Designer Diary: From a Marvelous Mechanism to Witless Wizards

I've always enjoyed the "I split, you choose" board game mechanism: One player divides a group of items into smaller sets, but the other players then get to choose one of these sets first. It's a fabulous and underused concept most famously employed in the classic San Marco and more simply in New York Slice (formerly Piece o' Cake) — with games such as Coloretto, Isle of Skye, Castles of Man King Ludwig, and Biblios using a take on the system in their mechanisms.

Of these, I found Biblios most fascinating. One player takes as many cards as there are players (plus one) and they give one card to each player, while setting one on an auction pile for later — but what makes the decision delicious is that you see only one card at a time, so you have to allocate them as they come out, adding a big "press your luck" element to the game (another mechanism I really like). But while I enjoyed my first few plays of Biblios, this is only about half the game — and I didn’t find the other half very compelling. This drafting is followed by an auction phase that just doesn't do it for me.

Don't get me wrong. It's a great and well-respected design, but the overall package just wasn't for me — so as you do when you're a budding game designer, I set out to try to make something that was.

The First Draft (Ho Ho)

I made the first cards for the game in December 2013, with the intention of making a tiny two-player microgame. (Hey, they were cool at the time!) The basic mechanical ideas for the game were in place and haven't changed since: Player 1 draws a card and assigns it to either themselves or their opponent. The next card will go to the other player — but on either pick the player could spend energy (generated by some cards at the end of each round) to draw one extra card, giving them more of a choice. After drafting, the drafter would attack their opponent: wounds vs. defense, plus a (1-3) dice roll. This would go back and forth until one player had lost all of their 25 health and the game was over. A simple use of the excellent Biblios mechanism in a smaller, faster, nastier, and sillier little battle game.

For first testing, I created a 14-card deck. (It was to be a 16-card game for Brett Gilbert's Good Little Games website, with the other two cards being a scoring and a health card.) There were eight weapons and six armors. Each player could have one of each and could never refuse a card drafted; any new card discarded the old one. Weapon strength ranged from 2-8, with armor 1-6 to ensure players would always be going downhill health-wise — although energy could also be spent to heal at the end of your turn. I dubbed the game "War!Drobe" (a title which, pretty unbelievably, would be taken by another game in the following years). The theme was simple: Two wizards each powering an automaton, which they were manipulating through time and space into odd fighting machines. Half the cards were medieval, the other half sci-fi.

The First Hurdles

Having damage and defense on every card was quickly dropped as it was a pain to add up each time while offering nothing of real worth to the game. At the same time, two card slots and just 14 cards made for very little replayability — and every time I played, I was thinking of (and being given by opponents) great ideas for new cards. I instead made the decision to go to three slots: one weapon, one armor, and one "enhancement" — an idea I'd toyed with as an extra list of things you could do on your turn with energy, but which had proved unwieldy in practice. As cards, though, it helped to add loads of cool special powers.

I also abandoned the idea of this being a pure micro game. There were way too many fun ideas to play with, and ideas for extra sets of cards. But what about a microgame that came in two-set decks? The first could be "Medieval and Sci-Fi", but you could also buy "Ninjas and Buccaneers" or "Crusaders and Magicians". I moved to eight-card decks, each of which had three weapons, three armors and two enhancements — and each of which had mechanisms I tried to fit to theme: magicians gained and used more energy, sci-fi items did big damage, crusaders healed well, etc.

Testing Testing Testing...

Other mechanical issues included game duration, deck size, and card balance. Health dropped to 20 (or a 12-point short game) to stop the game overstaying its welcome, while I settled on a three-deck (so 24-card) standard game, or two-deck tactical game in which you'd have a much better idea of what was coming. I also moved away from any thoughts of a microgame as the general gaming population quickly fell out of love with the format (as sales of Empire Engine will sadly testify!). This freed me to add "concentration cubes" (to replace an energy track), a custom die for damage, and player sheets to keep your cards on.

Card balance was an interesting one. In theory it didn't matter much as the game used a shared deck of cards, but many small issues developed in terms of decks clashing with each other in annoying ways. Some deck combinations would lead to way too many concentration cubes or to too few; some would see very slow damage, others ridiculously fast wins. It took a lot of combo plays to ensure they all fell into an acceptable (but still random and fun) range of results over any given game.

The final big change to the system was to do with healing, which was slowing the game down a little too much and adding an extra decision point to every round that felt unnecessary in many situations. I solved this by making healing a last-gasp desperate act you could call upon only if you had five health or less left at the end of your turn. Having this as a late game decision added a bit of extra arc to the game, too.

The Publisher Problem

I took the game to SPIEL in 2015 to show to publishers. While several found the concept intriguing and enjoyed their play, it became clear the bigger publishers weren't looking for a two-player game. I went away and made rules for a three- and then a four-player variant. It was surprisingly easy to up the number of players — a good lesson for anyone who gets stuck in a rut of their idea of a game. Taking on other ideas while occasionally taking a big step back from your game can be hugely useful.

Also, while perfectly playable, the lack of art on the prototype failed to convey the playful feel of the game. This hadn't been an issue with other games I'd demoed as they were more "Euro", and publishers were used to seeing them as drier prototypes! I thought about better ways to present the game and came up with the idea of locking the cards together to make a larger picture. I didn't make the whole game into cards in this way, instead doing example cards to show a publisher how it might look finished.

I hoped this would fire the imagination, without having to spend an awful lot of time, energy, or money creating a bunch of art that would probably never be used. I settled on making the image the actual wizard, simplifying the theme a little in the process. I found some art online which luckily depicted a wizard, a ninja and a Viking in the same style — three of the themes I'd chosen for card decks. I feel they got the idea across image-wise, without me having to do too much extra. A talented graphic design friend at work (thanks, Simos!) helped me with the layout, and I was ready for round two of facing publishers, this time at UK Games Expo in 2016. (Sorry, I would have linked to the original images, but I can't re-find them on Google).

War!Drobe Finds a Home — as Witless Wizards

Unfortunately, UKGE wasn't the best place to meet publishers back then. While many companies had stands, their decision makers were rarely in attendance (with some notable exceptions). However, a productive meeting with LudiCreations saw head honcho Iraklis suggest I contact his friends at Drawlab Entertainment. We met up at SPIEL '16, and the deal was done. After a frustrating 2017 (for both of us) when progress stalled due to reasons beyond our control, Drawlab got into top gear in 2018. [person=94832]Asterman Studio[/person] were brought on to do the art and have done a magnificent job.

Drawlab also made some changes to the rules, simplifying a few things but largely keeping the original game intact and changing the theme slightly, for the better I think, while we worked together to add a lot of humor to the card titles. A close-to-finished version was demoed at UK Games Expo 2018, which was followed by a successful Kickstarter campaign a couple of weeks later, and now a five-year process is coming to an end with Witless Wizards set to debut at SPIEL '18.

So that's that — how a marvelous design concept introduced to me by excellent designer Steve Finn was adapted from a serious hand management auction game into a humorous take-that fighting fantasy game.

Chris Marling