Stonehenge RSS-Feed

...in Production

georgvw@gmx.de — 2007-03-30T01:19:01+02:00

von Volker Hesselmann:
Aktuell läuft die Produktion für Stonehenge, ein Projekt, dass mich selbst vollkommen in seinem Bann geschlagen hat. Sobald es auf dem Markt ist, wird es hier meine persönliche Regel für Stonehenge als Download geben.

Parallel wird dieses Jahr an zwei weiteren Projekten gebastelt:
• Fishing for Compliments ist bis auf die Illustration praktisch fertig.
• Bei Schattenfels sind wir zwar noch auf den einen oder anderen Schaffensrausch angewiesen, aber optimistisch gestimmt, dies auch bewerkstelligen zu können...

The world's first Anthology Board Game

georgvw@gmx.de — 2007-03-29T21:47:03+02:00

von den Stonehenge-Druiden:
Spielzeit! and Titanic Games present the world's first Anthology Board Game™. We gathered together five talented game designers and gave each of them the same board and pieces. Five unique designers resulted in five unique games: an Arthurian showdown by Richard Borg, a monumental fire sale by James Ernest, a druidic election by Bruno Faidutti, a magical convocation by Richard Garfield, and an alien chariot race by Mike Selinker.

- Expected approximately May 2007

Can you solve the mystery?

georgvw@gmx.de — 2007-03-25T05:46:49+02:00

von den Stonehenge-Druiden:
A group of spellcasters announce their spells to raise the fifteen rocks of Stonehenge's five trilithons.

"I shall consume a pint of ALE, dance under the MOON, and play the pipes of a SATYR!"
"I shall drink the blood of a HERO, bind myself in ROPE, and strip the bark from a TEA TREE!"
"I shall sacrifice an EMIR, skin an IGUANA, and drape my head with a LEAF!"
"I shall imitate an APE, strike my apprentice with an OAR, and impale him with a SPEAR!"
"I shall ride up in a GONDOLA, demonstrate my FAITH, and intone an AUGURY!"
"I shall fashion weapons of IRON, offer up a COW, and come forth in the NUDE!"
"I shall become a PARIAH, betray an ALLY, and stake myself to a WALL!"
"I shall sever my own TOE, make an offering to HELIOS, and honor a DAME!"
"I shall go out on the MOOR, play my PIPE, and eat the leaves of a PANSY!"
"I shall hoot like an OWL, sacrifice a LAWYER, and set ablaze an Egyptian SUN BARGE!"
"I shall burn some ART, give forth some ORE, and throw OPALS into the sea!"
"I shall arrest SOMEONE, burn him as an ATHEIST, and surround him with PEAHENS!"
"I shall genuflect before TIAMAT, follow a HUNCH, and become one with NATURE!"
"I shall sacrifice a DOE, filch the fur from a CAT, and set it adrift on a RAFT!"
"I shall compose a sacred LYRIC, entice a FEMALE, and dance with a NUBIAN!"

