Scania, I see market for you here!

I am on vacation now. And you, boardgamers know that vacation is a great time. This is the moment when we can finally play all these great games we were buying and collecting for whole year!

We have many games. We are well prepared for every occasion.

Is it raining for whole day? Everybody on vacation is pissed off except us, boardgamers! Rain, this is great! You must sit in hotel room! Now you have time to open Arkham Horror with all expansions you bought for last decade and play it for 24 hours!

Is it cold? Don't go sightseeing, it sucks and you can got a flu! Sit at your hotel room, open suitcase and bring it to the table - Twilight Imperium, III ed. Oh, yes, I wish it is cold for whole 2 weeks. No problem at all.

Nice weather? OK, let it be nice weather. I am not big fan of nice weather, but what the hell, I ame prepared! I can go to the beach. I can go to the beach with Cash & Guns, Tichu, Hystericoach and have some fun. Of course, when on the beach, be aware of water, especially if you can't swim, like me.

You are with kids? Give them Talisman and you don't need to care about them for next 6 hours. Giving them Talisman is like hiring a nanny but better because it can handle up to 6 kids! What nanny can beat this?!

You are with friends who don't know boardgames yet? Put Ticket to Ride on table and look how their eyes open with excitement and new born passion. This is huge moment. It is worth playing Ticket to Ride for the 328th time in your life.

You are with die hard geeks? Lucky bastard, make it Neuroshima Hex's vacation! Start league, play every day, with tables, results and final price. You do drink beer, do you? If not, send you price to Portal, we will handle it.

Oh yes. Boardgames have answer for all vacation situations.

That's why I have everything with me here on vacations. Settlers of Catan to play with kids. Twilight Struggle to play with my wife. Brawl to play tournament with my friend Widlak. Neuroshima Hex so our kids can play tournament. Prototype of Robinson and Winter so I can test it on my friends. Yes, vacations and games work great together.

But... There is one small question I had to ask.

How the hell I am supposed to pack all these games to my car?! Where to put clothes and stuff?! I need a truck!

Scania, I see a huge market for you here. I will need to rent a truck for two weeks. And my fellow geeks too. What are the prices? Any discount for BGG members?

You have to have guts to ask this question.

Last weekend in Bulgaria there was a final of The Volleyball World League. Polish team beat US team 3:0. It was nice, thank you very much Americans ;) 

Anyway, when I was watching the match I realised that you can learn a bit as a designer when you take a second to talk about volleyball.

You know, for almost my whole life rules of scoring in volleyball worked like that: when you serve and win the point, you score. If opponent serves and you win the point, you don't score, you just have the right to serve. If your attack is successful now, you score. If the opponent wins, he only has the right to serve...

Official volleyball federation was founded in 1947. For 40 years people were playing like described above. If you serve, and I win, I don't get a point. I only get the right to serve. So now I serve, but this time you win, so you don't score but now you can serve...  And it goes like that for two hours.  Score? 0:0.

Watching volleyball was kinda' boring for over 40 years.

And then somebody finally figured it out. This game is broken, he said. We have to change the rules. You need to score after every successful attack, no matter who served. 

You know, it's not easy to change the rules of a game that is played for almost 50 years. A game that was played in world championships, during olimpics, a game with officiall leagues in almost all countries all over the world. 

But the Federation of Volleyball had the balls.

They had the guts to say: "Our game sucks. We can make it better." And they changed the rules. It was 1998, 41 years after Federation was founded. They had the guts to remove rule that was making volleyball boring.

Volleyball got much more simple. It is fast, extremely engaging. It is a great sport now.

***

This is a nightmare for a designer. You design a rule. You test the game, you play a lot, you get used to this rule. Finally you're stuck with it. You don't ask yourself an important question:

"Does my game really need that rule?"

It is hard to ask that question. There is a risk that you could hear "No". You would need to delete this rule. The rule you got used to. The rule you like. Exactly that rule...

So you're stuck with it. Your game is filled with rules that don't bring anything to the gameplay. They don't make the game better. They don't bring more choices. They don't  bring more emotions. They just are. They just are because you got used to them after these all those test games.

All those rules could be removed if you had the guts to ask the question.

***

I am a young designer. Yes, I was lucky to make some - I believe good - games like Stronghold or The New Era but this is just the beginning. I am aware of that. I am still in the primary school of designing. I am learning every single day. I have flaws that I need to get rid of. I know that. 

