It contains flames, dragons, priests, chainsaws, and a flowerpot* and it is available to all of our newsletter subscribers**.

And now, without further ado, enjoy our preliminary trailer.

* It does not contain any of the following: flames, dragons, priests, chainsaws, flowerpots
** It is available to anyone, but I’d really appreciate you to subscribe to our newsletter, so we can reach you, as soon as our awesome, magical Kickstarter campaign starts

We’ve been busy preparing and producing video footage for our trailer. We were aiming to create a mysterious, somewhat cheesy, and slightly funny video experience. When writing our script, we looked at other videos for inspiration and in the end, we settled with something heavily inspired by Escape the Dark Castle by Themeborne (by the way, they have a campaign for their next project on Kickstarter) and the Age of Empires II intro scene. NOTE: All newsletter subscribers will get an exclusive copy of our script and exclusive behind the scenes photos from our shooting day. Subscribe now.

The shooting day was quite an experience. I arrived at the church at 10-ish with over 60 kilograms of monk robes. After the initial setup and a first walk around the set, I selected locations for filming our scenes. And then some magic happened. We took 2-3 shots per scene on average and were finished with the first pass after like 4 hours. We repeated and added a few scenes after checking the footage. We had planned for two full days of shooting and were finished in 6 hours total. Amazing!

Here are things I learned:

• Everything looks different from the camera’s perspective
• Being silly sometimes brings the best ideas
• Marble church floors are really cold, especially when walking them barefoot for 6 hours
• Monk robes are heavy but quite comfortable to wear.

A friend of ours is already involved in cutting so that we hopefully have a trailer ready soon. So excited

If you want to have exclusive access to behind the scene materials, namely our script AND photos from our shooting day, subscribe to our newsletter now.

Note of shame: Guess who managed to write a blog post over a month ago AND forgot to publish it. Yes, it was me. The good news is, there will be another blogpost shortly

It is astonishingly difficult to plan a video trailer for a board game. First there was the logistic challenge of finding all the actors and the equipment. Then, someone needed to write a script. We needed props, to build a mood. Finally, we had to find a location.

And as always we are ever so thankful for our network. Within the last 2 weeks…

• we found an actual church, that allows us to film there.
• we had 6 people agree to help us out as actors and helping hands on set
• we can borrow clothing from a friendly LARP association. Big thanks to Engonien e.V.. Check them out for (German) mid-/high-fantasy, mid-power LARP conventions.

So everything is ready, right? Wait, someone still has to write the script …. and this is how I decided to procrastinate writing the script with writing this blogpost.

It is written:

All smirky comments aside, we thought about it more than once to just abandon the project, to save time, to save money, to save effort. But we never really could accept that, so we started meeting weekly in mid-2018 to go one baby step at a time.

And here we are. With a brand new website, with an extremely polished prototype print run and plans to start a kickstarter campaign for production costs in the 3rd quarter of 2019. If the chronicle above holds true, you will hold your copy of Habeamus in your hands before Easter 2020. Subscribe now to our Newsletter, so you are the first to learn about our Kickstarter campaign and catch the attractive early bird or one of the limited “your face in the game” tiers.

Back from subscribing? Then tell all your friends foes-to-be about Habeamus.

Thank you so much for your support and stay tuned for updates (I told you about our Newsletter, right?)

One and a half weeks ago, me and Johannes were discussing a game that had nice game mechanics, but did not really fit into the setting chosen by the authors. When I suggested the following, a new “creativity competition” was born.

Rules

1. Alternate through the alphabet
2. Find a title starting with the letter (and using an alliteration)
3. Describe the setting in up to 4 sentences

It was the most intense 90 minutes I’ve ever spent in a WhatsApp conversation. But it was great fun as well. Since this first round happened to be in German, this week, we started a new round, but this time in English and we set the additional rule of having a twist to the game.

Letters

• Johannes: A C E V I K M O Q S U W Y
• Simon: B D F H J L N P R T G X Z ⁠⁠⁠⁠

So without further ado, here are the first 13 ideas

Actionable Activism

You and your group try to influence the political landscape. To do so, you need to gain favours with different groups. The first one to gain enough influence to get a bill passed wins. But beware lobbying groups that can block your progress. Twist: You get to choose which tactics to use (ie. resources you harvest), but they exhaust and only renegerate slowly (political will gets used up).

