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The story of Core Worlds begins at DexCon, a popular game convention in New Jersey during the summer of 2009. My friend Geoff Engelstein (co-designer of The Ares Project) had picked up a copy of Arctic Scavengers, the first deck-building game to follow up on the massive success of Dominion. We played Scavengers with a prominent publisher and some other friends and had a good time – but afterwards an impromptu discussion arose about the nature of the new deck-building genre. Here was the second incarnation of this intriguing game mechanism, and although it offered some interesting twists, there also seemed to be a lot of room for innovation.
After getting home that evening, I thought about this for some time, focusing on the sorts of things I would love to see in this type of game. At that point, I focused on two elements that would eventually become the core of the game design: 1) inspired by Vlaada Chvátil's Through the Ages, we would replace the face-up piles of draftable cards with an ever-changing mix of cards that would become progressively more difficult to draft and increasingly more valuable to own; and 2) instead of relying solely on the cards you draw each turn, we would create a tableau in front of each player where cards could be stored until ready for use, thereby allowing for more long-term planning.
I thought of gearing the theme toward the tastes of the publisher who had played the game with us and originally considered a World War II theme. Players would invade different regions and score them for their team, while also upgrading units and attacking the other players. Instead of players having to draw resource cards into their hands, they would place conquered regions in front of themselves, thereby creating a constant stream of resources while also keeping the players' victory points on display throughout the game.
Well, the difficulties of creating a team deck-building game began to weigh down on me, and I also realized I didn't know quite as much about World War II as I would have liked for tackling such a difficult project. So I thought of other themes that appealed to me that I had not yet used in a game. Growing up, I was a big science fiction buff, particularly enjoying works about massive space empires and all of their complexities. I was an ardent fan of Frank Herbert's Dune books, as well as Asimov's Foundation series. In particular, Foundation presented a galaxy in which the empire, ruled from a central core world called Trantor, was on the verge of collapse. A scientist named Hari Seldon had set up a Foundation on the edge of the galaxy that would slowly grow to power and eventually challenge the crumbling empire, albeit indirectly. The Foundation was surrounded by other rebellious planets seeking to expand their power as well.
The more I thought about those outlying, rebellious planets, the more I found they inspired me, even more than the methodical Foundation that was the focus of the story. What if the players could be barbarian kingdoms living on the edge of a similar galaxy, but this galaxy would be ruled by many core worlds (six to be exact)? And instead of biding their time for centuries like the Foundation, the players would immediately work their way in from the outer edge of the galaxy all the way to the galactic core, building up new forces and conquering planets along the way. Funded by these lesser planets and bolstered by powerful new fleets and ground troops, the players would ultimately invade the center of the galaxy during a final, epic confrontation.
Image from lead artist Maciej Rebisz
Creating the Prototype
Those who have playtested my games in the past know that I like to make detailed prototypes. In particular, I like to use images as a source of inspiration, both to immerse players in the game world and to spark new ideas for cards. Fortunately, the Internet is filled with such inspiration in the sci-fi arena: Star Wars, Halo, Warhammer 40K and on and on. I found myself in one of those rare moments where you get on a roll and can do nothing else. For three straight days, I did nothing besides eat, sleep, and create prototype cards for Core Worlds. The structure of the game was not yet fully formulated, but I'm a believer in letting some of the game design itself. As I would make cards, I would make rules for those cards. Those rules would then influence previous cards, and I would go back and forth.
In the first version of the game, drafting Unit cards was easy and cheap: You spent as much Energy as the current Sector number. And as I created planets, the amount of strength needed to conquer a World became a relatively simple mathematical formula: (Energy Generation X 2) + Empire Points + 1 if there was card text. Thus, a planet that generated 2 Energy, provided 1 Empire Point, and had special card text would require a strength of 6, divided up between Fleet Strength and Ground Strength. Coming up with Deploy Costs for deploying Units into the tableau had to be much more intuitive based on the value of their special text (and therefore I made lots of mistakes). At the end of those three days, I had a playable prototype – but would the system work or fall apart completely during the first playtest?
Prototype card
First Playtest
Traditionally, the first playtest of one of my games ends in complete failure. Sometimes we can't even finish the first turn; other times the developers give me that look that says, "This is not working"; and at still other times they will literally say "This is not working" and throw their cards into the center of the table.
