The Four Doors – Design Diary

Matt Leacock: The design of The Four Doors followed a long, meandering route. It was the result of four different designers working alongside four different publishers to produce no fewer than five different games. I thought it’d be fun and enlightening to show just how much time, energy, and iteration can go into what (on the surface) might look like a fairly straightforward card game.

Please welcome one of the game’s co-designers, Matt Riddle (Matt R). Matt R will join me as we describe these five games below. Each iteration had its own strengths and each successive game improved on the former, until we were able to pull everything together into the final product, The Four Doors.

Believe it or not, our story starts with Matt Riddle and Ben Pinchback’s The Goonies: Adventure Card Game (2016).

Matt Riddle: After we made The Goonies, things did not go as planned (more on this below). I remember saying to Ben, “Now, I understand everyone's stuff is emotional right now. But I've got a Three Point Plan that's going to fix EVERYTHING.

Step 1. We’ve got this guy, Matt Leacock.

Step 2. ???

Step 3. He is going to fix EVERYTHING.”

So really, more of a two-point plan… Goofy movie quotes and false humility aside, I reached out to Matt about the possibility of working together with no expectations. Ben and I aren’t nobody, but still, Matt could have completely ignored me, and I would not have thought any less of him. Turns out, he is actually super cool and was willing to take a look at our design idea that we wanted to squeeze into his world, more on that soon. I did not expect it to be the circuitous journey that it was, but I could not be happier with where it ended up. 

And so, it all started with…

The Goonies: Adventure Card Game

Key dates

• Design started: Early 2015

• Published: 2016

Matt R: Designing games on spec is HARD. “On spec” means that a publisher asked us to work on a game with a specific set of requirements, or to a specification. As engineers (Ben and I are both engineers IRL) we deal with specs all the time. I am pretty sure Ben’s real-life job is to take the spec from the customers and take them down to the engineers. He is a people person. Designing Goonies was hard and easy at the same time. Mechanically, we knew it had to be a co-op, and the spec said it had to be a card game. That was easy, let's just be inspired by the best co-op game on the planet, Pandemic! I mean this, this is not made up, we literally designed a card game based on Pandemic over 10 years ago and then tried to convince Matt L that it should indeed BE Pandemic The Card Game later on. Life is crazy.

Matt asked me to explain how Goonies works, and I will, I promise. Eventually. We very quickly had the structure of moving between locations and clearing obstacles (cards) using cards from your hand while holding off the Fratellis (threat meter and events). That was the “easy” part. The hard part was making it a Goonies game. We learned a lot when we designed a Back to the Future game that was, well, a game. Again, a card game, mechanically solid, but it did not FEEL like Back to the Future. It didn't deliver the feeling of BTTF that people expected when playing. On Goonies, we worked really hard to remedy that through characters and shared team turns and a general sense of adventure. As much as we could with 100ish cards (again, that pesky spec).

The locations from The Goonies: Adventure Card Game

Fast forward a few years, and Goonies has sold pretty well, but we had yet to receive payment for said project. It happens more than you think. The publisher hit hard times, and the check was in the mail for YEARS. This is a hobby for Ben and me, so it was annoying, not harmful, but it still suuuucckkkeeddd. That all led to the above two to three point plan. I knew we would make DOZENS of dollars to split three ways with Matt L., and they might even put our names on the box under his… but prolly in MUCH smaller letters. 

Pandemic: The Card Game (Pitch)

Matt R & Ben’s Initial Submission

Key dates

• Matt Riddle first emailed Matt Leacock on: 9 November 2018

• Prototype Submitted: 22 January 2019

What elements did you change in The Goonies in order to make it feel more like Pandemic for your pitch?

Matt R: Most of the original Goonies core design elements – locations with accumulating threats that need to be kept under control, the team turn, the card management – made it into the Pandemic redo. 

We changed the way Fratellis (escalation events) worked as many of them made a lot less since in the context of Pandemic, mechanically and thematically. Our design efforts were more around tweaking balance and incorporating any consistent feedback that Goonies received, which we felt could help that game.

The four cards that made up the board in Matt R and Ben’s initial submission.

Matt L: I took their original submission apart, put it back together with input from them, and iterated on it for two years until it was…

Pandemic: The Card Game

Key dates

• First design journal entry: 8 March 2019

• Last design journal entry: 28 January 2020

What from the originally submitted prototype stayed the same?

Matt L: Many of the fundamentals of the original submission carried over into the final version of Pandemic: The Card Game. Players took actions using multifaceted cards to move, treat disease, and meld cards to cure diseases. The same deck of cards was used for both player actions and to track the disease as it spread in the world. Players each had a role-specific power. Disease accumulated in specific regions, and once they passed a threshold, an outbreak occurred. You won the game if you discovered four cures, and you lost the game if you had too many outbreaks.

What changed in the developed version?

Matt R: It was fun going back and forth with Matt and watching our game turn into Pandemic while still seeing the core parts of the Goonies design. I wanted to say one of the hardest things in game design is killing your darlings. You will see in the next section that Matt helped us do that when we moved from a single pawn and “group turn” to individual pawns and turns. While the former could accentuate the master gamer problem, we did our best to design around that. Also, don’t be that guy. All that said, the game was BETTER after the change, it just took some time to get there. No one has ever accused me of lacking confidence, and I do not suffer from imposter syndrome. Neither should you BTW, do that thing you have been thinking about, the world needs your voice too, I promise. BUT still, I couldn’t help but think, why does Matt need us on a Pandemic game? He could totally move on and do it himself, but he did not because he is a good guy. And also, we are pretty dang good at making card games, look ’em up. 

Matt L: In order to increase player agency, I gave each player their own pawn and turn (instead of having the players play collective turns with pooled actions). To simplify things, I also decoupled “Move the team and cure a patient” into two separate actions, Fly and Treat. Giving each player their own pawn also meant they could meet to share cards, leading to the introduction of the Share Knowledge action and the need to coordinate in order to discover cures.

Matt R and Ben had four cards that had “specialist” abilities on them that could be played for a special effect and then removed from the deck. These added a lot of strategic depth, so we developed them into a larger set of event cards. Because these cards were removed from the deck (and not discarded) when used, this opened up a new loss condition: if the draw and discard deck ever ran out when you needed a card, you lost the game.

I removed the Rest option – where you took fewer than the allocated actions in order to draw additional cards. This seemed to reward inaction which felt against the spirit of needing to take urgent action. Instead, I introduced the Research action which simply lets you draw 1 card for an action.

To increase tension, I introduced an infection rate. Each time you reshuffle the deck, you advance a token along a track. At certain thresholds, advancing this token increases the number of cards you need to draw during the Infect step. This led to the third loss condition: if the infection rate marker ever reaches the end of the track, you lose the game.

The four locations from the developed version of Pandemic: The Card Game.

Other Changes

• One of the earliest tasks was renaming most of the nouns and verbs in the game to be consistent with the Pandemic board game. Patients became disease, epidemics became outbreaks, curing became treating, escalate became infect, specialist became event and so on.

• I removed the requirement that forced you to treat all the disease in a given location before you could discover a cure since it felt grindy, didn’t fit the theme particularly well, and wasn’t how the board game worked.

• I removed the idea that when you tried to discover a cure, you’d have a 50% chance of success (a holdover from The Goonies) since that just felt random to me.

• I simplified the way treating became more effective once a cure was discovered.

• I changed discarding so it was carried out as part of each action that required it, rather than a discrete step in the order of play.

Abandoned Ideas

Matt, Ben, and I briefly explored a zombie theme and a realtime version of the game, but quickly abandoned both ideas. Pandemic has always been about “science not violence” so zombies were out and the real time version didn’t feel like a Pandemic game.

Why was the game abandoned?

Matt L: While Z-man was open to the idea of the game, I was really uncertain about how it’d fit into the product line. We already had Pandemic: The Cure (the dice version of the game) and Pandemic: Hot Zone – North America was already planned as a simpler, more portable, entry product. It wasn’t clear that there was enough room for another simplified Pandemic game. As such, we kept kicking it down the road when it came to planning a release.

Matt R: If the game had not ended up being as awesome as it became as The Four Doors, I think I would have flown to Matt’s house and pulled a Say Anything to try and change his mind and get Pandemic the card game in the hopper. Luckily, I didn’t resort to that, and it all worked out in the end. Though Matt and his family missed out on me scream singing IN YOUR EYES THE LIGHT AND THE HEAT. Their loss, really. 

Matt L: A real shame.

Instead of being serenaded, time passed, until one day, I had an idea. If there wasn’t much need for a simplified version of Pandemic anymore, perhaps a simplified version of a more complex game (such as Pandemic Legacy) would work. I pitched the idea to Rob Daviau and Z-man and they were both excited about the potential and decided to come on board. This could open up a new category of game!

We tentatively called the resulting project…

The Clockwork Initiative

(a Pandemic Legacy Card Game)

Key dates

• First design journal entry: 21 January 2021

• Last design journal entry: 27 June 2022

What changed in this new version?

Matt L: We took Pandemic: The Card Game wholesale and developed a story and campaign to layer on top of it.

Matt R: I have never suffered from imposter syndrome a day in my life. My Midwest white guy confidence is off the charts, my parents did TOO good a job with my self-esteem. That said, I spent months on calls with Matt and Rob, barely contributing. Ben and I would test an iteration and give feedback here and here, but it was Matt’s show. Ben and I are slow, we meet once a week, generally and pick away. By the time Ben and I would test, Matt L likely had fixed anything we found AND made a new build. He was very gracious about that lol.

Matt L: We worked with Rob to craft a story of agents tracking down enemy threats, avoiding toxic vermin, as well as prying locals in a six-chapter genre thriller set in the ’70s. Players basically played Pandemic: The Card Game, but their abilities, equipment, and objectives changed from chapter-to-chapter as the story unfolded.

This led us to explore the design space even more, which increased the number of events in the game.

The Clockwork Initiative was set in a gritty 70s townscape.

Matt R: The Four Doors? More like the four designers, amirite? This part was really cool for me. We were already working with Matt L, and now Rob Daviau as well. Especially because I am not a storyteller. I like theme and I want it to make sense in games, but I don’t read flavor text. I don’t read the paragraph at the front of a rulebook telling me some lore about being a farmer, or ship’s captain, or monster hunter, or post-apocalyptic delivery driver. I want theme in as much as it does not get in the way of rules and my understanding of the game. So to watch Rob develop this whole story system and adjust mechanics and actions to account for that was really, really exciting as a game designer. 

Why was the game abandoned?

Matt L: The game was a lot of work… and we simply weren’t having much fun doing it. We took a hard look at the numbers. Since it was a card game, it would have a fairly low price point and we’d be splitting the design royalty four ways. It would be a really heavy lift for a fairly modest reward. Ultimately, we were happy to put our tools down and move on to other projects.

Rob D: Hi, just wandered in to note that I spent a year of my life on this and then Matt kicked me out of the band. “Creative differences” he said. “Going in a new direction,” he said. There was also murmuring of me “bringing everyone down to my level.”  If you know Matt, or Mr. Leacock as he demands I call him, you know he’s a cruel vindictive person full of spite and I should’ve seen this coming. (Actually, this was fun to work on for a bit, until it wasn’t. It was never going to be a great game in this iteration so I bowed out and wished everyone luck, including Mr. Leacock.)

Matt L: <coughs> The project then lay fallow for some time, until one of the good folks from Gamewright (who had tried the game out at a conference) wondered if it might make a good Forbidden card game.

I took a look. It would. The result became…

The Forbidden Island Card Game

Key dates

• First design journal entry: 15 February 2023

• Last design journal entry: 4 September 2023

I made the game’s card square and arranged them into a 2x2 grid to form the island. Each location had two different “shores” that could be threatened.

What changed in this new version?

