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This process has led to very different published games, which have all been released in a period of twelve months: Tea for 2, which is the card game War revisited with the Space Cowboys; Glow, a beautiful card- and dice-drafting press-your-luck family game published by Bombyx; Lost Explorers, a simple, quick and brainy chip-collection race game published by Ludonaute; and Shamans, a social-deduction game using a trick-taking mechanism from Studio H that is the subject of this post.
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So let's go with my second BGG designer diary!
Birth of an Idea and Inspiration
Shamans is by far my design that creates the most social interaction. The initial spark came at the end of 2016 after numerous plays of Time Bomb. Before that, I used to play The Resistance a lot, and when I was in college long ago — and yes, I got my degree! — traditional French trick-taking games like Belote and Tarot. They all might have had an impact on this first spark.
I thought about designing a social-deduction game that would not rely only on bluffing like most of them. The situation in a trick-taking game where you have to provide a certain color seemed to be perfect: If you are allowed to play any card, you can pretend not to have a card of the color asked and play a card of another color. This principle immediately worked very well!
Then I looked for a rarely used theme that would fit and I ended up using the Blade Runner setting (which I love) to develop the prototype. The first version of early 2017 had the same core mechanism as the final published game, so sorry everybody, I will not have many big design questions and changes as is usually the case. The first idea was strong enough.
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Oh, you can choose the Voight-Kampff tile to prove you're a Runner!
My playtesters and I played this game a huge number of times to finely tune every possible situation. The tiles/tokens were added to create variety while respecting the setting, and the player-count scaling was also adjusted. The final gameplay is exactly what I wanted, and I saw that the game could also be enjoyable with kids aged 10+, despite some "gamer" mechanisms.
Finding the Right Setting and Art Style with Studio H & Maud Chalmel
I had known Hicham for many years at Matagot before he joined Studio H, a new publisher created by the big French book publisher Hachette. I thought Hicham was the right person to show the prototype to at SPIEL '19. A few months later, Studio H confirmed that it wanted to publish the game and to have it released by the end of 2020!
When later I played Oriflamme and Hagakure, two card games published by Studio H, I understood that my "Blade Runner" game would fit perfectly in that game line.
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Studio H brought the thematic idea of Shamans and decided to trust the talented illustrator Maud Chalmel to give a soul to this world. She managed to transform the visual aspect of Shamans into a huge plus, and I'm really impressed by her work! She said she was inspired by a former game she illustrated, (Siggil), and also by the artists Hari and Deepti.
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Mischievous Maud and I in the Studio H offices just before Christmas 2020
Releasing Shamans in 2021
As I wrote previously, I like to explore the game mechanisms in my designs, whatever they can lead me to. Shamans is no exception and a very good example of that. It is far from the current "satisfying" games trend as it produces some harsh interactions between players. Therefore, this is quite a risk for Studio H to release such a game now, so I'm thankful and glad they did.
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Demoing at Orléans Joue con in August 2020
Shamans has been well received in France but is still flying a little under the radar in the U.S., so I hope that Tom Vasel's April 2021 review will give it a bit more visibility.
Closing Thoughts and Future Projects
I'm sure that Shamans will make its way among the players themselves as it is a very unique game. It's not for everyone, but the social-deduction lovers should enjoy it as much as I did designing it!
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All the games mentioned above are already released in the U.S., except Glow, which will be released in mid-2021 in many countries after a very warm welcome in France in February. Its print-and-play solo variant (PDF) was released last week by Bombyx for its tenth anniversary.
Have fun!
Cédrick Chaboussit
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