Sometimes, enough of the math has been worked out that you can actually finish the game despite its many flaws. Such was the case with Core Worlds. We actually got all the way to the end. Of course, my math was way off as we could barely even conquer any of the Core Worlds. (The formula for conquering Core Worlds was purposefully different, but it was completely wrong.) Those sorts of problems are to be expected. But there were two fundamental flaws that I had not anticipated that required immediate attention:
1) Some Units provided inherent victory points, and everyone drafted them immediately; and
2) The player who had the most Energy would just keep playing cards, conquering worlds, and generally bullying the galaxy while the rest of us watched helplessly.
Fortunately, I am blessed with an incredible team of developers. The Quixotic Games crew does not quit. Even when I'm ready to say "Let's just stop for now," they will continue to talk and discuss and argue until a solution is found. Such was the case here. The first problem was relatively easy to fix. We realized that Units that provided inherent victory points had to cost more to draft than other Units from the same Sector. At that time, no matter how powerful a card was, its draft cost was equal to its Sector number; more powerful cards might be more expensive to deploy to your tableau, but drafting costs were constant. This had to change, so we developed this formula: Draft Cost = Sector Number + Victory Points. Problem solved.
But the second problem was a bear. We did not want players to win simply because they conquered the biggest Energy planets at the start of the game. Yet about halfway through the game, people with big Energy were doing twice as many things as everyone else. Thus, pursuing any strategy other than acquiring massive gobs of Energy was a losing battle. We played around with the Energy Surge cards as a means of playing catch-up for those who did not conquer an early planet, but we quickly discovered that these cards would have too strong an effect if they were too powerful, almost negating the effort put forth by those going for big Energy. We didn't want to negate the importance of Energy; we just didn't want those people doing more things than everyone else. And that's where it hit us: Action Points. By making sure everyone always performed the same maximum number of Actions each turn, we stopped big Energy players from dominating the entire game. Yes, they could draft and deploy more expensive cards, but they could not keep playing on and on while everyone else just watched.
One of our design principles then became: "Thou shalt not create cards that grant more Actions." We would start everyone off with a certain number of Action Points each round, and as the game progressed, we would give players an increasing number of Actions, but although some would have more Energy than others, the number of Actions would be a constant for all players.
This ended up being an important breakthrough as a player who wanted big Energy could go too far, accumulating too much Energy instead of needed Empire Points, and by the time he started focusing on Empire Points, it might be too late. This change also meant that a player who built an efficient deck, using synergistic card text to deploy cards more cheaply, could focus on Empire Points more quickly. In the end, the player who makes best use of his Energy will have a strong advantage over the other players. Sometimes the player with the most Energy wins the game; sometimes the player with the least Energy wins. Making wise choices about how to use one's Energy became the key to success, which is exactly how we wanted it.
Prototype player board
Additional Playtests
The team was fond of the game, so it got a lot of attention over the next several weeks. We knew we had two other issues that separated us from other deck-building games in a potentially negative way: length and complexity. The epic scope of the game required a longer play experience, with players building themselves up from humble origins and slowly developing their space empires. And the types of strategies that can build up in a tableau are necessarily more complex than those in a game that is primarily hand-driven.
We originally had six Sectors, and we reduced this to five early on. This cut a lot of time without sacrificing the feeling of progression. But even so, the game took 1-2 hours depending on the number of players, and that was unlike other deck-building games at the time. Fortunately for us, over the course of the next two years, the desire for more complex deck-building games arose, so our fears were somewhat allayed. After we started working on Core Worlds, games like Ascension: Chronicle of the Godslayer came forward and used a central drafting pool. Our game's central zone works differently, but it was interesting to see that the desire for a changing pool of cards was there among gamers. Similarly, Thunderstone showed that players didn't mind a slightly longer game if it followed a bit of a story, so we were heartened by that as well.
But we still had one major problem that other deck-building games did not share. Because Core Worlds takes place over ten Rounds, players are typically not shuffling and drawing new cards as frequently as in other games. Because of this, many of the cards drafted by the players were not being seen. People were getting increasingly tired of seeing the six Galactic Grunts and six Snub Fighters that littered their starting decks, so we realized that we had to ramp up the drafting process and get many of those Grunts and Snubs out of the deck.
