Archive for Alf Seegert
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Alf Seegert
United States
Salt Lake City
Utah
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I have always been fascinated by religious history, theology, and heresy. And for some reason I seem to enjoy taking the side of the heretic (even if I don't agree). I still think that Pelagius had a good point about free will despite anything Augustine might have insisted. In my view Marcion is underrated. And the legend that Saint Nicholas smacked Bishop Arius full-on in the face makes me pity the poor heretic. (Bad Santa!) I'm still surprised that Saint Francis' lavish expression of kinship with nature only resulted in stigmata and not, say, a literal crucifixion for charges of pantheism – for which I'm happy. The Cathars were not so fortunate.
As a college professor (literature, not theology), I often find myself discovering intriguing things like these which often end up not only in the classroom or in an article, but also in a board game design – or at least in an attempted board game design.
So, for instance, consider the weird theoretical and game-like dilemmas that emerge from the following mix of history and theology: the Roman Emperor Constantine, who issued the revolutionary "Edict of Milan" that finally tolerated Christianity in the Roman Empire in 313, was himself only baptized at the very end of his life. As I understand it, even though he was (ostensibly?) a true believer, his theological interpretation of baptism was that it washed away one's past sins only. It thus stood to reason that to get as much bang for the buck as possible (so to speak) you would wait as long as possible before "taking the plunge" (or the sprinkle? I'm not sure whether immersion was en vogue in Constantine's day or not).
As an aspiring game designer I encountered such facts as an intriguing dilemma, much like the mechanism in a board game. The idea of someone's seeking to fool God through the calculatedly deferred timing of a holy sacrament screamed "press your luck" as a basic mechanism. Thematically, it also invited satiric humor in a Monty Pythonesque vein. Imagine a game where the goal would be to play an early Christian who secretly wishes to indulge in the most sin and debauchery as possible before being finally baptized – and then dying in the good graces of God and the Church, thereby winning the game!
To quote Homer (Simpson, not the blind Greek poet): "Sacrilicious!"
The risk, of course, would be that while performing such perfidies you might get carried away and actually DIE before your baptism and last rites could be performed. Hmm....this combination of theme and mechanisms seemed like a fascinating potential game design.
But of course, it didn't work. Not for me, anyway. I'm no fan of player elimination, so the notion of having each player BE one of these debauched Roman faux Christian elites created too many problems. I then tried to have players each represent an entire family, and thus have multiple personas to douse in sin before having them doused in the waters of baptism and then safely buried. But it just didn't quite come together for me in figuring out how to kill everybody off without reprising 13 Dead End Drive in 4th century Italy. So I tried to think of logically similar circumstances, and before long, it came: the figure of the medieval Pardoner shone forth in a deranged epiphany, a naughty Virgil guiding me through the dark forest of game design into a Hell of fictive corruption....
Oh, wait, that's Dante. We're supposed to be doing Chaucer! And besides that, I'm getting ahead of myself. Before I tell you anything about my friend the Pardoner, I first need to say a little something about Chaucer's fourteenth-century literary masterpiece The Canterbury Tales.
As you might already know, in The Canterbury Tales, a company of medieval pilgrims journeys together from the Tabard Inn at the outskirts of London to the shrine of Thomas Becket at Canterbury, entertaining each other with stories along the way. Some of these tales are incredibly bawdy (and very funny). Many challenge existing social hierarchies and expose the hypocrisy of those who supposedly represent God and the church.
Chaucer makes his Pardoner into an especially striking figure of such religious hypocrisy. In the Prologue to "The Pardoner's Tale," the Pardoner's motto is "Radix malorum est cupiditas," or "Greed is the root of all evil." But he is himself the greediest member of the entire company! He brings with him a vast supply of false relics and an array of counterfeit indulgences or pardons (certificates that reduce the amount of time suffered in Purgatory as a consequence of one's sins). The Pardoner goes on to tell a tale about the deadly consequences of greed. In doing so, he hopes that the company of pilgrims will seek him afterwards and offer coins in exchange for the forgiveness he falsely promises through his relics and indulgences!
