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In 2017, I was traveling with a friend as we often do on buses and trains to coastal towns or around Europe. We were on the Eurostar from UK to France, and as we sometimes do, we played the small game Province. It was enjoyable, but they had no desire to play again.
I travel light, which means any game has tough competition to earn a space in my backpack. I love the idea of having a portable, short-playtime game that gives me the satisfaction of a proper Eurostyle city-building game — but if it is going to take up that space and be one of only two or three gaming options, it needs to have a good amount of replay value.
We discussed it, and she said, "Why don't you make one then? Something we can play on our train journeys." She had a good point. Why don't I make it? So now I had a mission and a clearly defined design brief. It had to be portable, highly replayable, and good with two players with a satisfying sense of progression.
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Passing the time queueing for the Palace of Versailles with a bit of in-head game design
At the peak of summer, the queue for the Palace of Versailles can be long. Really long. However, that time can pass a bit more smoothly if you now have a game to design in your head. Shuffling along the line in the baking heat, I started to piece it together. An early thought was to include tiles. I appreciate the tactile nature of tiles, which don't blow away in the wind and can replace the need for a board, and I think they provide more of a "big game" feel than cards.
I knew I wanted players to build a city and decided they should be building it together. This would be an opportunity for more interaction, felt more thematic, and provided further replayability as you wouldn't be able to control all placements or exactly how the city would form. I think a great thing about tile placement is that it can create interesting decisions, but because we are familiar with spatial reasoning to some extent in our daily lives, it does so with fairly little additional complexity. I'm particularly interested in these emergent properties in games where subtle differences in your actions have consequences for your strategy and that of your opponent.
The city built together would be the central focus, replacing a board. I would make some buildings factories that would also function as worker-placement spots letting you do special things. They would have guaranteed access for the owner, but the other player could visit only if the spot were vacant. This would give a sense of progression as the city and options increased throughout the game. I imagined the square tiles filing up a bigger square and creating a nice clear, tense endpoint to the game as you completed that grid.
I was reminded of my hometown, Glasgow, which was the third city in Europe to adopt the grid structure for its city center. It has been claimed that this was the model on which New York was based, but I'm not certain of the evidence for that. Either way, it has a notably clean grid layout to it, and if I were to create a game, why not somewhere special to me? The game could be a love letter to my friend and my city.
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I modified this system to a single line representing the river Clyde, where goods would arrive into Glasgow. You moved your piece along this river and picked up the tile for use anytime in the round. There were a couple of additional touches to keep some tension: you had to use the action tiles collected that round or lose them, and you could store only a few resources and never gold.
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First ever playtest
Returning from France after that long weekend, I had the outline of a game. I made a simple prototype shortly after and was pleased to find it all worked. It wasn't the most exciting experience, but it worked. Of course, many things would change as the game developed; scoring for set-related bonuses increased to encourage strategic planning, contracts were "unbalanced" to make decisions over when to jump more difficult, the chaining of builds was introduced to make players pull off bigger plays, and whisky was introduced because I really like the wee barrel component*.
However, it turned out the game needed two major changes to become a smoother and more engaging experience. The first was the workers. The workers did little early game, but as the city expanded, you had more options. A familiar pattern would arise: New players did not use the workers/forgot about them/were unclear when to play them, but the couple of experienced players really liked the workers. I tried having a "family" version without workers and "advanced" with workers, but the family version wasn't engaging enough, and I couldn't trust players would play again until they learned how to use workers.
I noticed the buildings that people enjoyed most were those in which their position in the city was important and realized I could create a more elegant solution by having the factory buildings automatically trigger when buildings were placed next to them — allowing me to get rid of the whole worker system while keeping the engine building in the game intact. If I could remove that, it would drop the play structure down from three actions (move, take tile, optionally place a worker) to simply move and take tile. This streamlining would make it much more approachable.
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Early version of the game with worker placement
I had a friend who said their favorite bit was the workers and they wouldn't play without them. This made them the ideal test because if they could enjoy the game as much without the workers, I would know that was the way forward. I managed to convince them to try the new system, and while they complained at first, afterwards they said, "It is basically the same" and I was pleased the job was done.
It was around this time I found out about Playtest UK and decided I would try to make their next monthly meeting. It was an exciting prospect, especially when at the session I found myself sitting with experienced designers Asger Harding Granerud, David J. Mortimer, and Rob Harris to playtest my game.**
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Asger makes a move at my first Playtest UK meet-up
I didn't know how much more work would be needed before I showed the game to publishers, and this seemed the right crowd to ask***. Asger enthusiastically said I should be doing so already. With the 2018 UK Games Expo on the horizon, I contacted some publishers that would be in attendance. There was some general interest, but nothing came of it — other than one encounter that would prove very important.
The first publisher I reached out to was Aporta Games. This was because I really like their titles and I'm an idiot. I hadn't realized that Aporta doesn't publish games from other designers, but Kristian Amundsen Østby was very friendly and made time to meet me. Kristian has an incredible design insight, and although he had not played the game, he said an immediate thought was whether there was a need for rounds. Had I tried continuous play?
