Archive for News
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Brett J. Gilbert
United Kingdom
Cambridge
Divinare — Coming from Asmodee 2012!
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Divinare
In precisely one month’s time Divinare will be published by Asmodee in France. I’m not privy to exactly when the game will likely reach these shores — or American ones; or the German, Italian or Dutch borders either! — but I don’t think the waiting World will have to wait too long. Tick tock!
The story of Divinare’s development was featured in Episode 1 of Asmodee’s rather swanky new webcast La Tête dans le Pion — a ‘making of’ feature begins at 10:34, and is a lot of fun to watch, even if you don’t understand the très rapide French voiceover. The gameplay will be covered in the forthcoming Episode 2.
If you can’t wait, TricTrac TV recorded a gameplay video at the Cannes Games Festival, which shows off the artwork and components.
LEGup
Next week I’m going to be speaking at the London Education Games Meetup, which is only a mildly terrifying (I’m hardly a practised public speaker!). The meet up is open to all interested parties, so do come along if you fancy it.
I wrote about last November’s excellent meetup in these pages, and following my blog post organizer Kirsten Campbell-Howes graciously asked me to take part in a future session, which, at the time, seemed a suitably distant prospect. However, the weeks have rolled by and this month’s meetup is the ‘board game special’ to which I hope to be able to bring some practical insight into the process of board game design. Fingers crossed!
Playtest
Can I also point your collective browsers to the Rob Harris’s Playtest Games Meetup, which is a monthly get-together for, well, playtesting games, oddly enough.
The group has been meeting for a while (and thoroughly productive and fun it has been, too!) but now that Rob has made the jump to Meetup, it looks like there’ll be plenty of new blood in future get-togethers. One thing you can never have enough of is playtesting, so hopefully the group can continue to be an excellent incubator of new ideas and new talent. And the more the merrier!
This post also appears on my BrettSpiel game design blog.
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Brett J. Gilbert
United Kingdom
Cambridge
Divinare — Coming from Asmodee 2012!
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In which I collate for the interested reader a few recent snippets of information about Divinare. Or rather, in the absence of an interested reader, purely for my own predilection and delight!
For example, over at Asmodee HQ, the company has added the game to their online catalogue, and posted a French publication date of 27th April. I have no definite information on when the game will reach other markets, but I shall keep a weather-eye out for news of its arrival overseas.
Asmodee have also now finished publishing a series of four ‘Making a Game’ articles about the development of my original prototype Oracle Pathway into Divinare. They are, of course, in French, but some translations have also appeared on the company’s Spanish and American websites.
* Chapter 1: From Prototype to Project — French, Spanish, English
* Chapter 2: Finding a Theme — French, Spanish, English
* Chapter 3: From Vision to Reality — French, Spanish
* Chapter 4: The Finishing Touches — French, Spanish
The game was on display at the Nürnberg Toy Fair at the beginning of February, where it was photographed by Daniel Danzer for BoardGameGeek News. His article boasts ‘94 pictures of 36 games’ and Daniel’s photos of Divinare really show off some of the amazing artwork by Benjamin Carré and Asmodee’s visual production work. (Great pics, Daniel!) The game was also snapped for the Milan Spiele website.
Elsewhere in Europe, Asmodee took the game to the recent Cannes Games Festival, where the game was shown off by a demonstrator in full costume, fully equipped with divination props! The teapot, in particular, was a lovely touch. Asmodee reported direct from Cannes, as did Guido for the German Tric Trac site.
And I cannot end without passing on the generous words of Bruno Cathala who, commenting on the French Tric Trac TV site, had this to say about Divinare:
It made me think of a Knizia at his best!
- Bruno Cathala
And you can’t really say fairer than that, now can you?
This post also appears on my BrettSpiel game design blog.
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Brett J. Gilbert
United Kingdom
Cambridge
Divinare — Coming from Asmodee 2012!
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In which I can finally, with great excitement and not a little pride, take the wraps off ‘Divinare’ — the new name for my game Oracle Pathway!
Yesterday, Asmodee made the first public announcement of the game by featuring it in their 2012 schedule, and included this not-quite-100%-final-just-yet box artwork. I have been bursting to share more about the game with the world for months, and now I can!
Divinare — Latin for “to foresee” — features the most wonderful and evocative artwork by French illustrator Benjamin Carré and is set in Victorian London at the very end of the 19th Century. Players test their predictive powers of chiromancy, crystallomancy, tasseomancy and astromancy, and take the part of one of four colourful characters to compete in the illustrious ‘International Contest of Mediums’.
My game will take its place in Asmodee’s line-up alongside Bruno Cathala & Serge Laget’s Mundus Novus: The two games share not only Latinate names, but Asmodee’s stylish new compact box format too! I am honoured, truly, to be in such distinguished company.
Philippe and the team at Asmodee have taken the greatest of care to craft my little game into something that can take on the world, and I cannot adequately express my gratitude for all their hard work and creative, thoughtful endeavour. Not that their work is done yet! There is still much to do before the game can be published in April, but for me that date cannot come soon enough. Stay tuned for more details soon!