⁠⁠⁠⁠Beanign Empire

Being a plant is not easy. You are dependent on resources such as CO₂, NO₄, PO₄, and H₂O to grow and develop offspring. All the while you need to compete for said resources. Place your seeds wisely, for resources are scarce. Grow roots to acquire new nutrients. Upgrade your seed to a plant, the plant to a flower and finally the flower to a new seed to place. Twist: If your roots touch an opponent’s roots, you may steal some of their resources, BUT so do they ⁠⁠⁠⁠

⁠⁠⁠

Captive Contractors

This is a very strange prison. There are craftsmen everywhere, but very few guards. And it’s falling apart, too. What a coincidence?! Gather all the resources you need for improving your cell from packets sent into prison and trading with other inmates and guards. Then build (or commission) additions to your cell, which give you advantages. First one to place a throne into their cell gets crowned contractor king. Twist: You can order resources from your outside contracts, but resources are drafted, so you might not get what you want. Also the one with the largest order gets to choose last. (Card drafting: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgamemechanic/2041/card-drafting) ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Bonus twist: Build underground tunnels to escape and win that way! ⁠⁠⁠

⁠⁠⁠De-icing the poles

You place drills on tectonically active ridges on the north/south pole. These are resonance drills. Thus you need to collect four different types of force (vibration, impulse, sliding, pulsating) and apply them to create cracks in certain directions. If a crack spans from one end to the other, the cut-out part will float freely and belongs to the party with the most drills. Twist: Global Warming. Every four turns, a random crack appears between two fields (determined by dice roll)

⁠⁠⁠

Escape from Tokelau

This island is sinking, slowly, but surely. You need to make it off the island before the sea reaches you. Every few turns, an island tile will be removed — with everything on it. After having placed your settlements in the first phase, now it’s time to save them. There are several ways to do so:

• flag a passing vessel for help (you’ll have to pay them)
• build your own floatation device and save your own bottom
• you could all cooperate and ask the international community for help (they’ll only help if all of you work together!)
• or simply wait for evacuation teams to arrive (you might have to move to the center of the island for that to work in time)

If nothing else helps, you’ll have to move your settlement away from the water. That’s costly, so don’t do it too early. And also (of course) you’ll have to fight other players for the best spots. Twists: Island slowly removed, battle mechanics for movement, prisoners dilemma (cooperate and equal win, or defect and save yourself?)

⁠Falkland Country Club

You are running one branch of the smokers’ lounges of Falkland Country Club. To be more successful to your competitors and attract members you have to provide tobacco and wine. While you can extend your smoky empire with hallways from wood and stone, your primary goal is to build even more lounge rooms and attract the most members. Twist: The more members you have, the more likely one of your lounges will burn down (Including everyone inside that is).

Vicious Viruses

There are viruses everywhere in this animal. Fortunately, they are all dormant. For now… You play as one of these viruses, trying to infect the animal. You need to gather enough ATP and different sorts of proteins to infect lymph nodes. You can also use your resources to modify your genetic code and get some special abilities that way. But the real game starts once one virus has gathered enough VP (virus points) to start the infection. From then on, that player’s objective is to win and infect the whole animal. The other viruses, of course, need to stop that. Either the animal gets infected, or the infector is destroyed. Twist: Turns from free-for-all into 1-vs-rest.