Matt L: In order to make the “island” for the game, I removed one of the game’s locations (reducing the number of locations from 5 to 4), made the cards square, and arranged them into a 2x2 grid. Since it didn’t make a lot of sense to Fly around the island (the board was much more compact), I dropped the Fly action and let players simply move to adjacent locations for an action, like they could in the Forbidden Island board game.

Instead of having an improved Treat ability when each cure was discovered, players would find treasures that unlocked a new power for the adventurers who held them.

Matt R: You will notice less and less of my witty repartee in these sections, and that is because, as I mentioned before, Matt L could have dropped us at any time, and we wouldn’t have complained or thought less of him. Sure, the DNA of Goonies has survived and evolved and improved throughout this process, but Matt L’s effort had far outstripped ours at this point. If that game had suddenly been released as Forbidden Island: The Card Game I would not have blinked twice. (I know Matt L. never considered it; he is a man of integrity, honor, justice, and the like, but just saying.) 

Why Was The Game Abandoned?

Matt L: I developed the game fully to spec, turned it in, and eagerly looked forward to its production and release. Then, after reevaluating their plans, Gamewright decided to cancel the game. So it goes. (Remember fellow designers: always be sure you get an advance upfront.)

I put the game into File 13. Perhaps something would come of it someday.

The Four Doors

Key Dates

• First design diary entry: 3 September 2023

• Last design diary entry: 23 March 2025

• Published: August 2025 (Gen Con)

Matt L: I was fortunate that Jason Schneider of Happy Camper (who had originally commissioned the game when he was at Gamewright) remembered the game and asked what had become of it. I was happy to tell him that it was still available. We got to work!

This cover composition prompted The Four Doors’ setting, threats, and goals.

What changed in this new version?

Matt L: Jason suggested a treatment early on: “In the clearing of an overgrown forest stand four mysterious doors. Behind each door lies fantastic treasure, but also imminent peril!”

I ran with it. The shadowy threats could be dispelled by illuminating them. The doors could contain the treasures the adventures needed – but they could be closed off if the players weren't careful. I experimented with the door card layouts and came up with the idea of stacking them into a tower. That opened up the idea of a lighthouse with a magical beacon on top. This in turn led me to change the treasures into the relics needed to light the beacon to dispel the shadows forever.

I stacked the four doors to form a lighthouse. The beacon card (on top) came soon after.

Most of the work in this version was spent trying to make the game as accessible as possible. One of the biggest development tasks was making it abundantly clear where each card goes on the table, how to stack and overlap them, and how to understand them in each of these states. I also spent additional time on all the phrasing of the spell effects and adventurer powers.

Another task was refining the solitaire version. I found the recent work I did on the solo mode for The Lord of the Rings: Fate of the Fellowship rewarding and applied some of that same energy to The Four Doors. I wanted to make sure that the solo mode wasn’t just a patch or afterthought and worked to ensure that every card was usable and balanced when you played the game on your own.

At Last!

Matt L: The game premiered at Gen Con in 2025 and I couldn’t be happier with the final result. The mechanisms were refined over the five different incarnations and the product design really came together in this latest version. If you haven’t seen the shimmer on the lit beacon and the relic cards, you really should check them out – they’re nearly blinding!

So happy that Matt R and Ben patiently came along all the twists and turns. The game is better for it.

The published game, in progress. Photo courtesy of Ilya Ushakov.

Bonus Material

Some additional odds-and-ends that illustrate the game’s development.

Reference card evolution. Left-to-right: Ben and Matt R’s initial submission (typeset by me), Pandemic: The Card Game, The Clockwork Initiative, The Forbidden Island Card Game, The Four Doors

Player card evolution. Left-to-right: The Goonies: Adventure Card Game, Ben and Matt’s initial submission, Pandemic: The Card Game, The Clockwork Initiative, Forbidden Island: The Card Game, The Four Doors , prototype and early proof.

A big top with four doors

When I was translating Forbidden Island: The Card Game (with its square board) into The Four Doors, a briefly considered setting the game in some sort of a building or tent with a door in each corner. I wasn’t able to pull that together into an overall theme or story, so I abandoned it.

Animal Rescue Team – Design Diary

Origins

The idea for Animal Rescue Team began in a conversation with my family as we walked our family dog, Fintan around the block (1). We were brainstorming different possibilities for rescue games because the license for one of my games had run out and I had the opportunity to revisit it.

Unless you were really into 1960s-era kids’ shows featuring marionettes, you may have missed that game. It was called Thunderbirds. In the game, players go on rescue missions around the globe. You have to gather the right rescuers, vehicles, and equipment in order to have the best chance of success. The game requires you to make constant tradeoffs between risk and efficiency, has a lot of tension and storytelling elements, and did quite well when it came out in 2015.

We discussed what players might rescue in a new game with a rescue theme and remembered the game Animal Rescue that my daughter had prototyped when she was in elementary school (2). What if the players were rescuing animals? While discussing it, we quickly realized that we knew a real-life animal rescuer – our friend, Lisa Towell! I contacted her shortly after our walk and was delighted to hear that she was up for helping to design the new game.

Lisa and I started out by building out some tables for translating the game’s characters, rescues, vehicles, and setting over to the new theme. I looked at things through a mechanical lens (how might the game’s mechanisms change to fit the new theme?) while Lisa looked at the design from the other direction (how might the game’s new theme change the existing mechanisms?). During our early conversations it became apparent that we had two main goals. We wanted to center the game on animals and we wanted to improve on the previous game wherever we could.

Goal 1: Spotlight the Animals

One of our early ideas was to embody the animals you were rescuing in the game, making them an important part of play. Perhaps in the new game, you could actually see the animals and load them into your vehicle when you completed a rescue. This not only fit the game’s story well but it leaned into one of the elements of Thunderbirds that people reported enjoying the most. In that game, you could load “pod vehicles” into Thunderbird 2, fly them around, and drop them off in order to complete rescues. In this new game, we could give players the option to load and unload animals and equipment into and out of every vehicle.

We also wanted to be respectful of the animals shown in the game. We favored showing the animals in a naturalistic way (no exaggerated, Disney-like treatments to their eyes, faces, or proportions), give each of them their own names, and treat them – even the chickens and lab mice – as individuals worthy of being rescued. Lisa spent a lot of time directing the illustrators as well. She favored the depiction of animals of mixed breeds and wanted to make sure the little details were rendered appropriately. (Examples that I recall: “a goat’s tail points up!” and “OMG, you’d never hold a lead rope like that when handling a horse!”)

Like all of my games, we spent some time early in development on working out the language used in the game. Here’s an excerpt from one of our controlled vocabularies:

An excerpt from our long controlled vocabulary for the game

One dilemma: while we wanted the players to emotionally connect with the animals in the game, we didn’t want them to despair if they failed at a rescue or at the game. We used some strategies to provide some emotional distance for more sensitive players:

• The cover of the game shows the animals in the act of being rescued – not in peril.

• The illustrations on the rescue cards show the animals, but they’re never shown in danger.

• While the short stories on each rescue card describe real-world rescue situations, that text doesn’t need to be read to play the game.

• If you lose the game due to a failed rescue, we assure you that another volunteer rescue team comes to help. (And we suggest you buy them lunch as a thank you.)

We felt this approach maintained the game’s realism and tension while reducing the likelihood of upsetting players, especially young folks.

Goal 2: Lean into the Fun, Clean up the Janky

This was also a great opportunity for me to revisit the underlying Thunderbirds design and tune it up. My goal was to lean into the elements that worked well while cutting out the bits that were confusing, awkward, or unnecessary. Over the course of development, we made the vehicles more fun, improved the way the cards worked, dropped one type of action, modified the dice, and made a few other miscellaneous improvements.

Make the Vehicles Even More Fun

Animal Rescue Team makes use of six different vehicles and we really explored how they could be different and playful. They have a toy-like quality and we worked to ensure each vehicle’s form helped communicate its function.

A rabbit and a specialist on a motorcycle, on a truck
(prototype made from 3D printed resin and laser cut illustration board)

• The speeds of each vehicle are printed directly on them, making it really clear how fast they can go.

• Each vehicle can carry specialists, animals, and equipment and those pieces each take on a different form. Specialists are represented by pawns, animals are represented by animal meeples, and equipment is represented by tokens. You always know what you’re allowed to carry. If it fits, it sits! 

• We added a (non-drivable) trailer to fit large animals (horses, cows, and a tiger) (3). That led to the idea of towing vehicles. You can attach the trailer to the SUV or truck using a hitch that’s similar to the hook-up used in Brio trains.

• We added a boat to the game for water rescues. This, in turn, led us to change the board’s topology. Players can move the boat between regions, provided they share a coastline, or they can hitch up the boat (like the trailer) and drive it between land regions.

• We added a speedy motorcycle to the game which can be loaded onto the back of the truck, which essentially lets one specialist move two vehicles at the same time.

All these additions resulted in a lot of playful variety without much additional complexity. You can look at a vehicle and see what it can carry, how fast it moves, and whether it can hitch or be hitched to another vehicle or not.

Because the vehicles are also limited in what they can carry, they will start to fill up as they pick up animals. To solve this, vehicles can drop animals off at shelters (where they'll be cared for) in order to free up space — but the shelters also periodically fill up, leading to even more logistics problems.

Make the Special Cards Work Better

The game uses logistics cards which give players special one-time powers (these were called F.A.B. cards in Thunderbirds) and event cards which challenge the players with new circumstances or restrictions. Lisa brainstormed all sorts of different benefits and challenges that we could throw at the players and then we both set out to figure out how they might play out in the game.

Then, I made the following changes to the two systems so they would function even better in the new game:

• I changed the event cards so players encounter an ever-increasing number of them at a time, escalating the danger as the game unfolds. In Thunderbirds, you only ever turn over one of these at a time, which often led to dead beats when a card didn’t really do much. I also added events that change the topology of the board by closing bridges or roads.

• I addressed a problem I had with the F.A.B. cards in Thunderbirds. They always felt a bit random since they’re drawn blindly from the top of the deck. Now, in Animal Rescue Team, you can choose between two faceup logistics cards (essentially drafting them) or you can draw blindly from the deck in times of desperation. This gives the players more agency – they can purchase a card knowing it’ll help them. These faceup cards also now cycle as time progresses which lets you see the majority of the deck each game, instead of a limited handful.

• To add more variety from game to game, we added more of each type to the game. There are now 18 event cards (up from 12) and 24 logistics cards (up from 18).

Other Tuneups

People who are familiar with Thunderbirds may be interested in the following other changes that we made between the two games:

• I dropped the somewhat awkward “Plan” action that let you exchange an action for a random F.A.B. card since it was rarely used in practice. There are now only two possible actions in Animal Rescue Team: Move or Rescue.

• I flattened the curve on the rescue dice. Thunderbirds uses dice that each show 0–5; Animal Rescue Team’s dice each show 0, 1, 2, 2, 3, 4 for a range of 0–8 instead of 0–12 when the two dice are summed together. It’s a subtle change but it means that each bonus matters more in proportion to the numbers that are randomly generated. (4)

• Some rescues now escalate in difficulty the longer you put them off. 

• After a bunch of testing, I changed the rules so the eight “Time Ticks Down” cards are simply shuffled directly into the rescue deck during setup. Thunderbirds used a more complex setup (similar to Pandemic) where the deck had to first be split into smaller piles with these cards shuffled into each pile. This method eliminated the possibility that your game is derailed by a really bad shuffle. But those games are exceedingly rare and the special setup is complex and time consuming. This change also had the side benefit of raising the tension in the game since you can never know what you’re going to draw next.

Development Process

As we developed the game we did many rounds of playtesting with families, animal lovers, hobby gamers, cooperative game lovers, and lots of folks from the animal rescue community. We lent copies to friends, tested at conventions, and did video-recorded remote tests. The game changed in several ways over the course of development.

Animal Evolution

Of all the components in the game, the ones that saw the most iteration were the animals themselves. We started by representing the animals as simple wooden cubes, then punchboard tokens, then experimented with 3D sculpted miniatures, before finally deciding that wooden animal meeples were the best approach.

