Archive for Brett J. Gilbert
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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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I recently tweeted about my small stash of early-to-mid 20th-Century card games — the accumulated harvest of an erstwhile eBay habit! — and their often wonderful visual design. This seemed to pique enough people’s curiosity, so for the interested reader here are some images of the first game out of the metaphorical hat: Rainbow.
I can’t find any additional information about the game, but the British patent number suggests that the patent was granted during 1920, most probably in the latter half of that year. Which, if you consider the design on the back of the cards, presents an interesting confluence of history: this is precisely the period during which Adolf Hitler adopted the swastika as the symbol of the Nazi Party.
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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We were schooner-rigged and rakish
With a long and lissom hull,
And we flew the pretty colours
Of the crossbones and the skull;
We’d a big black jolly roger
Flapping grimly at the fore,
And we sailed the Spanish waters
In the happy days of yore.
— John Masefield, ‘Long John Silver’
I am thrilled to announce that my card game Brethren of the Coast has been announced as the winner of this year’s Hippodice game design contest in Germany. The Hippodice organizers have not yet themselves published the results — so I sincerely hope that I am not jumping anyone’s gun! — but the news comes from no-less a gaming authority than the Spiel Des Jahres website. A trusted sourced, I think we can all agree.
I spotted my own name, quite by chance, in the @SpieldesJahres twitter feed — something that would surely raise the eyebrows of even the most phlegmatic of game designers — and I will post more details soon. But for now: Go me!
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 rattle through my reactions to the nine (count them!) new games played over the past week. As in earlier episodes, I won’t formally review the games, but will instead just jot down what my designer’s eye made of them.
Glen More — Matthias Cramer (Alea, 2010)
First to the table at the weekend was this nice little tile-laying game which I’d always liked the look of. Martin warned me of the bizarrely game-breaking tile ‘Loch Oich’, and his prediction that whoever claimed it would eventually win was spot on. It does seem egregiously over-powered, and the speed with which the game accelerated to its end was unsettling.
The game packs a lot in, but felt like it ended, anticlimactically, just as we were getting to the good bit. I did like the tile rondel and the market, but the successive rounds of majority scoring were a bit predictable, and the (necessary) penalty for over-building an unsatisfactory hack.
Gilbert’s Unreliably Insightful Design Evaluation (GUIDE) rating: 3/5
Quarriors! — Elliot & Lang (WizKids, 2011)
We barrelled into this one with rather more enthusiasm than hope, and tried our best, in the face of faltering expectations, to enjoy it. The first game was (of course) random, and felt disappointingly one-sided — a victory of pure skill on Lucy’s part, of course! — but we immediately had a second game to see whether, with a little more care, it was possible to exercise a little more control.
And it was, but only a little. It’s hardly a surprise that a dice game should feel random, and the game does give players some tools to counter this, but without that randomness there’s little point to the game at all, so you just have to go with it.
We liked very much how the cards changed the characteristics of the dice, so there’s plenty of game here… for the right crowd.
GUIDE rating: 3/5
Oregon — Berg & Berg (Han im Glück, 2007)
A very clear and intuitive ruleset smoothed our experience of what is a very neat and engaging tile-laying and meeple-placing family game. The simple card-play and the surprisingly powerful joker and extra-turn tokens did keep things moving, and the way in which the game’s geography developed was fun. There weren’t, however, too many sparks; the game was simply a pleasant-enough journey through a pretty-enough landscape.
I do appear to be damning Oregon with faint praise, but all I can say is that it hasn’t really stuck in the memory.
GUIDE rating: 3/5
Hansa — Michael Schacht (ABACUSSPIELE, 2004)
I’ve always wanted to try this, and just like Oregon, the rules and gameplay are smooth and clear, and gave us plenty to think about. Hansa is certainly a game that does more with less, which is always a good thing in my book, and the game is quick enough that poor choices won’t survive long enough to be regretted too deeply.
Actually, our game was over a little too quickly, and the ending had the same sense of “Oh. Look. It’s over. How’d that happen?” that Glen More had, but I think more plays of Hansa would be rewarded with a better understanding of the game’s tempo, and hence a better feel for how to play the middle- and end-game.
