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

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Since each of these problems is very hard, here they are in no particular order:

Out of print

This happens so often. So many good games are out of print, yet eagerly awaited by fans. Just look at the reaction to the Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective reprints, or Container, or Stone Age, Concordia, Scythe, Le Havre, Terraforming Mars, Food Chain Magnate, or of course Glory to Rome. All of these are out of print, or have been out of print or will be out of print forever because of rights problems. Why is that? Obviously people are clamoring to find copies, with Glory to Rome frequently going for $150 or $200 on ebay. Of course, reprinting is a costly thing, like any production of anything. But it shouldn’t really be that hard, right? I’m saying this out of the naivety of my not-yet-produced state. But all the files are there. All the suppliers are (probably) there. Just put up a Kickstarter and as soon as the necessary amount is reached, start the presses!

Or someone creates a really good print-n-play company that can make production-quality copies of a game (at a premium, of course), so enthusiasts can buy between print runs. Again: Easier said than done. And then some of them are getting reprints, some of them aren’t — but it’s really hard to find out which it is, and when. How do we attack this? I imagine a site where, first of all, the status is listed. This is hard already, but not impossible. The wisdom of the crowds produced Wikipedia, we’ll be able to produce a list of games, won’t we? That site could then also be used to indicate to the publishers where there’s interest in reprints. So, win/win? Anyone want to code something up with me?

Different editions

Every game has so many editions, sometimes with different availabilities and different errata. Some games that should be completely language independent still have language versions. Others only have one version but that’s not available everywhere. It’s the source of many discussions. Obviously, there’s not really a solution here. One thing we will try to do with our game is keep the amount of editions to a minimum. That means making all the cards language-neutral (we’ll keep them in Latin), and just supply manuals in all the languages. It’s a slight cost add, but I think it’s worth it to make each copy international.

WSIG

The final and hardest problem: WSIG. The simplest sound. Four letters. What should I get? By my guess scientifically accurate statistics, this is about half the posts on /r/boardgames. The community is very helpful and there are usually a great number of suggestions, but the raw amount of people asking this hints at a problem, or a market. There are so many recommender systems out there, but for board games they either seem not to work or not to exist.

So, these are issues for board gamers, I identified and some of them might have solutions. Let’s try to find them!

Since there are so many steps, I’ve put them in list format. What follows is a summary of what we did to get there.

1. Design a game (d’uh!): To be able to make a Print-N-Play, you’ll need to make a game. Obviously.
2. Do in-person play-tests: It’s really not that useful to send out rules and print files to the Internet without having a solid playtesting base under your belt. There are so many things you’ll find during playtesting at home, with friends and in board game groups where you are present that you really should use all of these avenues before you turn to the Internet for help.
3. Decide you want to blind playtesting on the Internet, and that you’ll package your files into a PnP.
4. Agonize about that decision for a few months.
5. Start writing rules that you think someone might understand without you being there.
6. Scrap everything from point 5 and start over.
7. Scrap everything from point 6 and start over.
8. Show the rules from point 7 to someone you trust, then scrap them and start over.
9. Show them the rules again, this time don’t scrap everything but refine instead.
10. Repeat 5-9.
11. Remember that your game consists of not merely the rules but also the cards.
12. Get nanDECK and design your cards:
    1. Start with a tutorial.
    2. Add your number of cards.
    3. Add your card backs, fill up blank pages to enable double-sided printing, otherwise, nanDECK will misalign the cards.
    4. Start adding the cards.
    5. Start adding lots of cards.
    6. Notice that your numbering is wrong, add the cards you actually need as well.
    7. Find a nicer font. Re-do everything in that font.
    8. Notice that your numbering is off again and fix it right.
    9. Add some graphics (if you have some), notice that the build script is getting much slower.
    10. Put the right graphics in the right place. Enjoy breaks while the deck is building.
    11. Fiddle with fonts and layout to make the cards look nice.
    12. Admire the result.
13. Notice that your game consists of rules, cards and a board. Make the designs you had for the board printable and add them to the PDF.
14. Notice that your game consists of rules, cards, a board and player mats. Add those to the PDF.
15. Collect all the files you need and upload them somewhere.
16. Create Google Forms for feedback on the rules as well as on gameplay.
17. Tell the testers you gathered in step 4(a) about the files and the feedback forms.
18. Marvel at the excellent feedback you get.

It’s really a joy to see so many people play our game now, even though some of the feedback we get is quite tough to swallow. There are definitely some game-breaking bugs in our rules, still, as well as so many stylistic changes we need to do. And it’s excellent to be told about this, so I am grateful to all testers involved.

If you are designing a game, I urge you to get the word out about it and get as many people as you can to playtest it, including blind playtests over the Internet. The feedback you get is incredibly valuable!