The first vehicles, specialists, and animals that I put together to show Lisa. Look at the two chickens, a dog, and a horse! It’s also clear at this point that I had no idea what sorts of vehicles would be used to rescue animals. (Take note: people do not typically pack dogs into a container pulled by a semi truck.)

The punchboard version of the animal tokens. When they were in the vehicles, they looked great. But they didn’t look so good when lying on the board. This photo also shows some color-coding on the vehicles that we later dropped.

Stock wooden pawns as specialists with sculpted, plastic animals (hand-painted 3D resin prints)

A prototype showing specialists, animal meeples, and shelters (all meant to be in wood) (5). We’re still developing the vehicles and equipment at this point. The equipment shown here is a simulation of screen-printed wood; we changed these to be punch board tokens in the final game since those felt better.

• The first animals were simple wooden cubes, glued together that we used for rapid testing.

• Punchboard tokens were the least expensive. We could fully illustrate these but they didn't have a very good table presence as you’d have to lay them down on their side before they were rescued.

• Miniatures looked great but they introduced more plastic into the game and would have been quite expensive, especially if each species was in a different color. It also would have increased the overall size of the vehicles, and therefore the board, and then possibly even the box, adding to the game’s cost.

• Wooden animal meeples however, could stand up, could be in different colors without much additional expense, and each would still have a distinct shape. They also looked better next to the wooden pawns we had planned to use for the rescue specialists.

Specialist Evolution

The specialists started out as pegs that were inserted into the vehicles but we then switched them to be wooden pawns which felt much better. The pegs always needed to be in a vehicle or shelter (otherwise, they’d awkwardly lie down and roll around on the board). Once we made them pawns, we realized they could simply stand on their own, outside of a vehicle or shelter.

Uhh… hello? Can I get a ride?

When we let them stand by themselves on the board, we realized that there were some situations where it made sense to leave one behind in a region, for example to make room for an animal in a vehicle. We soon learned that this can lead to unfortunate (and often, very funny) situations where you have all the best intentions of picking up your team member before their turn, but circumstances change – or you forget – and they’re left stranded, looking for a ride.

Rescue Card Evolution

The illustrations, structure, and design of the rescue cards evolved along with the rest of the game. 

These cards have a lot of information to convey and need to do so efficiently so they don’t slow down play. Each card needs to communicate the rescue’s difficulty, the bonuses you can apply, its location, the animals you’ll need to place on the board, the bonuses you’ll get if you’re successful, a title, the story behind the rescue, and an illustration of the animal being rescued.

A selection of rescue cards as they evolved through various prototypes

We determined early on that it wouldn’t make sense to illustrate each rescue situation on the rescue cards. We didn’t want to show animals in peril, and if we did, the animals would be quite small. Such illustrations would also require a tremendous amount of art direction and expense. So instead, we put a hero illustration of the animals to be rescued on each card. We also learned that illustrating each location helped give the regions an identity that helped players find them on the game board.

Sample rescue cards showing final artwork. The one on the right shows our new method for showing scaling difficulty.

Zev Shlasinger, who runs Play to Z, wondered if some of the rescues could get harder the longer you wait to complete them. The idea worked well. Should you complete the rescue with a tight deadline or should you do a different rescue (that’s less pressing) but will get harder the longer you wait? The hardest part for these was encoding them in a way that didn’t force the player to do a lot of arithmetic.

World Building

Lisa also spent a good deal of time building out the world in which the rescues take place. She started with something we both knew – the San Francisco Bay Area – but then we decided to change the setting to an imaginary world in order to give us more freedom with the design, and so the players could imagine this place being anywhere.

The first board (modeled after the San Francisco Bay Area) and the board during development. One key change was the integration of water into the regions so the boat could function as a rescue vehicle.

Another study of board topology. (If you ever need to get around in the Bay Area, print this out and take it with you.)

Lisa described each region in detail. These descriptions helped her write the different rescue stories and were a useful reference for the illustrator (Jeff Langevin) when he drew the board, rescue card, and mission card backgrounds. Since the game has come out, we’ve already been asked by several people if the game is set in a real place. I take that to mean it feels pretty authentic to folks.

Using her extensive experience in the field and from consultations with other experts, Lisa also supplied the majority of the details you see in the game. She wrote descriptions of the specialists, what they’d be wearing, the equipment they’d be using, the vehicles they’d be driving, as well as other notes on the logistics cards and event cards for the game. While the game isn’t a simulation, we wanted to take every opportunity we had to get things right.

A closeup of 3D printed proofs of the vehicles, animals, on an inkjet proof of the board

Results

We’ve been really happy with the outcome. Thanks to Zev Shlasinger of Play to Z, Tony Mastrangeli, and SU&SD for helping us really fine tune the product. Thanks also to the illustrators, Alyssa McCarthy, Jeff Langevin, Eric Hibbeler and the vehicle sculptor, Toan Nguyen. Special thanks to all the people in the animal rescue community who helped advise us on the game including Janice and Norm Rosene, for sharing their technical expertise; and Michelle Cehn, Lisa DeCarbo, Dan Miller, Rebecca Platt, and Claudia Sonder, for sharing their ideas. And thanks to our many playtesters.

We started this way back in 2019, before the lockdown, and even managed to steer the game from one publisher to another over the course of development. We’d also like to thank the folks at Z-man Games who helped Play to Z secure some of the wonderful artwork in the game. (Thanks Mike and Bree!)

How the Game Compares to Real Life (Lisa)

Working on this project with Matt has been fantastically fun for me – what a great opportunity to share stories about animal rescue with more people! Animal disaster response can be exciting, exhausting, surprising, heartwarming, and heartbreaking – but it’s always rewarding. I was thrilled to try and capture the whole experience in a board game. I hope that the game inspires people to create a disaster plan for their own animal companions, or maybe consider volunteering with their local animal disaster response team.

In our early discussions, we realized that we would have to take some creative license with real-life animal disaster response in order to suit the mechanics of the game, and to make the game more interesting and fun to play. Here are some of the ways real animal response compares to the game.

It’s More Than Just Field Operations

Real animal disaster response requires volunteers in many different roles. Hotline operators take calls from members of the public who need help with their animals. Field team members are assigned to visit properties to locate, assess, and transport animals. Shelter team members care for animals in temporary shelters until they can be reunited with their humans or transferred for adoption into new homes. Additional volunteers handle planning, tracking, logistics, radio communications, public communications, and other supporting roles.

We simplified things for the game by focusing just on the work of the field teams. In the real world, the field teams also do a lot of sheltering in place (in addition to evacuating the animals to shelters), but we decided that the addition of sheltering in place would be an unnecessary complication in the game.

Volunteer Animal Responders Can’t Do Everything (Even Though We Want To)

Lisa evacuating koi from a pond on a burned out property (photo courtesy of North Valley Animal Disaster Group)

The game's specialists (Firefighter, Swiftwater Technician, Extraction Specialist, Rope Rescuer, Veterinarian, and Animal Behaviorist) are real roles, but a typical team doesn't usually have so many skilled specialists on it. In the real world, we generally rely on trained professionals for the advanced stuff. We might request a team of veterinarians if any animals need medical care, or we might partner with local animal control officers who are experienced in handling aggressive and difficult animals. Animal response volunteers bring a wide range of skills and experience to the table – everything from species experts to SAR (Search and Rescue) volunteers to people who have never handled a large animal. Luckily, there are roles for everyone, no matter what their background.

We train year-round to continue expanding our skills, but most of us are unpaid volunteers, many with full-time jobs or other responsibilities, so we focus on learning the skills for just one or two roles. Training as an animal disaster responder has given me the opportunity to acquire all kinds of interesting skills, like ham radio operations, fireline safety, animal triage and first aid, and safe handling of many animal species like cats, dogs, rabbits, horses, sheep, goats, pigs, alpacas, chickens, turkeys, and even emus.

A typical field team in a big incident might have just two people (since we often just don’t have enough people available to form larger teams). One is the trailer driver (trained in trailer safety and maneuvering), and the other handles the navigation, paperwork, and radio. Both people assess and handle the animals.

Safety Comes First

To make the game more exciting, we have some rather dramatic scenarios. But in real life, we are very careful not to make things worse by putting human volunteers at risk. For example, we don’t send volunteers into areas at immediate risk of burning or flooding, or into a half-collapsed building. We use PPE (Personal Protective Equipment) like helmets, work gloves, etc., and we keep tabs on our field teams by radio at all times. Some of the equipment in the game (like the Fire Protective Gear) serves important safety functions.

The box cover art posed some interesting challenges – we wanted to show a lot of action without making it look too scary or dangerous. Claudia Sonder, founder and president of Napa Community Animal Response Team, helped me to spec out the water rescue scene for the illustrator with the appropriate equipment and PPE. Note that all the rescuers are wearing helmets, and all the people on the river are wearing personal flotation devices. The original art had a couple of safety elements that you can’t see (we decided to zoom the scene in a little for the final version) – the rescuer in the water is attached by a rope to the boat, and there are crates that the animals are being loaded into – that’s much safer than letting the dogs and cats just run around loose. That tired horse in the background is getting a forward assist to climb up the hill via a rescue strap around his chest – much better for him than pulling on his head and neck.

Different Types of Disasters Don’t All Happen at the Same Time

The game is designed to give a glimpse of lots of different types of disasters – fires, floods, mudslides, earthquakes, tornadoes, collapsed buildings, hazardous material events, contagious animal diseases, and even human-caused disasters like neglect and abuse cases. Individual animals also might need the help of a technical rescue team when they fall into a hard-to-access space or get stuck somewhere and their humans can’t get them out. (Real animal technical rescue teams even have the rigging equipment needed to airlift a horse with a helicopter.)

In the real world, you don’t get all of the disaster types at once like in the game. So, one incident might be a large wildfire with many homes burned, another might be flooding affecting livestock, and another might be a neglect case involving a bunch of small dogs. We would then choose volunteers for that incident who have the appropriate skills and equipment for the conditions (species-specific handling skills, animal first aid skills, trailer driving, technical rescue, etc.)

However, quite often one disaster will lead to another – for example, earthquakes can cause fires, collapses, and hazardous materials spills – so real life teams get exposed to a wide variety of challenges. A sudden evacuation might result in the discovery by first responders of previously unknown neglected animals who need care. Surprises happen all the time – you go to a property to pick up a couple of cats, but you drive by an injured goat on the way and end up loading her into the back of the SUV because you don’t have a trailer. I was once en route to a property to feed some donkeys when we were stopped by a first responder to warn us about a bear with burned paws who had been seen limping around nearby. Never a dull moment! But all of that said, the game definitely puts a lot more disaster scenarios side by side than we typically see in real incidents.

Sometimes There Are LOTS of Animals

A large incident like a wildfire can impact thousands of animals. The board game simplifies this to just a few animals per rescue so that the mechanics of the game are reasonable, but in the real world we might get a call to evacuate 30 horses from a boarding facility, or to provide food, water, and medical care for a flock 60 chickens or a herd of 25 goats. In the game, we used the mission cards to bring in some examples of larger rescues.

A lot of the challenge in a large animal response is in the paperwork – keeping track of who each animal is and exactly where they are at all times so that we can successfully reunite them when the time comes. We have to be careful when two similar-looking black horses come in at the same time to make sure we ID them correctly. But paperwork doesn't make for the most compelling game experience, so we only added it via the event cards "Paperwork Errors" and "Bureaucracy." Fun times!

Lisa comforting a dog who survived a large wildfire (photo courtesy of North Valley Animal Disaster Group)

Sometimes It’s Really, Really Sad

We wanted to keep the game hopeful and focused on the rescues, but field work can be pretty rough in a big wildfire. Sometimes we arrive at a property to search for an animal and all that’s left is a smoking ruin. I’ve had to make phone calls to tell someone that we couldn’t find their animal and they probably did not survive. Those phone calls wreck me every single time.