Helium 3

The moon is inhabited. There is a small group explorers left behind by Apollo 17. Abandoned by mission control they strive to survive. This requires valuable resources like water, oxygen, moondust, glue, and Helium3 for power production. Twist: Since there is no atmosphere asteroids will hit the surface and render mining grounds unusable for a few turns. ⁠⁠⁠⁠

⁠⁠⁠⁠Investigate Inventors

Paris, 1885: The city is ablaze with innovation. There is even talk of an absurd metal tower over 1000 feet high for the World Fair in 1889. The things these inventors come up with… But now one of them is dead, thrown out of a moving train, and you need to find out who killed him. Move through the (randomly built) city, gather clues (witness reports, documents, pieces of evidence) and build your case with the jury. The first one to gain 8 of the twelve juror votes wins the case and may present it to the other players. Twist: The gathered clues must stack to make a convincing case. Each clue has a sequence number, you must play clues in increasing order (gaps are allowed). Bonus twist: trading certain types of clues with other players duplicates the clue (reports, documents). Bonus bonus twist: The value of a clue depends on the gap in the clue sequence. Playing clue #10 after playing clue #1 is worth 3 points (sqrt(3)), playing clue #2 after clue #1 is worth only 1 point. This way, we incentivise gaps (which make it harder for you to play other clues) and add a bit of a puzzle into it. ⁠⁠⁠⁠

Javalicious

A group of Java developers relocated their offices to Java, the island where the coffee lives. In the year 2041 however, AI took over. Economy crashed. Programmers were not worth a penny anymore. But as its AI was trained by human datasets, the Major Coordination Processor (MCP) demands one thing: COFFEE. ⁠To become the MCP’s favorite meat companion you need to extend the coffee roasting blades in your data center and connect them via highspeed ethernet to reach just the right throughput and hence roasting temperature. Twist: Trick the other players by trading them decaf, so they fall asleep and miss one turn ⁠⁠⁠⁠

Krakatoa

The natives are sure of it: now that these foreigners have arrived and started mining the precious minerals, they angered the volcano god. It is only a matter of time before it strikes the island with is vengeance… Your job is to mine the rich resources of this wondrous island: gold, platinum, diamonds, unobtainium. Do it quickly, the volcano will erupt any minute now! Every round, you draw a pressure card. Once the pressure reaches 1000 GPa, the volcano erupts (special cards relieve the pressure, but only temporarily). It’ll destroy everything in the center of the island and start lava flows from there. Try to save as much of the mined resources as you can, since that’s what you’ll be scored on. Move people and resources. Evacuate what you can from ports and from the air. Save the natives if you can. Direct lava flows using technology (barriers, channels, bombs, whatever you can think of) and luck (ie Carcassone-style tile placement, using triangular flow tiles on hexagonal island tiles). Once all lava flows terminate in the ocean, you’ll be safe. Twist: First you build, then you destroy. Bonus twist: There are two winners: the one with the most money (boo!) and the one that saved the most people (yay!) ⁠⁠⁠⁠

Lizard people

M.C. Escher’s painting has come alive. The colors are in disarray. 3-4 lizard people have emerged from the drawing plane of Reptiles in an endeavor to sort the colors and build new 3-dimensional homes from them. Whoever wants to be victorious needs to build one house of each color. Twist: There is a chance, 2D lizards get so pissed off by your 3D world, that they burn down your 3D objects.

If you already have an idea, which game these ideas are based on, send us a tweet. The solution will be posted along with the missing 13 letters next week. Stay tuned

Lucrum tecum sit.

The Search

In late 2016 (around November, I believe) me and Johannes sat together once again to further plan out the project. It was pretty clear to us that without proper artwork, Habeamus would not succeed, at all. So we made a grave decision: either we would find an artist within the next 3 months or we would bury the project until we have the budget to buy in on an artist or forever, whichever comes first.

I cannot say whether we changed our attitude towards searching an artist because of these drastic measures or whether we were plain lucky. However, a friend pointed us to a deviantArt page on which we found awesome drawings like this one or this. We were immediately convinced that this style would fit our game and setting very well. The style, by the way, is inspired by Alfons Mucha (Wikipedia).

The Meeting

So we contacted the artist and arranged a first Skype call to talk about the project. I will spare you the details of that call, but we quickly found out, that we have the same line of humor and similar ideas about the artwork. Thus, we scheduled meeting in person few days later. On this meeting we were already presented with a bunch of fonts and logo ideas to select from and refine.

The First Result

Of course, the very first thing we needed was a logo. You might already be familiar with it. When me and Johannes saw it for the first time, we fell in love with it, immediately. I especially love the many hidden details. And there are more to come in the card, board, and box design. But I’ll save that for another day.