One of my flaws is putting to many rules into my games. I have difficulties with designing simple games. It's hard for me to delete rules, to ask myself a question: "Does my game really need that rule?"

But I am working hard. I am trying to be better. I am aware of the problem and I believe this is a good beginning. I see the problem. This is always a good first step.

During the last months I was working damn hard on my Robinson Crusoe game. The game is ready. Works really great. I am proud of it and I can't wait for you guys to see it. But it's not going to print yet. I still have a few weeks left.

During these weeks I will ask myself the question.

In 1998 the Volleyball guys showed that they have guts. Now it is my time to act.

How I didn't win Spiel des Jahres

It was a blink. In one moment I got my new game ready. It just came to my mind and was brilliant. I was so excited. Players are shepherds and have to have the biggest flocks of sheep. Different tiles have sheep with different colors, some tiles have wolves who eat sheep. Your aim is to gather group of 4 sheep in one color. Simple, easy, great.

No orcs. No mutants and tanks.
No "Trzewiczek style".
Spiel des Jahres jury, I am coming!

I took brushes, I took paints and started to make a prototype. I have huge range of Citadel paints, very expensive, but very good. I wanted my prototype to look great. I used Citadels. I painted 32 tiles with green paint (sweet meadows!). I drew 158 little sheep and then I painted all of them (yellow, white, blue, red).  It was great, I was imagining myself coming to the office, showing the prototype to the guys and telling them that I've just designed a great game! It took me whole night. Nearly 5 hours of painting little sheep.

The most beautiful prototype I have ever seen.

It was very late in the night, but I was so proud of myself. It had to be a hit!  I was excited. I didn't go to sleep. I took a box of chocolate, I painted it grey, and then I drew a meadow and some sheep on the front cover. It was awesome. Spiel des Jahres jury, I am coming!

Finally I went to sleep.

I woke up the next day. I was so proud. I ate breakfast and sat at the table to play my game. The first test. I was very excited. First time in my designer life I was about to play a test game on such a beautiful prototype. So I played.

Well, not exactly. I didn't play because it didn't work. It didn't work at all! I was sitting at the table and couldn't believe that I spend whole night painting sheep without first checking if the rules make any sens.

That's how I didn't win Spiel des Jahres this year. And my today's advice for you is - first test, then paint, my friends. First test, then paint...

Can I bite your game?

The first time I came across this term was in 2007 during my interview with Bruno Faidutti for Polish magazine “Swiat gier planszowych” (World of board games). I asked him how many games he had in his collection. "More than five thousand, hard to say. I cannibalize many games."


"What?" - I asked, clearly not understanding what he meant. My conversational Polishenglish combined with his Frenchenglish ... I think you can sympathize.


"I cannibalize. I take components from other games and use them in my own prototypes. Thus, a lot of my game boxes are incomplete and will never be playable again."


"Oh." I said. That was something absolutely new for me. And it was two years after my conversation with Bruno, when – during my works on Stronghold - I finally fully understood what he meant.


***


I have used wood from two Mykerinos boxes, two Glik boxes and one box of Elasund for my Stronghold prototype. I’ve added a cartload of Lego bricks as walls, pots, cannons, hooks... The castle looked like a vast construction site. For a moment it even seemed possible that five incomplete game sets and a pile of my son’s bricks was enough for me to work. Unfortunately... During the final stage of my work on the game I had to send the prototype to testers, and had I not discovered a store with wooden beads I would have been in serious trouble and Ystari company would have been over the moon with twenty more Mykerinos boxes sold.


While working on Prêt-a-Porter I’ve cannibalized copies of Arkham Horror. This game has wonderful cash tokens. I’ve borrowed one of the copies from the club in Gliwice, the other one was lend to me by Tycjan from Opole. I have tarnished the sanctity during my works on Stronghold: Undead – I’ve used chess pawns for priests. I have also made use of green cubes from Space Alert. They have worked so well that eventually we contacted our friends from the CGE and with their help the final version of Undead is equipped with the same tape of cubes as in Space Alert, however they are blood-red colored...