Somehow, and I'm not quite sure how, my "naughty Constantine game" underwent its own baptism and ultimately emerged sparkling in fresh guise as The Road to Canterbury. It might be just because I love Chaucer so much. In any case, in this new game, the same "press your luck" mechanism was in play, but instead of having players play the ones seeking sin and salvation, I instead let players play the ones providing the very means of temptation – and its forgiveness! (I should mention that before I ever got to this point, I had simply worked with the Pardoner as a free agent who would pardon a bunch of sinful old Italian men in my proto-design The Pardoners of Padua – and I do like the alliteration with the "P" – but the call to literary pilgrimage proved too tempting to resist.)
The premise of my new game became this: As you travel together with pilgrims along the road to Canterbury, you sell indulgences delivering pilgrims from the eternal penalties brought on by the Seven Deadly Sins. But to succeed as a pardoner, you will need to do more than just sell forged pardons for quick cash. To keep your services in demand, you will actually need to lead these pilgrims into temptation yourself! Perhaps some phony relics might help? There is one big catch. The Seven Deadly Sins live up to their name: each sin that a pilgrim commits brings Death one step nearer, and a dead pilgrim pays no pardoners!*
To help you get a better sense of what an unpleasant – but fascinating – character the Pardoner is, read this selection from Chaucer's "Pardoner's Prologue" in The Canterbury Tales (which is a modern translation of the Middle English by J.U. Nicolson):
"Masters," quoth he, "in churches, when I preach,
I am at pains that all shall hear my speech,
And ring it out as roundly as a bell,
For I know all by heart the thing I tell.
My theme is always one, and ever was:
'Radix malorum est cupiditas.'
First I announce the place whence I have come,
And then I show my pardons, all and some.
Our liege-lord's seal on my patent perfect,
I show that first, my safety to protect,
And then no man's so bold, no priest nor clerk,
As to disturb me in Christ's holy work;
And after that my tales I marshal all.
Indulgences of pope and cardinal,
Of patriarch and bishop, these I do
Show, and in Latin speak some words, a few,
To spice therewith a bit my sermoning
And stir men to devotion, marvelling.
Then show I forth my hollow crystal-stones,
Which are crammed full of rags, aye, and of bones...
By this fraud have I won me, year by year,
A hundred marks, since I've been pardoner...
Of avarice and of all such wickedness
Is all my preaching, thus to make them free
With offered pence, the which pence come to me.
For my intent is only pence to win,
And not at all for punishment of sin."
Using such an irreverent character as the premise for a board game made me happy. As you can probably tell from the descriptions above and my sympathy for heretics, I enjoy making games where players get to play the "bad guys." In my prior two published game designs – Bridge Troll and Trollhalla, both from Z-Man Games – the players take on the role of hideous, nasty trolls who either guard bridges waiting to extort (and eat) passersby, or who plunder and pillage helpless islanders and livestock, Viking-style.
I suppose that the motivating allure I find in designing such games is much the same that I find as a film lover, reader, and in teaching film and literature. As I see it, one of the great powers of storytelling – or more generally, of play – is being able to fictively experience the world or perform as someone or something very much unlike oneself in "actual life." I really like how C.S. Lewis expresses this power of the virtual in An Experiment in Criticism:
Quote: Literature enlarges our being by admitting us to experiences not our own. They may be beautiful, terrible or inspiring, exhilarating, pathetic, comic or merely piquant. Literature gives the entrée to them all. [...] My own eyes are not enough for me. The man who is contented to be only himself and therefore less a self, is in prison. My own eyes are not enough for me, even the eyes of all humanity are not enough. I regret that the brutes cannot write books, very gladly would I learn what face things present to a mouse or a bee. More gladly still would I perceive the olfactory worlds charged with all the information and emotion it carries for a dog...
In reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action and in knowing, I transcend myself, and am never more myself than when I do.
Yes, C.S. Lewis is of course praising the powers of literature here, high literature at that – not board games. And I suppose that my sense of playful deviancy-via-virtuality is more Oscar Wilde than C.S. Lewis. But I understand games and stories as both inhabiting the same continuum of fictional play. Some are more rules-based, others more story-based. Like many designers, I like mixing both. I guess I see the trolls and pardoners in my games much like the characters in online role playing games, except that instead of pixels the players get to use cardboard avatars – and hopefully as a result they find a way to play as something quite UNLIKE the person they encounter in the mirror every day.
I see The Road to Canterbury as the third title in my "trilogy of villainy." (Heh, collect all three!) It works both as a continuation and as a departure from my earlier games Bridge Troll and Trollhalla. With Bridge Troll I was aiming to do as a game (in a "lite" homage) what John Gardner did as a novel with Grendel (a novel that takes the narrative point of view of the monster in Beowulf). Both Neil Gaiman's and Terry Pratchett's independently crafted "Troll Bridge" stories likewise do brilliant work making you see things from the troll's point of view. (What ARE your opportunities, really, if your big choices in life are whether to eat or extort a passing traveler who wants to cross your bridge?) And remember the vicious Cave Troll in Moria in Tolkien's (or Jackson's) The Fellowship of the Ring? Director Peter Jackson actually felt bad for him, and imagined this poor troll was always mistreated by the Orcs and that his Troll-mum was waiting for him at home, cookies and milk awaiting, but after a very nasty encounter with terrible elves, dwarves, and men, he somehow never makes it back....
I likewise felt kind of bad for my bridge trolls' limited options for upward mobility, and thus decided to send them to Trollhalla, where these trolls could happily abandon their bridges for the promise of plunder. (From what I've heard in response so far, players really enjoy the trollish "value system" involved, and express snorts of displeasure at nasty Billy Goats and grunts of glee over the pillaging of pigs and peasants.)
In The Road to Canterbury, however, my goal was not so much to actually see things from the Pardoner's perspective – for he IS a despicable hypocrite and victimizer for whom I feel little sympathy – but to instead just have fun in playing somebody so UTTERLY corrupt that few of us could imagine being like that in real life. Or so I hope, anyway....
Okay, I've spent A LOT of time explaining the development of my theme here. But I've taken enough of your time already. Instead of now diving into a discussion of the actual game play and mechanisms, let me urge you instead to watch the Road to Canterbury promotional video which debuted on Kickstarter on April 15, 2011. It does a wonderful job of SHOWING such things instead of my TELLING them!
But do let me wrap up by saying that Gryphon Games has been wonderful to work with on this game. I'm grateful that Rick Soued and everyone else at Gryphon really seems to enjoy the quirkiness and fun of The Road to Canterbury, and I'm happy that their vision for the game only made it better. The game's production follows the high standards set by Gryphon's recent game Pastiche, by Sean MacDonald, my compatriot in the Board Game Designer's Guild of Utah. (Let me take a moment to thank the BGDG at large for their helpful feedback during this game's development!)
All the art and components contribute to the theme and atmosphere: the game board is taken directly from Hieronymus Bosch's tabletop painting The Seven Deadly Sins and the Four Last Things (when I first encountered this painting a few years ago I said to myself, "I MUST make a game to play on this tabletop!"). The art for the Pilgrims and the Pardoner are from the earliest illustrated manuscript of The Canterbury Tales. Oh, and I shouldn't forget to mention that players get little cloth bags in which to store their ill-gotten gains. In short, I'm delighted at where The Road to Canterbury will finally take those who play it!
Gryphon Games is using Kickstarter for its launch of The Road to Canterbury and needs Pardoners – I mean, partners! – to ensure that this quirky title will actually be published and to give an idea of just how many copies to print. Tempting collectible incentives are available! (*Cackle*) I hope you can join in. Thanks for all your support!
