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Andreas Propst
Austria
enzenkirchen
upper austria
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Since I was in my early teens I constantly thought about making my own card games, enthralled by the all-popular Magic: the Gathering. Especially when performing mind-numbing activities like chopping wood with my father or weeding the garden with my mother my mind started to stray and ideas and concepts for new games came to me. The first of them was a game about food where you had to get a maximum of nutrients out of your diet while avoiding fat-caused heart attacks.
Then about five or six years ago – some Lord of the Rings movie was in the cinemas – some friends of mine were bragging about making their very own fantasy table top game, which sparked my interest in designing a game again. I could only shake my head at their feeble attempts of creating a better-than-Games-Workshop game out of nowhere. So I said: “I bet I can make a better game than your fantasy tabletop illusion in like no time!”
And that is how my first fantasy card game came about in 2005: Warlocks. It was like a crossbreed between the ever-on-my-mind M:tG and some trick taking game as they are popular in Austrian taverns. Sadly it did not play out that well – despite of some nice artwork I in all my enthusiasm had already made – so I, quite to the contrary of my friends who had given up on their game before they ever got started, went on to the next card game project.
This time around I wanted to have something unique and more different from M:tG. So a game under the working title of “Nordic Walking” came to be. Each player represented one mighty Hero who could summon Units who could perform daring Deeds or cast magical spells. Sadly, at the time when I was finished the World of Warcraft TCG was released and after I had read an article about it I stopped working on “Nordic Walking” as some of the concepts were just about the same in both games.
So instead of throwing in the sponge I made a dungeoncrawler-style game aptly named “Dragonslayers” (which is available at www.thegamecrafter.com even) and then moved on to another take on a Customizable Card Game of my own devising. After a fit of inspiration in the year 2006 which I can only call an epiphany the game that is now known as “Elemental Clash” took form rather rapidly like a red hot iron bar taken out of the furnace.
EC started out as 6 A5 pages in a notebook of mine. On the first page I established the Deck = Life Points mechanic as a main pillar of the game and then went on to define the ATK and DEF Zones. On page two I made a sketch on how an alternative
resource system could work by stacking “Energy Cards” and playing spells and creatures on top of them. Also on page 2 I defined the 4 flavors of the game. At first I wanted to give it an antediluvian theme with Humans, Albs, Neanderthals and some intelligent Dinosaur species as the four factions. On this very page two I decided to have the four classic elements Earth, Air, Fire and Water of medieval mysticism and magic instead. On page 5 and 6 I assigned to each element its abilities, its strengths and weaknesses and then went on to devise two 40 card starter decks. Now speaking of epiphanies: As a matter of fact the cards I described on page 5 and 6 are about 80% the same as you can purchase now, five years after that revelation from the gods of gaming.
After I had established the mechanics, the "colour pie" and a good deal of the basic set cards I went about to make a first prototype for playtesting. At that point I still used Microsoft Word for designing my cards – with respectable outcomes I would say. Then something crucial happened. A relative and friend of mine pointed me to “The Geek”, which proved to be the best thing that has ever happened to me in my life as amateur game designer and artist. From then on it was really just spreading the word, getting the game up on the database, recruit playtesters, improve the layout, make hand drawn artwork (at first only black and white pencil drawings). Helpful people were to be found everywhere. So at first EC was available for PnP, then as an artscow deck, then as a first edition on TGC (which sold poorly but still made it on the popular list on there). EC got a lot of positive feedback and reviews. An EC picture about the evolution of a card from back in 2006 until now got over 60 thumbs from total strangers and was on the BGG front page for days. EC and my humble person even made it onto the Hotness in the wake of that picture. Also my good friend Gregory from France made a VASSAL module so EC could be played online. Then last year I posted in the game design forum asking for suggestions for publishers who might be interested in Elemental Clash. Fellow gamer Markus Hagenauer pointed me to TOG Entertainment...
Well the rest is history. Now EC is published by TOG Entertainment ( http://www.togentertainment.com) with an all new colourful layout and full color artwork, the latter all done by myself, and many Expansion Sets are planned already. Expansion Set 1, "Underworld" will be available at the TOG shop by mid may.
So that is the story in short - hope you enjoyed it!
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