But sometimes it goes the right way. Someone has lost their home and all their possessions, but we get to call and tell them that, against all odds, we found their beloved cat and are headed their way to reunite them. It’s those moments that keep me going.

Creative Problem-Solving is Always Required

Some elements of the game surprised me with how much they feel like real world disaster work. The element of creative problem-solving is present in both. Real field teams are constantly asking: What do we do first? How much time do we have before things get dangerous? A fallen tree is blocking the road – can we remove it with the tools we have in the truck? Or instead, can we safely walk the last half mile to the property and lead the horses out? These pigs won’t load into the trailer; can we improvise a loading chute out of the materials lying around here?

Animals get up to all kinds of crazy stuff – some real-life stories that I’ve heard didn’t make it into the game because they actually seemed too outlandish. One recent example: some colleagues of mine were called to assist with extracting a pregnant cow from a swimming pool (I'm so curious how she managed to fall in there!). One possible method would involve passing some lifting straps under the cow’s body and hauling her out over the side of the pool, but this was ruled out because of the risk of injury to her unborn calf from the straps. The team ended up draining some water from the pool so that the cow could stand instead of swimming, and then they built a ramp to enable her to walk out on her own. A panicked cow is no joke to deal with, and a cow is less likely than a horse to be used to halters and human handling, so this rescue involved a lot of planning, creativity, and teamwork to come up with an effective method that kept everyone safe.

How Realistic is the Game?

I’ve been asked how realistic the rescue stories in the game are. Many of the scenarios on the rescue and mission cards were inspired by real-life rescues, but with details adjusted to keep things interesting and to suit the game’s mechanisms. In case you’re wondering, the rescue where the horse falls through the top of the septic tank is actually very realistic – we are trained to watch out for this hazard. A large fire can weaken the top of the underground tank, and when the horse (or a person) walks over it later they can fall through. The horse would definitely need some decontamination afterwards.

Regarding the game’s vehicles, real life field teams do use pickup trucks, SUVs, and trailers. Boats are heavily used in water rescues, but you wouldn’t likely see a boat being towed around during a wildfire incident. A car might be used in an incident that affects mainly smaller animals (but is less useful than a larger vehicle). The motorcycle is not that realistic for animal response simply because it can’t hold much in the way of equipment or animal carriers (although perhaps it could be used for scouting an area with poor road access). But for the game, the motorcycle is very fun – I love the visual of a chicken riding on the back!

Your Turn!

Despite the simplifications and adjustments we had to make, I think we've been able to achieve a lot of the feel of real world animal disaster response with the game. (One of my colleagues is actually toying with the idea of using the game as a training tool for new field team members.) It's been amazing to watch people playtesting the game, getting deeply invested in their complex plans to rescue the cats, while assembling specialists to save the horse, and wait, we need to drop off some equipment to help nail that mission, and OMG WHERE DID THIS TIGER COME FROM? AND WE'RE RUNNING OUT OF TIME ON THE DOG! AND NOW THE BRIDGE IS OUT, YIKES! That's exactly how it feels in the real world – we get tired and hungry, and things go wrong unexpectedly, but we keep going as long as we can for one more animal. And now, you can try this out for yourself!

Bonus Materials

• Be sure to check out Lisa’s Real Life Animal Rescue Stories which also includes some stories where the animals are the heroes.

• Here are some Tips for Being a Real Life Animal Rescuer. We also put these in our rulebook.

Notes

Fintan Leacock

1. Our family adopted Fintan in 2015. I never thought I’d want a dog, but Anna slowly worked on us by showing us detailed slide presentations, researching non-allegetic dog breeds, and agreeing not to complain about anything for 30 days. (That was some especially creative parenting on our part at the time.) Anna recalls that not complaining for that month was one of the hardest things she’s ever done in her life.

2. Players flew helicopters around and rescued animals from danger. Anna confirmed recently that she did indeed (despite earlier protestations) deliberately change the rules of the game during play so she would win every time.

3. Lisa added the tiger to the game based on real world stories of tigers and other wild animals being rescued from poor conditions under private ownership. This was long before the 2020 lockdown and the popular series, Tiger King.

4. Since the “2” result is on each die twice, you’re more likely to get the average total result of 4 (22.2%) than you are of getting a total result of 5 in Thunderbirds (16.7%).

5. I prototyped these using a laser cut illustration board. When illustration is cut in layers, stacked, glued, and painted, it’s a convincing proxy for wood. The motorcycle in this photo is also prototyped using illustration board.

Lord of the Rings: Fate of the Fellowship – Design Diary

Origins

The Lord of the Rings: Fate of the Fellowship has been a long time coming. Its roots can be found in my earliest attempts at game design and my love of Tolkien.

My Uncle Pat introduced me to the works of Tolkien when I was a young teenager. This was the same uncle who designed games in his spare time, inspiring me, at a young age, to do the same (1). He gave me a tattered edition of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings along, with a dog-eared copy of Robert Foster’s A Guide to Middle-earth and his copy of Middle-earth Role Playing. I never played the role-playing game, but devoured everything.

An early influence

Later as a teen, I played Howard Barasch and Richard Berg’s War of the Ring (1977) over Christmas break with my dad. We woke up, had a quick breakfast, then spent the rest of the day playing it, not stopping to eat or even change out of our pajamas. I lost on what was essentially a coin toss at Mount Doom around dinner time. (Then, if I recall correctly, threw a bit of a fit.) We played only the “character game,” not the full war game. The full version was too complex for me at the time, and likely still is. Before War of the Ring, my war game experience was limited to Avalon Hill’s Tactics II (1958), The Battle of the Bulge (1965), and Midway (1964). They didn’t resonate with me at the time: I was neither interested in the stories they told nor their history, and lost to my dad every time, often in a state of frustration.

I made an early attempt to create my own fantasy war game, one that was more accessible to me, when I was about 15 years old. I named it Quest of the Nine Orbs. It was highly derivative of War of the Ring, both mechanically and thematically, but I’d left out all the bits that I found frustrating or fiddly. My uncle Pat provided the illustrations. I played the game with friends a few times and then packed it away for nearly 40 years. (2)

The board for Quest of the Nine Orbs. Marker on hex boards. Note the resemblance to Middle-earth!

Card backs for Quest of the Nine Orbs, illustrated by Pat Leacock. Marker on card, laminated with shelf liner.

The game’s plot was pretty thin: the Good player needed to recover the majority of magical orbs and bring them to their capital while the Evil player tried to do the same. The game’s “Cloaked Nornaz,” “Mark of Razum,” and “Men of Dalen” were clearly derived from the Nazgûl, Rohirrim, and Men of Dale. There was even a Gollum-like character who could switch his allegiance. But I had a lot of fun making my own world nonetheless, and took great pleasure in drawing its map.

In the mid-2000s, I tried to play Roberto Di Meglio, Marco Maggi, and Francesco Nepitello’s War of the Ring (2004, first edition). I found it difficult to get into, I couldn’t read the tiny type on the cards, and never completed a game.

In October of 2021 (35 years after Quest of the Nine Orbs!) things started to come together in my mind. I had both an idea for how I could make a new game based on the story of the War of the Ring along with an opportunity to bring it to market.

The opportunity came before the idea. I had discussed a number of different licenses with Z-Man for future Pandemic System games and The Lord of the Rings was an early favorite. The trouble was, I really didn’t have any concept of how I’d pull it off, nor did I have the time or stamina that I figured such a project would require at the time. But a few years after the release and success of Fall of Rome (2018), the ideas started to come together. Fall of Rome featured barbarians migrating across a map of the Roman Empire and includes a dice-based battle system. Perhaps I could modify those mechanisms as a starting point for a game set in Middle-earth?

I figured the resulting game might be a good “war game for non-wargamers” since it would be based on a familiar system (Pandemic). And I enjoyed the fun symmetry to all of this: Pandemic itself was influenced by many games, most notably Reiner Knizia’s cooperative game, The Lord of the Rings (2000). It felt like things could come full circle.

Starting Points

Pandemic System games can be broken down into two major parts: the puzzle the players are trying to solve and the threat that is working against them.

At the beginning of development, I kept the puzzle simple. Frodo would need to collect 5 ring cards with the help of the other players, travel to Mordor, and discard them to destroy The Ring. This was similar in a sense to melding 5 cards of the same color to cure a disease at a research station in Pandemic. I put this simple puzzle in place quickly and moved on to work on the threat system.

a “Simplest possible experiment.”  I find that I get the best results if I quickly try out something simple and build out from there. This early notebook page has the order of play, actions menu, and shadow card behavior, and the attributes of each location.

For the threat, I needed to find some way to model the forces of Sauron, most notably shadow troops marching across Middle-earth and the Nazgûl, flying overhead. Using a simple point-to-point map, I started by playing around with wooden cubes and simple threat cards. While I liked the way characters could move troops around in Fall of Rome and engage enemy forces, I didn’t think the barbarian migration behaviors from that game were suitable for the forces of Sauron. I wanted to see distinct armies of orcs moving across the board that would threaten Minas Tirith and Helm’s Deep – not endless, unbroken streams of troops emanating from Mordor.

First pencil sketch of the board from 12 October 2021.

An early board undergoing a playtest. The battle lines were a foundational concept.

A prototype shadow card. If the top card of the draw pile shows a flag, all the armies on the pictured battle line (from Umbar to Helm’s Deep) advance. If the top card shows a banner, then the army in Umbar is reinforced.

I came upon a mechanism I really liked: by using shadow cards with two different behaviors, “reinforce” or “advance,” armies could accumulate troops before they marched out into battle. The shadow cards each showed both behaviors (reinforce and advance) and the top card of the shadow deck would indicate which of the two behaviors triggered with each card draw. This idea hooked me right away and became the core of the threat engine. I spent over two years refining it.

By interweaving the lines the troops used to advance on the board, I found that these armies could have behaviors that could be anticipated but not wholly predicted. Troops from Núrn typically march forth to attack Minas Tirith, but depending on the specific order the shadow cards were drawn, they might instead march on Helm’s Deep, The Woodland Realm, Erebor, Lórien, Dol Amroth, or in rarer combinations, locations as far away as The Grey Havens or even The Shire or Rivendell.

I brought a bare bones prototype to The Gathering of Friends, a game convention that I attend each year. Despite how raw the game was, playtesters liked what they saw so far and encouraged me to keep at it. On arriving home and learning that I’d been exposed to COVID at The Gathering, I sequestered myself in a back bedroom and spent two days in isolation, working on the game nonstop using all the data and ideas I’d collected at the convention.

Solo tests of the early game during isolation.

Major Problems to Solve

Traversing Middle-earth

The first major problem I had to solve was figuring out how to make movement across Middle-earth interesting and viable. You fly around the board in Pandemic, take trains across Iberia, and can sail across the Mediterranean in Fall of Rome, all letting you cover a lot of ground quickly. The residents of Middle-earth (with the exception of some travel on horseback and the occasional eagle) are largely crossing their large world fairly slowly, on foot.

Early on in development, I gave each player two characters to play instead of one. This made the game feel much better since The Lord of the Rings features such a large ensemble of characters. (For example, in a two-player game, having a Fellowship made up of only two characters, one being Frodo, felt really wrong.) But having a larger cast also meant that more of the board would be easily reachable with more characters in more places.

To make movement faster and more interesting, I let characters move along with each other. This was appropriate thematically: The Fellowship traveled together, after all. But it also meant that their effective range of movement could be much greater if needed. Aragorn could, for example, lead Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin to from Bree to Rivendell to join Gandalf on his turn. Then Gandalf could lead the group further south to the Fords of Isen on his turn, to be led even further east through Rohan by Éowyn on her turn.

Character Clumping

Early tests showed that all this traveling together could be a problem, however, as there was a tendency for everyone to bunch together in one big group over much of the game, making it far less interesting. I certainly didn’t want the dominant strategy to be having the entire Fellowship sneak into Mordor together!

To address this, I need the characters to be strong together but then present a whole host of reasons why they needed to be apart.

