Archive for Eric Vogel
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Eric Vogel
United States
Hayward
California
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Currently, I am best known for designing fast-playing (and I like to think relatively meaty) filler games. However I do design larger games, and sometimes my little fillers start out as longer games.
I started making filler games because I could afford to self-publish them, then continued to do so because publishers seem more willing to take a chance on a relatively new designer if the game would be inexpensive to produce. I have a large-scale game design (working title: Rise of Carthage) that I have been working on since about 2006, and Hibernia was initially an outgrowth of its development. Hopefully one day I will have enough of track record as a game designer to get larger games published, and Rise of Carthage will finally see the light of day.
There is a common feature of light wargames that has always bothered me, which is that most of them reward defensive play. If player A fights player B, then both are weakened and player C is the only real winner. The problem with this is that attacking is the most enjoyable activity in a wargame – yet the emotionally rewarding play does not bring you closer to victory most of the time.
Rise of Carthage is partly a light wargame and involves several mechanisms to reward players for being aggressive. Back in 2007, Carthage was basically complete, except that I wasn't happy with its scoring system. I was experimenting with possible scoring systems that would contribute to rewarding aggression when I came up with the idea of a multicolored score track that required players to hold board territories of matching colors in order to score. This would prevent players from playing entirely defensively because they would need different board assets to score each turn. I was sure that someone, somewhere must have come up with this idea before because it seemed so simple and elegant, yet I couldn't think of a game that used anything like it. I consulted my good friend, game reviewer extraordinaire, Shannon Appelcline, whose knowledge of game design is virtually encyclopedic, as to which games in his experiences had a score track of this nature, and he replied "Candyland". Kidding aside, he said I seemed to have developed a pretty original mechanism. Unfortunately, this new scoring mechanism did not work terribly well in Rise of Carthage, but it did strike me that it would make a good central mechanism for a light wargame.
I already had a game map set in Ireland that I had created for a different game design, specifically a wargame themed around the Irish myth cycle Táin Bó Cúailnge. (Fun fact: I partially develop five or six designs for every design that I even bother to playtest with other people, and probably design 2-3 complete games for every one that I consider worth trying to publish). For those who aren't familliar with it, the Táin is a kind of Irish Iliad, in which three of the ancient kingdoms of Ireland – Leinster, Munster and Connaught – launch a war against the fourth kingdom, Ulster. Thus, this game map divided Ireland into four player kingdoms, with these subdivided into several territories each. I added the new score track to this existing map and started designing. Thus the theme of Hibernia was present at the outset of the design, although I considered the possibility of re-theming the game later.
Color-coded non-confectionery
I set out to make Hibernia a "minimalist" wargame stripped down to just the essential elements that this kind of design needs. In a good wargame, board position should matter, so I made adjacency of territory be the game element that conveys attack strength. Concentration of pieces, by contrast, would create defensive strength. I knew that getting the amount of randomness in the game right would be critical to its success. If it had too little randomness, it would be prone to analysis paralysis and stalemates; in my opinion End of the Triumvirate is an example of an otherwise good game impaired by this problem. If the game had too much randomness, then putting any consideration into choices would be pointless, and the game would be just a shorter version of Risk.
In general, I think that the shorter and simpler a game is, the higher a level of randomness it has to have in order to be functional; in longer and more complex games, minor logistical and tactical mistakes by players are inevitable and can supplant the function of randomizers. I wanted this game to have a moderate level of randomness, but I specifically did not want it to have random combat outcomes; instead I wanted it to have one-for-one combat like Antike.
I decided to create a game with semi-random movement and non-random combat (in other words, the opposite of Risk). I can't honestly remember where the idea of using colored dice to regulate movement came from, but I do remember borrowing color-spot dice from my copies Genesis and Carolus Magnus while I was prototyping.