Alf Seegert
*If you're having trouble imagining what my conception of Chaucer's Pardoner looks and acts like, close your eyes and brew up a really strong cup of tea. Collaborate: hold a séance and summon the genius of the late great Douglas Adams for company (or you might also contact writers Ben Elton and Richard Curtis, who still dwell in the land of the living). In any case: together, envision a brilliant new British comedy series: Black Adder Begs your Pardon. Or somesuch. Notify Rowan Atkinson! If you know Black Adder at all, then you are already aware that in the British-televised world of corruption, smarm, and deceit there is no more delightful figure than the craven and opportunistic, cackle-happy Edmund Blackadder. It's for these reasons that I would "get medieval" – in rather more the BBC's than Quentin Tarantino's sense – and cast Rowan Atkinson's Blackadder as the deliciously wicked figure of the Pardoner from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales...
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Alf Seegert
United States
Salt Lake City
Utah
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The game Trollhalla came about through the designer's momentary bewilderment in the canyonlands of Southern Utah, by way of the imagined ploddings of African elephants, courtesy of Viking pig-muppets and the seafaring inclinations of discontented bridge trolls. In this designer diary, designer Alf Seegert talks about Trollhalla's peculiar journey from conception to publication...
I suppose I should begin by telling you something about the game. Trollhalla is for 2-4 players (and plays genuinely very well with two), ages 8 and up. It plays in about an hour. Trollhalla is the spiritual successor to Bridge Troll, but has very different mechanisms and theme. It's also less complicated, and it has a glorious big game board and super-thick, high quality components and wonderful colorful artwork by Ryan Laukat. Zev from Z-Man Games really went all out on this one. My goal with Trollhalla was high simplexity: the offering of tactical/strategic engagement with relatively simple rules, which (I hope) will appeal to children and adults alike, both gamers and casual players.
Here is the description of Trollhalla from the back of the game box:
Quote: You and your hideous troll-friends have decided that it's time for a career change. You are tired of guarding bridges and shaking down weary travelers all for the sake of a few clinking coins! Tolls are down, bandits are up, and besides, living under your bridge is damp and uncomfortable – and breathing all that crumbling bridge mortar is taking a toll on your lungs...
It's time to venture forth and find some fresh sea air! In Trollhalla, you join forces with your fellow trolls to sail the seas in search of islands filled with pillage and plunder. Crunchy livestock, nervous monks, panicked princesses, piles of gold, and casks of grog await you! But watch out for Billy Goats – if you're not careful, they will knock parts of your precious stolen cargo out of your boat!
With so many goodies lying about on these islands, it feels like you've died and gone to troll heaven, or perhaps someplace even better – Trollhalla!
Unlikely as it might sound, my aquatic Viking troll game Trollhalla began seven years ago in a moment of hesitation on a snowy expanse of desert slickrock. My wife and I are avid hikers of the Colorado Plateau and were on a crisp winter hike to Double-O arch in Arches National Park (near Moab, Utah). Trails over slickrock are typically marked not by paths but by cairns – tall stacks of usually flat rocks – used as path markers. (Here in the western United States, cairns are also commonly used to mark alpine paths above the tree-line. Example here.) But cairn-marked trails can sometimes lead to confusion because it seems not everyone always agrees where the path should go! On this hike at one point we discovered not one but two cairns, heading in seemingly very different directions – and we had no idea which direction was right. But one of the cairns was substantially taller than the other and hence seemed to "carry more weight". Apparently following that taller cairn was the right choice, for we had no problems reaching our destination, but the encounter had gotten the geek in me thinking...
By this time I had tried my hand at several board game designs, including one that had come in second place at the 2004 Hippodice competition in Bochum, Germany (The Vapors of Delphi, which is, alas, as yet unpublished). Always keeping my eye out for new potential game mechanisms, I began to wonder whether a game about cairn-stacking might be viable and fun. I began by playing around with a chessboard and a stack of wooden discs. Before long, I had a little game in the works where travel between different villages was governed by a simple stacking mechanism. Players would vie to stack cairns in places where they wanted travel to happen, tallest stacks would dominate, and travel would be triggered by a combined random/player-controlled element.
