Designer Diary: Honshu, or An Idea That Blossomed Into a Game

The journey of Honshu begins in the first quarter of 2014. I had played Patchistory twice in January 2014 and really liked the patching aspect of the game. The rules were not very clear, but what we gathered as a whole was a good experience.

The patching thing stuck to me, and I was wondering how I could make that more accessible to players? I hadn't played any other patching-like games (Hanging Gardens, Flix Mix, Edo Yashiki, Sunrise City, Heartland, Java, Taluva, Marrakech) at that point — well, Poseidon’s Kingdom but the patching aspect is very low in that game. I wanted the components to be easy to prototype and readily available, so basic cards were the choice. How could I distribute these cards among players before patching the cards together?

Trick-taking was the answer right from the beginning. Tichu was a game that I really learned to play in the first quarter of 2014. While Tichu is a climbing game and not a trick-taking game, the distribution mechanism idea for Honshu can be derived from my love of Tichu and trick-taking games. It is easy to understand, and players can have some interaction with it. I wanted the game to play up to five players and first thought that the lower limit would be three since two-player trick-taking isn't very interesting.

Trick-taking also can be used to determine player order. Win the trick go first, play the lowest go last. From the start I wanted the player order to be fluid and not locked in clockwise order. This opens up tactical play as going last in a trick is very good; going first is also good as you can pick the card you really want. I wanted a flowy vibe for players, allowing you to find a purpose to affect your own place in the order. This also links to the quality of the cards, but more on that later.

That was the foundation of Honshu: trick-taking to distribute basic playing cards and determine player order, make a map from those cards, player count 3 to 5. Then came the questions: What are players building? What are the pieces on the cards? How does the trick-taking work?

The prototype I made was thematically just a city-builder in the modern era called "Parks & Pavements". The reason for that theme and name is that my first published game — Councils & Contracts in 2013 — was a city-builder and I wanted this to be the second part of my small city-builder series. So what elements do cities have? Roads, houses, parks, water areas, factories, stores and (of course) land. Those were and pretty much still are the land types of the game.

Finished city map of Parks & Pavements

What each element did was pretty straightforward thinking. I could have longest road, resources delivered to factories, and single parks. Land was and is nothing, easy to replace. Water areas were also nothing, but they couldn't be replaced, so water was just bad without any upside.

During the prototype phase, the game was divided into four parts. First, you played three rounds of trick-taking. Then with the cards you collected, you made the map. Then you gave the rest of your cards to your neighbor. The "play three rounds until map-making" was there to give players some room to think. The change cards rule was — and still is — there because I wanted players to have an incentive to play high-numbered cards. This helps the map-making part and also gives players a little information of which cards can be played in the following three rounds.

The other important rule in the prototype was a size restriction on the map that a player would build, taken from Patchistory: You could build at most a 9x9 grid. Restrictions didn't stop there as the cards had numbers both horizontally and vertically. This was done as each number had to be readable from the player's viewpoint. (See the leftmost card in the image below.) The quantity of each number in the deck was very different as the numbers went from 1 to 10, with only four 10s, ten 1s, and the other numbers falling in between those two. Finally the cubes, in four different colors, were suits. In the trick-taking phase, you could make a card a particular suit and it thus became trump.

Map card phases through development

That was the prototype phase. The contract between me and Lautapelit.fi was signed in early 2015. I must say that I really like working with Lautapelit.fi; I know many from that company personally, including the owners; have had game nights with them; helped them promote gaming in Finland; and overall have a great working relationship with the firm and the people operating it. They know what they do and want to develop prototypes to a polished product, as was also the case with Honshu.

Then came the development phase. The theme was thrown out the window, and a medieval theme was suggested. (Limes was the inspiration here; see the cards second from left above.) The game got a working title — "TriXity" — that would have been a great name for the game. Lautapelit.fi wanted the game to be more family-friendly, so the size restriction of the map and the facing of the cards went away. I had no problem with those changes as they reduced the number of rules to be explained, while the gameplay didn't really change. (I still play with the self-imposed restriction of the map size from time to time.) The "play three tricks, then build" rule was also gone as it bogged down the game. It was like fun, fun, fun — then wait for all players to build. Since the building restrictions were now gone, it was better to use the pattern trick-build-trick-build since that toned down the waiting quite a bit.