In the first design iteration, each color was concentrated in one quadrant of the board, and the territories were irregular. It quickly became clear in playtesting that I had to mix up the colors between regions even though I didn't like the reduction in historical feel this caused. It was also clear that the game balance was too delicate to use irregular territories, so I borrowed another element of the Rise of Carthage game design: a board with exactly equivalent quadrants, disguised to look like irregular territories. I started by drawing a four-pronged pinwheel shape in the middle of Ireland, then subdivided this into equal territories with mirrored connectivity. I then compared this against an early county map of Ireland and tried to somewhat shift the boundaries towards those of the county map. (There was no point in using maps of Iron Age Ireland or Ptolemy's map of Bronze Age Ireland as there were no clear boundaries between familial chiefdoms in those periods.)
My playtesters thought Hibernia was a lot of fun from its earliest iterations onwards, but it took a lot of playtesting to get the board geography and the score track to be balanced and functional. The ways in which different connectivity influenced play were unpredictable, so it came down to a pure trial-and-error development process. In one iteration, players all tended to rotate their positions clockwise throughout the game, temporarily earning Hibernia the nickname "the toilet bowl game" among my regular playtesters.
Quote: Aspiring Game Designer Social Skills Tip: You need multiple, independent circles of gaming friends for playtesting, and you need to be very careful not to burn them out. Don't browbeat people into playtesting because you won't be able to gauge their feedback.
I had particular trouble creating workable connectivity for the center of the board, something that would enable players at opposite corners of the board to interact occasionally. I experimented with a lot of rules that did not make it into the game, such as indestructible forts that the players could build. Eventually I added a mechanism whereby dead pieces had to be reclaimed from a holding zone; this was mechanically similar to the "Warp" in Cosmic Encounter, but played differently in practice. Players could use one of their two actions to reclaim pieces at any time, but doing so gave all of the other players half their pieces back at the same time. This made piece reclamation a significant strategic consideration.
The first workable version of Hibernia I developed would be recognizable to people who have played the published version, but had several key differences:
• The board was divided into 25 territories rather than 20.
• The score track was about twice as long as it is now and had a row of triples of same-colored spaces at the end.
• Each player had a larger set of pieces.
• The game used two color-spot die, and both player moves were randomized each turn.
• The game took about 90 minutes to play and had a variable game ending mechanism. (This was because I was trying to please the former publisher I mentioned in the Cambria desinger diary, whose playtesters seemed to prefer games in which the end turn was not entirely predictable.)
So Hibernia was originally a medium-length game rather than a filler, but this was probably always at odds with its level of complexity. I think it was "meant" to be a short game.
Hibernia got pitched in this form to a couple of publishers who turned it down. It ended up sitting on my shelf until after I had self-published Cambria on a very modest scale in 2008. At the time, I had intended Cambria to be a one-shot experiment with self-publication. However, I had found that redesigning Cambria to make it shorter and reduce the number of components had also made the game more fun and challenging, so I began to wonder whether the same kind of changes would improve Hibernia and perhaps also make it feasible for self-publication. Besides, I felt I had learned a lot from mistakes I had made in self-publishing Cambria and wanted a chance to put that learning into practice.
Hibernia first edition from Vainglorious Games
I wanted to use wooden cubes for player pieces, which would be the most expensive component. I tried buying unpainted cubes and coloring them myself, but was not happy with the end product or the amount of labor involved. I ended up buying a large batch of the smallest cubes Meeple People had available, and raising the price point of Hibernia a bit over Cambria. I found a long, narrow blank-box available in bulk at Kelly Paper that I could use to make attractive, semi-professional-looking packaging relatively easily and cheaply. With some crafting advice from Aaron Lawn of EndGame, I was able to reliably make a folding game board, but it had to be small to fit in this box. Thus, the first redesign task was to reduce the number of player pieces the game needed and to reduce the number of territories on the board. I found that I could get away with reducing each quadrant of the board by one territory, specifically by eliminating the neutral center territory. This was when I added the adjacency arrows in the center territories. I found that my local art supply store was willing to cut mat board into neat half-game-board sized rectangles fairly cheaply. The trickiest component to find was the color-spot die; one finds these things around commonly enough, but finding who actually supplied them turned out to be difficult. Eventually, after a little pleading, Koplow Games was willing to sell me a smaller batch than it normally would on a one-time basis. All the other components I could buy in smaller batches as I went along, so I did not need to commit as much money up front as I did with Cambria.