This post also appears on my BrettSpiel game design blog.
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Brett J. Gilbert
United Kingdom
Cambridge
Divinare — Coming from Asmodee 2012!
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In which, primarily for my own reference, I collate the details of five board game design contests that are all open to international submissions. If you know of any other regular contests that I’ve missed, do let me know!
Europa Ludi (France/Spain)
http://www.ludotheque.com/spip.php?article583
Europa Ludi has been newly formed in 2012, and combines the existing Boulonge-Billancourt and Granollers contests. The schedule for this year’s contest has not yet been announced.
Hippodice (Germany)
http://www.hippodice.de/AWB.html
The 2012 contest is already underway, and the winners will be announced in March. Submissions for the 2012 contest were made in November 2011, with shortlisted prototypes requested in December.
2013 contest details
Deadline for submissions: November 2012
Winners announced: March 2013
Premio Archimede (Italy)
http://www.studiogiochi.com/en/p/premio-archimede.html
The Premio Archimede contest is run every two years by studiogiochi in Venice.
2012 contest details
Deadline for submissions: May 31st 2012
Winners announced: September 29th 2013
Lucca Comics and Games: Gioco Inedito (Italy)
http://lucca2011.luccacomicsandgames.com/index.php?
The contest is only for card games, and each year the contest organizers choose a theme, with is typically only a few words. For example, the themes for the 2009, 2010 and 2011 contests were ‘Nessun Dorma’, ‘15 Minutes’ and ‘Jungle!’.
2012 contest details (not yet confirmed)
Deadline for submissions: July 2012
Winners announced: October 2013
Ludopolis (Portugal)
http://ludopolis.pt/en/
The contest is being run for the first time in 2012 as part of the Ludopolis games festival held in Lisbon in June. Deadline for submissions has already passed and this year’s winners will be announced in June.
This post also appears on my BrettSpiel game design blog.
Mon Jan 16, 2012 12:09 am
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Brett J. Gilbert
United Kingdom
Cambridge
Divinare — Coming from Asmodee 2012!
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All in the blue unclouded weather
Thick-jewell’d shone the saddle-leather,
The helmet and the helmet-feather
Burn’d like one burning flame together,
As he rode down to Camelot.
— Alfred, Lord Tennyson, ‘The Lady of Shalott’
This isn’t a post about anything very profound; I just wanted to interrupt your regular viewing to report on the entertaining but doubtless unintentional similarities between two new board game cover designs: Donald X. Vaccarino’s Kingdom Builder by Queen Games, and the new edition of Reiner Knizia’s Kingdoms by Fantasy Flight.
The illustrations share so many cues — a red-cloaked knight overlooks a gleaming white citadel amongst an impossibly mountainous landscape — that I couldn’t let them slip by unnoticed. Both are prime examples, I would say, of a familiar mythic representation of the age of chivalry, rooted in Arthurian lore, that directly evokes “the saintly days of yore” (as Poe once put it).
And when I say familiar, I really mean it! It took me five minutes on BoardGameGeek to find the examples below, so there are probably plenty more out there. When it comes to chivalry in board games, it does seems as if there’s a lot of it about.
This post also appears on my regular BrettSpiel blog, which you are, of course, more than welcome to come visit!
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Brett J. Gilbert
United Kingdom
Cambridge
Divinare — Coming from Asmodee 2012!
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I'm going to try cross-posting stuff from my regular blog here on BGG, although the reformatting is a bit fiddly, isn't it? If you know of any HTML-to-BGG-forum-formatting conversion tips or tricks, do let me know!
Devotees of such things will no doubt have noticed that Days of Wonder have announced the twin winners of their Ticket to Ride Map Design Contest. Fulsome congratulations are due to the winners, who will see their maps published later this year: Ian Vincent of the UK (go Ian!), and François Valentyne of Canada. Readers interested in the delicious details of the new geographies offered in the forthcoming Map Collections can find out more on the DoW website.
When I first heard about the contest I, like many, many others, immediately set about the task of designing my own map, but before doing so publicly speculated on what Days of Wonder, in creating the contest, might be looking for. Ian Vincent read that blog post (without realising who I was, although we had previously met) and has, graciously, been kind enough to credit me in the rules for his India map.
Not, I hasten to add, for inspiring any specific part of his design, but rather, I think, for helping to articulate the nature of the Ticket to Ride brand itself. It’s genuinely gratifying to know that my words were helpful, and a geek thrill of another kind to see my newly minted nickname — Brett “Spiel” Gilbert (thanks Ian!) — up in metaphorical lights. Commensurately small lights, of course, but lights nonetheless.
But what of my own design? News of the winners has reminded me of how much I enjoyed the challenge of designing a map, and I thought you, dear reader, might be interested to see what I came up with — Ticket to Ride: Around the World.