Small, but perfectly formed, the game is an object lesson for any designer.
GUIDE rating: 5/5
Get Bit! — Dave Chalker (Mayday Games, 2007)
This one was a just-one-more-before-bedtime interlude, and something of a pleasant surprise. I wasn’t expecting much — the cards, robots and shark all felt a little cheap, to be honest — but the game did deliver a dose of double-guessing fun which certainly never threatened to out-stay its welcome. And, cheap though they were, the plastic robots and shark did add a certain something (although quite why a shark would be nibbling a robot’s limbs is anyone’s guess).
GUIDE rating: 3/5
Takenoko — Antoine Bauza (Bombyx, 2011)
Despite playing one key rule wrong for the entire game (and by the time we realised, it was too late to make a difference) we all enjoyed this lovingly crafted and produced gem of a game. At first, though, it seemed almost too light to be interesting. Great bits, a fun theme and thoughtfully designed and helpfully explanatory player boards are all well and good, but where’s the meat? Where’s the meaningful interaction?
It wasn’t until we interrogated the distribution of the objective cards at the end of the game that we began to see how the game would have a bit more to offer, once you’d fully understood it. Having said that, there does seem to be the presence of a ‘hit and hope’ strategy at the end of the game, in which players can grab new objectives (specifically, those based on the existing placement of tiles) in the blind ambition of finding one that they can immediately score. This doesn’t break the game, but it has the possibility of rendering the end-game anticlimactic (something of a theme developing here, I think?).
GUIDE rating: 4/5
Emerald — Rüdiger Dorn (ABACUSSPIELE, 2002)
Though firmly in the territory of the family game, with a simple ruleset and clear objectives, Emerald nevertheless offers lots of interest, and would be an excellent introduction to more meaty tactical Eurogames for younger children.
The randomness of the card distribution will easily skew the outcome beyond the realm of strategy, and the capricious behaviour of the dragon will grate with more studious players, but taken for what it is, the game is a light, fun romp.
One thing I really liked was the effortless pressure the game puts on the players to ‘get on with it’. You can’t hang back indefinitely, and you can never retreat. The dragon sits in wait and, whether you like it or not, you’ll have to take your chances eventually. Remember, fortune favours the brave!
GUIDE rating: 4/5
Ora et Labora — Uwe Rosenberg (Lookout Games, 2011)
This is quite the meatiest Eurogame I’ve played in many a long month and though professionally curious, I was really not expecting to be so entertained and so engaged for the full 2½ hours that it took us to play. And yet, entertained and engaged I most certainly was! I am no Rosenberg aficionado, so cannot speak of how this compares to or contrasts with it’s cousins Agricola or Le Havre, but the received wisdom seems to be that with Ora et Labora the designer has continued to develop and perfect his very particular art.
Yes, the game has a multitude of rules and a boat-load of components, all sprinkled with an expansive litany of iconography, but once the game is up and running, everything flows incredibly smoothly, and is wonderfully supported by the excellent graphic design. Quite how any designer tames such a multi-headed beast of a game I am genuinely at a loss to know, but Uwe clearly knows his onions. And a wide selection of other animal-, mineral- and vegetable-based commodities.
What I particularly liked was the degree of player interaction, not something Eurogames are typically famed for, especially those in which players independently build their own tableaux. But through the simple and really rather cunning trick of allowing players to pay their opponents to do work for them, the interest in the affairs of others, and the ability to disrupt their plans, is increased enormously.
GUIDE rating: 5/5
Dragon’s Gold — Bruno Faidutti (White Goblin Games, 2011)
And finally we have this recently rereleased title by Faidutti, which stands or falls on whether you can stand (a) the direct, time-limited negotiation, and (b) the utter chaos of the magical item cards. This is by no means a bad game — although the miniscule numerals and dark, indistinguishable art and card colours of the recent edition are almost unforgivable — but this really is one of those ‘love it or hate it’ games.
I’m certain it will work brilliantly for some, but for others it will be the gaming equivalent of nails down a chalkboard. As one detractor on BoardGameGeek pithily put it: “Bickering in one minute chunks. No thank you.”