The first thing we did was remove one Grunt and one Snub, reducing the size of the starting deck and allowing players to get through their decks more quickly. We also came up with the Colonization Rule which allowed you to permanently remove Grunts and Snubs from your deck without needing to spend a whole turn or possess a special power to do so. Essentially, whenever you conquer a world, you can ditch one of these cards on the planet to "colonize" it – and since we wanted to encourage players to conquer worlds, this was an extra incentive for them to do so.
But it was still not enough. People were still drawing Grunts and Snubs and having trouble putting together a coherent strategy that would fire off throughout the game. That's when we finally came up with the pre-game draft rules. Now experienced players can upgrade their starting decks during set-up. First of all, when using the pre-game draft rules, the players immediately eliminate another Grunt and Snub (leaving only four of each), and replace them with two "Sector 0" cards of their choice. Everyone's starting deck therefore begins with a bit of customization, and that level of customization might even lend itself to a full-blown strategy by the end of the game. I can't say enough how much this changed the game. Now people were seeing serious deck synergies by the third and fourth turns of the game, with everyone's deck looking almost entirely different by the end of the game. It was a huge turning point for the design, and we felt at last it was ready for presentation.
Finished card design
The Presentation
Any game designer will tell you that nothing makes you sweat more than showing a prototype to a publisher. There are so many strange things that can go wrong, and often things that you never even thought of can suddenly happen during the publisher demo, and the publisher just stares at you and says, "Why the heck did you do that?" This is not really coincidence, of course, as often you have been playing the game with a small group of people and new players will get in there during the demo and try crazy things. However, with Core Worlds, we had playtested it a lot, bringing in lots of new players and watching all kinds of interesting things happen, so we were reasonably confident that nothing insane would occur.
The good news is that the game played like a dream. In fact, it was probably one of the most perfect sessions of the prototype to date. However, although the publisher enjoyed the game very much, he wanted us to change something fundamental – add player versus player combat. At first this seemed possible. After all, hadn't I originally considered this back when the design was going to be a WWII game? How hard could it be to add a different type of action to the game that allowed players to conquer each others' worlds, or perhaps just attack each other's forces?
Well, sadly, it was very hard. We tried three different rulesets to allow this, but unfortunately the game fell apart each time. The biggest problem is that the game's "fun value" evaporated. Nobody wanted to do anything for fear that it would make them vulnerable to attack. The game's indirect interaction already has a "competition for resources" feel to it. You feel a lot of pressure to go out and get the things you want before anyone else snatches them up. And typically there are at least two things out there that you really want, so a difficult decision must be made. However, by adding the possibility of player combat, nobody would make the first move. And anyone who dared to conquer a world would get jumped by everyone else. Also, players who were doing poorly were beat on continuously. The problem was simply that the game system we had created did not support this mechanism. We would have had to completely recreate the system from the ground up.
A Strong(hold) Opportunity
As chance would have it, I was discussing the situation at the 2009 World Boardgaming Championships with Stephen Buonocore, a fellow gamer who at the time was in the planning stages of creating his own game company, Stronghold Games. He and his friends had helped us playtest Core Worlds, and they really enjoyed it with its current model of indirect interaction, so during a pivotal discussion in the lounge behind the buffet table at the 2009 WBC (over a beer of course, as Stephen loves his beer), Stephen mentioned that if he did indeed go forward with creating his game company, I could present the game to him and Stronghold Games for consideration.
And the rest is history. Stephen Buonocore, with his business partner Kevin Nesbitt, did start Stronghold Games a few months later, and after several more months of heavy playtest and revision, we presented the game to them for consideration. After reviewing the game with outside testers for several months, Stronghold agreed to publish the game, offering important feedback such as the creation of the Player Boards to keep track of Energy and Action Points – we had been using giant piles of Energy Tokens before then! – as well as simplifying the table layout by using Sector Cards. Over the course of the next year we worked together on important changes and adjustments to the cards and to the game components, and after securing some extremely talented artists and a wonderful graphic designer (Chechu Nieto), the game went to press at the end of August 2011. The first copies were sold during Spiel 2011 in October, with the full release expected in December 2011.
Andrew Parks
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