To start, I developed the shadow cards and battle lines so that the shadow troops would threaten multiple havens in different regions of the board, often at the same time. In this way, players couldn’t accompany Frodo and also defend Helm’s Deep or Minas Tirith at the same time. (While there are some friendly troops in the havens that can defend themselves to some degree, they can’t move or muster on their own. So if the Rohirrim need to rush to defend Minas Tirith, a player character needs to ensure that happens. And if the Easterlings are marching on Dale, well, another player character is going to need to do something about that.) This kept the characters as the major agents of change in the story and required them to be active and make tradeoffs, all over the board.

Easy Melds, Monotony, and Grind

Creating fires all over the board worked pretty well to break up The Fellowship. But other problems reared their ugly heads:

• What happens if Frodo draws a lot of ring cards early in the game? He can just sprint to Mordor and win.

• How do I prevent each game from being the same, well-worn march to Mount Doom?

• How can I make each region of the board interesting and active?

The ring-melding problem plagued me. For nearly a year, I had the players add the ring cards to each section of the deck along with the Skies Darken cards (the cards that function like Epidemic cards). While this technically worked, it felt clunky. It required additional setup, but worse, it felt like the players were playing the game only to bide the time that was required to draw the ring cards they needed. It felt grindy. It felt like work.

A Breakthrough – Objective Cards

Martin Bouchard at The Gathering of Friends (3)

Fortunately, I found a solution that addressed all of the above problems and more. About a year into development, after some fruitful conversations with Martin Bouchard, I added objective cards to the game. Like any great design solution, they solved more than one problem at the same time:

• They provided incremental goals to the game. Before I added objectives, the players’ experience was one long, slow, slip into a pit of despair, resolving all at once only at the very end of the game. With the introduction of the new objectives, hope could be rekindled at several points during the game. Completing an objective felt like an act break and helped generate a series of upbeats and downbeats – a simple, proven foundation for a compelling story.

• They let me introduce additional non-player characters, threats, and subplots without complicating the core game with additional subsystems. The Balrog, Shelob, Denethor, Théoden, the Dead Men of Dunharrow, and others appear in the game in this way.

• They opened up the world of the game, allowing for more counterfactuals to be explored. What if peace was made with the Dunlendings? What if you weren’t exactly sure when Gandalf would appear after his fight with the Balrog? What if Moria, Osgiliath, or even Minas Morgul was retaken by the Free Peoples?

• Mechanically, the objectives provided uses for all the other suits of player cards used in the game. In addition to needing to collect the ring (resistance) suit, you might need to meld friendship, stealth, or valor. This solved the problem I had where the players might draw all the ring cards they needed during the first round of the game. With the addition of these other melds, drawing rings early was no longer a blessing since they’d compete for space in your hand with all the other cards needed for the other objectives. This simplified the game’s setup and gave the players flexibility over which objectives to attempt to complete first.

• They simplified the presentation of the rules for destroying The Ring. Instead of needing to learn and remember the rules for this one-time action as part of the core game, the rules could simply be presented off to the side, on the card for its objective, next to every other objective.

• They provided a more compelling way to scale the difficulty of the game. Players could make the game harder by introducing more objectives instead of just increasing the number and rate of shadow troops that are added to the board.

Managing Complexity

Development was a constant struggle to resolve the tension between bringing to life more iconic story moments while keeping complexity under control. I found that I could integrate many one-off story elements through the game’s objective cards, event cards, and character abilities, but needed some additional subsystems to make the core game tick.

Two of these important subsystems relied on dice: the way the Nazgûl search for Frodo and the way battles are conducted. As these systems evolved, their reference cards saw more iterations than any other element in the game.

This video, showing the evolution of the reference cards, gives you a good sense of this iteration:

The game started like many of the other Pandemic System games, with a single way to win and multiple ways to lose. The problem I started to have, however, was that the number of ways to lose kept piling up and keeping track of all these game loss conditions made the game feel more complex. At one point you could lose the game if shadow troops captured two havens, if you ran out of player cards, if you ran out shadow troops, or if the Ring-bearer took on too much corruption or perished. Not only was this a lot to keep track of, it was unforgiving! In an early demo to the publisher we lost the game on turn four when a single haven was lost. (4) I eventually solved this by funneling all of these loss conditions into a single number: Frodo’s despair. This made the game more dynamic and forgiving (you could gain hope as well as despair and survive the loss of havens) and you could have exciting finishes where you won the game even after all the player cards or shadow troops were exhausted.

Perhaps the trickiest bit of all was managing the overall visual complexity of the board. Players reported enjoying the way the troops accumulated and moved along the battle lines as one of their favorite aspects of the game. But, in addition to simply making them work as a game element, keeping the battle lines from looking like a jumbled pile of spaghetti – while still being accessible to players with limited color vision – was quite the challenge.

The map underwent dozens of iterations, many of which are captured in this video:

Another key part of managing all this complexity was killing some darlings.

Abandoned Concepts

Character Combat, Wounds, Perishing, Different Ring-bearers

Before I had the objective system, and inspired by the 1977 edition of War of the Ring, I went down a path where player characters could confront many of the servants of shadow (The Nazgûl, The Balrog, Shelob, The Watcher in the Water, even Old Man Willow and many others) in head-to-head encounters. Players used the battle dice to resolve individual combat, took wounds, and could even perish. And that, in turn, could mean needing new Ring-bearers…

Needless to say, this was all very complicated and didn’t serve the story particularly well. (Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin shouldn’t be able to defeat the Balrog on their own, for example!) I simplified and removed these elements. The Nazgûl now cause despair rather than wounds. Iconic foes such as The Balrog and Shelob appear instead on objective cards. And only Frodo can now carry and destroy The Ring. (That change alone, saved nearly a page of rules.) As a result, the game felt much tighter, took far less time to learn, and still contained all of its key moments.

Evolving Characters

Taking cues from the story and other War of the Ring games, I experimented with versions of Gandalf, Aragorn, and Gollum that could grow stronger or transform. Gandalf the Grey could become Gandalf the White, Strider could become Aragorn, and Sméagol could transform into Gollum and back again. I loved this concept and must have tried at least a dozen versions of Gollum/Sméagol alone. While these all had their charms, they ultimately proved too complex. I found simpler ways to include these elements using character abilities and objective cards. Only Gandalf now undergoes a change and only after confronting the Balrog.

Some of the many (complex looking!) versions of Gollum below. Click to see a larger version.

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Mobilization, Zones of Control, Stacking Limits

Yeah, I don’t think that we’re going to retake Minas Tirith in this game. Fortunately, it looks like Frodo & Sam, Gollum (and Aragorn!) may have succeeded at Mount Doom nonetheless.

I experimented with some rules that restricted both the addition and movement of friendly troops to satisfy the expectations of people familiar with war games. I ultimately removed these rules to increase player agency, minimize frustration, simplify the game, and reduce the number of errors I’d seen in playtesting. I kept some of the thematic aspects around mobilizing the Free Peoples in some of the objective cards without complicating the game’s core rules.

For a long while, I limited the number of troops of a given army to 3 cubes, mostly out of habit. The game got significantly easier to learn and more fun to play when I dropped that restriction. It’s a good rule of thumb: when in doubt, drop the restriction.

Location Effects and Equipment

The landscape of Middle-earth is rich with story. To bring its locations to life and provide additional reasons to visit the various regions of the board I’d initially included a “location event” on nearly half of the player cards. This meant that in addition to seeing a location name and suit on each card, you’d have an effect you could trigger if your character was in the specified location. This provided a rich tapestry of options and potential stories. It also made players’ heads explode and added substantially to the play length. I first moved these effects onto the ring cards and then I boosted their strength and moved the best of them onto dedicated event cards. The effects felt better, play length dropped, and heads stopped exploding. Similarly, I experimented with an equipment deck that players could spend friendship on. The results were dull: it turns out that characters are much more exciting than objects and the deck didn’t add any interesting decisions to the game. I quickly dropped it.

Staying True to Tolkien’s World

I wanted one of the central themes of the book, that even the least of us, standing up to our oppressors, even at overwhelming odds, can make the difference. So, while I briefly considered letting the players win through some sort of military victory (capturing Barad-dûr, for example), I abandoned it fairly quickly. And I never considered letting the players keep The Ring or to use it militarily. You can only use it to avoid shadow troops temporarily, and even that comes at a cost to Frodo.

Which leads to the way Frodo’s struggle is characterized in the game. This evolved over time. In early versions Frodo gradually underwent “corruption.” This changed midway through development into a struggle with despair. That in turn, changed again as opportunities for “recovering despair” multiplied. We changed “recovering despair” to “gaining hope” since that sounded more natural.

I initially made the change from corruption to despair to better explain why losing a haven of the Free Peoples might lead to defeat, but I’d argue the struggle between hope and despair is a more important theme in the book than Frodo’s struggle to resist The Ring’s corrupting influence. (5) But do note that I was able to capture that final moment of struggle against The Ring’s corrupting influence with a final die roll on Mount Doom, where Frodo is better able to resist if he’s suffering from less despair.

Regarding that final die roll: it was important to me that there was some uncertainty regarding The Ring’s final destruction at Mount Doom. This is in keeping with the story. Recall that in the book, Frodo decides to keep The Ring for himself and if it wasn’t for Gollum’s actions at the last moment, it likely would not have been destroyed. But this is also important mechanically: if you’re able to predict with absolute certainty how the game will play out in the final act, there’s less tension and this typically leads to a less satisfying finish. This, of course, needs to be balanced out: you don’t want the game to end on a coin flip! (I learned for myself with my early experience with War of the Ring.) I was able to resolve these forces by requiring a roll in most cases, while also giving the players multiple ways to mitigate its outcome. Other characters (most notably Sam and Gollum) can help, Frodo and other characters can bring extra resistance with them to reroll dice, and players can use event cards. And the test doesn’t even need to be made if Frodo is in really good condition and there are few Nazgûl around.

Bonus Materials

Development History

I’ve written up an abridged history of the game’s development, pulling notes from my design journal (6) for those who are interested in a closer look at how the design came together.

Sources and Trivia

While the game is based specifically on The Lord of the Rings book, I consumed all manner of other related media, using various wikis, the movies, Karen Wynn Fonstad’s excellent Atlas of Middle Earth, and many other games on the subject. Like any fan of Tolkien, trivia started to quickly accumulate in my brain. I thought I’d share some of it in my own, short trivia quiz. Let me know how you fare.

If you’re an orc and want to travel from Núrn to the Grey Havens, how many times will you need to change lines?

Tube Map

I’m recently back from UK Games Expo where we pre-released the game. Before heading up to Birmingham for the conference I spent the day touring London to get over my jet lag. There, I made good use of the London Tube Map. Later, at the conference, during a demo, one of the players noted that the battle lines on the board reminded them of the tube map.

That got me thinking. And then, I simply couldn’t resist.

Thanks

These games are the result of many talented people working together. First, massive thanks go out to the Z-Man development team. Kevin Ellenberg was a reliable and patient partner who carefully documented many playtests and helped break them down with scientific precision. The product’s gorgeous appearance came together under Bree Woodward’s steady and confident hand. We were fortunate that Sam Shimota was available to work out the challenging graphic design of the board (Sam had proven his skill on other Pandemic System titles including Fall of Rome) and Jared Blando brought many playful storytelling elements to life in the illustrations and cartography for the board. Meanwhile, Cory Godbey provided wonderful character illustrations. This is Corey’s second board game project ever; the first was his work on another title of mine, Ziggurat, and I was so happy when Bree independently discovered and suggested he work on this game.

On the playtesting side, huge thanks go to Randy Hoyt, Rich Fulcher, Brent Lloyd, and Corey Thompson. They each played the game many times and offered countless suggestions over multiple years. Thanks also to Paolo Mori for some of the foundational work on Fall of Rome, to Tom Lehmann for his suggestions and support over the years, and to Pete Fenlon for his encouragement.

