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It would be hard for an outside observer to track the evolution of my games over time because the order in which I design games is often not the order in which they get published. First Empires was evolving right up to the point at which it was published, but its roots go back to my early game design career.
In 2011, I had designed a game with the working title "Iberia" that was intended to be published by Sandstorm LLC as the follow-up to the two other games they had published for me: Cambria and Hibernia. I had even built the first prototype over a copy of Hibernia to make sure it would fit in the same box. That game was essentially an attempt to turn my card game Armorica into a board game, so the original design was much more like Kitara than like First Empires. Sadly, Sandstorm went out of business in 2012, and I was left without a publisher.
Getting Published Is a Dicey Business
I shopped "Iberia" to a large game company, which expressed some initial enthusiasm but ultimately passed. As our meeting was ending, on a whim I asked, "What if I replaced the card mechanism with a dice mechanism?" They said that yes, they might be more interested in that.
This is exactly how I create headaches for myself, by telling a publisher I can do something they want before I am absolutely sure I can deliver. I was a much less-experienced game designer at that time, less certain of my abilities; however, I had converted card mechanisms to dice mechanisms before, so I thought I could probably pull it off.
In "Iberia", as in Kitara, as you built cards into a tableau over time, you would gradually increase abilities you could use each turn, with cards providing more movement, pieces, and other assets. I moved some of those assets to a series of tracks on a player board that could be elevated over the course of the game, creating a kind of simplified tech tree that doesn't branch. The problem now was how to translate dice rolls into movement up those tracks, with that movement being mediated by the action of a dudes-on-a-map board game in between.
I do a lot of my prototyping with color-spot dice because I like the idea of dice that roll nominal categories rather than values; Hibernia was the first time I did this. In the case of First Empires, my intention was always that the color spot dice would eventually be replaced with custom symbol dice.
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I finally decided that players would roll all their dice at the beginning of their turn, with those dice rolls determining which of their tracks they had the opportunity to push up at the end of their turn. Regions on the game board would match the colors of the dice, and players would need to have a matching die-and-region to increase a track by one increment. Advancing the playerboard tracks would provide increased abilities as well as victory points. During their turn, the player's pursuit of the regions they needed to make use of their dice would be non-random.
At this point, the abilities the tracks provided started to evolve away from what the cards in "Iberia" provided. The tracks still provided additional pieces and movement points, but they also provided new abilities that were derived from the dice mechanism. They provided more dice, re-rolls, and an increase to the maximum number of regions your pieces could occupy. (We will come back to this mechanism later in the story.)
That left me with one leftover face on the die that I wasn't sure what to do with. At first I tried making this a wild die face as I had in Hibernia. However, that game was shorter and more random overall; in this game, a wild die face was much too swingy. This illustrates a design principle I try to always follow that I think is worth taking a moment to discuss.
Optimal Randomization Level Theory
I believe all game hobbyists go through a phase in their understanding of games when they think all randomness is bad, and the less random a game is, the better. I went through the same phase before any of my designs were published. After playing some long, complex games that were very random, I felt like the randomizers had determined the winner long before the game was over.
However, I then played some notably non-random games that I experienced as palpably unenjoyable, and I wondered why. If non-random equals good design, why am I not enjoying these games with minimal randomization? I eventually realized there is an optimal relationship between game length/complexity and randomness. In a long game, with a lot of complex decision points and factors to evaluate, you don't want or need much randomization because the random factor is essentially the choices of the other players; with enough factors to consider, the chances of two players making exactly the same calculations and choices are lower because there is not a clear optimal choice, and as the game state evolves, the same choices aren't optimal for all players.
In a shorter, more streamlined game where all the factors are more clearly visible, without randomness the game devolves into a stalemate that cannot be resolved until one player makes a mistake that the next player can exploit. If no one ever makes a mistake, which is possible since the optimal play is easily identifiable, then the game either goes on forever, or eventually allows player-order advantage to determine the outcome. Tic-Tac-Toe illustrates this problem perfectly. Even a more complex non-random game like Chess can be said to have this problem if you consider the advantage the first player has in games played at the grand master level.
More complex low-randomness games are also subject to "analysis paralysis" because of the advantage that a thorough analysis of any given move creates. Randomizers reduce analysis paralysis by incentivizing players (at least the good ones) to think about their moves only until the factors are within the range of variability created by the randomizer. Thus, if a game is relatively short and streamlined, as most of my games are, it needs enough randomness to ensure that the outcome doesn't feel deterministic and to keep the players playing quickly. If a game is longer and more complex, the randomizers need to be reduced in power, so that the effort players need to put into thinking out moves feels worthwhile. Hibernia was very short and streamlined; this new game was still short and streamlined, but less so than Hibernia, therefore it needed to be less random.