Next up, Johannes will tell you what steps we took creating a print and play version of Habeamus to allow for even more playtesting.

Lucrum tecum sit.

As Johannes already wrote in our last post, after one design meeting we already had rules and a vague idea of the card distribution (funnily, independent from each other we came up with 40%-50% empty cards in the deck). But we knew, in order to figure out, which distribution is more fun to play, we would need to test it, with a few people. Then again, testing requires some kind of prototype, because our friends were not too keen playing a hypothetical bluffing game in their heads by filling an excel sheet with their hypothetical moves.

Fair enough. So we designed a prototype with a hand-drawn board, some tokens taken from another game, and cards. The cheapest version of empty cards we could find online were business cards. Since the store is pretty much next door, I went there and happened to be the cause of the following dialog:

Me: “Hey there. I want to buy 1000 empty business cards for a crafting project. Is this possible?”

Them: “Uhm, well sure. You need to order these online, though, we just hand over the orders here.”

Me: “Ok great. By the way, how do I tell the online form to just send empty cards?”

Them: “Oh, that is not possible. You’ll need to upload a white template file for that.”

Me: “…”

Them: “And make sure it is the right dimensions, or it will be rejected.”

This was the weirdest thing to do, but it actually worked. Three days later we had our cards. Our first version had a shared deck for all players holding ~110 cards in Johannes’ version and ~150 cards in my version. So we sat down for a few hours, manually numbering one deck for each version.

Back then, the prototype looked much different from the current version described in the about section. We had this bidding area, where players could give an additional hint on how much money they already placed on the board. Six cardinals were available for bribery and we had a lot of action cards.

Upper left: empty business cards turned into playing cards. Upper right: First board sketch. Lower left: prototype board based on the sketch. Lower right: Initial set of rules (description of the action cards) and some background story.

And with the first prototype set up, next time we will dive into the first playtesting session. Stay tuned.

Lucrum tecum sit.

“Simon, I really feel like plotting against and betraying you. What do you think of creating a board game together?”
With these words, Johannes had immediately caught my attention. I didn’t have a concrete idea about this game, at that time. However, it had the notion of playing each other instead of playing the game. In addition to that, it is an open secret that I cannot read Johannes, so I would have a very hard time playing this game.
Needless to say, I agreed.

After the pledge, I asked Johannes, if he already had an idea. He told me about the blogpost he had read earlier that week and that he would like to place the game in this historical setting of 1492. Where the papal election was a cesspool of betrayal, bribery, and intrigue. To allow me some time to catch up on research about the Borgia family and historical events in the 15th century, we fixed Monday for a Skype conference.

The following weekend was intense for my brain. I spent it on reading Wikipedia, the blog post Johannes got the idea from, and constantly asking myself many questions:

• What was it (presumably) like to be a cardinal at the 1492 Conclave?
• How does bribery work? Is it always about money?
• How can you convincingly fake a lot of influence/power?

At the end of the weekend, I was hyped. I wanted to create this game so much, even though it was nothing but a mere idea at that time. So I was wondering: Did Johannes trick me into believing I want to do it? No, he didn’t, or did he? And the game was on…

Next Up: Johannes speaking about our first lay down the rules meeting.

Motivation

A few weeks ago Johannes approached me with the task of creating an interesting game from a fixed set of materials (taken from an existing board game). It took around 1.5 hours to lay down the initial set of rules and some background story. After presenting the new game to Johannes two things became clear very quickly: One of my rules did not work out at all AND we wanted to have an event for quick prototyping of board games. The idea of a game jam for board games was born. We wanted it to be similar to a game jam, which are common for video games, but for board games instead. Some research later we had found out that there are a few board game jams around the world. But we did not want to spend 48 hours on this event, even though this is a usual time for jams or hackathons. So we decided to cut it down to one afternoon of design and one evening of play. Board games can be developed much quicker than video games, after all.

