Designer Diary: Digging Through the History of Pergamon

The roots of Pergamon go back to the year 2004. That summer, I visited a number of Greek islands as well as parts of the Turkish west coast. My travels also brought me to the city of Bergama in present-day Turkey. Here stood the ancient Greek city of Pergamon, which, though once splendid, had suffered greatly from disrepair, erosion, and grave robbery over the centuries. In the 19th century, Pergamon became one of the most signiﬁcant excavation sites in the world.

My travel guide took me immediately to the center of the erstwhile archeological action. I found myself on a dry plateau, surrounded by crumbled walls and remnants of stone columns, as well as small excavations. Nothing was whole – nor was it when Pergamon was ﬁrst made archeologically accessible and excavated. The archeologists of 130 years ago found nothing more than fragments that had to be pieced together again in painstaking effort before they could be exhibited at the Pergamon Museum in Berlin.

Here lies the source for one of the basic mechanisms of Pergamon the game. When I had returned home, I told my friend Stefan Dorra about my plan to create a game with the title of "Pergamon". Stefan, having been to Pergamon before, was immediately sold on the idea. And so we knew right from the start that the players would assume the roles of Pergamon's archeologists and that they would excavate broken fragments in the course of the game. It was also clear that the ﬁnds would be illustrated on square tiles. However, instead of showing complete objects on the tiles, we needed to ﬁnd a way to depict them in their broken state. The rather obvious solution was to split the objects down the middle and to place the two halves on the opposing ends of a tile. In this way, a tile with a whole vase became a tile with two vase fragments.

And so the method and modality, that is the core, of Pergamon was born. The most interesting gimmick was that now the fragments on the right-hand side could be furnished with a number in large font for the century (from 1 to 5 B.C.), while the left-hand side fragment received a number for the decade (from 00 to 99). In this way, piecing together the tiles rendered complete vases, with each having a different age.

Since we were quite pleased with this jigsawing and judged it to be easily translatable to age evaluations, we decided, after some cultural-historical research, on three further ﬁnds, split them graphically as we had done the vase, and thus produced more tiles with fragmented pieces.

Apart from the vase we now had the bracelet, the jug, and the mask. Indeed, these four objects are among the most frequently excavated ﬁnds at Pergamon. In order to further force the jigsaw mechanism and to make it more challenging at the same time, we then mixed the halves of the different objects on the tiles. Now we had tiles that, for instance, had half a vase on the left-hand side, but half a mask on the right- hand side.

Furthermore, to facilitate distinction, we used different color schemes for each object type. Thus, we produced sixty different tiles which could be ﬁtted together in a horizontal line. This was also when the in-game term "collection" was born. A collection was not only characterized by the correct matching of adjacent tiles, but also by the easily discernible value of the collection, as well as the immediate determination of each object's age.

This exemplary collection has a value of 8 (1+5+2), the oldest piece being a vase from the year 558 B.C. The publisher eggertspiele later commissioned the illustrator Klemenz Franz with Pergamon's design. His ﬁnal realization of the sixty tiles is not only beautiful, but also adds a functional level: in the ﬁnal game, the tiles are not merely square, but jagged. This complements the broken and fragmented character of the objects and markedly stabilizes the ﬁtting of the tiles in the ﬁnal game.

The evaluation mechanism was – as described above – plainly self-evident and logic dictated its relocation to the renowned Pergamon Museum in Berlin, which famously exhibited the ﬁnds and collections of the Pergamon archeologists at the time.

Thus, there was no signiﬁcant development time needed for the evaluation system. The museum was simply subdivided into 24 spaces, on which the players' collections are exhibited for the audience. A collection with a value of 8 is therefore placed on space #8; a collection with a value of 20 is placed on space #20, and so forth. The collections of higher value attract more audience interest than the ones further back in the museum, on the lower spaces. This is shown in the game's four evaluation turns (out of 12 total turns) by indicating that more or fewer visitors are interested in one collection or another. As the museum plan shows, a collection on space #8 has exactly two visitors, a collection on space #20 a grand total of five visitors, and so on.

