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Emanuele Ornella
France
Dijon
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The idea of Charon Inc. came to me just after Hermagor was released in 2006. Hermagor received good feedback, but there were two main concerns:
-----1. The theme did not appeal to a significant number of players (who were expecting something different for a fantasy-themed game), and
-----2. Too much "manipulation" was needed for each action.
Hermagor is, in fact, a gamer's game and it takes up to two hours to be played. It's tense and strategic, though as mentioned above, probably it is too "fiddly". In spite of this, the main mechanism of the market was really appreciated and enjoyed. That was also the most tense and strategic part of the game.
Before I proceed, let me explain something more about this market mechanism.
The market is basically a rectangular board where tiles are placed at the beginning of each phase. Tiles have goods that can be sold later in the game, but you can consider these as general resources. Each player on his turn must place one of his pawns on one of three possible positions on the board:
-----• Directly on a tile
-----• In between two tiles (on tile edges)
-----• In between four tiles (on tile corners)
Depending on these positions, a single pawn is able to "touch" or influence 1, 2 or 4 tiles. When all pawns for each player are placed, each single tile is checked and the player who has the most pawns "touching" the tile will win the tile. Any tie is broken in a clever way: A pawn that touches more tiles has less tie-breaking power. Because some positions were more useful than others, the cost to place a pawn was different.
So I started to think about ways to create a smoother game and also one that could be played by families as well, while still using the same core mechanism of the market. At the same time, I started to think about simplifying my design for two main reasons. The first was that the market for bigger publishers seems to be for simple games – easy to learn and taking between 30 and 60 minutes, if possible. The second was that it was a challenge for me to try to design good games that are not too complex.
Too often my games came out geared only for gamers (think Hermagor, Il Principe, Assyria), while the game which had the most success was Oltremare – the simplest one.
I started to think of how I could keep the Hermagor market mechanism flavor, yet have a different game. The way, I knew, was to simplify it. So I started to get rid of money. In Hermagor, each time you place a pawn, you need to pay money. The pawns you played, at the end of the phase, will earn back that money. So you first pay money, and then you gain money for the pawn placement! That was something I thought I should remove for sure. And that was one of the main reasons for the length of the game: paying, exchanging banknotes, and calculating how much you would have earn in the end was very time-consuming.
However, money in the Hermagor market was a way to balance one of the main problems of the market: If you play your pawns on the center of the market, you will need to fight more to retain the market spots. That's simply because there are more chances that another pawn will remove your hegemony. So money was the balancing factor: If you placed a pawn in the center of the market, you paid less than if you placed the pawn on the corner or on the border.
Hermagor market – image courtesy of Dave Lartigue
I needed to find a solution for this to balance the mechanism. The solution arrived one day when I realized that another way to balance the position was to offer more resources in the center of the market keeping the "cost" of the pawn the same for all the markets. In other words, instead of differentiating the cost for placing a pawn, I differentiated the reward. So on the corners, where it's easier to maintain the superiority on a spot, I decided to reduce the number of resources a player could earn. While in the center, where the competition is more intense; the reward, in terms of number of resources earned, should be greater.
Because the cost of placing pawns was equalized, I was able to remove it completely, so in our new game there is no more money, and no more payment for placing a pawn. That was the greatest simplification of the game.
Then I wanted something easier to play as well. The first part of the game is therefore to collect resources from the market by placing pawns on strategic positions. What then to do with the resources? Well, the easiest way to use resources is to build something with them! So I decided to have cards depicting resources to be built.
As it usually happens, I then started to think about a theme for the prototype. When I am happy enough with the core mechanism, having a theme to think of helps me to go ahead with the rest of the design.
I needed something different from a market theme, and certainly different from a fantasy theme. My choice was an historical theme – the emperor Charlemagne. Pawns became the tax collectors, and resources were needed to build part of Charlemagne's huge castle!
Unfortunately my design was still not simple enough, and I realized that because the game was still too long and too complex to be explained easily. However, I started to show it to publishers. Gryphon Games, and specifically Rick Soued, wanted to test it. Rick was able to see how good the core mechanism was, but he confirmed my hypothesis: The game was still way too complex for the mass market.
Rick and the Gryphon team really enjoyed the game, and while we arranged to sign the contract, they started to re-think and simplify the game more and more, paring it down to just the two essential elements of the market and the flag selection (see below). They also changed the theme from an historical one to a science fiction one, and I really appreciated that: I love science fiction, but I was always told that publishers are not willing to have SF themes for games, though maybe this is a trend that is changing in the last few years.
Rick and his team did a great job on simplifying the game, leaving the strategy and the fun part intact. The artwork, by Charlie Bink, and the theme are also great. In Charon Inc. each player is the CEO of a futuristic company that is settling the main Pluto moon (Charon indeed!) to extract the minerals from there. Using the same minerals it's possible to build buildings directly in the moon. These buildings are the way to score!
We did a lot of playtests after each change, and in the end we agreed on all of them! Rick coordinated some great team work, even though many of us live remotely from each other.
For those who have played Hermagor already, I wanted to add something, a completely new and original mechanism to make Charon not just a simplified version of Hermagor, but a completely new game, with a similar idea, but with a very different flavor and strategy. Together with the main mechanism of the market, that new action is positioning flags with which to stake claims in Charon.
Each player now has five flags to be positioned on the regions of Charon regions. There is one flag more than the number a player is allowed to use to stake claims on regions. Each flag is initially placed on a "special action area." Placing a flag on the moon requires the choice of flag, and therefore the choice of which special action that player will not be able to use. At the end of the "staking" phase only one flag remains on a special action area, which will trigger a special ability. This is a mechanism where each turn you need to select not only where to position the flag on the moon, but which special ability (area) you are going NOT to use. Rick and I spent a great deal of time in choosing and refining these special actions, working hard to create a "balance" between them which makes the choice of which action to retain another difficult and challenging decision for the players to make.
A bonus that I am very pleased with is that the game works very well (I would say better than Hermagor) for two players only. For any number of players (2-5), the game is tense and the interaction between the players, while contesting the limited resources of the shared moon of Charon, is incredibly high. All in all, I think Charon Inc. is an excellent game, with terrific components, art, and thematic "flavor" that plays very well for gamers and non-gamers as well. I hope you will enjoy this game as much as I enjoyed the process of designing it, and I would love to hear feedback from you about this game.
Emanuele Ornella
Editor's note: This preview first appeared on BoardgameNews.com on August 31, 2010.
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Hermagor market – image courtesy of Dave Lartigue