Notes

1. This same Pat Leacock (coincidentally) led Elizabeth Hargrave (of Undergrove and Wingspan fame) on a mushroom foray in the Chicagoland area before I met her.

2. Please do not add this game to BGG’s database. I only made one prototype and I promise you, it wasn’t very good.

3. Like the original Pandemic, I’d end up taking this game to the Gathering three successive years.

4. Here’s a tip: when demoing a cooperative game to a publisher, make sure you don’t lose on the fourth turn.

5. A simple measure: “despair” appears 63 times in the novel while variations of “corrupt” appear only 8 times.

6. The journal’s first entry was 14 October 2021, its last entry was 19 December 2024, and it ended up being over 750 pages long.

Find me on bluesky and Substack

The migration continues!

I’ve moved from X to bluesky:
https://bsky.app/profile/mattleacock.bsky.social

I also pen a newsletter, Leacock’s Lab, which I send out about every 1–3 months. You can sign up for that and see older posts on Substack:
https://mattleacock.substack.com/

I’ll keep this blog up in case I have the itch to write anything longer. If there’s anything in particular you’d like to learn more about, feel free to drop a comment here or get in touch.

Coming Soon: Leacock's Lab

After many months of hemming and hawing, I’m finally taking the plunge and setting up a newsletter for my games since this blog isn’t usually timely enough and many folks are drifting from social media.

I plan on posting about every other month.

Subscribe now using the box below to start receiving updates!

Forbidden Jungle – Design Diary

After several years of design and development, Forbidden Jungle is finally here! In this diary, I’ll recount the search for the setting, some of the design challenges I faced, and look to what’s next.

The Setting

The adventurers lift off from Forbidden Island in their helicopter to later escape in a rebuilt airship in Forbidden Desert, then power a rocket to lift off in Forbidden Sky.

When I began the design of the fourth game in the Forbidden series, the first thing I tackled was its setting. Players had already encountered a sinking island, a perilous desert, and a mysterious power platform in the sky. What was next? I figured that since Forbidden Sky ends with the players taking off in a rocket, I should pursue an outer space setting. So my initial design had the adventurers dock their rocket at a space station that I populated with self-replicating maintenance robots. The players would need to explore the station, avoid the robots, and find some means of escape. I gave the new prototype the tentative name, “Forbidden Station.” 

One problem: I hated the name. The setting felt too cold and clinical. And it didn’t seem to be in line with the line’s “adventure” genre.

A screen grab from a fairly early Forbidden Station prototype file (July 2021).

A screen grab from an early Forbidden Island prototype. Forbidden Island also began its life with a space theme.

Coincidentally, way back in 2009, I pitched the design that went on to become Forbidden Island also as a space game. In the first prototype, Asteroid Storm, the players were in a spaceship that had drifted into an asteroid field. They needed to gather up four pieces of equipment (space suits, food for the journey, a flight plan, and their alien artifact*) and make it to the escape pod before their ship was blown to pieces. During play, asteroids slammed into the ship, damaging it, and if damaged pieces were hit again, they were removed from play.

Because Gamewright wanted to avoid a space theme, we switched its setting to sinking island. The modules of the space station became different locations on a mythical island and the equipment to be gathered became treasures that the players would need to collect. CB Canga’s artwork brought the game to life and we all agreed that this story and setting was much stronger.

Forbidden Jungle saw a similar shift during development. I changed the space station into an abandoned spaceport on a remote moon, overcome by encroaching jungle (think: Yavin 4 from Star Wars). I changed the self-replicating robots into aliens that resembled spiders.

I found that using spiders had lots of advantages: they could be shown in various life stages: egg, hatchling, and adult, they could sting the adventurers, and they could spin webs to block tile exits. While the self-replicating robots functioned in similar ways (they came in small, medium, and large sizes, could zap adventurers, and spray hull-reinforcing, hardening foam to block the exits) they felt like much more of a stretch thematically. (I especially grew tired of explaining the idea behind the foam.) But the biggest reason I changed from station to jungle was how I imagined the setting would be brought to life in the game’s illustrations. An ancient spaceport, overrun by jungle and inhabited by spiders would result in much more pleasing and lush visuals compared to the (typically) sterile environment that a space station suggests. Jungle felt like a better fit.

Differentiation

I never want to add a title to a series unless it offers something new to it – so a player would consider owning every game in the line. Forbidden Island offers an easy onramp and features a rapidly shrinking board. Forbidden Desert ramps up the challenge and has players shifting the board around as the winds of the sandstorm dictate. Forbidden Sky has players exploring and building their board as they go. For me, the challenge for game #4 was, after shrinking, shifting, and building what’s next?

I ultimately answered this question by sampling a little bit from each of the earlier titles. As you play Forbidden Jungle, different tiles sink into sinkholes, shrinking the board like Forbidden Island. You explore the jungle, flipping tiles over to see what’s inside them and can shift them in a way that is similar to Forbidden Desert. And you must also assemble your escape route by arranging a portal next to four powered gems. This echoes how you power up the rocket in Forbidden Sky. There are callbacks in Jungle to each of the preceding titles.

The Antagonists

Instead of relying solely on the board to differentiate the game, I decided to focus on its antagonists. Forbidden Jungle is the first game in the series to feature baddies that are actively out to get you. In contrast, the other titles all feature environmental threats – rising water (threat of drowning), a blowing sandstorm (threats of exposure, dehydration, being buried alive), and a thunderstorm (threats of electrocution or falling from a great height). In Jungle, players must avoid being overrun or poisoned by the spiders.

I was especially drawn to having a stronger sense of an embodied threat on the board after seeing the reception of Forbidden Sky. Forbidden Sky has you constructing an elaborate – and functional! – electrical circuit to power your escape which is thrilling when you can accomplish it, but the antagonists in the game are quite abstract. You’re up against time, the threat of being struck by lightning, and the strength of your rope – none of which are shown on the board. You don’t get the visceral sense of an island rapidly shrinking to only a handful of tiles or sand accumulating into larger and larger dunes. With this new game, I wanted even casual observers to be able to glance at the game on the table and think: oh, wow, I can see that you’re all in a lot of danger!

But picking a baddie for a game targeted at kids and families can be a challenge. You don’t want to pick an antagonist that is too scary and yet, you don’t want the players to feel remorse after removing them. I was initially excited about the robots since they can be disassembled without too much fuss on the players’ part. But it turns out that creepy, dangerous, otherworldly spiders also felt like fair game – especially if they are aiming to sting or bite you.

The inspiration behind the three life stages of the spiders (egg, hatchling, and adult) came from Tom Wham’s classic game, The Awful Green Things from Outer Space which I played and loved in college and the movie Alien, both, coincidentally from 1979. (Though in this game, the hatchlings are relatively harmless, unlike the face-huggers of Alien.)

The Machines

With the threat well established, I wanted the players to have a robust set of options to consider while solving it. To that end, Forbidden Jungle offers a variety of machines that you can discover that unlock new abilities:

• The Destruct Switch gives you the power to destroy a tile in the game – and everything on it – by spending a single action. Being able to blow up a tile full of spiders can feel incredibly powerful. You need to show some restraint though: if you blow up all of the portals (or any of the illuminated gems), you’ll find yourself without a way out.

• The Configurator allows you to rearrange the space station’s tiles, moving them like a sliding puzzle. This has all sorts of uses: first, you can slide gems next to an escape portal to power it – but you can also slide tiles containing other adventurers to help them move or slide spiders closer to the Electrifier which works as a glorified bug zapper.

• The Compeller lets you move a group of hatchlings and adults from one tile to another. This can be handy if they’re in your way, about to sting your friend. You can also move them into the Electrifier. Zap!

• The Portal is about as simple a machine as you can get. It features one button. If you press it, you win the game! (Provided that everyone is assembled on the tile, it’s powered up, and there aren’t any aliens on the tile.)

These special tiles let me expand the range of options available to the players, widening out space of possible solutions, without dramatically increasing the complexity of the overall game.

Samples of the machines from a printer’s proof. (Images may change slightly in the final game)

Design Challenges 

Managing Tension

Maintaining the spider population proved to be one of the thorniest design challenges. Early versions of the game relied solely on the threat cards that managed the life cycles of the spiders. These cards have the adults lay eggs, turn eggs into hatchlings, and turn hatchlings into adults (who can then lay more eggs). This worked great, except that if the players managed to clear the board of spiders, their population would crash, bottoming out most of the tension for the remainder of the game. To solve this, I supplemented the life cycle cards with three new cards that have adults emerging from the portals, hatchlings emerging from the tunnels, and eggs being discovered in nests. With this design, as you explore more and more of the board, more portals, tunnels, and nests appear and the danger increases in parallel.

These six cards increase the population of spiders in the jungle. Early prototypes only used the first three cards. The last three cards ramp up the tension of the game as more and more of the jungle is explored.

Doubling Down on Fun

In playtesting, players found blowing up tiles felt incredibly satisfying. Early prototypes had only a single piece of equipment (Explosives) that let you remove a tile adjacent to your adventurer. To give players more opportunities to blow stuff up, I added the Destruct Switch… and then a second Destruct Switch! These tiles not only let you blow up spiders, but also allow you to remove tiles that may be in the way of completing the puzzle.

Eliminating Grind

Early prototypes featured “Computers” that could only shift a tile up/down or left/right. In testing, these felt quite grindy. You’d need to move to one computer, operate it to move tiles in one direction, then run to a different computer, and operate it to move it in another direction, and so on. The Configurators in the final version of the game let you feel much more powerful—you can choose any direction: up, down, left, or right, then move the tile any number of spaces in that direction. 

Forbidden Station also had players managing their oxygen levels like water in Forbidden Desert. This was a bit too similar to Desert, felt mostly like work, and since the game already had plenty of other problems to juggle, I was happy to ditch it.

Designing the Alien Figures

It took a bunch of iterations to nail the figures down. The adults had to be scary but not too scary. (Some early versions were quite goofy looking.) The final adults are quite tall which let them have long, scary legs without taking up too much space on a tile. I specified little nubs on the ridges of the hatchlings so they’d be easier to pick up off the tiles. And getting the small/medium/large proportions just right was surprisingly difficult. The illustrator, C.B. Canga specified a color palette for them which helped them coordinate with his illustrations while feeling otherworldly.

A partial evolution of the adult spider. As they evolved, the adults lost their goofy grin, collar, and stinger and grew sharp teeth. The left two figures are from .stls found on the web and were used for inspiration. The Sculpey one was made by my daughter Anna as part of an experiment exploring scale.

Early (left) and final (right) aliens: adult, hatchling, and egg. I had the sculptor add nubs to the edges of the hatchling so they’d be easier to pick up. The most important change here was a sense of large/medium/small scale. In the original metal comps the hatchling looks smaller than the egg! 

Replay and Variability

In response to all the enthusiasm for the variable island layouts that were first featured in the German edition of the Forbidden Island, I included six different spaceport designs with Forbidden Jungle so that you can try your hand at each one of them. Their design was a bit counter-intuitive – denser spaceport layouts were actually harder to play since the tiles have fewer degrees of movement.

To ensure variety and challenge, your next game can feature a different mix of adventurers, explored machines, equipment cards, random tile arrangement, along with a different spaceport design and/or difficulty setting.

Beyond the Portal

Different space station layouts add variety to the game.

If and when the adventurers escape, what lies beyond the portal? Will they ever find the Archeans? I’d love to hear your theories!

---

*I was able to realize a similar objective in Space Escape (formerly Mole Rats in Space), except that the alien artifact became a toothbrush, along with a few other tweaks. They both featured duct tape.

How to Play Daybreak

CMYK posted a new version of the How to Play video for Daybreak. I’m really happy with how it turned out!

Daybreak Design Diaries

Matteo and I have been busy documenting the journey we took while designing Daybreak.