The year is 1925. A quarter-century after our five old friends met to commemorate Phileas Fogg’s famous journey, they meet again. Within the past decade, great transport projects such as the Panama Canal and the Trans-Siberian Railway have opened up the world to the adventurous traveller like never before, and now, with the Roaring Twenties in full swing, and inspired by their dynamic spirit and industrial fervour, our friends agree to take on their grandest challenge yet — to recreate Fogg’s impossible journey for themselves!
That was my pitch, and the principle conceit of the map was that some routes would wrap around the left and right edges of the map, creating an entirely new geography and the possibility of true ‘Around the World’ tickets. These ‘long route’ tickets feature two cities as usual, but require them to be connected by a single, continuous, circumnavigational series of track. Other than that specific addition, the game preserves all the familiar concepts of the existing games and added no new mechanics or scoring bonuses.
I do wonder, of course, whether anyone else who entered had the same idea. It’s impossible to know, although since when I mentioned the contest to my maze-designing sister, herself a keen TtR online player, she independently expressed exactly the same idea, I can’t help but think that other entrants had it too!
Anyway, I began by looking at the different world map projections, and quickly settled on the Robinson projection as being a good fit for the standard Ticket to Ride board size. After that I roughly scaled the projection, overlaid this with a scan of the original Ticket to Ride map (of the United States) and, working in my favourite graphics package, began to pick out a selection of world cities that might form the basis of a workable map.
I deliberately set out to create a map which would have (roughly) the same scale and density as the US map, partly because I was looking to create a map that would similarly fill the rectangular board space, but also for pragmatic reasons. I knew the US map ‘worked’, in terms of its balance of route lengths and colourations, and I didn’t want to set myself the additional challenge of reinventing that part of the system. To me, the geographical conceit of the map was the key idea.
Soon enough I began to add routes to the map, using the background US map as guide to how large the train car spaces needed to be. If you compare the first two versions of my map you will see that I quickly ‘zoomed in’ on the Robinson projection, cropping the Arctic, Antarctic and Pacific regions as much as possible to focus on the main continental landmasses. This maximised the usable portions of the map and allowed more room for longer routes to be fitted between cities.
The overall form of the map began to take shape quite speedily, although many details remained to be worked out. I had to pick junction cities for the wrap-around routes, and work out how dense or otherwise all the ferry routes demanded by the abundant oceans ought to be. Inevitably, of course, I started to take rather preposterous liberties — What’s that? A trans-Atlantic tunnel between Africa and South America? — but I was still playing around with ideas and figuring out where more routes would be needed for the map to be suitably connected to support 5 players.
Ah, now things are starting to come together! This was an early attempt at colouring the routes, but established some useful conventions: Note the rounded lozenges for ferry routes, where dots indicate necessary locomotives, the heavy outline on tunnel routes, and the six differently coloured routes that span the board edges. Things would continue to evolve, but I wanted to make sure that the Pacific routes would be clearly readable during the game to avoid any confusion, so decided upon a limited number, all differently coloured, which would be as disparately located as possible: top, bottom and middle.
Here we catch the map in the middle of being re-coloured (something that I did repeatedly, each time trying to balance the mix and density of routes). Note that the routes within Africa and Asia have been visually tided up — I didn’t like all those kinks! — and that there is a new Iceland-Africa ferry route, that there is (at last) a ferry from Dakar to South America, and that some of the place names have now changed.
By now I had begun to think more carefully about the time and place of this map (the very thing I counselled readers about in my original post) and realised that I needed to pick a specific year and cross-check world place names with that era. I eventually settled on 1925, and so Brasília was out (not founded until 1956!), and Jakarta, Ulan Bator and Chennai all needed to revert to their erstwhile monikers.
Playtesting continued to reveal more things that needed to be fixed, such as relieving the congestion around Panama, and also demonstrated that simply forming a circumnavigational route was actually rather hard work! Not that that I wanted the map to make things easy for the players, but I did moderate the challenge by contracting key routes such as Tokyo-Panama, and completely removing the need for a trans-Pacific stopover in Hanga Roa (goodbye Easter Island!). Meanwhile, South America, which I had never been happy with, changed again to more accurately reflected the local geography of the cities, and elsewhere some of the tunnel routes shifted, again to better match the placement of large mountain ranges.
Rules mavens should note that the necessarily large number of ferry routes mean that the game is played using the ‘three card’ joker rule from Ticket to Ride: Nordic Countries (where, when completing a ferry route, three matching cards can be played in place of a locomotive).
Another complete re-colouration of the routes and — at the very last! — the sudden disappearance of Beijing and appearance of San Juan (plus another nudge to South America) brought the map into focus. Personally I really enjoy both the detail and the whole, and was pleased with how the varied geography created different challenges for the players at different points on the map.
My favourite part (if I were forced to choose) is the array of routes in and out of Panama, which features regular, ferry and tunnel routes, and all 9 route colours (if you count grey as a colour, that is). That one city offers everything in the game in one place!
This post also appears on my regular BrettSpiel blog, which you are, of course, more than welcome to come visit!
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