The Plan

We announced the board game jam two weeks in advance. Having two modes, creating a game from scratch or creating a game from another game’s materials, we planned for 4 hours of development time and 4 hours of presentation-/playtime. As location we chose the local hackerspace in Düsseldorf, Germany (Chaosdorf). In the announcement we asked for game donations, i.e. games people own but never play anyway. So we started with a pile of games to scavenge and refactor. We received a great collection, with some classics (Mahjongg), some lesser known games (The Secret Labyrinth) and some completely strange ones (GZSZ Das Brettspiel). To provide a starting point we picked two random themes at the beginning of the jam but declared them as optional and just for inspiration. The first one was “Vögel” (birds) drawn from a pack of tarot (also a donation), the second one “Der große Preis von China” (Chinese Grand Prix) picked by clicking “random article” on Wikipedia.

My personal experience

First, I chose to refactor the secret labyrinth, because the material, especially the board, is quite unique. Since I could not find a good idea in the first 30 minutes I decided to go for the topic “birds” instead. After a few minutes only, I suddenly remembered a random fact about crows from my genetics 101 class. In Europe there are two crow species that are distinct species, but still able to mate with each other. A mixed offspring, however, is not nearly as fit as pure-bred individuals. Inspired by this example, I decided to make a game about bird migration, where each player takes responsibility for the fitness of a certain species (color). In the game birds are stacks of 1-5 gene tokens. The species of a bird is determined by who has the most tokens in the bird’s genes. The goal of the game is to have the most birds of your species on the board. The game starts in Western Europe with each player having two birds with two tokens of the player color. A player can migrate any bird to the next field (Western Europe -> Eastern Europe -> Libya -> Algeria -> back to Western Europe). Players having birds in Europe can forage to gain food tokens. Birds in Europe can be fed (only by the species owner) by spending a food token and will gain another gene token of the player color. Birds in Africa can mate with other birds in the same region. A player selects one of their birds (active) in Africa and any other bird (passive) in the same region to mate with. By rolling a 6-sided die, the position (from the top) of the gene token to propagate into the offspring is determined for both. If there is no token in one of the positions, mating was unsuccessful. If there is offspring but it does not have a dominant color, the 6-sided die is rolled until another token from the active bird goes to the offspring (Note: The offspring can be of a different species than the active bird after this). The game ends after 16 cumulative transits (Algeria -> Western Europe or Eastern Europe -> Libya) of any bird. For scoring, birds with no dominant species identity are taken out of the game. All other birds count 1 point for the species with the most tokens. In case of a tie (two or more players have the same number of birds) the highest total number of gene tokens still in the game wins. In case of a tie the player with the most food tokens wins. If there still is a tie, congratulations, nature wins, as you contributed to allopatric speciation.

Other Games Created During The Jam

Of course, I wasn’t the only developer in the jam. The other games created were

• Mahjong Tactics: Taking apart Mahjong and turning it into a tactical war game. The twist here is that the three different suits (bamboo, dot, character) become army units that work like Rock/Paper/Scissors: bamboo beats dots, dots beat character, character beats bamboo. This makes for unusual combat situations and thrilling duels.
• Dateninsel (Data Island): Save your data from bugs by transporting them from a server into the cloud.
• Der Große Sprung Nach Vorn (Great Leap Forward): A strategy game inspired very loosely by the theme “Chinese Grand Prix” in which you try to buy political will to make your commune the best.
• Kreislauf des Wassers (Water Cycle): A game vaguely related to the rules of pachisi. Roll dice, try to reach your house and if you are lucky, block the way for others.

Conclusion

It has been an awesome event. Apparently 4 hours were sufficient for everyone to create a prototype for a board game. And while some of them were better than others, everyone had fun playtesting the new games. The donations helped a lot as we had some stock materials to start with. Also, having a laser cutter on hand turned out to be quite useful for quick (15 minutes) production of 60 tokens. We can probably improve our outreach, as we would have loved to host more than just 5 people. Also after 4 hours of creative outbursts, people were in general rather tired, so we have to consider splitting the event into a development day (4 hours) and a gaming day (open end) instead of having both on the same day. Summing up the event: it was a great success and we will definitely have a second edition in 2017.