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This is the story how it came to take 23 years to publish this game:
My original idea for this game came in 1995, when I was working part-time for Schmidt Spiele on the German role-playing system Das Schwarze Auge. I had the idea of people playing pieces on a game board, "finishing" it through some kind of play, stacking another board on top of it (and on the pieces as well), playing on that board, then topping it with another board when finished, and so on.
Very soon I realized that all of this was much too complicated, so the rules for "finishing" a board were reduced to filling spaces with pieces, with the cards in your hand telling you how to set pieces on the board and with you earning points for doing so according to the level of the board on which you set a piece. You see, unlike today's Menara this game was competitive.
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My cat Felina hadn't even been born when this proto was made
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The pictures above, which I took recently, show the prototype of the game from the year 2000, which is pretty similar to the one from 1996, but that one does not exist any more. The shapes of the floors were very geometric (triangles, squares, hexagons, etc.), with only a few of them having experimentally odd shapes. The pieces were commonly shaped pawns with round heads and flat feet; a round top, of course, was much more unstable than the flat tops of the columns in today's Menara.
The artwork style was roughly influenced by a water-loving culture in a fantasy world that I had created in my spare time, and the color arrangement of the pieces (white, blue, green, black and purple) is reminiscent of that culture. (All of this was only for my own background in the game and not necessary for a release).
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I showed this design to Schmidt Spiele. The editor was interested and he said it had potential, but unfortunately in 1997 Schmidt Spiele went insolvent, and was then sold and moved to Berlin. I searched for other publishers and found Hans im Glück, then they introduced me to Zoch and I began a practicum there aside from my studies. Albrecht Werstein from Zoch was very interested in my prototype, but he told me that there was another game — one they would later call Villa Paletti — they were working on that they would do first. (Villa Paletti looked totally different at that time.)
I turned my degree in graphic design on my own game, which I was then called "Pagode". It was in this version that I developed the concept of game boards in various shapes, while giving the design a Thai look and feel. Albrecht later admitted that my design influenced the look of Villa Paletti.
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The 2004 version of Pagode
Some pictures from the 2004 version already show the delicately formed floors. Until that time, the floors had only one side, so you couldn't flip them for variety.
The wooden playing pieces came from the Zoch Verlag game Zapp Zerapp; Zoch gave me hundreds of them, and I painted and lacquered them one by one in the colors I chose. The overall style of the game comes from Thai decor and ornaments. All in all, the need to have a fully rounded concept when you do a graphic design degree is mandatory. (By the way, I got an "A"...)
I designed the box cover as if Zoch had already released the game, and strangely this cover found its way onto the internet, with claims that this was a real Zoch game. I do not know how that happened. The internet is always a fountain of wonders...
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The game was driven by cards in a player's hand that would be played on their turn, with them trying to score as many points as possible. Some basic tasks on the cards still live on in today's Menara.
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Then in 2002, Villa Paletti won Spiel des Jahres. I was really devastated and packed "Pagode" in a cupboard. I didn't touch it for ten years.
I think Albrecht had a bad conscience about that as he continued to ask me about "Pagode" from time to time, and after a while I gave in and started to think about the game again. Albrecht always was keen on releasing it soon as he really liked it.
The idea to do this design as a cooperative game came to me after I enjoyed playing Pandemic. I needed time again. In 2013 my father died suddenly, and then I needed a break. In this break I developed everything that is now released as Menara. Albrecht was very happy, and we signed a contract for the game. (This might be unusual because I'm part of the Zoch team, but he wanted it like that — and me, too.)
The release date was set for SPIEL 2018 — then in August 2017 Zoch moved from Munich to Fürth, where my new boss Ossi Hertlein saw the game, played it, fell in love with it, and gave the order that the game was to be released in January 2018. Wow! Suddenly, everything had to be done very quickly. I was lucky to find Sébastien Caiveau for illustration. (I didn't want to do it myself because I'm a graphic designer, not an illustrator, and my actual work on all the other Zoch games kept me absolutely busy.) He has done a great job!
Unfortunately in 2014 Pegasus had released a game with the title Pagoda, so my long-loved working title had to change. Still in love with far eastern cultures, I found the word "menara", which means "temple tower" in Malaysian. Now everything was complete, and so after 23 years the game of Menara has come to life...
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