It should be noted that in the course of the game the value of the collections decreases over time. On the one hand, the audience loses interest in a collection after it has been exhibited for a while; on the other hand, new collections making it into the museum decrease the value of already existing ones. Thus, collections constantly lose value during the course of the game, making it a common occurrence that even a collection that started with a value of 20 will eventually leave the museum altogether. Ideally, however, such a collection has brought its player a lot of audience interest during the four evaluation turns.

Much more than over the evaluation at the museum, we had to rack our brains over the excavation mechanism. There were two essential components important to us. On the one hand, we wanted to include research funds, as those were paid from the German treasury at the time of the archeological development and, thus, would help make the game even more realistic. On the other hand, we wanted the depth of the layers of earth, and consequently the age of the excavated fragments, to play a role.

Early on it became clear that the provided research funds should not be speciﬁed too precisely in order to force the players to take risks of their own. For that reason, two face-down research funds cards are laid out at the beginning of each turn. The precise value of the two cards thus remain unknown. The back of a research funds card, however, gives clues as to its value. Cards with a small moneybag contain research funds with a value of 1-4, while cards with a large money chest contain funds with a value of 5-8. If, for example, at the beginning of a turn a moneybag and a money chest were shown, the actual amount of research funds ranges between 6 and 12.

In the beginning, there was only one track on which the players could place their ﬁgure (and only one in the game, incidentally) to indicate the amount of money they wanted to apply for in the current turn. This was quite fascinating actually, since the players – after placing their ﬁgures and revealing the funds cards – had to divide the actual amount among themselves. The players who had been modest and applied for a small amount received their research funds ﬁrst. Only afterwards did the players who had applied for more money receive their funds step-by-step. Sometimes, when the available amount of money was insufﬁcient, these greedy players were left empty-handed.

Still, this money-acquisition mechanism did not implement our second wish for shallow and deep layers of earth. We knew that at the beginning of each of the 12 turns, along with the new research funds that had to be provided, new ﬁnds had to enter the game, too. Since we had 60 manufactured tiles and the game was to last those 12 turns exactly – each turn reﬂecting one month of the year 1878, which was the main excavation year in Pergamon – we decided to introduce five tiles to the game in each turn. After a while, we came up with the idea of placing those five tiles that came into play each turn into the five layers of earth, ordered by their age. Along with the higher costs for excavations in the deeper layers, the introduction of those layers allowed us to allocate a sort of "digging concession".

From this development stage of the game onwards, a player who wanted to excavate ﬁnds in layer "V" needed an accompanying digging concession "V". Fortunately, we had already completed our track for the application for research funds! Because now all we needed to do was to neatly distribute the various digging concessions on this track. When a player placed his ﬁgure on the track now, he was not only applying for more or less research funds, but at the same time securing a digging concession for particular layers of earth.

By now it was 2008. Only now were we satisﬁed with the entire structure of Pergamon. In this structure, five new ﬁnds were placed in five layers of earth in each of 12 turns. Following this, digging concessions were acquired while research funds were pocketed at more or less risk, then ﬁnds were excavated and ﬁnally ﬁtted together in a way that would attract as large an audience as possible at a later exhibition at the museum. Only now did we start testing the game extensively in a number of game groups. In this test phase, a few further bits and pieces were added (e.g., the storage costs for objects and collections not exhibited at the museum).

Our testing ended it 2009. By that time, five years had passed. Only then did we introduce the game to Peter Eggert from eggertspiele. He was immediately convinced of the quality of the interacting mechanisms and started testing the game extensively himself. A few more, yet essential editorial improvements were made, so that Pergamon could be published a further 1.5 years later in February 2011.

Stefan and I wish to thank eggertspiele for its outstanding editorial work, as well as Klemens Franz for his imaginative and atmospheric design.

Ralf zur Linde