Here are all the entries we have published and planned to date:

1. Why We Made Daybreak

2. Antagonists and Impacts

3. Models and Resources

4. Players and Powers

5. Winning and Losing

We enjoyed looking through the hundreds of photos, dozens of kits, and our 500+ page design journal when putting this together. We’re now entering one of my favorite stages of a project: reviewing and evaluating all the product, graphic design, illustration, and editorial choices for the game.

Hope you enjoy this look into our process. If there are any other aspects you’d like to know about, please leave a comment!

Daybreak is Live on Backerkit!

After more than two years of design, Daybreak is now live on Backerkit. Check it out!

Daybreak – Crowdfunding Begins on September 20th!

We’ll be crowdfunding Daybreak on BackerKit starting on 20 September 2022.

Sign up to be notified when the project goes live!

Daybreak is a cooperative boardgame about stopping climate change. It presents an optimistic vision of the near future, where you and your friends get to build the mind-blowing technologies and resilient societies we need to decarbonize the world.

I designed it with Matteo Menapace and the game be published by CMYK Games. It’s expected to ship in 2023.

Find out more at daybreakgame.org.

Daybreak Overview in 7 Minutes

No small part of game design involves figuring out how to best explain your game. An old adage of software design was, “write the manual first” as this forces you to think about how the end user will experience your product. This carries over into game design as well: if, when writing the rules or teaching a game you find that you can’t explain it, it’s time to have a hard look at the underlying design.

Below you can see a 7-minute overview of the in-progress game, Daybreak that I shot yesterday for a group who will be playing this Friday.

The game continues to evolve, but it’s exciting to see the changes get smaller and smaller with each iteration. Once that wraps up, we’ll shift into product design and at some point, our videos won’t feature so much shiny Scotch tape and awkward transitions. In the meantime, have a look and let me know in the comments below if you have any impressions.

If you found this interesting, you can follow our design process more closely in our design log. You can also sign up for exactly 1 email when Daybreak launches at daybreakgame.org.

UPDATE:

The new, updated version of the video is now available:

You can also check out the first version of the video that originally accompanied this post.

Daybreak – A Cooperative Game About Climate Action

In August 2019 a climate scientist named Declan Finney emailed me, explaining in great detail the gravity of the climate crisis and offering to help re-theme Pandemic to fit the topic. The idea was to help people better understand the situation and what could be done by wrapping it up into a game. This was a bit of a kick in the pants for me. I’d been thinking about doing something similar for some time, but hadn’t started on anything. I began researching. Months passed. I decided that the topic was deserving of its own game (not a re-theme of Pandemic) but it also felt enormous, daunting, and somewhat hopeless to me.

Then, in April 2020, I came across an article about learning from Pandemic during the Pandemic on Twitter, written by Matteo Menapace. I noticed from Matteo’s bio that he was interested in games and climate and contacted him about the possibility of collaborating on a game about the climate crisis with me. We hit it off and we’ve been working together ever since.

Photo: Peter Prato for The New York Times

Here we are, one year later, and we have a design—Daybreak—that we’ve been putting through its paces, both on the table (with our families) and in Tabletopia (with everyone else).

Daybreak puts you in the role of a world power. Your goal is to decarbonize your economy while at the same time build up the resilience your people will need to survive climate-induced crises.

If you and the other players can collectively draw down emissions to net zero while ensuring that no single player has too many people in crisis, you all win the game. This is quite difficult—but crucially, possible.

If you’d like to learn more about the game, Matteo has written an overview of the design so far. We also did interviews with the New York Times, Wired, and Polygon.

This has been one of the most rewarding designs I’ve worked on to date: the problems we face with global warming are deep and complex. Turning them into game dynamics that are representative, balanced, and—perhaps most importantly—engaging and fun to play is a steep challenge. And we want to get it right. To that end, we’re looking for critical reviewers. If you think you might be a good fit for this, have a look at what we’re looking for and let us know.

I’m also happy to share that CMYK has come on board to publish the game. If you’re interested, you can sign up to get exactly one email when the game launches.

And finally, happy Earth Day everyone! I hope you can find a meaningful way to observe this day, even it’s as simple as taking a walk or hike outdoors.

Forbidden Island Now on Board Game Arena

If you’re like me and isolating due to Covid, you’ve probably had to find new ways to play boardgames with friends. I’ve been playing boardgames online now with two groups of friends and one of our most frequent stops is Board Game Arena.

So I was happy to learn that Forbidden Island is now available to play on the platform, starting today. If you haven’t checked out BGA, have a look. They have many games that are free to play; other games require a premium membership, which will run you about $2 per month for unlimited use and it allows you to host games for others who don’t need to pay themselves.

I also found it fun to learn that Jeff DiCorpo implemented the game. Jeff’s local to the San Francisco Bay Area, and we’ve been gaming together on and off for many years. Thanks Jeff!

The Game Designers – Clip Released

It’s startling to revisit this excerpt from The Game Designers showing the Lucca and SPIEL game fairs with their massive crowds. SPIEL drew close to 200,000 attendees from around the world in 2019 and Lucca—the city—fills to the brim of its medieval walls with people, elbow-to-elbow. We were carried away by the crowds.

Seems like so long ago already.

This clip is from The Game Designers, a feature-length documentary, directed by Eric Rayl about professional and fledgling board game designers. Available on iTunes, Google Play, YouTube Movies, Amazon, and Vimeo.

Pandemic Survival Over Zoom! – Rules and Tips

The Pandemic Survival 2020 tournament season may have been canceled this year due to the need for physical distancing, but that doesn’t mean that we all can’t enjoy it together over Zoom! That’s what Rodger van den Braak and thirteen other former contestants did last month. I hosted a tournament myself last weekend to try it out—and it worked so well that I’ve written up rules and tips for all of you to try out on your own!

Two-player teams compete to be the first team to find all four cures or the last team to survive.
Images: Sasha Shen Johfre

If you’re not aware of the format, Pandemic Survival pits multiple teams, each composed of two players, against each other with the aim of being the first team to find all four cures or the last team left standing. Every team plays with the same roles, starting hands, player deck, and infection deck. It’s then up to each team to decide how best to play with what they have. The game is typically played on the heroic level and each turn has a time limit of only 75 seconds.

Sound crazy? You are correct.

Up for giving it a try? If you have a copy of Pandemic in your home and access to friends over Zoom (that also have a copy) you have everything you need.

Here are the full rules. I’ve left comments on in the rules document—if you have a question, correction, or suggestion, feel free to note it down or contact me.

I hope this gives you a fun, new way to connect with people while you’re distancing.

Now go wash your hands!

View fullsize

A screen snap of the seven-team tournament that I ran last Saturday. Special thanks to Siew, Alain, Donna, Colleen, Beth, John (hiding behind the whiteboard of doom), Phil, Leslie, Hannah, Sasha, Rich, Michelle, Ken, and Jos for participating. And congratulations to Hannah and Sasha for surviving!

Designing from the Inside Out

The keynote I gave at TableTop Network just went up today. If you're interested in the importance of emotion in game design and empathy as a design skill, check it out:

What’s the difference between a good and a great game? Often it’s the depth of the emotional response that it generates. But how do you know when your game is effective? Learn more about the importance of emotion in game design, empathy as a game design skill, and a technique for determining whether you’re on the right track when you design games to solicit an emotional response.

Resources

• Research Log – Sample

• Research Log – Template

• Punch List – Template

References

• Emotions Revealed by Paul Ekman

• Empathy: Why it Matters and How to Get It by Roman Krznaric

• Empathy Engines by Elizabeth Sampat

• MDA: a Formal Approach to Game Design and Game Research by Robin Hunicke, Marc LeBlanc, Robert Zubek

About TableTop Network

Tabletop Network is an annual gathering of tabletop game designers, dedicated to honing the craft of game design. Tickets to the 2020 conference will be on sale soon. Learn more at: https://www.tabletopnetwork.com

Quarterly Report: September 2019–February 2020

It’s been longer than a quarter. Has it really been six months?! Here’s a summary of what’s been going on since I last posted.

In The News

As you might imagine, the Covid-19 outbreak has generated a lot of media interest in Pandemic. Here are a few interviews and articles that I participated in recently.

• The Washington Post ran a story on the popularity of games centering on the “proliferation of pathogens” including Plague Inc. and Pandemic: Virus games are going viral as the coronavirus spreads.

• The Chicago Tribune ran a story on Pandemic as well. (This one was actually queued up by the Tribune prior to the outbreak of Covid-19, but by the time the interview happened, the topic was unavoidable.) Q&A with the Chicago creator of Pandemic, the board game that has become all too real.

• Dicebreaker did an interview last February. "It's difficult to keep things fresh": Pandemic creator Matt Leacock on Legacy, co-ops and Lego which ranges over several topics including the game development process. (Not sure why they chose that headline as the article spends most of its time attempting to prove otherwise.)

Speaking of Covid-19, everyone please:

• Avoid close contact with people who are sick.

• Avoid touching your eyes, nose, and mouth.

• Stay home when you are sick.

• Cover your cough or sneeze with a tissue, then throw the tissue in the trash.

• And here’s a suggestion: let person who encourages everyone to wash their hands (for at least 20 seconds) before your game be the start player.

More advice on prevention at the CDC site.

The appropriately titled expansion to ERA: Medieval Age.

Coming Soon

• The ERA: Medieval Age Expansion is due at Gen Con this year. Eggertspiele released a short teaser video (20 seconds) which shows off some of the new pieces including rivers, roads, gates, bridges, and more.

• At long last, the third and final installment in the Pandemic Legacy series is coming later this year! Keep an eye out for announcements from Z-man.

• And look for one other soon-to-be-announced game—coming this summer!

Currently Working On

• A new dexterity game, co-designed with Josh Cappel. Josh and I worked together on the first edition of Pandemic over ten years ago and it’s been fun to work together again. We’ve spent over two years on this game and I’m thrilled that we recently found a great home for it.

• The next game in the ERA series—which is coming together quite nicely if I do say so myself.

• A new, non-Pandemic, cooperative game that I’m working on with a first-time designer.

• A big box game that I’ve been developing for over two years with two established designers.

• And a few other unannounced projects in various stages of development.

The Game Designers

I appeared in the documentary, The Game Designers, which premiered last November. Directed by Eric Rayl and produced by Scott Alden (of BoardGameGeek fame), the documentary follows five different designers (Antoine Bauza, Kelly North Adams, Chris Faulkenberry, and Doug Schepers and myself) at various points in our careers, and gives an inside look at what it takes to design a boardgame.

Check out the trailer below.

You can find it on Amazon or stream it on demand via Vimeo.

Game Design Resources

So it turns out that I’ll be working with John Brieger on one my upcoming games. I bring this up for several reasons: 

1. He’s got a new company that specializes in game development. If you’re looking for additional testing and development resources, check them out.

2. He’s written some great articles on playtesting and uses a process very similar to my own.

3. He lives in my hometown! And I had never met him until last month! (How weird is that?)

If you’re a local to the San Francisco Bay Area and are interested in doing some playtesting (your games or others’) be sure to check out some of the Meetups that he’s put together. I plan on regularly attending Friday playtesting at Game Kastle in Mountain View.

Missing GDC?

Check out the Boardgame Summit on March 17th in San Francisco. “Designers, developers, and publishers in the tabletop game (and tabletop game adjacent space) are gathering to share their planned talks from GDC, network, and talk board games. Publishers & industry service providers on hand for pitches and business meetings.”

You can also check GDC’s video archive for some great talks on design. Christina Wodtke sent me this talk by Alex Jaffe on “cursed design problems” which include the quarterbacking problem that rears its head in pure cooperative games. I thought this was a great framework for evaluating opposing forces in your game that may be irreconcilable.

TableTop Network

I gave the keynote talk at the TableTop Network in Dallas in November, and spoke about the importance of emotion and empathy in game design. [Update: the talk is now available.]

TTN is a gathering of board game designers talking shop, networking, and refining our craft, organized by game designer, Tim Fowers.

