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The spark came after a game of Walls of York, a great game about protecting York from pillaging vikings that probably could have been a small box roll-and-write, but instead comes with delightful little wall pieces. There I was, toying around with those walls, and thinking, "I've built the wall — now I really want to build the city." And off I went.
I wanted to build a city, but also populate it with people, each of them bringing some skill or knowledge to the village, passing in and out from the surrounding area. This made me remember that I've always wanted to make a press-your-luck game as I've always enjoyed that mechanism, but never really found "my" game that would implement it. Most times, I find that it is too either/or in the results that you get —bust or win big— or that the outcome is so mitigated that it hardly matters, apart from the slight adrenaline rush you get.
But here was an idea that I could use: Players could choose how they wanted to do their city. Either they could lean in to pressing their luck with a big deck of townsfolk and hoping for the big actions, or they could build up their village, being more conservative, and build up a baseline of resources they could depend on, or anywhere in between. This also gave me the idea of having several victory conditions; one way to win would be to have the largest village, another to have the most nobles in your deck.
Another way of lessening the either/or effect was to give players two actions per turn, but only one if they bust. This immediately felt right as losing an entire turn isn't any fun, even if it's your own fault.
I did consider whether I was throwing too many mechanisms into one pot, but after the first few tests I realized that they came together quite intuitively and that I was on to something good. Speaking about tests, I need to mention the great community of known and (undeservedly) lesser known designers we have in Denmark. They helped the game so much in all the various stages, and they are a big part of what the game is today.
So Living Forest started as "Pillage!", a press-your-luck game about building an English village and defending it against raids — and the walls would continue haunting the game for some time...
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In the first version, I placed the stats to the right, which made flipping cards quite awkward. One tester turned them all upside down to flip them left to right.
Friend or Foe?
At first, I thought it could be interesting to have players attack each other and defend from left, right, and across, such that attacks would come from a certain direction, depending on which player took the attack action. This created some interesting situations, but overall it just lead to players focusing on their armies and walls too much. Soon after, I realized that a common enemy would fit the feel and the theme much better. Enter the Vikings!
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A playerboard from when I still thought players should attack each other. This version also had players place buildings from left to right in rows.
My first idea came from the "use with extreme care" toolbox of game designers — an event deck. At the beginning of each round, a card would flip, and it would bring Vikings, Papal decrees, merchants, or visiting nobles to the villages, each of them altering the way the round played a bit. It worked okay, and since it affected all players equally, it didn't feel too random — but it did muddy the whole thing a bit, and apart from the Vikings, none of the effects felt important to the game.
So slowly the Vikings wandered off to the "market" of townspeople who you could attract to build up your deck. This again made a lot of sense both mechanically and thematically; after all, what proud Viking would attack a poor village of just a few peasants instead of a thriving town with nobles and cardinals? Every now and again, when the market would refill, Vikings would show up and warn of an attack at the end of the round. This worked well and was easy to understand; your walls would keep the Vikings out, and if you didn't have enough, your army might do the rest. Now the third victory condition seemed obvious: Whoever fought off the most vikings — that is, whoever took an action to help everybody — could try to win that way.
Seeing with Eyes Unclouded by Theme
At this point the game worked a lot like it does today, and I felt like I was ready to show it to publishers at the SPIEL convention. This was in 2019 before Covid, but I had caught...something? I spent no more time at the convention than the meetings that I had planned, then I went straight back to the Airbnb we had and felt more sick than ever before. (I knew it wasn't contagious as my doctor had told me that before I left, but he could not tell me exactly what it was.) It was an awful fair where I did my best to look okay at the meetings, but probably gave a somewhat pale and ghoulish impression.
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Even though the whole thing sparked from a setting, it was an absolute no brainer for me. Despite the neat wall pieces, I had absolutely no attachment to the theme; it had guided me through the design, but I don't really care about that setting in games, and neither did Cédric. We quickly agreed on going in a direction of an ecosystem, which I've tried again and again to make work in other designs, but now, thinking about an idea for a retheme, it seemed so obviously a match for "Pillage"! Cédric took to the idea, and a short while later he had found Apolline Etienne and asked whether I liked her art, and what I thought about making the game inspired by Japanese spirits and Studio Ghibli movies, like Princess Mononoke. I was super excited about this. Apolline's art is brilliant and gave everything this magical, mystical glow, and Princess Mononoke is one of my all-time favorite movies.
Reliable Vikings and Leap-Frogging Monks
But there was still work to be done. First, the Vikings kept being a bit too swingy. In some games they didn't show up much, and in other games, players got swarmed. Another issue was the monk track — of course there was a Monk track; I consider myself a Eurogame designer after all! — which Cédric correctly pointed out felt too much like the building construction action. He was right; both actions gave some permanent effects that felt very similar. We also agreed that it would be a good opportunity to find a mechanism that added more interaction between players.
Still thinking with the old theme in mind, I thought that it would make sense for players to try to "convert" each other's villages to their school of Christianity. Thus, the circular monk track took form, where players could leap-frog each other to gain a bonus.
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In this first draft, a player could win by jumping over all opponents, collecting a coat-of-arms from each. This added a fourth victory condition — but it also created a lot of anxiety for players, who were suddenly all about monks.
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The player board changed quite a bit through development. Now the monk track is gone, and the buildings can be placed in a more organic way, starting from the middle and building out. This was a great suggestion of the sort you get from testing with other designers!
We liked the core idea of this movement, but not the pressure that it put on the players. Slowly we toned it down, trashing the fourth victory condition and instead making leap-frogging a way of getting closer to the other three ways of winning by stealing points from each other.
At this point, Cédric was sure that he liked the game and offered to publish it, and I knew that Ludonaute would be a very good home, both because of Cédric's obvious enthusiasm and its catalogue of fun and good-looking games — and I have to admit that I'm a sucker for a pretty looking game.
But the Vikings and walls — now Yokai and lanterns — kept playing tricks on us. The Yokai had wandered around, haunting the players from different parts of the game. First, they went back in their own separate deck, then they moved into the players' decks, making other players' "flips" matter a whole lot, then they even had a short life as dice. After a while, we agreed that the simplest solution was also the one that worked best. For each card taken from the market, a Yokai would show up in the following round. This gave players agency and kept the Yokai coming somewhat reliably.
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Getting the vikings into the players decks worked well...until it didn't. This flip was just no fun.
A Farewell to Walls
Now only the walls stood between us and a great game. (Well, that and a whole lot of balancing numbers.) And at this point the walls had morphed from lanterns into clouds as we had agreed that leaning too heavily into Japanese folklore might seem a bit much coming from a Danish designer and a French publisher, both with only a passing knowledge of it. Happily the clouds did as clouds do and simply vanished into thin air.
Now, Living Forest had the theme and all the mechanisms in place, and I could sit back and just wait (im)patiently for the game to come to market, while following all the gorgeous artwork slowly being revealed.
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I don't think I can overstate how happy I am with the care and inspiration that Ludonaute and Apolline has shown the game
Finally, to say something about the slow and careful process of development, art, graphic design, and production, my daughter was nearly one year old when I took her and my wife to SPIEL in October 2021 for the release of Living Forest, and I did not have any clue that I was about to become a father when my first brainstorms with Cédric about development started. Life is strange and mostly wonderful.
Aske Christiansen
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