Designer Diary: Finding the Way to Terra Mystica

It started in 1998. I had just bought my first Mac (G3) and soon played some games on it, amongst them Spaceward Ho!, an old 4X computer game. What I really liked about the game was that you had to terraform planets before you could inhabit them. I thought, this is a really nice mechanism, and with my brother Anselm soon started to design a board game that had terraforming as one main mechanism. At this time, we also played Settlers of Catan a lot, so naturally we thought of a modular board. We tested the game with family and friends, I took it to my regular gaming group in Freiburg, and when we heard of the International Game Inventors Fair in Munich, we went there and presented our game to the attending publishers.

Well, with Gorod (Russian for "city") we caught the interest of Hans im Glück, which tested the game for some time, but then decided against publishing it. We abandoned the design for some time, until I moved to Bremen where I started redesigning it. This was in 2001/2002.

What was the game about at that time?

There were five different landscapes and five different fantasy races, each the inhabitant of one particular landscape. Each race had one speciality and all had the goal of expanding as much as possible on the game board. Thus, players had to terraform landscapes into their homeland in order to build. Three types of buildings (dwellings, main buildings, temples) provided the players with workers, money, or action cards ("oracle cards"). We had a lot of fun testing the game, but in the end – after rethinking everything in light of the rejection from Hans im Glück – we realized that the action cards added too much luck to the game, unbalancing all strategies.

Early action cards in Gorod

When I came to Bremen as a student, I had one drawer in my desk in which I stored all my prototype games. Every now and then I worked on some of my designs. I told some friends about my passion for designing games, and we came together for testing sessions; this is how I showed them Gorod, which hit the table again after about two years. They all liked it, so I started redesigning the game, reducing the impact of the oracle cards.

I added two more landscapes and two more races, experimented with modular and fixed game boards, increased and decreased the number of possible buildings and resources – then put the whole thing back into my drawer.

In the meantime I started Pfifficus Spiele with my brother Anselm and we went to the Spiel game fair in Essen, Germany in 2004. We published some games in small editions, including Desperados, Kaivai, and Guru – while Gorod was still mostly in my desk – then I left Pfifficus Spiele in 2008, knowing that I was more fond of being a game designer than a publisher.

In 2009 I moved from Bremen to Eppstein (near Frankfurt) and Gorod came out of the drawer again, this time to be completed. I focused on the civilization aspect of the game, giving the players abilities to improve, buildings to upgrade.

Also in 2009 I met Andreas and Bernadette from Cliquenabend at Spielewahnsinn Herne and soon became a regular member of their gaming groups. I brought Gorod to one of these gaming sessions, and they all liked it, though it still included those oracle cards. (In the meantime I had bumped the number of races up to fourteen.) In 2010 Cliquenabend organized its first Mallorca-gathering event, bringing together game designers and publishers for about ten days of extensive gaming and prototype testing.

There I met Uwe Rosenberg, who really liked the game and promised to see it published, yet there was still a lot of improvement to be done, e.g., removing the oracle cards and their unbalancing luck factor and creating more difference between the races. Uwe visited a friend of his near Frankfurt and we had an extensive gaming weekend, testing prototypes. Uwe invited Jens Drögemüller, who after a few more gaming sessions became my co-designer and Frank Heeren became the publisher with Feuerland Spiele. We had many, many testing sessions, as fourteen races with all their different abilities had to be balanced, which took us until June 2012. Now Terra Mystica is completed, Dennis Lohausen did an incredible job with the art, the rules are available in English (PDF) and German (PDF), and Spiel 2012 is ahead – can't wait for it!

Helge Ostertag

(Editor's note: If you don't feel like reading the rules yourself, Luke Hedgren has summarized them on Opinionated Gamers; in the same post Dale Yu interviews Helge Ostertag about the game, adding more details to the story Ostertag relays above. —WEM)