All That and a Box of Rocks

georgvw@gmx.de — 2007-03-18T18:29:13+01:00

von Mike Selinker:
Boo! It must be Samhain, which maybe you know as the night of Halloween and All Saints Day. I've just returned from the Essen Game Fair, which is the largest hobby-game convention in the world. If you've been to Origins or Gen Con, you might have thought they were big. And they are. But Essen is 180,000 people, nearly all of them there to play board games. It is a sight to behold.
At Essen, I showed the Stonehenge prototype to a lot of my European game designer counterparts. Most of them thought it was quite cool, and were quite intrigued by the design team I introduced to you in my last Stonehenge diary. I picked those particular people because they're good game designers, they're my friends, and they play well with others. And also because they all were smart enough to help me figure out which anthology board game to do.
It might surprise you that we didn't start with the idea to do Stonehenge. We actually had a different idea, which Bruno tells me I can't spoil in case we pick it up for some other anthology board game in the future. It was a great idea, but we all suspected that the subject wasn't well known enough for the launch of this line. Here's what the Mystery Idea did have going for it, though:
1. It was historical. You put enough time between something and now, people are gonna come up with all sorts of reasons to like it. That contrasts with, say, a science-fiction or fantasy game, where you have to tell people why they should like it.
2. It was mysterious. (All good Mystery Ideas are.) You didn't know quite what it was used for, or how it got where it was, or what people thought of it at the time. That suggested lots of different things you could justify doing with it, because no one had a fixed idea in their head.
3. It had lots of objects associated with it. If there's lots of stuff in the environment, there's lots of things you can make into game pieces.
So if we weren't going to do the Mystery Idea, what subject could we do? We kicked around a lot of ideas, but it took a friendly little gathering at Alan Moon's to nail it down. I gathered up Richard Borg, Alan, and Überplay Entertainment publisher Jeremy Young and floated them a number of ideas for the project formerly known as "Shared Designer Box." Alan, however, made an eloquent defense of Stonehenge as an ideal first anthology board game. Here's how it stood up against the criteria I just mentioned:
1. It's about as historical as you can get. In fact, it's prehistorical, as nobody with a written language was anywhere near it while it was being built. There are postholes at the site that date from 8000 BC. (Eight thousand. To put that in perspective, that's about the first time that blond hair showed up.) The real work at the site began around 3100 BC, though, with the first ditch and a circle of wooden posts in holes. Some standing stones were added around 2600 BC, and the giant sarsen stones in the familiar three-stone trilithon arrangment arrived between 2400 and 2100 BC. (Just to put that in perspective, Stonehenge was complete before anyone on Earth had drank a cup of tea.)
2. It's super-mysterious. About the only things we know for certain about Stonehenge is that it's about 8 miles north of Salisbury, and it has a lot of rocks. Who built it? Hard to say. Why'd they build it? Ditto. If you had to list the top 10 mysterious structures in the world, you'd be spending all your time ranking the bottom nine. Even in the cases of the pyramids and the Sphinx, you know exactly what those colossi were used for. With Stonehenge, you've got any of the following possibilities:
• It's a channeling device.
• It's a giant clock.
• It's a druidic sacrifice site.
• It's a marketplace.
• It's an astronomical observatory.
• It's a chariot racetrack.
• It's a UFO landing platform.
• It's Merlin's personal magical lab.
3. Actually, that's just the tip of the iceberg. Stonehenge has more origin stories than rocks.

4. But it does have a whole lot of rocks. According to the so-called "Restored Plan" (which I think is right, but not everyone does), Stonehenge has about a hundred small stones, 60 large stones, and 15 really large stones. Some are round, some are tall, and some are stacked on top of each other. This makes for a wonderful piece pack for a game.
And in the next column, I'll tell you about what's in that piece pack. Have a happy Samhain.

A Stonehenge Only a Game Designer Could Love

georgvw@gmx.de — 2007-03-03T18:10:52+01:00

von Mike Selinker:
Early in the design process for Stonehenge, our group of game designers agreed on exactly one thing: we needed a board. We were, after all, designing a board game. And with the real Stonehenge sitting on Salisbury Plain—emphasis on the "Plain" part—a flat surface seemed to be the best thing to build our stones upon.
But which flat surface was dramatically unclear. So, being the enterprising game designers that we are, a number of us started making boards. And we quickly reached what would be the first of several intellectual conflicts on the way to making Stonehenge.
There were two camps, which I would call the "minimalist camp" and the "maximalist camp." Except I don't really know what the word "maximalist" means (I think it has something to do with Russian politics), so I'm just going to call it the "hungry camp," for reasons which will soon become clear.

