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Andrea Chiarvesio
Italy
Torino
Piemonte
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Unpublished PrototypeI believe different people have very different approaches to the first phase of designing a game.
As of me, I try to build a mental image of the game. Not very often I need to put things on paper, because when I am in the creative status actually the game occupies a large portion of my mind, so the rules and the components are somehow always with me.
What were the basic elements for Hyperborea (still civilicube at that time)?
a) each population has a few basic skills.
a1) Combining the skills they can "do things".
a2) The skills are colored cubes.
a3) Cubes are taken randomly from that population's bag.
a4) Each bag is a pool of cubes, and new cubes can be added during the game
b) the game board is hexagonal.
c) the population occupies and moves through the board, so it needs to be represented somehow.
Of course, the core issue was bullet point "a1". How do you combine the cubes? At first, I thought to the cubes as letters of an alphabet, letting the players free to create their own words. It's a fascinating concept, but a balancing nightmare. I could easily see game-breaking combo to ruin the game and spoil the fun.
So, we (me and Pierluca) would have been the ones writing the words. Players will still be free to putting the words together looking for the best combination and timings.
How does all of this turns into mechanics? Each population (let's call them "tribes" from now on) starts with few basic "technologies". All technologies require one or more cubes to be activated. By placing cubes on a technology (in the first prototype we had technologies on a board, with each player having his own specific board), and removing them when all the required cubes are on the technology, that technology is activated, and the player can use its effect.
So, if I have the technology "riding" that requires one green and one yellow cube, once I have placed one green and one yellow cube on its space, I can remove both to gain two "movement points". Movement points, as anyone can guess, are used to move population between the hexagons.
To allow customization and growth, there was also need for "advanced technologies": more powerful and sometimes more complex "words" with better effects. Each tribe starts with one advanced technology and more can be discovered (acquired) during the game.
To create many technologies was one of the first shared tasks between me and Pierluca. It wasn't easy also because at the very beginning we even had cubes of 9 colors! Other than war (red), movement (green), trade (yellow), knowledge (blu), growth (purple), build (orange) and waste (grey), we even had white for blessing and black for uhm... curses? We did not had a setting yet estabilished, so black and white were, more or less, the concept of "good vs evil" "angels vs demons" "order vs chaos", so common in fantasy games we both like.
Anyway, I'll spare you the details (also because I don't remember them all!) but we had a good number of technologies ready to test before our first game. As anyone can imagine, they were unbalanced and naive, but fine for a first play.
let's briefly discuss item a3) = cubes are randomly drawn from each player's bag.
At first, the idea was to make it work right like deck-building games. Your bag is out of cubes? Just put back inside it all the used cubes and you have a new deck... ehm bag to draw your cubes from.
This mechanic proved immediately, even if only in my mind playtest, to not work very well - to be honest to do not work at all - with the whole "cubes as alphabet letters" concept. Having more cubes with this system would have been more a hinder than an advantage (it's actually a well known truth with deck building games that keeping your deck thin is a great path- if not the first- to victory). And, since there are no cubes that simply are worth victory points, no player would have been incouraged to acquire more cubes, once he had the two-three duplicates of the colors he needed.
First big difference between Hyperborea and a "pool building" game: when you're out of cubes in your bag... you wait for the other players to be out of cubes as well. This means that extra cubes are worth (potentially) extra technology activations, or other moves if you like.
This is of course a strong incentive to gain more cubes and to grow your tribe-civilization, that is a goal we wanted to achieve.
This post is becoming too long (and I need to go back to work), so I am splitting it in two parts... next half later today, or tomorrow!
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