Designer Diary: Hornet, from Politics to Pests

Hornet, released in September 2010, is the first published game by us, the Moliis Brothers. Hornet is also the first original game from the Finnish boardgame company Lautapelit.fi, with Z-Man Games acting as co-publisher in the U.S. and Asmodee as a distributor in Europe. With Hornet now topping 100 ratings on BGG, we thought we'd share our experiences of the full game development process of Hornet, from first idea to finished product.

We began designing board games systematically in the summer of 2007, although we have always designed games and modified existing ones. In the case of Hornet, while the game mechanisms remained relatively constant throughout, the theme experienced radical changes.

Let us begin with a short overview of the actual game: Hornet is an area-control game with simultaneous action selection and a dual-layered resource system. The game board is a modular board built of hex tiles representing a landscape with fields of flowers and hornet hives of various sizes. The players control two hornets each, which compete to collect nectar and produce honey in hives. The game is won immediately by conquering three hives or by having won two nests by the end of the game with the highest aggregate amount of honey produced. The nature of the various action cards ensures high player interaction, requires a need for pre-planning a number of turns ahead, and allows for the execution of cunning tactical moves.

First Inspiration

As strange as it now seems looking at the box cover above, the first inspiration for the game was the U.S. presidential primaries in early 2008. We both follow world politics with great interest, and we noticed that the U.S. primary election system has a lot of elements which could make for an interesting game. There are the regularly occurring primary elections in each state, the results of which have a significant effect on the consequent primaries in the next states. The size of different states matters a lot, as it's easier to win in smaller states, but you can't ignore the big ones either. The mechanisms of mudslinging and negative campaigning were also interesting and amusing: They might give a quick benefit for the slinger, but might also turn against the negative campaigner. Additionally, the theme had a clear victory condition: to become the party's one and only presidential candidate.

Out of this mish-mash of ideas, mechanisms and conditions, we developed a playable game quite quickly in early 2008. This version already had most of the same elements as the final game of Hornet. The players, instead of controlling hornets, were politicians flying around the continental U.S.A. trying to woo voters and win as many primaries as they could.

The somewhat peculiar mechanism of having two playing pieces on the board stems from this theme. In the earlier versions of the game, each player started with only one pawn – the presidential candidate – and the other pawn could be bought (we thought of it as a campaign office/trailer) during the game to give the player a wider geographical reach. The number of pawns per player varied throughout the development of the game and many different combinations were tried. (We shouldn't forget the vice-presidential candidates after all.) Eventually, we concluded that two pawns per player, both available from the beginning of the game, gave the best balance of flexibility and control – flexibility in that a wider range of tactics could be pursued, control in that the game did not degenerate into total chaos.

It is still relatively easy to see which roles the other components in the game played in the original theme: nectar was money, honey represented voters, and the hives were different U.S. states.

With the original theme, the game board looked something like this

As spring turned to summer and the primary season dwindled and finally ended, we felt that a game in which the theme is strongly relevant only once every four years may not attract sufficient interest. What's more, even once you win the primaries, you're still not the president – only one of two candidates – which made the theme a little weak in our mind. So we sat down one evening and after throwing around many theme ideas, we came up with bees and honey. Bees later gave way to hornets, which are more aggressive and are a better match with the competitive nature of the game. (For those reading this who have a problem with honey-producing hornets, feel free to call the pawns bees, or beeples.)

The Beeples come in five great and somewhat different colors than pawns in most games – image: Markus Aranko

Fine-tuning the Game Play

The game element which required the most work was the action cards: How many cards should each player have? Should each player have the same set of cards? How should the cards impact each other? How much should it cost to play a card?

The number of cards varied between four and eight during the development process, and finding the right balance between them was definitely the biggest challenge, especially since we wanted to have a high level of player interaction, something we both enjoy in games. For example, the aggressive honey action (also known as "super honey action"), which allows you to directly change other players' honey into your own, went from being much too strong to being irrelevant to (finally) its current form. Naturally, whenever one card was changed, it had a direct impact on the other cards as well, since all of the cards needed to be in balance between each other as well. The final structure, with a logical system of one risky and one safe action for three different kinds of actions (nectar collection, honey action, movement) provides a good balance of risk and reward, while keeping the number of options manageable.

Action cards used in the first versions of the game

We quickly discovered that solitary game testing (in which one person controls all the players) did not work at all as the interaction between the different players' choices is so high. A player may often be better off trying to influence his competitors' actions through negotiation, bluffs or even with straightforward threats – this happened at least a couple of times during test games! – than with silently optimization of his own next moves. Yet optimizing your own moves certainly plays a role, due to the fact that the players know in advance the number of rounds left before a hive is scored. This forces the players to plan ahead, consider their position in the turn order, and yet again outguess what the other players will do.

In the final version of the game, we feel that all the mechanisms are well balanced. The impact of experience/skill, impact of other players' choices and, in some cases, pure luck works well in our opinion. Naturally, the importance that these different elements should play is largely a matter of opinion or taste, but we strongly feel that the combination we have created makes Hornet attractive both for a beginner or younger player as well as an experienced game strategists.

From First Idea to Publication

Once we realized that the games we developed turned out quite well in general, being functional and enjoyable, we started considering whether and how to get them published. We were not interested in self-publication, so for lack of better ideas, we simply walked into our local friendly game store – Lautapelit.fi in Helsinki – and asked one of the owners whether they were interested in new game ideas.

After a somewhat sceptical initial reaction, we eventually managed to create enough interest that the owners agreed to hold a game-testing session in the near future. When a suitable moment finally arrived in the summer of 2008, we had three different games to present and ready to play, our bee-themed game amongst them. This was the one that attracted the most interest, and only two weeks after the initial playtest session, we had a publishing contract for our game.

After signing the contract, a lot of work went into developing the graphic look of the game as well as still further balancing the game mechanisms. By the end of summer 2010, the game was finally in print. We were very excited to have a board game with our names printed on the cover available in stores around the world. While this had been our original final goal, it is only natural that, having achieved this goal, we have moved on to striving to have a new game published at least once a year. With the positive response we have received for our other prototypes so far, we are confident this is achievable and that Hornet will not be the last time you see a game from the Moliis Brothers.

And who knows, perhaps by the time of the next presidential primary season, Z-Man will want to republish the game with the original theme...

Jani Moliis and Tero Moliis

White and brown fighting for control of a hive – image: Markus Aranko