I think I was also probably primed to use a stacking mechanism by encountering the use of stacked chips – although in a quite different implementation – in Steve Poelzing's very clever game Chobolo.
For no clear reason that I can remember, I was led to make my emerging game about elephants traveling village-to-village with empty baskets that would be filled with fruit on arrival. Not only did stacking happen on the paths, but on the elephants themselves. (I used little wooden elephant figurines at first, then plastic ones later. The elephants and cups in the photo above were made by playtester Sander Bol (cabol on BGG) in a prototype made from files I sent him.)
In my emerging prototype, I used 1" discs in four different colors to represent baskets belonging to each player. In each village smaller stacked discs represented bananas, pomegranates, passion fruits, coconuts, mangoes, and spoiled fruit (penalty points). I wanted to avoid a standard "majority of pieces in spaces" mechanism and instead tried a mechanism based on relative vertical placement: After traveling along the path containing the tallest stack of baskets (presumably full of grass or other tasty elephant treats), the active elephant would have the top basket on its back collect the top fruit in the destination village. The next highest basket would collect the next highest fruit, and so on. Players would strategize by redirecting elephants to different villages to each collect the most optimal fruits to add to their supply. (Bonuses were awarded for collecting a complete set in each color.) By placing baskets on paths, players would not only urge elephants in that direction but would also collect cards like Monkeys (to flip stacks of baskets upside down), Water Buffalo (to scatter baskets on a path), and Grasses (to weave an extra basket and perform one extra action).
Overall, I liked this new design and had good luck fine-tuning it, courtesy of my colleagues in the Board Game Designers Guild of Utah. Jonathan Degann, avid BGGer and the founder of the Journal of Boardgame Design, visited our Guild for one of our sessions and played TEMBO, as the game was then called. He was impressed by it and provided excellent suggestions for improvement and moral support. I submitted TEMBO (the Swahili word for "elephant") to that year's Hippodice competition, which had proved an increasingly promising venue for my designs. (I had since placed as a finalist for my prototype games Bridge Troll, Ziggurat, and Mont-Saint Michel.) In 2008, TEMBO came in third place and two major European publishers expressed strong interest in publishing it.
As it turned out, TEMBO didn't find a European publisher, and I'm still not clear exactly why not (though one publisher had two other pick-up-and-deliver games in the works and didn't feel comfortable making yet another one that year). Another reason might be the coincidental announcement of Ystari's game Bombay at a time while TEMBO was still being evaluated. At first, I was very pained by the visual similarity between Bombay and TEMBO (which I take as pure coincidence) although the games played very differently. As it turned out, however, I find the timing serendipitous because it forced me to pursue new (and for me, better) directions for this game.
I decided to see whether Z-Man Games might be interested. In 2009, Zev Shlasinger had released my game Bridge Troll, my first published game design. When I approached Zev with TEMBO he played it and said he liked it. "But," he said, "you said it might work with trolls. Let's try that." So I did. I had been toying with a nautical Viking theme for TEMBO and a terrestrial troll theme for it (not to mention several other ideas), and ultimately put these two ideas together: Viking Trolls! I suspect I must have been deeply deranged from childhood by the Muppet Show clip with Viking Pigs pillaging a village to the tune of The Village People's "In the Navy."
As a result, the elephants in TEMBO became Viking longships. The stacks of baskets became each player's individual trolls. Although I was proud of TEMBO, I found this new theme much more fun! And here was an opportunity to move away from the abstraction of colored discs and instead include more of Ryan Laukat's delightful artwork by using tiles instead. (Ryan, a fellow member of the Board Game Designers Guild of Utah, did the whimsical art for my game Bridge Troll, and he has been the artist for many excellent designers, including Reiner Knizia; he also did the art for several cards in Dominion and its expansions.)
