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Now you know the ending of the story, but what has happened earlier? I have asked designers Łukasz Wrona, Daniel Budacz, and Piotr Krzystek to tell their story, and here it goes!
The Beginning
Now that Germania Magna is ready, we often reminisce about the past, going back to the very beginning of the project.
What makes a board game successful? Even the best catchy phrases, an elaborate storyline, or beautiful graphics may not be enough if the gameplay just doesn't "click" as it is indeed the cool gameplay and the game's mechanisms that decide whether we come back to a given title or not. That's why our adventure with creating Germania Magna began by coming up with satisfying game mechanisms.
It's quite a long story as we based this game on our first design: Rok 1863, developed in 2012. The year 2013 was a special time for Poland. It was the 150th anniversary of the January Uprising, one of the most important events in the history of this country. Celebrations took on many forms: reconstructions, conferences and formal events. Łukasz and Piotrek, reconstruction enthusiasts and board game developers, decided to stand out and developed the first ever game about the January Uprising, the aforementioned Rok 1863. The game took the players to the time of the January Uprising, when we once again took up arms against the Russians to win back our freedom. Although historical sources focus on the fight for independence, it's no secret that during the uprising, commanders of the various insurgent parties clashed repeatedly. As such, we felt it was important that 1863 reflected this nuance, so we came up with mechanisms that would let players play against the game itself, as well as against other players. Player cooperation allows them to win battles, but the rivalry plot line between them develops at the same time as in the end there can be only one winner.
Piotr and Łukasz as reenactors of the troops from January Uprising 1863
That was the basic idea for the game, one in which the players go into battle together, helping each other out and...undermining one another at the same time. We'd been trying for a long time to come up with a way for the players to direct their troops, while building tension and keeping them guessing at the other players' intentions. At first, we had it that before playing their cards, the players had to indicate where they would add their units; battlefields had different colors, and the players showed their colored chips at the same time to declare which battle they'd participate in. However, we decided to drop that feature because it quickly made it apparent that a given battle is either unwinnable or too easy. Finally, we adopted a solution in which unit cards are played in sequence, and the player can add a card to a single battle, several battles, or none of them. The result is mounting tension as we send our troops into battle not knowing whether the other commanders will follow suit. Immediately the players start discussing and deal-making!
Should I help the cause — or myself? That is the question.
Almost from the very beginning, we assumed that the players would play with one of the several insurrection leaders. Each commander would in turn have different skills. In time, they also started to determine the sequence of each turn. Originally, we wanted the rounds to go clockwise. In each round, priority would shift to another player. However, we dropped it and moved the sequence determination to the commanders. This was a much better solution as you never know who's going to start the next turn, and at the same time it evens out the disproportions we started to notice between the abilities of different commanders. The assumption was that the stronger (in our opinion) commanders had higher initiative. As a result, players with theoretically weaker commanders had a little more control over the game as they knew what the players before them did. In that sluggish manner, step-by-step, we soldiered on, publishing the game in 2013.
Łukasz and Piotr awarded by Bronisław Komorowski, former President of the Republic of Poland
The game was noticed and became quite popular, both among the players, who appreciated the interesting mechanisms, and public institutions, which appreciated the freshness of the concept. The game received many awards, including the award of the President of the Republic of Poland. It was a major learning experience (both in the positive and negative sense), therefore our next game, based on the same core principles, needed to be thoroughly improved.
Development
What happened next? In 2014, Daniel joined the team as the third author, to work on the next titles as a bigger team, but we always had this idea in the back of our heads to expand and re-use the mechanisms that Piotrek and Łukasz developed for 1863. The January Uprising is, however, too obscure a topic to be interesting to non-Polish players, so we decided to use what we already had, but put a new coat of paint on it. Łukasz put in a lot of time researching player preference, and the team discussed every single possible game concept. We thought about creating a product set in World War II, during the early-medieval Viking invasions, and even the losing battles of Native American tribes against European settlers. Finally, we settled on late antiquity, the area around rivers of the Rhine and Danube, and the asymmetric warfare between the barbarians and the Imperium Romanum.
And so, Germania Magna was born.
Playtesting the game
Since Daniel has always had a thing for antiquity — not only in the pop-cultural sense, but also as a serious researcher as he wrote and published several articles on the topic — he gladly jumped right in and started working on the new game. First and foremost, we needed to splice 1863 with the realities of Germanic invasions. The 19th century military formations and tactics were replaced with the ones described in ancient sources, insurgent leaders changed into German chieftains, the Russians into Roman legions, and Insurrection battlefields into Imperium Romanum provinces.
Aquitania Prima under siege!
Many mechanisms fit quite well with the new setting; however, we weren't satisfied with simply more of the same. Therefore, we decided to replace and improve as many of the elements criticized by the players as we could.
As a result, the final version of Germania is very different from 1863. It has many of its advantages, but without, we think, any of its defects. We not only added new cards and improved the existing ones, but also introduced totally new types. Negative interactions and competition in 1863 took a back seat to battling the common enemy. In Germania, they take center stage, as where insurgent leaders competed for prestige, the German chieftains were oftentimes openly hostile towards each other. Battle cards from 1863 had only a marginal influence at the beginning, whereas in Germania each province is full of features that can completely change the course of the battle, as well as influence victory or defeat. Uniform unit cards in 1863 now come in five different types. Infantry, cavalry and war machines all have unique characteristics, which we can multiply by playing appropriate tactics and formations.
