Designer Diary: Ekö, or The Long Voyage

"This story takes place in the dark times from which legends come."

These are the opening words for the rulebook of Ekö. For those of you who have already played the game, I hope that this "designer’s diary", where I permit myself to talk a little about game design in a more general fashion, will show you how the game was born and has evolved. For those of you who know nothing about Ekö, let's just say that you will discover it the same way I did — by groping a bit. Oh, and sorry if those little titles in the text sound odd sometimes; I've tried to make them sound funny as they do in French, but...well, you'll see.

It all starts with the chicken and the egg question. The pawn or the Emperor — which came first? Theme or mechanisms? Here, it is the pawn. In 2012, I was fascinated by stacking games. Basically, I had tried to produce an adaptation of the "match 3" games like Bejeweled or Candy Crush with pawns and as a multiplayer game...without much success. I was not satisfied with the result at all: It was strategically poor and demanded a lot of fiddly manipulation, things that are normally taken care of by the system in the video game.

However, I found it excellent to start with a pawn, an "abstract" game, with a random set-up of the tokens: It created different situations each game and required the player to read a game freshly constructed right on the first turn. I saw the antithesis of games with scripted "openings", like chess, in which the set-up is fixed, and in which the first turns are far too crucial and can be more or less identical for seasoned players. I even used this principle for Crab Stack, which I created at the same time.

The Stack Options

So I was going with a random set-up of colored pawns without really knowing where I was going. Some mornings, you just play with the pieces like a toy and see how you naturally want to use them as a player. I stack the pawns, I unstack, and I see the possibilities of several amusing systems — but I tell myself that in terms of stacking games, it is awfully easy to reinvent the wheel, considering that there are already a number of them out there. I spent a little time researching, on BGG or François Haffner's site, in order to familiarize myself with the domain and to know where it was useless to go because others had already gone there before me — and better.

At that time, this resulted in a simple stacking and capture game — a distant cousin of Focus and Avalam, but with its own distinctions. I pasted on a theme because it's prettier, and — presto! — I cranked out a first prototype on a square cloth. The game functioned...not too badly...but there was a little problem with the victory conditions. Furthermore, it's a little dry, remaining a pure and true abstract game, and even though I adore games of this type, I had the feeling that this game would not be good enough to compete in the abstract domain. Since the system was already very pure, I told myself that I had a little room to add something to the game.

A Game of P(r)awns

The following draft was called "Medusa". I kept the sea floor theme because I was attached to my kawaii medusas, but I moved the game to a modular, hexagonal board: Hexagons are more "fair" than a checkerboard in terms of movement and trajectories, and the modular board fit well with the random set-up of the pawns, reinforcing my goal of high replayability by producing very different set-ups.

In order to enhance the theme a little and to resolve my victory condition problem, I placed "reef" spaces on the board, obstacles on which we do not place pawns at the start of the game and which are necessary to control during the game. In order to control a reef, you simply must have a majority around it. This is the prototype that I made to play at Cannes (the biggest gaming convention in France) in 2013. People had a lot of fun playing it, but numerous times I was told that even though the game was good, the theme was not a good fit. The colors of the board and the pawns suggested that it was a friendly family game, perhaps even childish, while the experience of playing the game was very calculated — literally, because you were constantly counting the pawns around each reef to see who controlled it, which was a bit tedious. Nevertheless, feedback on the game mechanisms were mostly positive, most notably a point that will later be what spices up Ekö: the placement of reinforcements.

Spinach Is Like Nietzsche: It Reinforces

"Medusa", like Ekö later, is a game that I wanted to be playable with up to four players. In its scale and features, "Medusa" is already a game of conquest. One of the problems with conquest games — games in which strong interaction is pervasive — when playing with three or four players is that in the same round, one player can be eaten alive by all the others (even without specific collaboration on their part as it often can happen circumstantially), and thus this player loses all traction and any hope of staying in the race. I wanted a balancing mechanism that could level the playing field in such a situation or at least make it less crippling. I decided that whenever a player's pawns are captured, he gets them back in front of him and can later bring them back into play on his turn. So, sure, he lost his strategic positions, but this gives him the opportunity to return his pawns to play with the flexibility to place them pretty much wherever he wants. This way, all players remain relevant and involved throughout the game. This (re)placement of captured pawns in reinforcement is a really nice addition to the game.