During development, it was suggested that each element in the cards should have something "good" in them, which meant that water areas needed to change. Thus, water in groups now earned points. I still wanted them to be little hindrances, so the first one is bad, but if you plan ahead, you can get a pretty good score from water areas. This was the first change made to the prototype.

The card numbers from 1 to 10 were also gone pretty quickly, which was a good thing as it took care of the tie-breaker rules and simplified the game. Now the numbers were just 1 to 60. At this point, I recalibrated the cards for the first time as the previous version had the cards of higher value be better. I wanted the cards to be distinct from the phases. A card that is good in the trick-taking phase should not necessarily be your best choice in the map-making phase. If that were the case, then the game would be a multiplayer solitaire as players could pretty much play their hand cards right to their map.

I introduced more things to the game, such as the B-side of the start cards and personal scoring cards. These were introduced because we wanted variety for the game. The B-side start cards are interesting as they put the players on different paths right from the beginning. Personal scoring cards were introduced so that players had a focus right from the start. However, these scoring cards were the last thing in development to change and they became an optional part of the game with one card being used for all players instead of one card for each player. (With four players, you can still try the "one card for each" variant if you want. I like to play like that.)

Until this point, the player count had always been 3-5. As my usual gaming partner is my wife, I wanted Honshu to be playable with two players. However, as I said earlier trick-taking isn't fun with two players, so what to do? The map-making part didn't need any changes as each player makes their own personal map. It took a few tries and very many losses to my wife, but I think that I came up with a good system for two players to replace the trick-taking. The main questions were how to have as many cards available during the game as with higher player counts and what to do with the resource cubes. The answer was card pairs and simultaneous play. Players lay down one pair of cards, then draw another pair from the deck; each player then collects a pair and picks one card to place in their map. Each "trick" was now four cards, and players basically had the same options as in four-player game, but what about the resources?

My initial idea was that by using any two cubes, the losing player could win the hand, but you had to use the cubes before the "normal" winner of the trick chose their pair of cards. However, my wife sometimes plays a mean game and really liked the idea that the "winner" could actually lose the hand unexpectedly. Well, I liked that idea also, and the rule was changed so that the loser could use any two cubes to win after the "winner" had chosen the pair. With this system, the normal loser of the trick can spare their cubes if the not-chosen pair has something good to place in the map. It is not nice and I haven't seen that in any other game, so that is how I got the two-player game working.

The last part of the development was the involvement of the artist. The final theme idea came from the artist, and the final name was discussed for a lengthy time. I suggested "Mura Ezu", which could be interpreted as "picture map of villages" and one other mention-worthy title was "Torihiki" — but when "Torihiki" is translated into Finnish, it means "market square sweat". In the end, Honshu came to be the name, and it is a good name.

Pretty quickly the final art was done and layout began. The last thing that had to be done was the rulebook. While I wrote the first version of the rules, there might be 20% of that text in the rulebook. That is a good thing. Rulebook writing is the hardest part of game design for me, and fortunately Lautapelit.fi employs a few great minds that read and really understand rulebooks. At this point, I made the last changes to the game. The suits were gone; now a cube added to the card gave it a boost. This change got rid of about two hundred words in the rulebook without changing a thing. People without trick-taking knowledge can now get the game more easily, but people with a card-playing background still recognize them as suits. The final change was the final calibration of the card numbers based on playtesting.

The cards can now be divided into three groups: the higher cards are easy to place in your map and give okay points; the middle cards have the four-point factories and score the most possible points; the lower cards have the majority of the resource-producing squares, but also a high number of lakes that are more difficult to place. With these groups, you hardly ever pick up the card you play on the trick, so goal achieved.

Finally with all the rule changes made to the game during development, the rulebook is a condensed source of gaming goodness.

Honshu went through a great development process. The starting idea for the game is solid and fun, but after all the steps we have made to take out unnecessary restrictions and rules, keep up the tempo, and make things clearer, Honshu has become a great fusion of two established mechanisms. While my name is on the box, the development team of Lautapelit.fi are the unsung heroes of Honshu. A big "thank you" for believing in my idea and making it a great game! I sure hope that you, the players all around the world, enjoy this game as much as we do.

Kalle Malmioja