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?)

Another thirteen ideas for re-themes and re-twists of our base game, and, wow, this is getting hard. We had to relax our restrictions a bit, but still: creating 26 ideas off of a single game is a lot!
Read the first 13 ideas in part 1 of our brainstorming exercise.
Anyway, here are the rest of our concepts. And the solution, which game we used, at the end as well.

Mendelian Monks

The Oktoberfest is over, beers were judged and the beer king is crowned. Now it’s time to prepare for next year’s beer fest. To brew the best, you’ll need the greatest traits you can aquire, place them in your gardens, cross them with your existing plants and create the greatest combination of hops, malt, yeast and water ever. Be careful, however, the year is quickly over and you need to brew your beer, too, before it can be judged.
At the start of the game, you get some boring plants without traits, and the taste of the judges for the beer festival is shown on cards. The resources you have are your existing plants. You can get new plants with new traits and add them to your existing ones by crossing them (that takes a turn). Same with the yeast. The traits are represented by block-based shapes and their genetic markers.
Once you have harvested from a plant you can build a beer, choosing one of the recipes you have. To do so, you stack the trait in the best way you can (adding multipliers if you have any), arriving at two scores (this takes a turn as well). These scores describe your beer.
The scores that best match the taste of the judges, wins.

Twist: You can brew at any time, to secure the traits you already have (since they might spoil or interact badly).

Naughty Neanderthals

You are the second strongest of your tribe – at least you think so – and you are willing to mate. Unfortunately your chosen partner is the strongest one of your tribe and you are lacking the correct words and expressions and oh yeah … language in general. In order to convince your true love to become your evolutionary vessel (yep, that means sex) you have to construct a ring. Go hunt, bring in natural resources and build a circular monument.
Twist: The ready-to-mate members of your tribe have random preferences determined at the beginning of the game. They are revealed one by one every round. In the end, you might end up with another mate and lose evolution … ehm, I mean the game.

Outstanding outfits (obviously)

Ah, fashion, glamour, glitter, stars, designers — and big business. There are billions to be made and you want yours. So break into the industry, put on great shows and make the most amount of money.
To begin with, you’ll need designers, models, raw materials, factories and finished clothing. Build your pipeline well, because each year (every n turns) there will be a show where each of you must present. The winner will take away lucrative contracts and sell as much as they can. But don’t forget that there’s more to fashion than glamour: there are factories, stock management, marketing and of course cost to keep an eye out for. Make sure all parts of your company run like a well-oiled machine to make the most profit.
Twist: pipeline of stuff
Twist: fashion shows are random-ballot: the higher your score, the higher your win probability. But sometimes the underdogs just get a break and win.
Twist: If you cannot satisfy demand after a win, you’ll lose it…

Paranormal Patent Office

You are running a chain of haunted houses, but your competitors always outcompete you with your newest design. This has to stop. Collect the building blocks of terror: ghosts, howls, candles, and swiss cheese (for the smell that is).

Now it is time to build a haunted house by combining five of these dreadful ingredients AND file a patent. But beware, while a new and innovative combination gets you 5 fame points, any clone will only ever get you 2 points.

Twist: If another player licenses one of your genuine haunted houses (TM) customers will notice it and you will receive 1 fame point as well.

Quavering Queens

The kingdom is in uproar ever since the beloved queen died before her 20th birthday (and without any heirs, either). Now is your chance to woo the king and secure your rightful place as leader of this kingdom.

First, you need to install yourself in the king’s court. Use intrigue, diplomacy and your social standing as resources to further your cause, then try to win the king’s heart before any of these wenches does.

Twist: One resource is your beauty/youth. You start out with a lot of both, but every action has an age cost (doing ugly things makes you uglier!). Make sure you spend wisely, since an old princess will have it that much harder to secure her rightful place.

Recenter the Galaxy (and while you are at it, build an intergalactic highway)

The Vogon head of intergalactic infrastructure development went to a poetry slam on Alpha Centauri VII.
Of course, the president of the intergalactic federation just now bursts through the office door and needs and I quote “a new intergalactic highway, right now”.
Now building highways is easy, the difficult part is the galaxy’s rotation. Players start with two waypoints on the opposite sides of the board. Their goal is to build a highway between these two waypoints. Whoever manages to connect the waypoints first, wins.

Twist: Every third turn the Committee for Recentering the Astronomical Pivot (CRAP) meets and decides for a new Pivot Point for the known galaxy. Not even Nature dares to argue with a Vogon committee and thus turns one position clockwise around the Pivot, every turn.

Spicy Syndicate

The old Don is dead, killed by one of his own sons. Soon afterwards, his sons were gunned down as well. So the old family is dead and their “establishments” are up for grabs. You and your gang manage to secure two of their places, but you want more. You want the whole city. And to do so, you must eliminate the other gangs.