The minimalist camp argued for the barest amount of information on the board. Alan Moon did up a board that a number of us liked, because it just showed the positions of the rocks. His version, shown here, is a black-and-white blueprint of the land, with the presumption that each game designer's game would place the rocks in realistic positions either at the start or over the course of the game. Which was a great idea, assuming you'd finished your game design and all you needed to mark was the positions of the rocks.
The problem was, none of us had finished our game designs. None of us had even started, in fact. We were in the interesting position of having to design a game board for each other to use, with no idea what any of us would need. So we started to think out the theoretical possibility that, if we were building Stonehenge from a game designer's perspective, what features would it have?
Number one, of course, was positions for the rocks. James Ernest and I started to research what rocks Stonehenge actually contained. Everybody knew about the trilithons—those monstrous three-stone megaliths—but what else was there, and how could we use it?

James started with a LEGO model of Stonehenge. Inside the horseshoe of five trilithons were 19 bluestones, easy enough to represent in a U-shape. And inside those was the altar stone, a huge flat rock. From the LEGO model, James drew a sketch of the board that was starting to take shape in his head.
One of the more interesting areas was the outer ring, which (assuming you believe that it was a regular shape) had 30 horizontal stones balanced on 30 vertical ones. To James, that screamed "numerical scoring track," like on the outer edge of hundreds of German board games. Certainly we wouldn't all use it that way, but a track numbered 1–30 seemed like a great idea.

In real life, inside of that ring were 56 pits, which may have held much smaller stones. One day, James asked me how I would feel if there were 60 instead of 56. I recoiled in horror, and then enthusiastically agreed. Sixty small stones matched up perfectly with 30 large stones, allowing the smaller stones to (mentally, anyway) be counted as "1A and 1B," for example. He added a ring of 60 stones in his next draft.
This allowed us to use two different color schemes—again, without really knowing why we would need them. We could color the trilithons and outer-ring stones with different colors, in a regular sequence, because sometimes game designers need colored sequences. And we could alternate the 60 small stones in black and white, or what Richard Garfield would eventually call "night and day."

And so James put it all together in a prototype board. A regular pattern of lines separated the various components of the board from each other, so that we could say "this is space 9," or "this is the blue space." And then the fighting began.
The minimalists argued that the board was cluttered with things that didn't exist in the real world. The maximalists argued that the board was now useful, because we could now refer to objects on the board as being in particular spaces or having particular properties. And the maximalists won out, for the simple reason that we were shopping hungry.
You've done that, I'm sure. You go to the supermarket to buy a gallon of milk, but you're famished, and so you walk out with the maxi-size carton of Ho-Hos. We did the same thing. We were hungry for functionality to give our as-yet-undesigned games features to hang upon, and so we went with a build that would allow any one of us to use the blue spaces for negative points or the night spaces for card-drawing prompts. Or whatever. They were there in case we needed them, and it turns out we all did.

Eventually we pared away things we didn't need so it didn't look like a dartboard. Then we played games on them for a year and ended up with a functional board as seen in James's final design.
Later on, it came time for our graphic designer, Sean Glenn, to take James's brightly colored prototype board and make it into something you wanted to see on your coffee table. Sean thought that the grass of Salisbury Plain from James's layout was a nice touch, so he borrowed it—and an image of real grass, which he spent hours turning into a usable backdrop. The background squares became shaded light and dark, as if a great lawnmower in the sky had come down to smooth it out for us.
The outer ring became a continuous band rather than individual blocks. That's closer to what it actually looked like, though of course the real lintels were all grey rather than an assortment of rainbow hues.
Then it came time for the inner ring. Where James had circles, Sean put actual stones. Each rock is individually shaped, as if they were pulled from the plain itself. The altar stone and the trilithons are shown in their real-world placement.

The end result is a Stonehenge that game designers and historians could love, assuming the latter group could get beyond the whole 56-pits-becomes-60-stones issue.
Next time, I'll talk about what it is we put on top of that board. Come back for that.