The finished product of the 2009 first edition of Hibernia would not be mistaken for a professionally manufactured game, but it was a lot better-looking than Cambria had been. The bits were all wood and all professionally manufactured. The box was nice-looking, had a distinctive shape, and was reasonably sturdy. The folding board was functional and sturdy, and had decent artwork.
I sent copies of Hibernia to several reviewers, and the response I got to it was quite positive. Rick Heli of A Spotlight on Games deserves credit for coining the term "Celtic Nations Series" (now Cambria, Hibernia and Armorica) in his review of Hibernia. I also began an enjoyable correspondence with a reviewer who goes by the handle of "Limp" for Jedisjeux, and he has given me good advice about the European gaming scene over the intervening years. Dominique of the Dutch site De Tafel Plakt also has been a consistent source of good reviews for me.
I was a big fan of Bruno Faidutti's games (particularly Citadels and Mission Red Planet) as well as his Ideal Game Library website. His reviews have often steered me toward games that ended up becoming favorites, so drawing upon some previously unsuspected reserve of moxie, I emailed Bruno Faidutti and asked whether I could mail him a review copy of Hibernia. He graciously emailed back and said that I was welcome to send him a copy and that he would play it, but he could not promise that he would review it. That was good enough for me, and surprisingly a few weeks later in June 2009 a really positive review of Hibernia was on the Ideal Game Library. Bruno even mentioned Hibernia in his 2009 Game of the Year recommendations.
This attention catapulted me from regional obscurity to international obscurity overnight, and generated a lot of interest in Hibernia, including from folks in Europe who had a very hard time getting it. It became easier to get game retailers to stock Hibernia and the remainders of Cambria. Unfortunately, a Hibernia set was even more work to handcraft than a Cambria set had been, so I decided to stop making them well before the market demand petered out. I think I made about 70 copies altogether. Ironically, all the copies of Hibernia had been sold before its highest profile review in the U.S. was even published, this being in GAMES Magazine. I had not sent them a review copy, but one of its reviewers, John J. McCallion, had come across a copy somewhere and did a really nice review. So plenty of demand, 0 supply.
In the Cambria designer diary, I discussed how Sandstorm Productions came to put Hibernia and Cambria under contract, thanks to the influence of my friends at EndGame in Oakland. Before that happened, I had a couple of discussions with other publishers about the game. I had discussed the possibility of Krok Nik Douil doing a French edition of the game, but we had some difficulties because its proprietor speaks little English and I speak little French. Unfortunately, through some miscommunication it got announced that KND would be publishing the game without any kind of contract being in place. Thus you can still find a few places online where Krok Nik Douil is listed as the publisher of Hibernia. I had also considered some offers of investment to do a professionally manufactured edition that would be distributed via Impressions Advertising and Marketing, as my card game Armorica had been. Ultimately, Sandstorm offered me the chance of a larger edition and much wider distribution, with more marketing support. I still plan to release another game through Impressions at some point, and I hope I get the chance to work with Krok Nik Douil in the future; I really liked its 2011 release Vanuatu and thought it was beautifully produced.
Board and pieces in the second edition
There were some production delays, mainly because of issues related to shipping, and I got my first look at the new edition of Hibernia at Gen Con 2011, where Sandstorm had about one hundred advance-shipped copies for sale. It was exciting to see the new edition in print for the first time, materially improved in almost all respects, but very true to the strengths of the first edition: a small sturdy box, all wooden components, beautiful art by Brent Knudson, and a low price point. It was equally exciting to be demoing the new game to the gaming public for the first time.
I would like say it was exciting to be exploring Gen Con for the first time, but honestly I barely made it out of the dealer room. I pimped Hibernia and Cambria for almost all of my waking hours. I did get to meet and have some conversation with Reiner Knizia, which was a bit of a fanboy moment for me. My last night at Gen Con, the folks at Sandstorm took me out for a posh celebratory dinner and a glass of port at a swanky cigar bar; the next morning I rushed through the dealer room to buy souvenirs, then headed home. Both Hibernia and Cambria hit stores in mid-November 2011.
