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Do you want to know how it happened? During one of the lectures by professor Jan Pomorski, I learned that in his graduate seminar students can design a board game as their graduation work. I decided to ask him about the details and after a short conversation I was convinced to join his class.
When I inquired more about the issue, it turned out that the possibility of making a game one's graduation work was not a one-time initiative, but a result of several people's efforts to create a new specialization at my university's history department — and in these classes students were supposed to learn about game design!
I got even more curious when it turned out that the main driving force of the project was Adam Kwapiński. I'd known him for a few years at that time, and now we together run the publishing company Fabryka Gier Historycznych (Historical Games Factory). Soon after that Adam and Jakub Wasilewski (one of the authors of Theomachie) launched game design workshops at the university and I began to think about my first game (unfortunately, never completed). The knowledge I got then helped me a lot during my work on "Zygmunt August".
A few months before I defended my MA thesis, Adam started helping me with "ZA". We consulted all the ideas and spent dozens of hours testing various mechanisms. He put much time and effort into the work and came up with many ideas that we later incorporated in the version of the game finally released on the commercial market. This is how our cooperation began.
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As soon as I completed all the formalities connected with changing the seminar, I started to work hard on the dissertation. After many hours of analysis I decided to create a game about Zygmunt II August (Sigismund II Augusts), the last king from the Jagiellonian dynasty. I love this period of Polish history, and I consider this particular monarch unique. This is why I resigned from many other topics, like battles and wars in which Poland was victorious, the origins of our statehood, or the development of industry after World War I.
First, I had to define the setting of the game: the time when the last of the Jagiellons ruled. Then I thought about what was actually most interesting in these times. What came to my mind first was the struggle for political offices, conflicts during sejms, caring more about one's own well-being than the good of the Polish Commonwealth, expanding one's manors and palaces, bringing artists from abroad (mainly Italy) and (finally) military conflicts. I was a bit afraid that if I included all of those elements in one game I would get a long, heavy title, something like Twilight Struggle in the Jagiellonian era, but then I realized that I will never find out unless I really design it.
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I do not remember the design process of "ZA" very well. It was over three years ago, and during this time a lot of things have changed and some game projects have started to merge together in my mind. This is why I will not tell you much about designing "ZA", but I will focus on the differences between "Zygmunt August" and Sigismundus Augustus: Dei gratia rex Poloniae.
About a year after I defended my MA, we decided to publish the game on the commercial market. This is when we also thought that we had to re-design it. Much time had passed since the last work on "Zygmunt August", so we could have a cold look at the game and were eager to work on it once again.
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At the beginning of the design process, one of the most important mechanical elements of the game involved the extension of aristocratic manor houses; they generated income and helped maintain figures. There were three levels: in a residence (highest level) you could have at most three characters; in a palace (middle) you could have two; while in a manor only one. Particular buildings also affected the number of prestige points at the end of the game differently. Investing in extending your manor brought great profits, and at first this was the main winning strategy. We racked our brains over the problem of manors; we tried developing them both vertically and horizontally, testing about five completely different variants. In the end we totally removed this element from the game. You don't pay for ideas, after all.
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The bidding element also changed a lot. At first, every player could vote for any player (including themselves) in the sejm phase, which resulted in ten minutes being spent negotiating alliances first before the actual voting. Honestly, I love negotiation games, I love talking, bribing and manipulating others (but only in games!), but such a game could last long hours and I simply didn't want it. An hourglass? Alliance tokens? Betrayal tokens? Yeah, we tested all these solutions, but none of them was satisfying and did not shorten the playing time. (Well, maybe except for the hourglass.)
We always work on our games in two ways simultaneously. On one hand, we work on the setting that is supposed to be as closely related to the game mechanisms as possible; on the other hand, we focus on choosing appropriate mechanisms and thoroughly count them in both micro- and macro-scale. Are we successful in this? It's up to you to judge...
Michał Sieńko
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