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Showing Glasgow to Kristian; I later discovered a pal, Ben Broomfield, was taking photos for UKGE and happened to catch this moment
After workers, this was the second big "problem" the game needed to overcome. The game played in rounds, which led to a confusing rule for turn order and some set-up time between each round. I think games are largely judged by their time input to entertainment output. I enjoy Catan as a 45-60 minute game, but that time my group tried six players and called it after four hours, I was less of a fan. The upkeep between rounds had seemed trivial, but ultimately all these things creep into our experience of a game.
Quote:
"I belong to Glasgow, dear old Glasgow town
But something's the matter with Glasgow
For it's going round and round"
—Will Fyffe
But something's the matter with Glasgow
For it's going round and round"
—Will Fyffe
This had been the core of the game — move your piece, pick up the tile — but if you didn't pick up the tiles, it would remove all the faff of refilling/resetting the river. All abilities would become instant; you would move on them and they would activate. Now that would mean making a big circle, with no need to refresh tiles or have rounds. Sure, this change meant some abilities and features had to be totally modified, but it also meant cutting out two pages of the rulebook and getting rid of the most confusing rule. This cut the playtime down significantly, and as a bonus it increased the strategy as people could plan more effectively by seeing what was ahead.
I was concerned this change may reduce variability and replay from not having the randomized river each round but was surprised that it had the opposite effect. It increased the variation between games because now you had to approach each new game with a strategy based on what was there, knowing certain tiles wouldn't show that game.
I now had my game. I had a game that worked smoothly and fit all the criteria I'd initially set out to achieve. My friend and I enjoyed playing it, so mission accomplished. I put it on the shelf and got on with my life.
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Enjoying a wee pre-lunch game on our travels
In April 2019, I had become a bit obsessed with my work. I really enjoy my job but with no set hours to it, I was getting a bit carried away and decided I again needed the creative outlet of designing. If I wanted to pursue it, I should get a bit more serious. I started attending the Playtest UK sessions and would put time aside to make prototypes.
One week I wanted to attend the session but didn't have anything new to bring and thought, "Why not dust off that Glasgow game and see what some fresh eyes make of it?" I was buoyed by how well it was received; players looked totally engaged and afterwards all said they would buy a copy as it is, one even going so far as to rate it in their all-time top ten. I booked a playtest slot at UK Games Expo that year and showed it to some people there and again had very positive responses, including people asking whether I could bring my copy so their friends could play in the evening. I was incredibly elated seeing people enjoy something I'd created — some cubes and bits of cut-up card coming to life after I explain what to do with them.
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On the final day of the event, I swung by to see Hanno alone and playing with his phone, so swooped in. I started explaining a bit as seemed normal in a pitch when he interrupted to clear space on the table and suggest we play. I had never had a publisher suggest playing on the spot. I was a bit concerned during set-up as no gold contracts were in play and wondered whether it would stifle the experience, but there are ways to work every set-up. Hanno got a good combo early, particularly exploiting the whisky factory for easy builds which allowed him to overcome the gold shortage. He joked about how it was over as he chained builds.
I'd played a bunch of times that weekend and lost almost all, sometimes quite badly. In playing my own games, I spend most of the time looking at other players' reactions and engagement, assessing their choices, considering balance, etc.
Now, I've heard people say to let the publisher win when pitching, but I don't believe that and I wanted to make sure he knew he hadn't "broken" the game with this combo. I became determined to win. It was the first time in a long time I felt I really played the game — just played it without trying to analyze it. The sound of the crowds disappeared, and I forgot I was pitching a game. It was close in the end, but I managed to get the victory. Afterwards Hanno told me he could see it being a Lookout title.
I was very fortunate to have interest from other great publishers, and I hope to work with them in the future but have no regrets in going with Lookout. Lookout was happy to keep the theme, and the only mechanical change was a nice little rule introduced by developer Grzegorz Kobiela that increased the gold cost for each bonus build to stop a player going completely crazy in chaining buildings.
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Snapshots of the prototype progression for some tiles that were present from the start;
note parks and tenement art swapped in final for thematic reasons
However, there was one big change from my prototype to the finished product. During the design process, I had expanded the game to play with up to four players. Lookout decided it wanted the game to go back to two players only. While I was reluctant, this would allow it to be a nice neat package with tight play for the prestigious two-player line. (Dear reader, between you and me, you can still merge copies with a few very minor changes to go up to four players — or maybe one day they'll let me do an expansion if the demand is there.)
Klemens Franz brought the beautiful architecture of Glasgow to life and let me include my favorite buildings. Once I saw there were to be people on the contracts, I was keen to make sure the game felt inclusive to the people of the city. With some research, we were able to identify what some of the people at the docks may have looked like at the time and include them in the game. (You can read more about the character diversity here.) I am really proud of what we have created.
I now have a game to play with my friend on our travels. I've had a wonderful time creating it, and I hope you too have a great time playing it.
Slàinte mhath!
Mandela Fernandez-Grandon
*Also, because it's Scotland and I don't know whether we're allowed to make games about Scotland without whisky. In the game, whisky is a wild resource to reflect its status as the most important and widely accepted currency.
**Incidentally I shared that 90-minute slot with David Mortimer's The Ming Voyages, which is also being released now and with art from Klemens Franz.
***It was also at this session I met Brett J. Gilbert, who encouraged me to change the name from "Merchant City: Glasgow" to simply "Glasgow". Merchant City is the area where the grid restructure started, but I did concur that "Merchant City" is a very generic Eurogame-sounding prefix.
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