I decided that the remaining die face would convey a combat advantage, making all of a player's battles during the turn require one fewer piece. This would help prevent players from being able to play defensively because the active player could possibly overwhelm strongly defended regions. I really dislike wargames that reward defensive play — "turtling" — because aggression is what is fun in a wargame. However, I have waxed philosophical about that in the designer diaries for Hibernia (here) and Kitara (here), so I won't belabor that point.
Drifting into the Mediterranean
It was time to retheme the game at this point. Iberia was the setting for the original design because it needed a square map of continuous land regions. However, I decided to add sea movement to this game, so it needed land regions arranged around a large water region. I decided to use the time-honored solution of setting the game in the ancient Mediterranean, which has been a hugely popular game setting over the years precisely because it allows you to have conflict between more-or-less equal contenders, arranged around a sea. Few other historical settings allow for this.
Besides, having grown up with a dog-eared copy of D'Aulaires' Book of Greek Myths, it was a setting I loved. I decided that I wanted movement to be only a moderate restriction in the game, so I made it possible for a cube to move anywhere on the board, over the ocean, with at most three movement points. I also created what I thought was a nice visual pun within the theme. The player boards were drawn as vaguely Greek-style temples, with columns holding up the roof; these columns were also the columns (tracks) that players raised during the game. The working title for the game was "Bronze".
Asymmetrical, But Not Uneven
After some early playtests, I decided that I wanted to make the player boards asymmetrical. Asymmetry is one of those mechanisms that players love to see in a game, but all too often it ruins that game's balance, so one needs to be careful to ensure that the asymmetrical assets are equivalent to each other.
In this case, the game had five players, and the player boards had five tracks, so I gave each player a track that started out stronger than normal, and a track that started out weaker than normal. I also created different VP scales for each track, so that some had large increments at the top of the scale, while others had their biggest increments in the middle of the scale. All players had the same scales, but each player would have a given scale on a different track. Both of these asymmetrical elements took quite a bit of fine-tuning over the subsequent years as the relative importance of each of the tracks became clearer through playtesting.
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I ended up having a pitch meeting with the decision maker for the big game company in the middle of its demo booth at Gen Con, but he paid almost no attention to my pitch and rejected the game. I then pitched it to a medium publisher that wasted a bunch of my time in meetings and pitches, but never playtested it, and likewise did not seem to be serious about evaluating the game. Generally, I think brief game pitches, as much as publishers ask for them, are useless. If a publisher won't sit down and play the game with you, you won't get anywhere.
I then pitched the game to a smaller publisher, which had it under evaluation, but then went out of business while looking at it. As I started to think about kickstarting a game myself, I knew "Bronze" would require a larger production than I wanted to deal with for self-publication, so I shelved it.
Mars Orbits Away, But the Cities Stay
A couple of years later, after Zeppelin Attack was a modest success for Evil Hat Productions and with the encouragement of Chris Hanrahan, I pitched "Bronze" in a meeting with Fred Hicks. I had rethemed the game around Evil Hat's pulp Mars setting, from its Spirit of the Century RPG. The company had just published the novella "Khan of Mars", which I used as my main source material for the setting. The Mediterranean bronze-age nations became the various John Carter-like species of Mars, and the ocean became a great desert. The theming worked pretty well, since the flying species started out with more movement, etc.
I think it was in this version of the game that I first added the city mechanism to have an element of secret victory points. Evil Hat tentatively optioned the game, but ultimately even with making the player pieces counters, using stickers on blank dice, and taking other cost-reducing measures, the components for the game were more than Evil Hat felt it could afford to do.
Besides, I had also showed Fred Don't Turn Your Back at the same meeting, and he was much more interested in that. Evil Hat held on to the option for a year or so, then acknowledged it was unlikely to ever make the game.
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The prototype languished on my shelf for a while as I went on to do Don't Turn Your Back, Kaiju Incorporated, and finally The Dresden Files Cooperative Card Game and five expansions for Evil Hat.
The Dresden Files was quite successful and raised my stock as a game designer. It was also during this period that I finally got to meet Bruno Faidutti in person after a few years of him mentoring me by correspondence. (He is a generous person and does this for a lot of new game designers, I think.) At his invitation, I started attending his annual Ludopathic Gathering in the French countryside — an event similar to the Gathering of Friends.
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At the time, Sand Castle had not published any games, but I was told its first release would be Res Arcana, and I am a big Tom Lehmann fan, so I found that very encouraging. My game would be its second release. Res Arcana turned out to be a beautiful production and a big success, so clearly I had backed the right horse.
Do You Want Cards With That?
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After talking about it, we arrived at the idea that the cards should be dual use; they would be objectives that players could fulfill for victory points, but players could also discard the cards to alter their dice results. I think they expected that I would work on a prototype after I went back to the U.S. and eventually mail it to them; what they didn't know is that I work fast and am infamously impatient.