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.

On the day we met with Simon and his wife to play the game. We had gathered all of the materials of last week’s crafting session and started setting up the game. Of course, that was when we noticed that we didn’t have all the parts we needed. And not all the rules were exactly defined. And that we had two different variants of the game we could and should test out. Luckily, all of these problems were quickly solvable: we simply agreed on the remaining rules and built the missing parts out of paper. Then we decided on testing my variant first, put everything up on the table and started playing. I was really tense when we started because this was it, our game, for the first time.

And it was… ok, I’d say. Wildly imbalanced, half of the options are useless and the other half were way overpowered. The bluffing didn’t really work well since we didn’t know what the stakes were. The cards were really quite off balance, with a lot of luck in it, mostly you’d just get empty cards. And of course, everyone wanted to try all the options, so we basically just goofed around with all the choices in the game.
But it was also fun. I was so relieved after the game because, even though the game was clearly far away from being a game, it was already headed in the right direction. The core of the game, bluffing to get votes, was working, and it was fun.

We might not have any pictures from the event, but at least we know who won: Simon’s wife. With more than two and a half times the points of the next player (me), and she wasn’t even elected. That also worked immediately: becoming Pope was so capital-intensive that the elected player usually wouldn’t win. We increased the gains from being elected in later versions to make it more balanced in that way.

Naturally, we played a few more sessions that afternoon, all with varying rules and differing amounts of cards. The results were all the same: it was fun, but also massively lopsided, half of our ideas weren’t working, and becoming Pope was so capital-intensive and risky that the players that were elected would usually not win.

There were many more playtests after this and the game changed completely up to today, but, again, we were already on the right track with that first game.

Next week we’ll jump in time a bit: Simon will show off some of the first artwork we got for the game.

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.

Creativity just flowed out of us, it was awesome. We had so many ideas, and each idea one of us had sparked so many new ideas in the other one. That was such a great feeling.

However, we still didn’t have our core mechanic, so while we were already talking about specific game scenarios, we didn’t even have a framework for putting them in. That was a bit weird.
At some point, one of us had the key idea: what if all the cards were played face down? And what if most of those cards were worth nothing, but their only function would be to distract the others and keep up the bluffing game? All of a sudden, everything clicked into place: the intrigue, the bluffing, the double-bluffing. Putting down cards just to make your opponents unsure of what you just did. Oh, everyone would see that you did something, but did you place that card there because you really want that vote, or did you place it there to lead them away from the real goal?

From that moment, we knew we had a game, and we finally put all of our previous ideas into place, turning it into a brilliant (as we thought at the time) combination of scheming an misleading. We wrote down a whole bunch of rules, created a spreadsheet for calculating the numbers of each type of cards we should have and noting down the different actions we wanted to allow each player. It was quite a big document and we were really proud of all the stuff we had integrated in the game.

Of course, that game was quite different from what we have today. How we found out that most of what we had was silly and didn’t help the game at all — I’m going to tell you that next week.

But do you know what the funniest thing is? We actually don’t remember which one of us had that brilliant first idea of playing face down with empty cards. So today we simply agree that it was both of us.

“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.

Here’s the link: Ex Urbe: Machiavelli III: Rise of the Borgias. That’s a fantastic article about Machiavelli and the world he lived in, specifically Rodrigo Borgia, a young member of the spanish Borgia family and his ascent to the Papal throne. And his machinations to put his family in power. And also his children (yes, the Pope had children). Go read it, it’s really great!

So, you’re back, obviously from reading the other (much better) blog post in between. Did you notice that one small section in the middle:

The papal election of 1492 was one of the great power games of world history. Anyone seeking to create a board game or one-shot role-playing simulation of an exciting political moment need look no farther.

Really, that’s all it took for me to start thinking about making a board game out of this. The setting is perfect: there’s intrigue all around. There are interesting characters. There’s a big prize. There are many ways this can end. And it’s all about playing your enemies, much more than playing by the rules. What better background for a board game?

Unfortunately, there was a lot more work involved than I first anticipated (and it looks like there’s going to be a great amount of work left until we actually have a game in hand). It took more than two years to get to the point where we’re at now. But that first seed, that broad theme and the idea to make a game out of this setting started with me finding a blog post on Machiavelli’s role in the Italian Renaissance.

And that’s also the point of this entry: Inspiration can come from anywhere. That blog you read? That article in that one magazine? That guy you talked to recently? That thing you saw on TV? That random thought you had in the shower? That dream you woke up with yesterday? That song you heard? That snippet of conversation you overheard on the subway? Everything can make your mind spark. This doesn’t mean that you should go running off with every thought in your head, but it means that you can take anything you experience and turn it into something great.

Next week: Simon tells us how it went from an idea to a project.