Sticks and Stones

georgvw@gmx.de — 2007-02-28T18:14:32+01:00

von Mike Selinker:
There I was, walking through the Essen game fair with my friend Patric from the German distributor Ulisses Spiele, when my heart stopped. I'm sure Patric was saying something very important, but I couldn't hear him. All I could see was heaven.
Heaven for a game designer, anyway. I could only gaze at the wonder that was the BEDI Holzspiele booth, which stocked dozens of colors of spare game bits. I immediately ran to get some cash. My haul from the BEDI booth was 1,000 Settlers of Catan roads, 1,000 Vinci pawns, several dozen Sorry! pawns, and 200 fewer euros.

Okay, you're thinking "that's nice, Mike, but who needs a thousand Settlers roads?" Well, I did, because I wanted to make 15 sets of Stonehenge for playtest purposes. Normally, when making a game, that kind of thinking wouldn't work (it's hard to imagine "I'm going to need 1,000 Russian aircraft carriers"). But in Stonehenge's case, it was exactly what I needed to be thinking.
To explain that, I need to go back about 18 months to when we were first planning the components for Stonehenge. We'd pretty much figured out what kind of board we needed (see my last diary), and now we needed to know what went with it. We still hadn't designed any games, so we had to figure out in abstract what we would use.
The one thing everyone agreed on was that the game needed rocks. Of course, we didn't know what we could make rocks out of (actual stone seemed right out). So we cast about for the nearest thing. Well, James did, and when he casts about, he finds LEGOs. So we made LEGOhenge, which had five brightly colored trilithons, each about a half-inch high. (Not exactly epic, I know.) We also added in an altar stone, representing the flat rock that the trilithons surround.
We imagined the outer stones fitting together in a neat circle of interlocked LEGOs, but this soon seemed impractical. The outer ring stones had to be separable for them to be of use in making games. So we settled on "bars" (Settlers roads, which are basically wooden sticks), and "disks" (Vinci pawns, which are squat cylinders). These were things we could move around freely, assigning them various roles like "apprentices" and "energy crystals." Whatever we needed a lot of, we could get with these. We started with twelve of each of these in five colors, one for each player.

At some point Richard Borg said, "Can I have pawns for my knights?" His game wanted a single piece to represent each player, and we all thought that was a swell idea. Suddenly, my little Vinci pawn representing my chariot could become... well, it could become a Sorry! pawn. Not much of a step up, but meaningfully different. Later on, we added one pawn of a neutral color (actually a Settlers robber pawn) because James asked nicely.
At this point you may wonder, "why not a chariot?" or "why not knights?" The answer was that we didn't want to lock down preconceptions in people's minds. If you had a piece that looked like a chariot, you'd make a racing game. If you had knights, they'd hit each other with pointy sticks. We needed generalities, not specifics. (Incidentally, my favorite section of the rules is the spread that defines the pieces, as it doesn't tell you what anything is for. Try finding another game like that.)
Our final component was a deck of cards, because we needed some method of randomization or number assignment. Again, we didn't want to get too specific. We had numbers on the board, so we replicated those, coming up with sixty cards, with a "left circle" version and a "right circle" version of each number from 1 to 30. At Richard Garfield's suggestion, left and right eventually became "day" and "night." We added in five wild cards representing the trilithons, because as Richard always says, "every game's better with specials."
As we developed through the year, we pruned away things we didn't need. Every game worked with only ten of each bar and disk, so we dropped two of each. And amazingly, none of us used the altar stone as anything more than a flat surface for storing pawns, so we ditched that too.
A year after we started, I dumped the remaining items in art director Sean Glenn's lap. Sean made a set of cards, and had artist Jeff Carlisle draw up some rocky disks, bars, and trilithons, plus a vaguely humanoid pawn. Again, we tried not to make too obvious what this guy's purpose might be. He could be a druid, a ghost, an alien—pretty much anybody mysterious.

Sean's versions are a long way down a very good road from where we started. After a year of playing with LEGOs and little bits of wood, it's going to be great to start playing with these nicely realistic pieces. Soon I'll be able to build a fully realized Stonehenge on my tabletop. Maybe you'll want to as well.
Next time, I'll actually talk about the games in the box. I promise.