As I write this, we have just wrapped up the launch party for both games (at EndGame of course). It felt great to have so many people who were involved in bringing the games into being in one room, and to take a little victory lap at the end of a very long march.
Eric B. Vogel
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Eric Vogel
United States
Hayward
California
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At the beginning of 2008 I was feeling pretty pessimistic about my prospects as a hobby game designer as a design of mine, a majority control game a bit like Samurai which was set in Mycenaean Greece, had been under contract – yet unpublished – for two-and-a-half years.
Now the publisher had finally stated formally that he did not want to publish the game after all – I prefer not to identify this publisher or the details of our interactions – so I was fielding a lot of well-intentioned but embarrassing inquiries from friends asking, "Say, whatever happened to that game you were going to publish?" On top of that, I had not had much luck pitching designs to other publishers. All in all, I was feeling a bit low.
Prior to this, I had always rejected the idea of self-publishing a game as risking too much money for too little reward. However, my real career as a professor was coming along, and I had a little more disposable income than in previous years.
Quote: Self-publishing lesson #1: Don't try to self-publish games without genuinely disposable income.
Also, after having done a lot of prototyping of my games, I had gotten better at illustration and at hand-crafting things like game boards and boxes. I thought, "Why don't I do a teeny-tiny, modestly-produced edition of one of my games, sell it through a few friendly outlets, then maybe consider giving game designing a rest." I started thinking about designing a game that would be feasible to self-publish in a desktop-published fashion, one that would need only a few, relatively inexpensive bits. This meant no cards, which I had no way of doing cheaply at the time.
Over the course of 2007, I had been playing a lot of the games that were part of the first wave of "dice Euros", particularly Yspahan and Kingsburg. I was intrigued by the way that using a dice mechanism in a resource management game – a genre of game that usually relied on a card mechanism – transformed the overall experience. It seemed to me that the same kind of change could be made to other genres of game, such as majority control, that did not usually involve dice, so I started with the majority control game that the aforementioned publisher had cancelled and tried to re-imagine it as a dice game.
I found that the form constraints of the dice mechanism practically designed the game board for me. The D6-face values would be the nodes of a network, and each node would have connections equal to its value. I would then use enough nodes of each value to make roughly equal numbers of connections lead to each value (e.g., two "6" value nodes and six "2" value nodes). Players would roll two D6, then select a connection leading to one of the two rolled values on which to play; at the beginning of the game, each roll would give them a choice of about one-third of the connections on the board, with this range of choices becoming more constrained as the game progressed. Scoring tokens would go on the nodes of the network and be worth the node value in points.
Like its predecessor, this game was clearly meant to be themed around siege warfare (surrounding and capturing the nodes of the network with player pieces). The network of the new game did not fit the geography of Greece well, and while the Mycenaeans built citadels (which would make good nodes) they weren't known for road-building (connections). I needed a theme that would provide for siege warfare in a setting with a system of roads and fortresses, so my mind went to the Roman world and the forts and implied roads between them, as in Britannia.
I did not want to just duplicate the theme of Britannia, however, or even the first third of Britannia, so I went digging through the history of Roman Britain for a more specific theme for my game. This is my typical approach; I usually theme a game about halfway through the design process, when the broad form of the mechanism has taken shape, but the details still need to be worked out.
Cambria game board, first edition
That said, I was now faced with several design problems:
• "1" value nodes did not work well in the network, so I needed something else to do with "1" rolls.
• Rolling doubles was also bad for the player, which did not make sense as doubles are usually something special and advantageous in dice games.
• The game needed to a way to break ties on surrounded nodes.
• I wanted the game to have a more combative feel to fit the new theme.
