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Market Place, Farmers Market, Produce
a combo between pit, monopoly, and settlers.
players try to make and trade for "monopolies" of fruits, veggies...etc. roll the dice each turn...the dice of numbers....or the dice have logos of the goods.
when your crop is rolled...you get cards....to assist in new monops.
Now, clearly the above is a raw concept and frankly not a very strong one – but I have many of these little ideas filed away, and often it takes just one more strong, single idea or theme to become the genesis of something I can visualize, print, and play. In the case of Cinque Terre, it was this raw game idea, the desire to use the wooden carts that I saw in my local hobby store, and a newspaper article in the travel section of the Modesto Bee that became that catalyst.a combo between pit, monopoly, and settlers.
players try to make and trade for "monopolies" of fruits, veggies...etc. roll the dice each turn...the dice of numbers....or the dice have logos of the goods.
when your crop is rolled...you get cards....to assist in new monops.
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When I saw the article about Cinque Terre, I was vacationing on our family's houseboat with another couple. I saw the produce cart on the front page of the article and thought about a game component in which players placed produce pieces inside of their player piece (the cart) and moved it to the different villages to sell them. I thought that the wooden carts from the hobby store would work perfectly.
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Often when I get enough of a game idea to begin designing components, I become hyper-focused, begin as soon as I can, and don't stop until I can play it. This is the most exciting part of game design for me. When I returned home from vacation, I had already fleshed out the idea of "harvest spaces" and the use of dice to determine the prices of produce at the five villages.
The next week or so was spent designing components, gathering dice, and painting wood pieces. My prototypes are often very elaborate and "playable", and Cinque Terre was no exception. Though I invest more time than many others when designing my protoypes, I find it helpful in getting buy-in from my playtesters, and it helps me gain insight on print, sizes, icons, and other aspects of the final print that can be critical in how players engage with the game.
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I spent the next six months playtesting different concepts and configurations, but mostly the game was strong from the start and needed only balance. We tested turn action counts (two, three and four actions per turn), blocking, and non-clockwise movement. We played with "yield" cards that acted as wild produce cards, but felt the game was better when players could combine two identical produce cards to create a wild card. Feedback for this game was always positive, and I felt that it had lots of potential to become published.
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Cinque Terre, probably my 25th game design, was my strongest Euro-style concept at the time. In Spring 2007, I contacted Days Of Wonder out of the blue. We arranged a meeting – as they are located about two hours away from my home – and played Cinque Terre. They liked it but felt that they didn't need a game with its kind of mechanisms at the moment. I showed them Long Shot next, and they kept it to review for a few months but ultimately passed on that one, too. (Z-Man Games published that design in 2009.)
My wife and I planned to be in Los Angeles for Strategicon a few weeks later, so prior to the convention, I contacted Jay Tummelson, the owner of Rio Grande Games, via email and he agreed to meet for a prototype pitch at the Con. Boardgame Babylon podcaster Eric Burgess conducted a great interview and Q&A with Jay at the Con, and afterwards we set up a meeting time to introduce Cinque Terre. We played a four-player game with Jay, Eric Burgess, myself and another gentleman whom I don't remember. My wife watched quietly from behind Jay. After a rules explanation, we played a full game, after which Jay said, "I don't play full games when being pitched to." In the case of Cinque Terre, though, he did!
He asked me to try to remove the produce cards as the main harvest mechanism, and I said I would try. He looked at the game, looked back at me and said, "I'll do it... What else you got?" Shortly after, I showed him my second-best Euro design at the time. As I was setting it up, he asked, "Is this one as good as Cinque Terre?" To which I replied, "I'll let you decide." After a few turns he decided it wasn't and said he'd pass; we parted ways with a promise to receive a contract from him for Cinque Terre within a few weeks.
THE REVISIONS: In an effort to refine and balance the game per Jay's request, I tried several mechanisms that removed the Produce Cards from play. The only one I remember used eight large wooden produce pieces that player's would push in and out of season within spaces on the board, and while aspects of this mechanism were unique and fun, ultimately nothing worked as well as produce cards for set collecting, timing, and the ability of players to press their luck. (I briefly used the large produce pieces for a mid-game majority mechanism that was good, but I removed it because I felt players had more than enough to consider and track during the game, and it was often a forgotten aspect to a player's turn. This mechanism problem is something I now call a "forgetty problem" in my new designs.)
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I relayed my revision efforts to Jay, and we decided that the game was better with produce cards. In early 2008, after his team of playtesters had played with the game, he requested that I balance the order cards and the points awarded for selling at the different villages. I spent two full days calculating the best way to represent all produce equally in each village and the most balanced payments for each order's village configuration. I felt that I was successful and shared the new components with the Rio team. The game seemed to be ready for print.
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THE LONG WAIT: In mid-2008 I launched GatePlay.com and became distracted by the new e-commerce venture and new game designs, but I trusted Jay's timing of the release. At one point he worried that Finca, with its produce collecting and order fulfillment, could hurt the reception of Cinque Terre if the games were published too close to one another. In 2009, I attended Alan Moon's annual "Gathering of Friends" convention for the first time and tested Cinque Terre with Jay and some of his most trusted game testers. We discussed ways to optimize the components and game board, especially the player cart and the concept of loading the produce pieces onto a player board instead of physically onto the cart. At one point, Jay showed me cardboard cart mock-ups from the artists. I liked them, but I prefer the wooden carts that shipped in the published game. I also saw an early version of the box cover art with the numberal "5" replacing the letter "Q" in the game title.
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There was a long period when the game didn't seem to have much momentum, which tested my patience but Jay assured me that the game would eventually be published. In his defense, this was around the same time that he was bringing Dominion to market, and frankly, that game would have been my focus, too. In 2012, Jay brought a renewed momentum to Cinque Terre and sample art from the art design team began to trickle in. By the summer of 2012, Jay, the art team, and I began to nail down the rule booklet. This is a critical component in the final product and can be difficult to get exactly right. After lots of revisions and proofreading, we all signed off on the rule booklet and began to finalize the rest of the game components.
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The art design team – Martin Hoffmann, Claus Stephan and Mirko Suzukiis – is extremely talented and was a pleasure to work with. They brought a fun, bright, "travel brochure-esque" feel to the whole project which helps to capture the beauty of the five villages, their buildings, and the surrounding landscape. I'm grateful to have had the opportunity to work with Jay and the Rio Grande team and appreciate their willingness to help tune the game and include me in the process. Overall, I'm very pleased with the final product and confident that gamers and casual gamers alike will enjoy it and find it has a high amount of replay value.
Chris Handy
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