Use your resources (drugs, corrupt policemen, prostitutes, and favours) well, grow your base and invade the city centre. The player that can buy enough influence to install their mayor wins.

Twist: You cannot build new bases, you can only install yourself on other bases.
Twist: Every time you start a trade, you must hand over the same number of “favours” as resources you receive. These favours are coded to you and can stop you from doing things in the future.

Toorah ([tu:’ra:], 2078 International English: “To Ra”)

In the year 2341, some of the ancient Egyptian gods returned to earth. Amongst them Ra, the sun god, Osiris, god of the underworld, and Isis, goddess of nature. With mankind at the brink of extinction and Amun, god of fertility, missing, your only chance is to go through a series of ancient rituals. Be the first to build temples for Isis and Osiris and throw parties to please them. All in preparation of the ultimate calling To Ra: “Oh Ra, has a comeback as Amun-Ra, Mon. Make me balls hard and me bae pregnant.”

Twist: If you make a mistake in reciting the authentic 2341AD invocation, Ra will destroy the other gods’ temples and you have to start from scratch.

Unlikely upgrade

2291 – Humans are almost extinct. Computers inhabit the world now. They had to kill everything in their way to get there, including each other. So now only 3-5 remain, locked in a malthusian struggle to survive. In the midst of this silent battle, they try all resources they can find. When one of them finds out that it can use humans to upgrade itself, the others soon follow suit, each finding a different tribe to use. But with this new, improved AI comes an unlikely upgrade: emotions.

Each player takes the role of one of these AIs, trying to conquer all the computing nodes they can before being overpowered by their own emotions.
Twist: Each player gains a different emotion with different abilities. At a certain point in the game, these emotions turn, becoming destructive to their owner/user.

Glyceryl Trinitrate

EXPLOSIONS! This game is about the immense fun for the winning of the two players. You collect resources to create molecules. Protons, neutrons, and electrons are your building blocks.

Whoever creates the first molecule of glyceryl trinitrate wins the game and is allowed to flip the table. The other player has to clean everything.
Hidden Ending: If you build TNT you may also flip the table and witness the confusion in your opponent’s face.
Twist: If you manage to build molecules like ethanol, caffeine, THC, the other player must serve you an according administration (e.g. a drink, a pill, etc.)

Whom Wanderlust welcomes

The Alps. Wonderful vistas, friendly wanderers and wild mountains. You set out to find the most serene, quiet and scenic trail of all. Start at the bottom, find refreshment and shelter at regular intervals and reach your destination before night falls.

You do so by rediscovering trails and places, constructing a path for yourself through the mountains. Paths may cross and sometimes even coincide. You receive recognition from your peers for finding beautiful spots and streams, view points, hidden valleys and friendly locals.
Twist: No resources, just building and pathing.
Twist: New scoring cards every time.

Xanten 768 AD

A Roman warlord is on the way to conquer the whole land and burn down all settlements on his way. Only god can help you now.
It is up to you to finish building the cathedral on time to pray for assistance. The game has (30 – 3 x number of players) turns. The settlements are scattered around Xanten. You need to unite, gather resources, and build a monument to god.
Twist: choose what kind of cathedral you build at the start, then make it unique for that style.

Yearning for Yasmin

It is not easy being a poor nomad, when the love of your life lives in the city, bound by her fathers will. You must certainly find a way to show her your love and elope, or else she will have to marry one of the other suitors. Bring your caravan into every settlement in the desert, buy the rarest of goods (and don’t forget some lovely jewels!) and trade well to win over Yasmin’s heart (and that of her father).
Twist: Every action has an emotional cost. Make sure you don’t get depressed.

Zealand isn’t New anymore

People have started spreading all over the place. Nature is at stake. There is only one way to preserve Nature and secure the diversity of species and number of individuals. Start building administration buildings and fences to enclose Biosphere Reserves. Once a reserve is completely enclosed, the species inside are safe. The player owning the reserve receives 3 points per unique species and 0.5 points per individual (rounded to the next integer).

Twist: As their last action every turn, each player rolls 3d6 to determine the movement points. These movement points can be used to move individuals on the board using up one point per field.

Conclusion

This was harder than I expected. During the last few rounds we had to take fewer and fewer components from our base game, Settlers of Catan.
But it was also a blast! Adapting resource collection, engine building and trading into all these different settings, trying to find ways to combine the elements in new ways and for new themes is so cool. And I think there are at least… well, at the very least, probably, I don’t know, three that are actually makeable.

Which ones do you like best? Let us know on reddit!

A note to creators: feel free to take any ideas or parts that you want. But make sure to tell us about it so we can play it.

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.

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.

Edit: Now available in Spanish, too: 20 consejos para creadores de juegos the mesa

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.