My 51st State was created using wood pieces from Light Speed, and Light Speed was created on the basis of Ikea glass markers. I designed Witchcraft with the usage of damage indicators from the first edition of Neuroshima Hex, and Machina (Machine)... To be honest, I've created Machina from scratch, all by myself. It was my first game. I didn't know then that one should steal the components, and not cut them out with scissors from cardboard…


***

I write about all this all as now working on my Robinson game I’ve cannibalized without even noticing my favorite CGE game - wonderful and crazy Galaxy Trucker. And now, not only I cannot fly into space and experience great adventures there – I also had to splash some paint on my brave Czech astronauts for the sake of Robinson. In my prototype I needed meeples in four different colors, so I had to paint the astronauts. Their resemblance to Neil A. Armstrong is lost.


Galaxy Trucker is one of my son's favorite games. And what will I tell him now? How can I admit what I have done? Even if I finish my work on Robinson pretty soon, even if none of the astronauts is lost during the tests and they all eventually return to Galaxy Trucker’s box, space trips will never be the same again. Robinson has left a considerable mark on them …

Ignacy, there is no such card!

Essen fair has ended, stress level has fallen- finally a moment to catch a breath. I can play in the newest releases, see what the other authors have prepared, take a gulp of new ideas. I’ll note the interesting solutions that may be inspiring and I’ll allow my mind to be stirred by others. Sometimes – quite unexpectedly - something completely new is born from all this commotion.

Finally, after several plays, the commotion came. Oh yes. And as a result, within two weeks after Essen the brand new prototype has landed on the table. We play. Turns come and go. Step by step Merry is gaining the upper hand and finally I can see nothing’s going to change that in the following two moves before the end of the game. I was beaten. The prototype seems to be cool, yet the cards have little to do with balance.

I draw my last card. It's named Commandos, yet there is no text nor symbols with rules on it, only the title and cool graphics. I didn’t have a slightest idea for the mechanics, only a cool title, so I just tossed this card into the deck. Very clever. "Trzewiczek style" they call it - the story always comes first, then you’ll have time to worry, dude, about the rules.

And so I draw this stupid Commandos and with a poker face I put it in New York saying "Commandos. I won."

Merry’s eyes widen.

If I had to buy her some contact lenses just in that moment, they would have to be the bottom of a jar size.

"What?" she asks almost completely speechless.

I lost miserably. The only thing left for me was to tease her a little bit. "Well, I pulled Commandos. Didn’t I tell you that when Outpost draws that card, it wins? And so I won."

Merry didn’t believe in what she’s just heard. "There is no such card."

I keep my face straight. "There is. As you can clearly see here. Commandos wins the game."

"Ignacy, there is no such card!" Merry furiously rushes to the other side of the table, grabs the Commandos and throws it away. The card lands besides the window. "Ignacy, there is no such card."
All I could do is bursts out laughing.

Two days later, the Commandos has its abilities described. Maybe it does not win the game, but… but still gets to be my favorite card in the whole deck.

Moneyball

Somewhere at the beginning of January, Steel Police got on my nerves and I snapped. The army’s made an incredible carnage on the table in Portal’s office. Won most of the battles. You see, it was not only winning all the battles – it was beating other armies into a pulp. Again and again. Results’ sheets from the turn of December and January are filled with such results as 17:0, 12:0, 13:1, and even 7: -4.

The day when we were to close our tests and start preparing files for printing was getting closer, and the army was behaving ridiculously. Finally I couldn’t stand it. I called Michał Oracz.

"Michał, come to the Company. We must weaken the Steel Police. What we have here is a mockery of a balance. "- since from January 2011 Michał no longer worked in Portal, we had to call him to the Company if we wanted to mix with Neuroshima Hex. And it seemed that we had to mix a lot. Michał had to come. Two hours later he stood in the doorway of our office.

"Michał, the army is not balanced. I have the entire file of results – and it looks very bad. " I greeted him quickly getting to the point.

Michał took the printout. Looked. And nodded.

"You’re playing it wrong."

I gaped at him.

"What?"

"The army is balanced. You’re playing it wrong. Who's watching the rules during the tests? "

"Maciek."

Michał sat down with him and began to question him from rules. Just like during the exam. He pulled from his sleeve the most bizarre situations and asked how he would interpret them. Such thing has yet never been seen in Portal. The situation was peculiar.

Maciek’s passed the test. He answered all the questions. And so Michał invited him to play.

"Show how you play the Steel Police."

Michał took the Hegemony. And took victory over Steel Police in stride. They played again. Steel Police has lost a second time. They played a third time. Steel Police has been beaten the third time in a row.