I didn’t think I’d like it, and I was right. But as ever, I’m glad I had the opportunity to find out!
GUIDE rating: 2/5
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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Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.
— Sun Tzu
How does change happen? That’s the question that’s been occupying me, in amongst the many recent playtests of my and other designers’ games. The initial creative spark is remarkable enough, but no game arrives fully formed, and so all games once created go through a process of change. Playtesting is the method we rely on to both initiate and validate those changes, and it is the very blackest of arts.
For one thing, it can be incredibly painful. Reaction to a new game can range from elation to derision or — which is demonstrably worse — indifference. As a designer you have to learn to suffer these slings and arrows and emerge unscathed, even if your game does not. But what happens then? If playtesting reveals that all you ever had was a bad idea, that’s one thing: throw it out and start over. But if playtesting reveals that you gave a good idea a bad execution — signalled by the playtester’s familiar refrain: “I like it, but…” — then the designer’s work is only just beginning.
First, the designer must learn to properly filter the playtesters’ comments: to tease out, as dispassionately as possible, some degree of genuinely objective meaning. And, assuming that’s possible, the designer must then have the gumption to actually do something about it: to embrace change. However, it is the received wisdom about the nature of that change that I would seek to challenge.
The risk is that game design is perceived from the outset as a process of necessarily iterative, evolutionary change: small, inevitable steps taken along a path that, if through nothing more than plain, plodding perseverance, will eventually reach its goal. But this approach, with each step taken to address a detail not the whole, can, perhaps paradoxically, often excise the heart of the game while leaving the surface scarred but intact.
My advice then is this: that radical, truly transformative change is, far more often than not, the only way forward. It will feel unpredictable, unstable, counterintuitive, dangerously uncontrolled, but the simple truth of it is that anything more timid is just death by a thousand cuts.
No, that’s not the truth of it. The truth, as Wilde observed, is never simple. But I see the result of timidity in my own designs and in those of others: I see it as a palimpsest of carefully placed, well-intentioned footprints, each one obscuring a little more precisely that which the designer was seeking to reveal.
Change is necessary; a journey is demanded; and if you take big enough leaps the footprints disappear.
This post also appears on my BrettSpiel game design blog.
Thu Jan 26, 2012 12:24 pm
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Brett J. Gilbert
United Kingdom
Cambridge
Divinare — Coming from Asmodee 2012!
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A few days ago I included information about the forthcoming Europa Ludi contest in a list of five international board game design contests — little did I know that I was preempting the announcement by a matter of hours!
Details of how to enter, and information about its schedule for 2012, are being posted on the new Europa Ludi website. So far the information is only in French, Spanish and Catalan, but Matthieu Nicolas, the Europa Ludi contest manager, has confirmed that the English and German information will be posted in the next day or two.
If you are a budding game designer and would like to enter, you need to be quick: Submissions must be received by 15th February.
Good luck to any and all entrants, and also to the organizers during the inaugural year of the contest. The Boulogne-Billancourt and Granollers contests have both had a successful history, and surely now have a bright new future together — and a rather fine logo, to boot!
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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Things have, I admit, been a bit quiet here at BrettSpiel Towers of late. But worry not, dear readers! There has been lots going on — I’ve simply been neglecting to write about any of it. So, what’s new?
Oracle Pathway: Le chat est sorti du sac
The Big News is that Oracle Pathway is coming, and it’s coming fast! I can’t tell you (yet) what it’s going to be called or very much about the theme, but I can tell you that Asmodee are doing a top-notch job. The publishing contract was only signed last September, but since then the team at Asmodee have been working flat-out to get the game ready to show at Nürmberg in just a couple of week’s time. And, as a way of teasing out the big reveal, Asmodee have so far published two ‘behind the scenes’ articles (in French) documenting their development of the game. Your French may be better than mine, but if not then you can at least enjoy Google’s entertainly odd interpretations…
* Behind the scenes of a game — Chapter 1: The prototype [original]
* Behind the scenes of a game — Chapter 2: Towards a theme [original]
There is some information in these articles about the exciting thematic direction Asmodee have taken, but the main visuals are all of my original prototype. (The only clue to the new look is the little ‘eye’ graphic connected with the second article.) I have seen all the key component artwork and, just this week, the first sketches of the cover artwork; I hope to be able to share some of this soon. I just need clearance from Asmodee HQ!