The fruits from TEMBO were transformed into the sorts of plunder that Viking trolls would relish pillaging: panicked princesses, mortified monks, frightened pigs and peasants, piles of gold and casks of grog. The Monkey, Grass, and Water Buffalo action cards became Weather Gods: Wind, Sun, and Storm Gods respectively. (My use of weather here was inspired by Mike Compton (compman on BGG) from his suggestion that I use a weather theme in Bridge Troll to justify the varying number of travelers each turn.) Instead of a generic player board for stacking collected fruit, Ryan and I devised individualized boat-boards on which to stack tiles.
Because of the changed theme and use of tiles, I had to change some of the spatial implementation of the other pieces. I kept the cairn-stacking mechanism in place at sea, where trolls "scout" for plundering destinations and the highest stack in a sea lane dictates the direction that an adjacent ship will travel. But stacking trolls on top of one another on ships themselves was unwieldy and didn't look right, so I instead had players seat trolls in ships in order from front to back. Likewise, plunder tiles on islands are arranged in order so that when plundered, the westmost troll in a ship claims the westmost tile on an island, and so on. The rules are pretty much functionally identical with the original stacking mechanic in TEMBO, only "horizontalized".
My favorite rules-transfer was inspired by Zev. I had a rule variant in TEMBO, a sort of "shoot the moon" effect, in which a player who piles up a bunch of spoiled fruit (each one a penalty) would actually score a big bonus if he collected a complete set. (Thematically, I had the player use all that spoiled fruit to make a distillery and sell alcohol!) In Trollhalla, the Billy Goat becomes the penalty tile. If you collect one, he goes crazy and kicks out one other tile from your cargo – always a tile in your largest set, which threatens your ability to score bonuses from completed sets. But just as in Bridge Troll – where the Billy Goats can actually help you if used properly – in Trollhalla a player who collects a complete set of Billy Goats now has a petting zoo and scores a whopping 25-point bonus.
Now I just needed a new title. The epic Viking aspect of the theme to me suggested Valhalla, the grand hall in Asgard for valiant slain Viking warriors. As I saw it, the big new island-filled game board and plunder tiles in turn suggested "heaven for trolls", and as a result offered a nifty portmanteau word. In the same way that Lewis Carroll used "galumph" (galloping in triumph) and "vorpal" (voracious and purple) in the poem "Jabberwocky", I now had trolls and Valhalla: Trollhalla. (Later I discovered that actually I didn't originate this term. Ken St. Andre, designer of the role-playing game Tunnels & Trolls, is the longtime holder of the domain Trollhalla.com, his official T&T fansite. Thankfully, Ken – noble Troll god of Trollhalla that he is – graciously decided to spin this connection into a win-win for both of us rather than be upset about it.)
Zev gave this new theme and title a thumbs-up and I continued to develop Trollhalla through 2010. Ryan began on the artwork and aimed for a more "epic" feel in comparison with Bridge Troll. (The cover and the board are each quite a sight to behold.) The artwork still remains whimsical, however: the characters in the plunder tiles all stare out wide-eyed in terror, while the Billy Goat glares and the cow stares stoically ahead, seemingly resigned to its fate...
In finalizing the game I received helpful feedback from the Guild – and unexpected assistance from a fellow BGGer I had never met before, Paul Incao (pincao on BGG). Paul had posted a comment on BGG asking how my proposed expansion for Bridge Troll was coming along and I had written him back. Before long we had a flourishing correspondence, and he ultimately became a dedicated playtester and major contributor to the final game, not to mention a good friend – and thanks to a suggestion made by his daughters, we now have a female troll in the game as well! This encounter, of course, is yet another reason why BoardGameGeek is so wonderful for connecting people through board games.
Trollhalla is scheduled for release in late February/early March 2011 by Z-Man Games, and I hope that players enjoy the game as much as I did designing it!
Alf Seegert
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