We also developed deck-building, which opens up virtually unlimited possibilities of expanding on the game, especially in the context of planned expansions, or playing with those who own their own copy of the game. As we said, we had so many changes that when we were finishing development, we realized that aside from the core mechanisms, there is very little 1863 left in Germania. Those who played the previous game will probably have a sense of familiarity while playing Germania, but they should also feel that they got their hands on something new — improved not only in terms of graphics, but also mechanisms, and additionally that it is a title open to expansions, new card types, and much, much more...
Graphics
We love illustrations. For as long as we can remember, we've been passionate for historical paintings and we love discovering the little details in every picture. We have great appreciation for works that, even in the tiniest of details, try to show the characters, their clothing, and the buildings and surroundings as they might have looked like in real life.
Nowadays, you can't have a good game without high graphic fidelity. Products with high-quality art, especially historical titles (most often strategy games), often become our favorites. Unfortunately, just like in movie, computer and literary pop culture, oftentimes the graphics have nothing to do with history. Illustrators go with current trends, copy and replicate falsehoods, and depict characters, events, and locations in a fantasy convention without caring for historical accuracy. For us, an approach like that is a simple cop-out.
Game box image from sketch to final artwork
That's why when we design a board or card game, we pay a lot of attention to the art. This is our favourite part of development. Coming up with ideas for cards and illustrations, browsing the Internet in search of inspiration, contacting illustrators, assessing their sample works, selecting the best candidates and reviewing each individual piece – fascinating months!
Germania Magna is a card game, and those rarely take up historical themes. Therefore, we had to come up with a satisfactory standard all by ourselves. We wanted to present the historical reality not only through game mechanisms (loose, ever-changing alliances between the barbarian tribes in their fight against Rome), or card names and quotes, but also in the graphics.
Fulcum card graphics
We were lucky enough to meet the right candidate on the first try. We were put in touch with a very talented artist who usually works on video games. Apart from great technique, Paweł Kaczmarczyk had several other virtues. He has a degree in history and knows how to work with different source materials, including archaeological findings, which are particularly important for our theme (late antiquity).
Additionally, he expresses his love for the period through historical reconstruction as a member of one of the top European groups dealing with Roman legions, the Legio XXI Rapax. Although he usually plays a Roman soldier from the turn of the eras — and those from the 4th century looked completely different — he knew exactly where to look to supplement his knowledge. He, and by extension ourselves, received help from our friends from the VicusUltimus group, who reconstruct late antiquity legionaries.
After only a few days of talking to Paweł, we knew we would be working with a hyper-competent person. That's why we weren't afraid to leave the scene composition entirely up to him. We came up with the card names and their functions, and Paweł created an entire series of artworks for tribal cards.
Paweł is ready to fight for the Empire!
Therefore our only enemy was the unrelenting passage of time. We wanted to release the game in time for the SPIEL 2015 fair, and in order to make the deadline, we needed the product to be ready for print by the end of August. Not counting the weeks, when we discussed the style of the cards and his responsibilities, Paweł had around two months to complete all the pictures. To make the task more realistic, we decided to contact Judyta Sosna to work on province cards and a dozen or so tribal cards. All the other cards from the tribal deck, as well as all the Roman and Chieftain cards, were painted by Paweł, who also created the layout for all card types, their backs, and most importantly, the box art. A group of German warriors plundering a Roman city is his piece.
A good example of how history influenced our work are the province cards. West-German tribes and confederations, i.e., the Alemanni and Franks, raided Roman provinces along the Rhine and Danube. Those territories were conquered by the Imperium Romanum at the turn of the eras, but during the late Roman Empire, the administration constantly changed their borders, created new provinces, and designated their capitals. Therefore we had to select around a dozen provinces and determine their distinguishing features, with all of this capable of being expressed in a single, small artwork. The process was simplest for provinces, which included cities and monuments we can visit today. The best example is the Augusta Treverorum, which is the modern-day German city of Trier with its famous Black Gate (Porta Nigra). City illustrations appeared on province cards with a high value of military strength. The weaker ones, we decided to adorn with pictures of less civilized parts of the province: forests, swamps, mountains, and at most a village and fields. Finally, we received a set of gorgeous landscapes of antiquity-era provinces, from the lower Rhine province of Belgica to the Alpine Raetia.
Final components showcase
Finally, after several months of work — yes, as you all know, the game didn't premiere in 2015 — Germania Magna can boast several dozen pieces of art that showcase the world of the barbarian tribes and their Roman enemies.
The Future
Our vision assumes that Germania Magna will be a basis for a system set in late antiquity and early middle-ages that takes the players back to the difficult times of the 3rd, 4th and 5th centuries around the Roman Limes, i.e., the borderlands along the Rhine and Danube. In this setting, the players take command of the powerful tribes of Western Germania: the mighty Alemanni confederation and the Franks, banding together around the Lower Rhine. Combating raids from these groups and dealing with constant political intrigue with their chieftains was the most important task of every single Roman Emperor of the time. However, the German menace was not the sole concern of the ruler, let alone officers from border forts, or rich owners of Roman villas and latifundia. The Imperium Romanum also fell victim to invasions from other tribes, which are due to appear in our game.
Some Huns would like to meet you
If you guys like the game, then you can look forward to expansions in the near future that will be devoted to wars between the barbarians and the declining empire. These will let you both play with new tribes as well as upgrade your existing decks and create unique alliances and confederations. We hope that Germania Magna: Border in Flames is just the beginning of a grand adventure in a world lit aflame and on the verge of collapse.
Thank you for reading!
This is how the dreams look, so far only in digital form, but soon in reality
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