The game design had a kind of beautiful simplicity up to this point, so I didn't want to just throw new mechanisms into it willy-nilly. In the end, I added two mechanisms. Doubles would allow a player to replace an enemy piece on a road. This fit well with the theme; the Irish invaders were a temporary alliance of clans who would sometimes compete over spoils. A role of "1" would allow the player to move a Roman legion piece to displace each other, which gave the Romans a more dynamic presence in the game. This was when I really started to form my present philosophy of game design: Accomplish the vital functions of the game with the fewest possible mechanisms, and every mechanism added should serve more than one function.
By now I was ready to head over to game night at EndGame – a game store in Oakland, California – and start cajoling my long-suffering friends into playing yet another of my designs. The game worked pretty well at this point; the small combat element made the game feel more exciting than many majority control designs without making the game unduly chaotic, and with the new dice mechanism, the game finished in just 20 minutes!
However, a couple of early difficulties became apparent in playtesting. First, trying to surround a high value fort, then failing to do so was disproportionately punishing. There needed to be some kind of second place points available on the larger forts, so I added second-place point tokens to the seven largest fort nodes. I was loathe to do this at first because it meant increasing the number of game pieces, so at the same time, I experimented with reducing the number of player pieces. I finally settled on five pieces per player since this meant that the largest forts could not be surrounded without the collusion of two players. Second, when most of the fort tokens were gone, players ended up with rolls they couldn't use, which was frustrating. After some tinkering, I settled on the best end point for the game being when only six forts remained on the board, with those forts being awarded based on endgame position.
I also found that moving the legion on a "1" wasn't an advantageous choice, so I added a mechanism which gave players the ability to reserve a roll of a number of their choosing for a later turn whenever they moved the legion. My playtesters consistently told me that these changes added a lot of interesting choices to the game, a little more sense of control and planning, and generally made it a lot more fun. Cambria had assumed its final form.
I then started looking for sources of components online, and budgeting for self-publication. Professional manufacture was out of the question for me as that would mean making at least 2,000 units and spending in the neighborhood of $8,000 dollars; this was more money than I was willing to blow, and more storage space than I had in my home. I also didn't think I could sell anything like that many units.
Quote: Self-publication lesson #2: Start as small as possible because you will inevitably learn from mistakes.
I decided to buy enough materials to make 100 or so units – although I ended up making only about 70 – and to get materials cheaply enough that I could hit a price point that I thought people would consider. In my experience, most of the self-published games I had bought turned out to be bad, so I felt the game had to be cheap enough – around $20 – that others who had experience similar to mine would be willing to take a risk on buying it. This meant that the components ended up being functional, but cheap: plastic cubes, plastic dice, a color laser-printed waterproof label on unfolded mat stock for a game board.
The infamously cheap component, however, turned out to be the box. The boxes I bought looked good online, but turned out to be incredibly thin, like the boxes new dress shirts come in. (Again, expect to learn from mistakes.) The amount of crap I would get from reviewers, geeks, etc. about those thin boxes would turn out to be considerable. I also had failed to account for the sheer amount of dull, repetitive, yet painstaking work involved in assembling the copies from these components: cutting, putting labels neatly on boxes, counting out components and putting them in bags, etc. This is probably the closest I have ever come to carpel tunnel syndrome.
Cambria first edition from Vainglorious Games
Quote: Self-publication lesson #3: Cultivate friendships with game stores.
–but I needed online retailers as well as brick-and-mortar stores. I built a website (good investment) and got a PO Box (bad investment), and started sending out inquiries to all the online retailers I could identify. In some cases this started rewarding relationships, particularly with Noble Knight Games and Boards and Bits. However, a lot of retailers didn't want to hear from me, and one even ripped me off. (Again, learn from mistakes.) I tried sending copies to some relatively small-scale game reviewers, which also involved trial-and-error learning. Later, when I self-published Hibernia, I belatedly realized there was no reason not to send my games to big reviewers. After all, the worst thing that could happen would have been for them to ignore the game, but at the time it seemed presumptuous for me to send a copy of my crappy little game to GAMES Magazine or to Bruno Faidutti for possible entry into his Ideal Game Library.