"The army is balanced. Learn how to play." He said simply and went home.

***

A few days later Steel Police tests moved to the next stage - we sent the file to the most trusted and experienced Neuroshima Hex players in Poland. Those guys who win tournaments. The ones that go to conventions and organize game shows. The biggest NS HEX geeks in the country. They were obliged to send daily packages of results, along with a description of their plays. The results ended up in Michał Oracz’s mailbox and a copy was sent to me. I watched them. They made my hair stand on the end.

The Steel Police was almost unbeatable. The results were frightening. We had 3 weeks to the tests’ closing date and the army had absolutely nothing to do with balance. It won all of the battles.

During this time I called Michał almost every day.

"Michał, did you get the latest results? We are weakening the army, huh? Introduce a few changes, please."

"They have to learn how to play against this army. It is balanced. Do not change anything. "

Just 3 weeks left. I was close to a heart attack.

***

Have you seen Moneyball? There is an extraordinary scene where Brad Pitt, manager of the Oakland Athletics is called along with his assistant on the carpet by chairman of the club. Team results are a catastrophe, Oakland lost eighteen games in a row. They are last in the group. The chairman asks what they’re going to do.

"We estimate that we will begin to win in mid-season."

"I beg your pardon?"

"The team will start to win in mid-July. We will qualify to the playoff. Trust us, please. "

They’ve just lost the eighteenth game in a row. Trust us. Yeah, they certainly have the nerve.

***

It was several days ago. Two weeks before the zero hour. After the weekend I received from our testers another large batch of Steel Police results. Resigned, I gave it a glance. And immediately, I mean immediately grabbed the phone.

"Did you see the results?!" I almost shouted to the receiver.

"They’ve learned how to play." Michał replied calmly.

The bastard was right. He had known from the start what would happen.

"They’ve learned how to play." I said and nodded. "They’ve learned how to play..."

In this story Michał has played the part of Brat Pitt. I was only the chairman who withstood the pressure and didn’t start to tamper in the team ...

Jokes are over

It’s January. Jokes are over. We begin the Operation: Essen 2012. It’s been like that in Portal for years. October means the Essen fairs, in November we take a break and rest, and in December we look through ideas, prototypes and different sketches we’ve collected over past few months. Then comes January.

In January we begin working on prototypes and new ideas. We analyze and discuss them. Finally, we choose the one we think is best and has the biggest chances for success. The one we want to present during the next Essen fairs.

In 2007, before Essen, Michał Oracz showed us his newest game prototype. He worked on it for the rest of the year and in January 2008 it was all clear - we will publish a game about a wizards duel. This is how Witchcraft was born.

In 2008 I had my idea for a game about a castle siege. It’s been a couple of years but I still remember how nervous I was when in January I came to the firm with a big sheet of paper with a castle drew on it to present my prototype to the rest of the guys. We decided that the game has a big potential. We began working on Stronghold.

We closed 2010 without an idea for a new game... We closed it with a finished game. That year we published Pret-a-Porter in Poland. We didn’t plan to publish it in other countries, but as weeks went by, that idea became more and more tempting. The reviews in Poland were incredible. Everyone was asking us the same question: “Are you going to Essen with this?”.

We didn’t want to do that. Pret-a-Porter was completely different from our previous games – theme was so strange. And cards - they were full of text. We also knew, that if we sacrifice another few months to prepare international edition of the game, we won’t have anything new for the Polish market.

Tough nut to crack. You have a great game on the table and a decision to make. Do you start working on it’s new edition? Or maybe put it on the shelve and begin a new project?

Finally, we decided to give Pret-a-Porter a chance for an international career. We had a lot of time. We designed the best, most legible icons in the history of Portal's games. We balanced the game even more. We added few new, great cards. We went to Essen 2011 with a fantastic game. Thanks to many months of hard work we polished up Pret-a-Porter in the smallest details.

What’s more, we still had a lot of time to rest, clear our heads, look for new ideas and prepare for the next year.

It’s January 2012. Again, there’s a lot of prototypes on our table. We have second 51. State’s expansion, we have a two-players card game, we have a new cooperative game, and couple of new armies for Neuroshima Hex. January is a month of playing and discussing. A month of decision making.

In a few weeks our publishing plan will be ready and approved. We’ll begin the Operation: Essen 2012.