After many lunches of playing Zertz and discussing games Jarratt suggested we collaborate on a game. We both had a large collection of partially designed games that we discussed a great deal. Working together on a game could go well.

I mentioned I had an idea I really liked, but couldn't get any traction with. The basics of the idea was that players were European powers just really starting build empires, and just starting to develop complex governments and organisations to manage the expansion. The players would build ministries that they could improve, and then activate the ministries to do a series of related actions. So a ministry of war could do several war actions, a ministry of trade could do several trade related actions. There were a few other ideas thrown in too. I'm not sure, aside from theme, that any of them survived the design process intact.

We decided we should have some design goals. We had been discussing design goals a lot. Mostly because of Alan Moon's games. We couldn't work out why his games turned out the way they did. We eventually decided that what we thought of as odd design decisions made good sense once we determined what his design goals seemed to be.

The design goals at the time were something like this: (we added a couple more later)

- Good decisions and long term planning would be rewarded. Strategy would matter.

- The game should support extreme strategies, as well as a balanced approach. Both Jarratt and myself tend to try extreme strategies in games, so we were definately keen this was a game that would support them. We didn't want it to be all about choosing one thing, and just going for it, a balanced strategy should still work.

- It was going to be a development game, where you started off with a small amount of power which increased based on your decisions. You should be able to look at your options at the end of a game and wonder how you ever did anything with the meager resources you started with.

- The players would be rewarded for doing what felt right, and what improved their power. Our big example of a game that did this was Age of Steam, where what you did to survive and thrive is exactly what gave you victory points. So, being a development game, you would not choose between spending resources developing or spending resources on victory points. You would develop and be rewarded accordingly. I think the final game does this mostly well, with most point coming from track development and board presence. We did however have 'Glory' earned from a variety of sources (such as the university and many of the cards). As glory is basically victory points for the sake of victory points this goes against this goal somewhat.

- It would have a player board. Player boards are awesome.

- It would be published. This was decided from the beginning and informed many of our decisions.

And then we discussed, and discussed, and had some more concrete ideas about we wanted. And then started talking specifics, components, boards. We started making rough bits, and doing some partial 'playtests' with some of the mechanics. After many lunches, and many emails exchanged we had a game.

This is what I used to think of as the 50% mark of game design. You had something playable. It needed some playtesting and refinement. I now think of this stage as about the 5% mark, and don't value my many other games designs I have at this "done except for the hard stuff" point in the way I used to.

There were player boards, each with a large grid. You bought buildings with gold, and they took up space. There were actions that could be placed on many of the buildings. A grouping of building s of one colour could be activated, and all the actions on that set could be used. Most actions went on one or two colours of building, so you would generally have a blue shipping set, with a finance or politics set of buildings as well. There were some other special buildings, markets, residences, cultural buildings, and colonial houses. Colonial houses let you place boards between yourself and a neighbour, opening up a new region.

The players could concentrate on the political area of Europe, go to India or the East and draw silk or spice cards and trade them back for money, go to North America set up cotton empires, discover the cotton gin, and become rich. You could issue letters of marque and leech off the trading of others, go to war, collect artifacts bring them home and display them. It was a big, big game. It was Splotter big, if not a little bigger.

We playtested it a lot. Mostly we playtested very specific strategies, often as a single player game. We loved it. I liked to set up big card drawing strategies that mined for good trade cards, and turn the cash into other ways to win the game. Jarratt planned great methods to get quick control of political areas. We looked at all sorts of strategies, tweaked the nine card decks (each with ten cards, lots of text, and often more than one thing you could do with each card). There was what we thought was a very scant 15 turns to build your awesome Empire.

We build a very good looking playtest copy. Well actually Jarratt built a very good looking playtest copy, he has all the graphic design skills. I cut out some cardboard.



This picture shows just some of the pieces involved.

We had our first playtest with real players. It lasted over four hours. The players were generally pretty bewildered, and grasping for thigns to do. One player, my cousin Matt, found a easy to manipulate system which he could loop for lots of power, and he went on to what would be a victory (although outr victory conditions weren't that well defined). We were comlimented (a bit) on the game, but Jarratt and I were not happy with how it played out. We discussed it briefly, but then didn't look at it much for the next six months or so.

-- To be continued. --