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In 2005, I was new to designing board games. I am a game lover and have played board games for decades. So how hard could it be?
Before Noblemen I made a couple of serious attempts at board game design. (At least from my seat they were serious.) My friend Scott Slomiany was way ahead of me and made it look easy. He told me about a local board game design group, the he introduced me to the Board Game Designers Forum (BGDF). I was hooked. I visited the site multiple times per day and participated in many of their monthly design challenges. It was from BGDF that I learned about Hippodice. Eventually I got the idea that I was ready to take what I had learned and try to design a game that would be worthy of sending to Hippodice for its yearly board game design contest.
The theme of Noblemen was born out of conversations with my wife. She is a fan of Queen Elizabeth and all the history of that era. That period is full of politics, scandal, sex, and plots of murder. We thought that would make a good backdrop for a game, and while much of that is there today, it's interesting now to look back at how the game morphed and moved from this beginning. The final game is about building your estate and family name. The gritty and scandalous mechanisms will have to wait for another game.
My friend Mark Galvez is an artist and at the time we were designing board games together. He was a great sounding board and filter to my wild ideas. One day I told him I had an idea to make a board game about the time period of Queen Elizabeth; also that I wanted to enter Hippodice in less than a year. I told him, "It was going to be my Driving Miss Daisy", quoting Gene Hackman from the movie Get Shorty. He thought it was a tall order but not impossible.
We started throwing ideas against the wall. I knew I wanted a tile-laying game in which each player built his own area, so I focused on that for a while. What lands should there be? To keep it simple I knew there should be a low number of land types, but I could have one land that was blank so that it could be used to expand the options by allowing players to add things to it. Thus, I settled on three types of lands plus a clearing. How and why they worked, I didn't know yet.
I also knew I wanted the game to be a "big box" game – meaning lots of rules, lots of parts, lots for the player to think about. I had lots of ideas, but they were all over the place. They needed focus. I started writing the rules out like you would read them from the game. This way I could read them like I was new to the game and better see which game mechanisms would clash with which. The rules started to gel after many discussions with Mark and with people from BGDF. I was excited to start playtesting the game, so I built a prototype, first by making art, then by cutting up over 200 tiles from foam board. Finally, I made a set of plastic parts: castles, palaces, churches and sheep!
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Once I had all the parts – and there are quite a few – I started subjecting my friends to the game:
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In this early version, the main mechanism involved donating money to the church. If you had more money in your coffers than the church had in the middle (from the sale of churches), you would have a larger array of actions from which to choose each turn. Also the game had scoring rounds after X churches sold, so buying a church increased the money in the middle and moved the game one step closer to the scoring round. But the game had too many things going on at once. It was too complex.
A good idea was suggested during playtesting. If I decoupled the amount of the sale from the amount needed to "have influence", I would have more flexibility in the prices of the churches, so I removed the middle area that tracked monies collected by the church. Now you only had to have more donated than the amount indicated by the last church not purchased. It was a great idea, but none of that is in the game today.
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Perhaps you can see in the picture above that four farms made a plantation. Four lands becoming something bigger is a rule that became part of the core rules. In these older rules this enabled you to take an action to buy a sheep. Trust me, that is a plastic sheep.
For the next 18 months, Noblemen progressed only in spurts, slowly morphing and evolving. At some point during this time Mark decided not to be part of this game as his interest had moved on to other things – which was fine with me as this was mostly my passion from the beginning.
In 2008, I pulled Noblemen back to the front burner. I decided that I was going about the problem wrong. What I was doing was like trying to solve a Rubik's Cube without understanding the secret to solving that puzzle. You know how you can solve one side, but then when you try to solve another the first side can be wrong again? I would solve one game mechanism, but at the expense of others. I was going in circles. Noblemen had too many "games" mushed together.
Thus, I decided to break Noblemen down to its core elements. What was it about at its core? Noblemen is about three currencies: money, land, and prestige. Therefore, the game should be about only these three commodities. All the mechanisms should be about allowing the player to get them or to spend them, so I reexamined each part of the game. If the rule or mechanism was not in line with this new thinking, I cut it from the game.
It was clear that each commodity – land, money, and prestige – needed its own path. It was equally clear that the three land types would be a natural step on those paths. It followed that when players succeeded at collecting them they needed to be able to redeem them. Also, if players choose to excel at any one of the three, they needed an equal chance to win the game – which meant that the paths needed to be balanced, so my design efforts, discussions with people on BGDF, and playtesting with my playtest group became focused on creating the three paths. Eventually the paths became:
-----1. Play Farms -> Make a Plantation -> Get Money -> Buy structures -> Acquire Bribe Tokens
-----2. Play Woods -> Make a Forest -> Get Land -> Play more land -> Donate land to the church
-----3. Play Fountains -> Make a Garden -> Get Prestige -> Get the Queen's Favor -> Participate in Masquerade Balls
Knowing the core of the game gave me a great foundation from which to build – but knowing the core and having a finished game are not the same. There were still many rough patches to work out, so I turned to a friend, Seth Jaffee. I "met" Seth on BGDF back when we were both daily regulars. He is great at analyzing and discussing rules. We had had many discussions about Noblemen, and with his help and with the help of my playtesters the game made strides to being finished. At some point I thought the game was almost done. Seth offered to play it with his playtesters, so I boxed up the game and sent it to him. He played it and sent it back.
Seth then knew the game much better, and he had some great ideas that we debated and discussed. Many are still in the game today. In my opinion his greatest contribution were some of the rules surrounding the Queen's crown. Many of these discussions plus tweaks from playtesting pushed the game over the top for me. I thought it was complete and fun. I declared it done, so the day finally came when I entered Noblemen in the Hippodice competition. Here is the main game board that was sent to Hippodice:
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As you can see the game morphed over the years.
I like Noblemen quite a bit, but I was not expecting it to win. When I received an email from Hippodice of the results, I didn't quite understand it. I thought it was maybe a poor translation from German, so I went to the web site for results of the 2009 design competition.
Holy smokes, it was true.
Here is the official PDF of the results from that year. It was very surreal and took a while to sink in.
Then I got an email from André Bronswijk of Pegasus Spiele. He was one of the judges of the final round of the contest and had taken Noblemen back to his friends at Pegasus. They had played the game and decided to publish it! WOO HOO!
Over the next few months André and I exchanged lots of emails. He was great and patient. He taught me how publishing works. We discussed everything about the game, and in the end most of it stayed the same. We changed the wording of scandal cards, simplifying them, and tweaked the values of things. Pegasus did all the production development and found some great artists and layout people to work on the game. Here is sample art from the finished design, which I think looks amazing.
Recently I learned that Tasty Minstrel Games (TMG) will be the U.S. publisher for Noblemen! In the intervening years, Seth Jaffee had gone on to become Head of Development at TMG, and when owner Michael Mindes asked whether TMG should become the English publisher, Seth was excited and answered "Yes!"
Thank you for your time. This game was an excellent journey for me. I hope you enjoy it. Please have fun and good luck!
Dwight Sullivan
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