The Anthology Begins...

georgvw@gmx.de — 2007-02-20T18:31:30+01:00

von Mike Selinker:
Happy autumnal equinox, everybody, and I hope you enjoyed our first little Stonehenge puzzle. Welcome to the new occasional design diary on Titanic Games' upcoming release, Stonehenge. It's a strange and exciting game for us in a lot of ways, and one that we've spent a lot of time developing. It's my job to give you the rundown on how this game came to be, preferably in small enough morsels so you still want to know more when we actually release it early next year. This design diary will not be just my own, but also that of many people who are associated with the game, some of whom you've actually heard of.
Stonehenge is Titanic's second big boxed game, following the stunning new color edition of Kill Doctor Lucky, which releases in just a couple weeks. (And by the way, if you haven't preordered KDL yet, now's a great time, because you can still get the exclusive Doctor Lucky miniature for free. Go ahead, I'll wait right here.)
OK, now that you're a bit poorer but richer with anticipation, I'll start talking about Stonehenge. At some point I'll twist James Ernest's arm to tell you the full story on this. For now, suffice it to say that shortly after James and I formed our game design studio, Lone Shark Games, James mentioned an idea of his in which multiple game designers would agree on a set of pieces and make different board games that worked with those pieces. For me, the idea was like a story anthology from the 1950s, where renowned sci-fi authors would all gather under a banner like 9 Tales of Space and Time and write somewhat related pieces. So I came up with the term "Anthology Board Game™," and convinced James that it was a practical idea, assuming one knew the right people.
Here's the cast of characters I rounded up for our first Anthology Board Game:

Stop number one was James himself. James Ernest is the founder and game designer of Cheapass Games, the little game company that could. Over the years he's put out dozens of modern classics like Give Me the Brain, Button Men, and Diceland. He and I started working together on the game Fightball in 2001, and later started Lone Shark to make games like Cowpoker, Dungeonville, and the really-coming-out-soon Gloria Mundi. I was pretty sure I could get more out of James than just the idea for this enterprise.

Next on my hit list was Richard Garfield, a longtime friend from our Wizards of the Coast days. When you hear his name, you may first think of his card game Magic: The Gathering, but he's also a major-league board game designer, having come up with RoboRally, Filthy Rich, Rocketville, and What Were You Thinking? Professor Garfield was the guy that a way-out-there project like this needed, as he's one of the most intellectually curious people I've ever met. Set him a bizarre proposition like an Anthology Board Game, and he'll poke around the edges till he figures out what makes the beast tick.

I then called across the pond to Paris to talk to Bruno Faidutti, designer of Mystery of the Abbey, Citadels, and many other games. Bruno is the ultimate collaborator. Check out this crazy map of game designers and you'll see why. I'm in the middle, connected to James, Larry Harris, the late Paul Randles, and Bruno (the latter two on the game Key Largo, which I hope comes stateside soon). But Bruno's the freakin' hub, with—count 'em—nine connections to other designers. Most designers get through their lives not having issued nine board games. But Bruno has been involved in at least nineteen collaborations, because everybody likes working with him. This anthology group wouldn't make sense without him, and he signed on enthusiastically.

I'd worked with all these guys before, but there was a connection I'd been meaning to make for years. You might notice that on that map, I'm near—but not linked to—Richard Borg, the designer of Battle Cry, Memoir '44, and Liar's Dice. He and I are in a very select fraternity: we've both been honored to design games for Risk, me with Godstorm and him as part of the Lord of the Rings expansion. We'd been looking for a project to work on together, so when I started the anthology project, I dragged him in.
(I also dragged in his buddy, Alan Moon. Alan is the creator of New England, Ticket to Ride, and other classics. Unfortunately, as the project got going, Alan had to drop out, but I hope to sign him up for another anthology some time down the road. You never know what these nutty game designers might do.)
OK, so now we had a crew. All we needed was a subject. Next time I'll let you in on how we decided on a bunch of rocks.
See you then!