I sponged some paper and a pencil off someone, went back to my hotel, and stayed up until an ungodly hour of the morning making up a proof-of-concept deck of cards and working out how the green track would award them. I was suffering from awful jet lag, so I probably would not have slept much anyway. We playtested it the next day and agreed that this would be the direction in which we developed the game.
Later, the Sand Castle team proposed using the turn track as a first player marker to help players remember to advance the turn track — a very original and functional solution to that problem. They also modified the mechanism by which the cities would be placed on the board in a way that made the rule easier to remember.
Rolling out a New World
That was most of the mechanical development the game went through while it was with Sand Castle. In subsequent playtesting, lots of small changes were made to game balance, game length, etc. This kind of asymmetry simply took a lot of playtesting to get all the bugs worked out. The idea of a starting weakness became less consistent across boards and instead was used to compensate for starting strengths that were better than others.
Also, the strongest scoring scale was placed on the re-roll track for all players because that was the one players tended to push to the top less often, and the weakest scoring track was placed on the card track because it also awarded points via the cards; the scoring scales on the remaining three tracks still varied between the players.
Sand Castle also thought the Mediterranean setting was over used and wanted the game to use a world map instead. For most designs, that change would have created a huge headache. A map of the Earth has a lot more water than land, and the regional connectivity doesn't lend itself to position balance. However, in this game players could travel across the map easily, so the specifics of geography were easy to play with.
After some discussion of how to revise the theme of the game, I proposed that we give it an alternate history — a uchronic — setting in which some less prominent societies from our timeline rose to become the dominant empires of history. Uchronia is a literary genre I like a lot, with Hannibal's Children being a favorite novel of mine. This allowed us to create more original theming and highlight diversity in the art more easily. Also, to make a world map work, I needed the starting regions for the players to be in particular places, so an alternate history theme gave me a lot of freedom to go looking for suitable candidates for each spot.
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I didn't do research as extensively as I did for Kitara since I wasn't doing a deep dive into a single historical/mythological setting, but I still had to do a fair amount of reading to find what I wanted. Two of the cultures in the game, Etruria (the Etruscans) and Karthadst (the Carthaginians), are reasonably well known. The Huaxia — the Xia Dynasty of ancient China — may have been mythological and may have been historical. According to legend, it was overthrown by the historical Shang Dynasty. My idea in First Empires was that the Xia Dynasty never fell, but rather served as the start of a somewhat different Chinese empire. The Mutapa Empire was a Shona kingdom in southern Africa, essentially a successor kingdom to Great Zimbabwe; I could have just used Great Zimbabwe, but I wanted a name that was less familiar.
Wallmapu is the indigenous name for the homeland of the Mapuche people in parts of modern-day Chile and Argentina. In the Pre-Columbian period, the Mapuche fought off an invasion by the Inca Empire, and in the colonial era they fought a highly effective series of wars and insurgencies against the Spanish for roughly a century. Today, they still retain their distinctive cultural identity and continue to resist attempts to encroach upon their lands and efforts to force them to assimilate.
I also needed to find less common regional names to use for the other areas of the map. Australia was particularly tricky since the indigenous people don't seem to have had a name for the continent as a whole, but just names for particular regions. I finally decided to name it Murrawarri after a small region that declared itself to be an independent indigenous republic only a few years ago.
Last Name, First Empires
Cyrille Daujean, one of the founders of Sand Castle, whose graphic design work you have seen in many Days of Wonder titles, did a lovely graphic design for this game. Since he lived near me while he was working on it, I had the rare opportunity to watch over his shoulder and occasionally give my opinion as his work unfolded.
Incidentally, until late in the development process, we were still calling the game "Bronze". One day I was playtesting the game at Victory Point Game Café in Berkeley, and I ran into Jon from "Jon Gets Games", who told me a game had recently been published with the title Bronze. Almost simultaneously, Cyrille also remembered that "couler un bronze" (to cast a bronze) is an unfortunate slang expression in French that we wouldn't want our game associated with; let's just say it would be an undue temptation to trolls. We played around with new titles and eventually settled upon First Empires.
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Sand Castle recruited artist Jérémie Fleury, whose work you know from games like Via Magica and the Timeline series. Jérémie did a lot of his own research into the cultures used in the game. He created a beautifully distinctive motif for each of the player empires, reflected in background textures as well as foreground art. I was really blown away by the richness and complexity of his art.
Sand Castle did an absolutely beautiful production of the game. It has lovely custom dice, which crosses another item off my game designer bucket list. It also has a different custom meeple for each player, which makes the game friendly for people with color vision deficiency.
The most notable aspect of its production of Res Arcana was the beautiful and highly functional tray insert for all the resource pieces. In First Empires, the company created a set of beautifully decorated boxes for each player's cards, tokens, and meeples; everybody who sees the game for the first time is immediately taken with these. When I first designed the game, I though the components it would require were pushing my luck with publishers. Sand Castle far exceeded my expectations with the production values. The finished game is absolutely beautiful.
Eric B. Vogel
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