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Inspiration can come from the strangest places. I had just gotten my first working prototype of another game called Born to Serve — a game in which players are out-of-work superheroes fighting for a wait-staff position at a restaurant — up and running when I was approached by a game designer friend of mine to create a board game based upon a specialized board the company had. I looked at the board which had an elevated area in the center with steps down the sides. If you can imagine a step pyramid, you pretty much have it, but for some reason it reminded me of a volcano. When I thought of a volcano erupting, I thought of the destruction of the legendary civilization of Atlantis — so what would the players be doing during a game in which Atlantis was being destroyed by a volcano?
I guess my cynical sense of humor was still active from the recent Born to Serve work because I had the following brainstorm: If I were forced to flee a high-tech society to go live in some podunk kingdom where they didn't even understand what electricity was, I would be grabbing as much high-tech gear as I could to set myself up as a wizard. I was also going through the series Stargate SG-1 at the time, so I'm sure there was some subconscious inspiration from that going on as well.
I decided to simulate all the high-tech gadgets with cards and have a variety of scoring systems for each group. The game would be a set-collecting one in which players tried to grab as many cards as they could before lava from the central volcano wiped out everything. As I built the card sets, it became apparent fairly quickly that the board I was using didn't work for what I was trying to accomplish. I needed a larger state space for the game in order for the scoring to work the way I wanted. I ended up withdrawing the design from consideration and began engineering a board around the scoring system itself.
Development Process
In some myths, the city of Atlantis was rumored to be a series of concentric circles, so I made a round board with the city on the outer edge and the volcano that would rain lava down on the city in the center. The first board I built was literally round as well. I created the cards with PowerPoint, which I usually do as I seem to be one of the few people on the planet who actually finds the software easy to work with.
After one solo playtest in which I played all four players, I realized that there needed to be additional cards that granted players special abilities to spice the game up a bit. The original equipment cards were just victory points in the early version of the game. I banged out twenty of these action cards to add to the eighty-card deck and set up to play again. I got about a third of the way in when it became obvious that these special abilities had to be on the equipment cards themselves so that in addition to giving players victory points at the end of the game, you could also discard them to help yourself during the game. Another session with PowerPoint gave me the card set I wanted and brought the game surprisingly close to its final form. This all happened in about two months, which is a record short design time for me.
The rest of the work on the game was a lot of details. The Mass-Energy Converters, Fusion Batteries, and Unified Field Generators all had slightly different scoring systems. The yellow cards (Fusion Batteries) started life as regular Fibonacci sequence which, for reasons I can't honestly remember at this point, gave me some sort of scoring concerns. The modified sequence that exists on the cards today fell into place first for these three sets. The UFGs took a little longer, and I created them because I wanted to give players a reason to collect different sets.
In the process of doing this, I kept simplifying how they scored — which sounds a lot easier than it actually was at the time. The blues (Mass-Energy Converters) got hit last. Originally, you needed one donut to score the circles at all, with each additional donut effectively adding one to the multiplier. Playtesting quickly revealed that the blues kind of sucked, so they ultimately got changed into how they score today. A side note here: The donuts were originally half-donuts, which quickly got called "rainbows" by just about everyone who played the game. I really hated that name for them.
Anyway, the other thing that shifted at this time was the card mix. I locked down the number of cards (80) first. How the deck used to work was that the maximum on the scoring chart was the total number of that type of card in the deck: ten Fusion Batteries, five or six UFGs, etc. I think it was one of my gaming friends who gave me the idea of raising the number of cards in a color but allowing players to score only at whatever the highest value on the table was. I also tend to design my games with expandability in mind, so between this and my friend's suggestion I decided to lock all the main sets at 15 cards each with five UFGs, the idea being that I could add new suits at a future date that players could swap in for existing ones.
The cosmetic change was the scoring chart on the card. Originally, all of the cards, including the browns, had a scoring chart on them. In the case of the blues, it was actually a scoring matrix that basically took up the entirety of the card that wasn't the top bar or the discard ability text. The matrix confused a lot of players, and the change to the blue scoring system I described earlier only made it harder to understand. Then there's this thing called artwork that most players seem to prefer on their game components, so between these two factors the matrix got pitched and replaced with the current system, which seems to work better for most players.
Final Adjustment
The final, and in my opinion, best change was the addition of the kingdoms, which happened only comparatively recently. They were inspired by the concept mentioned in a gaming podcast, and I apologize for not remembering which one specifically as I have seriously fallen off the podcast bandwagon over the past couple of years. The concept mentioned was the idea that a good game should tell a story, and the story here was that you were fleeing the collapse of Atlantis. Logically, there should be a point in the game when the players can actually do that.
I came up with the number of players minus one idea and actually got the point values pretty much right out the gate. If I remember correctly, originally fleeing was another action like moving or grabbing a card, but I changed it almost immediately as I wanted the decision on when to pull the trigger to be a little harder. It also made more thematic sense to me as — even though it doesn't look like it on the board — you are supposed to be flying a quarter of the way around the world or more with your air car.
Speaking of the board, the kingdoms also gave us something to do with the corners. To show you how late these were added, I had originally looked at the possibility of a round game board. For any future game developers/designers out there, spoiler alert, it's really expensive. Since we were kind of locked into doing a conventional square board, the kingdoms conveniently gave us something to put in the corners, and since we needed only three, this left room for the game logo on the last one.
That is the story of the construction of Looting Atlantis, and I hope you found it as entertaining as destroying that mighty civilization will be when playing the game.
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