However, there was a parameter to bear in mind: In spite of this balancing mechanism, the game still needs to resolve. Allowing players to replace pawns on empty spaces can lead to loops or blocked situations. A strategic advantage in one region of the board can be destroyed because pawns are "parachuted" from out of nowhere. (In Ekö, this will be prevented in part by the rule that forbids placing reinforcements adjacent to an enemy building.)

But it was equally important that the board gradually empties in order to allow movement. Because of this, I decided that the reinforcements must be placed on friendly stacks. This prevents the creation of new stacks, which means the board can empty, so movement becomes necessary if you wish to reclaim a strategic zone that you lost.

The Wrong Movement

The more the pawns pile up, the more empty spaces are created. In Ekö, empty spaces permit movement, and this is what provides the story arc for the game: The board starts the game full, and movement is impossible. As the game progresses, opportunities open up, and pathways emerge.

In "Medusa", stacks moved only in straight lines. This drew from a legacy of classic games with pawns: You could think of the queen in chess, or many, many "pawn" games that make use of vector tactics. My modular board, full of obstacles, produced winding corridors, and this linear movement was laborious; it was often unappealing to move because going from point A to point B often required several turns. As a result, the starting set-up, which was random, induced a bit of predestination. This was a problem.

I think I have provided the simplest solution in the world. If the problem is that you cannot go from point A to point B, um, let's just say that you can. That's it. Thus, a stack of pawns can go anywhere it wants on the board as long as there is a clear path to it. Certainly this can seem less "realistic" than the movement in a normal wargame. How would my army get to the other end of the map in a single turn? I would respond by pointing out that it is all about the scale: scale of time, scale of distance. Now, you will notice that this scale is not explicitly defined in the game. We kind of ignore whether the lands represented on the board are an entire country or a simple valley. Visually, the "geography map" style chosen for the prototype advantageously did not define this scale. Game boards often use this type of graphical ellipse, and this was the scale that was ultimately chosen for the final game board of Ekö.

Tactically, this rather liberal movement rule suggested another interesting aspect; instead of thinking in terms of the "range" of the troops, as is often the case in conquest games in which movement is limited to a number of spaces, this game will make you think in terms of "access": open or closed. This was even more efficacious than the proposed board of winding paths; managing access could be done at multiple locations and by different players. The starting set-up was becoming far less determinant.

The Stack of Cthulhu, or The Question of The Theme

Upon returning from Cannes in 2013, I still needed to acknowledge the shortcomings of the game. Even though I was fond of the gap between the form and the substance, in which a cute and colorful game could in actuality be less light than it might seem, I had a choice to make: Either render the game more accessible in order to keep my pink jellyfish, or find a more adult theme for the game. I decided to set my octopi aside. The game was rather pure, so I chose to adapt it to a theme of medieval Japan. Not bloody original, sure, but doubtlessly effective.

The Map Is The Territory

Having discovered at that time Taluva, which I adored, I realized all the pleasure that can be found in handling little wooden buildings. This is where games and toys share common borders. A little wooden building, this is quite concrete; the game constructs itself, stirs, and comes to life as the game progresses. Looking at this game, we see neither numbers nor icons, just a flat region portrayed in three dimensions by little wooden buildings.

Thus, I decided to include little houses, towers, and castles in the game. This kills two birds with one stone: On one hand, it permits me to totally create a construction part of the game, and something on which to base the victory conditions (adieu, simple majority!); on the other hand, it brings the game away from being a pure game of pawns, and this reinforces the theme.

Obviously, the trap lay in creating the management part around what I had, which could imply resources, perhaps gold pieces...but I wanted the game to remain pure. In order for the heart of the game to remain in the placement and movement of the pawns on the board, the system to construct buildings must therefore be intuitive, simple to understand, and easy to remember. It should not involve additional components (gold pieces, resources) — it thus needed to be connected in some way or another to the pawns representing the players' troops.

No problem! One, two, three: "Sacrifice" one pawn (returning it to your reserve) to build a level 1 building, which is worth 1 victory point, and so on. Imposing a linear progression in the construction of buildings (house → tower → castle) is reminiscent of development or civilization games, which is a good thing.

