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Over time, my son came to protect the villages and cities by making friends with the different dragons and other creatures that existed in his world. The stories turned into a nightly ritual, the creatures became more extravagant, and the spells that the young wizard had to use to defeat the evil shadow dragons and the forces of evil became more elaborate.
At the same time his mother and I enjoyed playtesting various ideas for board games that I constantly came up with. At the end of 2009, my son was helping us play a game and suggested that we turn the stories into a game with all the creatures and spells as cards so that he could battle them out when I couldn't be there to tell him the stories.
The first prototype was crude, with more than 800 pieces. When a quote was obtained for manufacturing the game, it was obvious that the design was too expensive and the number of pieces would have to decrease. While the game was extremely fun to play, it also took way too long to achieve victory.
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At this point I asked myself: What will make this idea sitting on my table into a really good board game? I looked into many of my previous designs and also at different ideas for game mechanisms and decided on four things:
1) A changing map was a must.
2) Custom dice had to stay in the equation.
3) Lose as much downtime as possible.
4) Make the cards work together while keeping the feeling of randomness.
Number one was fairly easy to resolve. Hex map pieces or square pieces are generally the only way to achieve this. Square map pieces were test-played but did not work. Hex pieces offer six different potential opponents to attack, and in a strategy game, options for attacking your opponents are a must, so the hex map tiles were chosen.
Having lots of opponents to attack also meant that there needed to be some kind of potential relief for that one player who is always getting taken to the cleaners by all the other players, so in playtesting it was decided to use mountains to block and protect assets. This border mountain piece eventually became impassable terrain which also provided for variable strategies during setup of the map for each player. As in Risk where you get to pick your territories (if you play that variant), in DragonMage Warfare you pick where your lands go so that you can optimize your strategy from the get-go. Set-up really does influence where your strategy goes.
Number two was basically already done. I conveniently had a friend who could engrave dice for me. I got some blank dice and sent them to him, and he helped with how to design dice that are easy to engrave. This helped cut down on manufacturing costs.
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Third was fixing the downtime. All players being able to complete phases at the same time eliminated downtime almost completely. Allowing all players to influence how a battle turns out was a game mechanism that I had not seen in previous games I had played, so we playtested this and it was overwhelmingly popular. Players now could help out the person who would possibly benefit their own situation. Balancing this was a difficult task, but after about 125 playtests the perfect mix of spells, dice and damage that could be done revealed itself. The attacker and defender in a battle both had an equal chance at success. Of course some battles favor the player with the better card combinations, but it also allows for the player with the unbalanced card combinations to deal enough damage to scare his opponent into a retreat. It was an invigorating and self-fulfilling accomplishment to see a simultaneous battle game mechanim work its way into near perfection.
Finally number four, the cards. It was obvious that the cards are what made DragonMage Warfare a fun game to play. Allowing different cards to work together while keeping the random draw was a task all in itself. It was decided to use the six worldly elements and also only allow a person to draw from a deck if they owned a land of that same element. Therefore if you wanted to play fire cards, you had to own fire lands. Since the object of the game is to gain experience in all six of the worldly elements, players had to balance the different kinds of lands they owned while trying to take over the lands they predicted other players needed to keep to win. It came together a lot more naturally than one would expect.
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We were always printing and reprinting and cutting out pieces every time we made major changes. We ordered cards from websites that allowed us to do this more efficiently and finally we came up with a very professional-looking prototype.
The only issue was we did not have any major artwork completed for the game. In January 2012, we found a website which hires out artists for $5 an image. We spent some money and were able to get the artwork for the game at about 90% completion. The map artwork it now at 100% completion and ready to go to the printer.
What is the future of DragonMage Warfare? We plan on going to conventions and showing it off to the world of board gaming. It's amazing that from the imagination of a three- to six-year-old boy, a fun-to-play and highly detailed game has emerged. He and I play it constantly, and he never tires of defeating his mom and dad. We want to thank all the fans who have helped support it. It has been a fun ride and can only get better from here...
Tyrell Wood
Silver Lake Games
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