So I found some retailers, at which point I realized self-publishing was also going to involve a tedious quantity of trips to the post office. The next year, I applied the scaling-down principles I used on Cambria, and the difficult lessons I learned from making and distributing it, to redesigning and self-publishing Hibernia. (I'll tell that story another time, but basically I decided, "Eh, what the hell – I'll do one more.")
By the time I had started distributing Hibernia, I had managed to sell all the Cambrias I had made. Hibernia got somewhat wider and better reviewer attention than Cambria had, most notably very helpful reviews from Bruno Faidutti and John J. McCallion at GAMES Magazine, for both of which I am quite grateful.
However, it was Cambria that became a hit among people with whom I was in contact. It became the go-to filler for almost everyone who had a copy, which made the effort feel worthwhile. There were even quite a few people making print-and-play copies for themselves. (By the way, now that the new edition is out, it is time for you PnP folks to go buy one!) People overseas started volunteering to translate the game rules into other languages for me. In this way, I established really rewarding long-term relationships with Achim and Magalie Varenholtz, who became my French and German translators, and Yegor Sadoshenko who became my Russian translator, for all three of my self-published games. I also self-published an alternative map, Cumbria, after I belatedly realized a more optimal structure for the game board network.
In 2010 I self-produced a card game, Armorica, on a larger scale using professional manufacture, and with much better distribution thanks to the services of Aldo Ghiozzi at Impressions Advertising and Marketing. Self-publishing Armorica was a whole different set of headaches, which I will go into another time.
Meanwhile, Chris Hanrahan, one of the owners of EndGame, was doing consulting for a start-up game company called Sandstorm Productions LLC, which was looking for new products. Chris mentioned my games, then Chris Ruggerio, one of the other owners of EndGame, volunteered to demo Cambria and Hibernia for them at a trade show. This led to Sandstorm's then-president, David Stansel-Garner, putting both games under contract.
If aspiring game designers take any lesson away from this diary, it should be this (and no, I don't mean go bug Sandstorm or EndGame to help you):
Quote: Self-publication lesson #4, and really a lesson for all designers: Cultivate your professional friendships most carefully.
I am a big supporter of my local game store, EndGame, because I believe they keep the gaming hobby alive, and also because Chris, Chris, Aaron and Anthony are swell guys. I didn't cultivate that relationship to help myself get published, but it worked out that way; loyalty and sociability get rewarded. Emailing people you don't know from Adam, and asking them to help you make your dreams come true is less effective.
There was some personnel turnover at Sandstorm, and some production delays in the period between the signing of the contract and my games hitting the market. Given my frought prior history dealing with game companies, I sweated those changes and delays a little. However, going to trade shows and cons – and getting to know the Sandstorm folks there – let me form strong working relationships with people who did lovely work on my behalf. In particular, Jessica Blair really listened to my feedback, kept a close eye on component quality, and generally nursemaided the games into existence. Michael Vaillancourt worked very hard on the arrangements for getting the games to our shores. David Stansel-Garner and James Sugarbroad Walker, who had left Sandstorm to pursue other gigs, are now helping me to promote the new games through the auspices of their new endeavor, the Verne-Wells Society.
If it seems like I am dropping a lot of names, it's because I genuinely owe a lot of people for their help. I first got a look at Cambria around the time of Origins 2011, and the new edition looked just beautiful. Brent Knudson did some really lovely artwork. The new components were all wood, and all of very good quality. The double-sided tri-fold board was very cool. And Jessica, bless her heart, made sure that the new edition had the sturdiest game box I have ever seen, hopefully erasing the memory of my homemade edition's flimsy box forever.
So while I had some fun self-publishing, I have to say it feels great to have the games published in nice editions with professional support and marketing. It feels like Cambria has traveled a lot of windy roads to get here and had to knock down a couple of forts along the way. Ironically, as I finish this designer diary, I am busy hand-crafting a giant copy of Cambria for a launch party at EndGame, proving how little professional publication really changes things...
Eric B. Vogel
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Color-coded non-confectionery
Hibernia first edition from Vainglorious Games
Board and pieces in the second edition
