short of winning the best of show rating.
And now for Spiel '06.
|