Unlike gatherings like Unpub and Protospiel, it focuses on talks and workshops and not on playtesting. It’s a fairly new event, this being its second year. I was impressed with the quality of the talks and especially enjoyed the ones given by Elizabeth Hargrave (OMG, My Wife Loves Your Game) and Nikki Valens (Creating Representation for Marginalized Groups). They’ve also started a scholarship program to attract new voices to the industry.

I’ll post videos or links to my talk and others when Tim opens them up to the public.

2020 Conference Schedule

I’ve taken this information down, pending information from the event organizers.

ERA: Medieval Age – Design Notes

ERA: Medieval Age was released this year at Gen Con and will hit stores later this August. The game has a long history, which started nearly twelve years ago. Here’s a look at how the game came to be.

Origins of ERA

Back in October of 2007, my friends Chris and Kim Farrell threw down the gauntlet and challenged the members of our gaming group to a contest in the spirit of Nanowrimo—the National Novel Writing Month. Our mission was to each design a civilization-building dice game that was playable in 30–40 minutes, during the month of November. We were to go off into our corners and come back with our results at the end of the month.

I gave it my best shot. I saw the challenge as a great opportunity to boil down the experience from one of my favorite games—Francis Tresham’s Civilization (1980)—into something that took far less time. (Civ was best with about five to seven people who could devote eight or more hours to play, and that was becoming increasingly hard to manage.)

I shared the results to the gaming group in early December. Encouraged by the results, I pitched it to publishers at a conference the following April. I got immediate interest and the game was picked up by Griffon Games as part of their bookshelf line. They published it as Roll Through the Ages: The Bronze Age in 2009. The game did well, garnering a nomination for the Spiel des Jahres in 2010.

The publisher saw an opportunity to ride on the game’s success and encouraged me to design additional ages and soon after I designed a print-and play expansion. But my attempts at other ages felt dry and lifeless, and I abandoned them. After one failed start after another, Tom Lehmann finally stepped up to extend the line with a version that we dubbed Roll Through the Ages: The Iron Age (2014).

After that, the game seemed to have run its course.

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ERA: Medieval Age (2019). Cover art by Chris Quilliams.

Roll Through the Ages: The Bronze Age (2009). The challenge that my friends Chris and Kim threw down was to create a civilization-building dice game that could be played in 30–40 minutes.

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A near-final prototype (version 23) of Roll Through the Ages from 11 years ago. The early prototypes were initially pitched as “Dice of the Ancients.”

Opportunity

That is, until I was approached by Plan B Games in 2016. They were fans of the game and wanted to know if I’d be up for breathing new life into it and potentially turning it into a series. I promised to take another look.

During this exploration, I started thinking about an idea where players could develop a city, drawing its buildings, instead of creating another checklist game dominated by a technology tree. I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of games with a drawing component. I can trace that as far back to games like Empire Builder (1982) and Source of the Nile (1978). Even Knit Wit started out as a drawing game.

I did a bunch of reading on the Medieval period, sketched a lot, tinkered around. One key breakthrough was the idea to map the four classes of medieval society to different dice that represented their role. For example, peasants would provide labor and food, burghers would provide more trade goods, clergy could provide administration (allowing you to manipulate your dice) and nobles wouldn’t produce anything, but could raise taxes and could rattle their swords to defend their domain or threaten their opponents. Soon, I had some early prototypes of a new Medieval Age.

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May, 2017. Here you can see some concepts taking shape. I often start with a concept map of the key objects and actions in the game. Sometimes this works; other times you get a boring, stilted, lifeless games.

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Early sketches of buildings and resources.

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More concept mapping.

Medieval Age Takes Shape

This new Medieval Age used dice that were similar to the ones used in Roll Through the Ages: they had resources and skulls on them, and players rolled them three times in an attempt to optimize their turn. but the experience was nicely differentiated from the Bronze Age. When you were done, you could look at a unique city that you had illustrated over the course of play. I also came up with a new turn structure that reduced downtime considerably, and found a way to work that back into the original Bronze Age design.

After a solid year of development, the game was ready to turn over to the publisher. Contracts were signed and the game was well on its way to becoming a reality.

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I spent about a year designing the roll-and-write version of ERA: Medieval Age. Players drew buildings on graph paper and drew walls segments on the lines that separated them. The game also used a reference card for building shapes and a simple pegboard to track resources.

One Question

The publisher liked the design. It was quite fun to play and fairly straightforward to manufacture. They did have one issue with it, however: it was really hard to see what your opponents were doing. (This is a bit of a classic problem with many roll-and-write games—they can feel a bit like group solitaire if you’re only focused on your own board.) They pulled out a napkin sketch of a building made from a few wooden blocks and asked me: “what if it was in 3D? Would that work?”

Little did they know that I had just received my first laser cutter earlier that week. My answer was an excited, “let’s find out.” We’d have to defer the game’s release at least another year, but hey, lasers.

I got to work.

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I actually used craft foam for my first 3D version of the board, which was a direct translation of the roll-and-write shapes: buildings went on squares; walls went between them.

It looked promising. Testing soon showed, however, that players had a hard time figuring out how to place buildings on this grid.

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I thought a laser-cut version with little white circles to help position your buildings might work. It didn’t.

I had to abandon this system as it went against years of Lego training.

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When I moved the walls onto the same grid as the buildings, the problem went away. The board also was significantly less noisy looking.

Roll and Build

Switching the game to a set of physical buildings opened up all sorts of possibilities. In addition to the wonderful, tactile feel, I could now work with a new dynamic: supply and demand. I modified the rules for walls so they’d come in different lengths, which introduced a strong push-your-luck element. Players now had to weigh the desire to defer buying walls (since they don’t help you bootstrap at all) against the temptation to buy them early when longer lengths are available. And if players wait too long, the supply can run out, putting a huge number of points at risk.

Having a building supply also made for a more dynamic game end condition. Rather than playing until a single player built a certain number of buildings (which was tedious to track on the score sheets), I shifted the game end condition so the game finished when a certain number of buildings ran out. This added more tension to the game since it’s harder to predict when this will happen.

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All the laser-cut pieces for the buildings plus a few experimental bits and other odds-and-ends. I cut the buildings out of illustration board, glued them together using a special tacky glue, then painted them with acrylic.

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A robust city at the end of a game. The buildings in the prototype had little “pips” etched into them so you could see how many points they were worth. The published version uses a more robust score sheet satisfies this requirement in a better way.

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All the parts for two prototypes, painted and ready to go. Before I was done, I created six full prototypes.

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A special shout out to Anthony Rubbo who worked tirelessly to convince me that the screens were worth trying out. He was right.

Other Innovations

The additional year of development brought other improvements as well. Most notable was the introduction of player screens that hide the results of each player’s roll during the Roll step. I was hesitant to add these as I was convinced that players needed to see each others’ dice while rolling in order to increase player interaction. Testing strongly showed otherwise, however—players welcomed the faster pace, the element of surprise, and the shorter play time that the screens afforded. They also made a great home for the information on the play aid.

Translating the Prototype into the Final Product

The Eggertspiele development team helped polish the remaining bits and pieces. Together we created the solitaire version and they helped refine the disasters, including increasing the number of scorched earth tiles that came with the game from what I specified. (Remind me to be wary of playing with them.)

The biggest change during production was to the player boards. These shifted from punchboard to molded plastic. While the icons are harder to read on the plastic boards—they’re sculpted rather than printed—the boards are much more durable than punchboard and the plastic nicely “grips” the building components, keeping them firmly in place.

In the video below, you can get a good look at how everything turned out in the final game as I give a quick overview of the rules.

The Harbor and Great Hall along with the Baron, Bishop, and Merchant dice that come in Collector’s Set #1.

Expansions Planned

If you purchase the game from the Eggertspiele web shop you can already pick up the first of several expansions planned for the game, Collector’s Set #1. This mini expansion provides two new buildings and rules for upgrading your clergy, noble, and burgher dice into a bishop, baron, or merchant.

First of Three ERAs

Eggertspiele has already announced that ERA: Medieval Age is the first of three titles in the ERA series. For the second installment, it’s likely that fans of Roll Through the Ages: The Bronze Age will be re-released in an updated and modernized version.

The third game in the series has not yet been hinted at. Which leads me to ask: if you had your wish, what ERA would you want? If you have an idea, leave a note in the comments!

Laser Cutting a Chariot Race

For some reason, I love pegboards. I think it has something to do with the satisfying way that a wooden peg bites into a wooden board—they feel great to handle. I was fascinated with cribbage boards as a kid and remember being disappointed when I learned that they were only glorified scoring tracks. My game, Chariot Race grew out of a desire to make a simple race game out of a similar pegboard.

That was part of the pitch anyway, when I signed the game with Pegasus back in 2014. Unfortunately, when we developed it, costs for doing the game in wood were prohibitive, and when the game came out in 2016 it never had the table presence that I’d hoped it would. (If you’re curious, I’ve written up more on how the game evolved given those constraints.)

Enter the laser cutter. A few years ago, I helped crowd fund the Glowforge and it finally arrived last March. I had no idea I would use this thing so much. I’ll write up another post on how I’ve been using it for prototyping extensively (everything from the ERA games to Pandemic Legacy: Season 3 and more), but to start, I thought I’d share my most recent creation.

After a couple rounds of prototyping in baltic birch, here are photos of the final result, crafted in maple, cherry, poplar, and walnut. The only thing I’ve kept from the Pegasus edition is the wooden dice.

The board sits on top of a box that holds the dice, six chariot boards, and a drawer that contains the pegs and caltrops for up to six players to play. It all packs up all nice and tight.

The drawer holds pegs for six players plus all the caltrops you’d ever need.

Everything tucked away

The chariot pegboards

The drawer and chariot boards all pull from the same side of the box.

On the reverse, the dice sit in their own compartment.

Pulling the walnut slider open grants access to the dice.

Each chariot pegboard has a unique combination of cherry, maple, and/or poplar. This is the cherry/poplar combination.

Here are the box pieces laid out. The interior is made of baltic birch and I used maple laminate for the top and each side. I inlaid cherry for the corners and starting spaces and used walnut for the caltrops and for the door to the dice compartment. The track itself is cut from basswood as I liked how uniform the color was and how easily it took the pegs and caltrops.

All the components

Top view of the track

I’ve finally scratched this itch now that I have my own wooden set. I just have to remind myself how much work this was every time I’m tempted to make another one. (I don’t have any current plans on creating these for sale!) If you are a crafter though, and would like a copy of the .svg plans (for personal use only) drop me a line.

Here’s my machine, right before I plugged it in for the first time last March.

Glowforge Plug

I can’t say enough good things about the Glowforge. It’s well designed and easy to use – to the point where it’s nearly as simple as sending a job to your desktop printer. It sets up quickly and requires very little maintenance. Cutting components on it has become an integral part of my prototyping workflow. It’s wonderful for anything round or irregular (think: round, chipboard tokens) and is precise enough that I can use it to cut stickers (but not the backing!) from sticker sheets with hairline precision.

They’re not cheap, coming in between $2,400 (for the Basic) and $6,000 (for the Pro). I picked up the Plus which currently sells for about $4,000. I recommend it as a great midrange product.

If you do decide to take the plunge, you can save some cash ($100–$500) by using this referral link: https://glowforge.us/r/kUGE8V. (Disclosure: they’ll kick back the same amount to me in credits that I can spend on materials.) The one thing that can be a bit tricky is that you have to vent them outside. They offer an air filter for another $1000 (so you don’t need to vent) but the filters have been backordered for over a year now. I’ve been venting mine out the mail slot of my garage until my filter arrives.

In a future post, I’ll share images of the ERA: Medieval Age prototype that I created on the machine. It’s hard for me to imagine creating, developing, and testing the final version of that game without this cutter.

New Game Announcement — Era: Medieval Age

I’m excited to announce Era: Medieval Age, a new dice game coming this summer from Eggertspiele.

I’ve been working on this game and other games in the Era line for the last few years and am really excited to start sharing more about them with you.

Read all about it here, or catch the 2-minute video announcement below.