’Twas the season to be gaming!
Just in time for Christmas I took delivery of a big shipment of lovely new games, which represented part of my spoils from last year’s Concurs Ciutat de Granollers de creació de jocs — the very contest that put Oracle Pathway on its path to publication. While I was away with my family I was able to try out some of the new games, which meant repeated plays of HeckMeck Barbecue, Zooloretto Mini, Level X and The Spiecherstadt — plus our first experience of the curious delight of Geistesblitz. In the New Year I also picked up a cheap copy of Fast Flowing Forest Fellers (thank you: The Works!), so my collection continues to grow. Alarmingly.
I was pleased with all my new games, and although switching from the regular HeckMeck mindset to the new demands of Barbecue was a little jarring at first, the game certainly grew on us. The components are wonderful and the gameplay rather more subtle than it at-first appears — the cunning Doktor does it again!
Zooloretto Mini was a hit, but I am now curious to try the original. There was quite enough game for us in the Mini version — does the bigger box really deliver anything more? Level X played less well with the others, although I rather enjoyed it’s simple brand of combinatorial dice-based tactics.
The Spiecherstadt was a step up from the other games, but went down surprisingly well with my mother and sister, with whom Pickomino has gotten the most plays in the past couple of years. I wasn’t sure the little Stefan Feld brain-burner was really going to hit the spot, but they were both up for the challenge and more than capable. (I, with all my gamer sensibilities, floundered about and lost both times.)
Geistesblitz was a lot of fun, although somewhat bewildering at first — I would love to see how kids play this one, since I think we were all a little too sober and cautious. And Fast Flowing Forest Fellers delivered a suitably speedy race game, with plenty of good-natured but ungentlemanly pushing and shoving thrown in.
Saturday 7th January: Gaming at the Grad Pad
The monthly board game meet in Cambridge’s well-appointed University Centre (do come along on the first Saturday of each month if you fancy it!) was another great opportunity to play games old and new. I avoided getting pulled into anything too heavy, and instead stuck to lighter fare: Carcassonne: Hunters and Gathers, 7 Wonders (including Leaders), Dixit and a furious round of Bohnanza to finish.
Given all my Carcassonne experience I was expecting great things, but in our 4-player match, I came last (albeit by a slim 6 points). And, just to compound my defeat, all three of my competitors managed joint first!
I did rather better in our 6-player 7 Wonders match, pulling off a rather stunning, although highly unexpected, win. I’m no 7 Wonders aficionado, having only one previous play to my name, but I was lucky that my Leaders gave me a hint at a strategy which, largely thanks to my demilitarized neighbours, paid off handsomely. I do really like both the base game, and the clever way that the Leaders expansion has been slotted oh-so-neatly into it, but the fact that in a 6-player game I only really ‘played’ with my immediate neighbours, and even then tangentially, is curious. Games that can scale to 7 players are good news for gamers, but I’d rather see them deliver more of a genuinely communal experience.
I’d always wanted to try Dixit, and now that I have I can say that it certainly deserves its success. Because of its openness and creativity, it’s a game that will adapt to almost any group, and the tension and interest created by its scoring design does an excellent job of keeping all the players involved in every round. And it has small wooden bunnies, so what’s not to like?
Bohnanza is another very well-known game that I have played only a few times, and then only with adults. Playing a 4-player game with two experienced under-10s was, in contrast, a delightful revelation. Their own approach to the subtle art of negotiation turned the game into something more akin to the raucous brawl of Pit — and the game was quite the better for it! There was no chance to carefully consider other player’s positions; no time to deliberate on the mathematical consequences of any particular trade. I simply had to brave the storm, knuckle down, up my game, and learn to play by their rules.
This post also appears on my BrettSpiel game design blog.
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