That the buildings provide better victory conditions and reinforce the theme is good — but it bothered me a bit that they ultimately served "merely" as victory point markers spread around the board. In order for the game to be able to balance itself and resolve, it was necessary to forbid placement of reinforcements beside an enemy building. Thematically, this is justified if one thinks of it as a form of the building's "zone of influence" — or their territory. Mechanically, this turned out to be an excellent idea: This completes the narrative arc of the game. In the early turns, it is a placement/blocking game, then as the game progresses, it becomes about access created on the map (with the players sacrificing pawns in order to construct buildings), which then becomes a game of movement/capture.

Fish! Fresh Fish Here!

For the most part, Ekö was already here. It was called "Uma-Jirushi", and the game ran like clockwork. I was at the point at which I neither wanted to add nor remove anything. I decided that it was "fini" — or at least as much as possible. Now it was time to find a publisher.

It was François Haffner who told me that pawn games were no longer fashionable — and I think he was talking about a period of time more vast than just last year. When I went door-to-door trying to pitch "Uma-Jirushi" to different publishers, invariably, one may recognize the qualities of the game, but be turned off by the stacking principle of the game.

Without really knowing with whom to publish the game, I joined the Boulogne design competition, which had been won in the past by some non-standard games. The game passed one stage after another, leaving me more and more perplexed, thinking, "Well, crikey, I'm a finalist." At that point, I'd achieved everything I'd wanted with this contest: The game would have visibility to a lot of publishers, which is what I wanted.

The icing on the cake is that the game won! Beyond giving me enormous pride, it was also an enormous springboard for "Uma-Jirushi". The initial task of the Centre National du Jeu in getting games before publishers — whether downstream to francophones or upstream by taking award-winning games to Essen to show international publishers — is enormous. Well, in the end, I found myself playing with the guys from Sit Down!, with whom I had already worked on Wiraqocha and Sushi Dice; they liked the game right away and wanted to publish it. This is where "Uma-Jirushi" became Ekö.

The Void Is On The Box, But Not Inside

Sit Down! and I decided to transpose the game to a more fantastic universe, more dream-like than it was at first. Even if it still takes some Asian graphical cues, the game takes place in a universe that can't be identified, and that is for the better. The cover illustration perfectly serves this purpose in that it hints at more than is stated explicitly, and the line of the horizon allows you to get lost there, looking at it.

However, when we started to talk production, we found that on the larger boards from which punchboards included in the box would be cut, there was still room. Well, this was unacceptable. Although this was a game made without Kickstarter, without stretch goals, we decided to add more content because it didn't cost more and because we had the opportunity.

Note that at first, I was not particularly in favor of this, and for one simple reason: The game had turned out very well as it was, and sometimes the best is the enemy of the good. Adding things for the sake of adding things is not necessarily a good idea because it can transform a simple, functional concept into a kludge-fest. And then very quickly, strongly warning myself with this same notion, I told myself it was also an opportunity to give more breadth to the game, and that this would not only make me happy, but future players, as well. The main thing was to keep in mind that it should not add more complexity to the game and that these elements should be optional, acting as variants.

Thus, our developments have added Tempest tiles, which are the most beautiful effect to add to the game board, while requiring only a single additional rule. I also added the Pyramids, which are a nod to the reefs of the first version of the game, with their majority rule — though now the majority is counted from merely three spaces, which can be tallied at a glance. Finally, the temples bring little interesting effects without breaking the game.

Oh, The Places You'll Go!

If there is a lesson to this story, it would be this: Sometimes one conceives a game with a strong and simple intention, and because it functions, one succeeds in keeping it that way through to its completion.

The story of Ekö is the opposite. This is the story of a hazardous, three-year pilgrimage, armed with a pawn game that was supposed to be Candy Crush on a board, crossed with Avalam, and married to pink octopi and yellow jellyfish; I traveled to a realm at war in which one constructs little wooden buildings to finally stop in a desert of ochre dust, facing a golem of wind and sand who tells me that his Emperor is long dead. In the end, this is a game "of strategy", and I think the term is not abused here. Yes, Ekö is more than the simple abstract game it was in the beginning. This is a game of conquest, tense and open, delivered with elegant components and visuals.

Now the game is yours. Your turn to play!

Henri Kermarrec 
Translation: Nathan Morse