:strip_icc()/pic1448210.jpg)
/pic1446357.jpg)
I got into game design the old-fashioned way – by random chance. I have always been into games and even when I was young, I would make up my own rules for existing games. I played a lot of games growing up that would be considered core hobby games these days. When Dungeons & Dragons came out, my friends and I started playing that and we had a campaign we would play on weekends. However, when I went on to college and work, I was forced to take a break from gaming for a while.
Fast forward several years, and I got back into gaming in a strange way. Several of my college friends and I would travel around playing in Bridge tournaments, staying together in a hotel and playing games at night after the bridge events ended. One of my friends, Jeff Goldsmith, who is an avid core hobby gamer, introduced me to a card game called Magic: The Gathering back in 1994.
/pic163749.jpg)
Over the ten years that I worked with Wizards, I worked on a number of Magic sets and designed a lot of popular game mechanisms like Slivers and well over a thousand cards. Early on I started doing design on other games, including other trading card games like Netrunner. I had a single-deck card game called Earthquake published in 1997 that was kind of an abstract math-based game. In late 2000, I created a trading card game called Duel Masters that went on to become a major success in Japan.
I was let go by Wizards of the Coast at the end of 2005 and started my own single person design company in 2006. I started working on some new designs, but it takes a while to get things published. In the middle of 2006, Jordan Weisman left WizKids and I was able to get a position with WizKids as Senior Designer. I worked on a number of miniatures games, plus the occasional trading card game. However, WizKids closed up its Seattle office in 2008 and I was back to being a freelance designer.
Luckily, my big project from 2006 was finally sprouting wings. I had pitched a new trading card game to Bandai in 2006. In late 2008, Battle Spirits was finally published in Japan. Like my earlier Duel Masters design, Battle Spirits was also a huge hit in Japan. I attended an event for Battle Spirits in Tokyo in July of 2012 that attracted well over ten thousand players. The success of these trading card games allowed me to focus on an area that is not as financially rewarding: board games. While some games that win the Spiel de Jahres or get into mass market have great success, most board games have a small core following and don't go beyond that. However, I find board games a lot more fun to do, especially after working on Magic and other trading card games for ten years and after having designed a dozen trading card games myself.
/pic71596.jpg)
I did not get back into board games until after WizKids closed up. I saw Dominion in December 2008 and played it constantly for about a month. Having done so many trading card games, I realized that it was essentially a trading card game in a box. I worked up a number of variations on the game and my favorite was a mash-up with elements from Dominion and Dungeons & Dragons which become Thunderstone. I have done a few other board games including Quarriors! and Star Trek: Fleet Captains. However, despite the success of the two trading card games in Japan and some reasonable success with board games, most players still have never heard of me.
Most people who hear a song and like it can name the artist of the song. The same is true for a book that you particularly like. However, for some reason, games do not tend to fall in the same category. Very few people can name the designers of their favorite games, and outside of some core hobby fans, most game designers are not particularly well known. I hope that by sharing my story and some of my past work, you will be able to get a feel for my style of games and will be able to decide whether this new game project is something you can get behind. Now let me tell you the story of the game.
/pic860217.jpg)
I played 7 Wonders at Spiel in 2010 and had nearly the same reaction to the game that I had to Dominion, which was that this was another card-based board game that was in my area of design. I spent a couple of months working up a couple of designs and trying to make a different type of drafting game, something I call a "draft and do something" game as opposed to a straight drafting game like Fairy Tale or 7 Wonders. I worked up three different games in which you drafted cards, then used the cards for something, then repeated this sequence one or more times until the conclusion of the game.
I thought the tech tree system in 7 Wonders was interesting, specifically how early resources or an early card purchase could make a card free later, but I wanted a more granular system. I ended up going with a reduction system rather than a full cost or free system. The way this works is that a card might cost four "coins", but if you have a particular resource such as oil or wood, the price would be reduced by two and cost only two "coins" instead. In some cases, various combinations of resources could reduce the cost, so the above card might cost a player 4, 2, or 0 if they have the right combination of resource cards. I first saw this type of costing system in the BattleTech TCG that Richard Garfield did in 1996, and I used it for a mechanism in Magic called affinity, then later used a variation in my Battle Spirits trading card game in Japan. As you can see, mechanisms from early games often get reused in later games.
Having come up with a base costing engine, I set my sights on the game pattern. My first thought was to go back to my favorite theme, which was fantasy dungeon adventuring, and combine that with the drafting elements of 7 Wonders. It came together fairly well. The players would draft equipment, weapons, and spells, then use them to fight monsters. Each "dungeon" would have its own set of equipment and its own set of monsters, and the game would get harder as the game went on.
Doing the flavor for the prototype was fairly easy. I have an amazing knack for naming, and came up with some fairly brilliant names for the heroes. The players would adventure into the dungeons playing Arazorn, Flauron, Wimli, or even the great wizard Landolf. Each player would be dealt a random starting character (although I envisioned in expert games the players might at some point draft characters) and the characters would each have different health, mana, and starting skills. The starting skills represented proficiency in the various types of weapons and magic, plus other skills such as healing and armor. These skills would help to steer a player down a certain path, but if the wizard decided he wanted to draft a sword during the game, the strategy was available as an option.
Many elements from role-playing games were kept in the game. Players gain experience from killing monsters and can level up, where they can choose to gain another health or another point of mana. This gives the players an immediate boost and since health and mana reset when a new dungeon round starts, it gives you a benefit in future rounds as well.
Lost Legends has a lot of elements of a role-playing game. You get the fun of equipping your character and watching as you build up from nothing to an unstoppable arsenal capable of slaying a demon in a single blow. You get the fun of killing monsters. You collect treasure and experience. You level up your character. You gain new skills. And occasionally you get killed. Don't worry, though – you will be back fully healed for the next dungeon and you still can gain resources even when you are dead.
Some of you are probably thinking, "If Lost Legends is a dungeon game, why is it not a cooperative game?" The answer is twofold. I don't particular like cooperative games and my Dungeons & Dragons campaigns were never really cooperative in the modern use of the word. Our game master liked playing the players against each other, so often our parties would have a mix of characters of various alignments with different and often opposing goals. It made for some interesting sessions and the general rule was that you were out for yourself first, and then if you could save someone else in the party as well, that was a minor bonus. So I based the concept of Lost Legends on my experience playing an adventurer, where you were out to get the best treasure you could without appearing to be too greedy. It's a tough world out in the dungeons, and these other guys with you might not even make it, so don't make any close friends in the depths of the dungeon. That said, there are a few cooperative elements. Your gold generation is based on how well you do, plus how well your left- and right-hand players do as you get to share in the spoils of monsters killed near you.
Prototype cards
I showed the design to Queen Games in 2011, and they enjoyed the game a lot. We added a few elements to the base design such as the monster trophies to simplify the scoring. Now not only are you competing to kill monsters to get XP, but you are trying to kill certain combinations of monsters before the other members of your party do. Originally the monsters were in the center and you could attack the monster of your choice, but this resulted in a little too much kill-stealing, where one player would damage a monster and another player would finish it off and get the trophy. The final version has the monsters assigned to a player, with the players having the option to pass off a monster to another player if someone has a spot open. This means that if you get a monster that you cannot handle, you can pawn it off on someone else. It may end up that that monster travels around the table until someone is either forced to fight it or a player decides he can take it on and kill it. With the help of the developers at Queen, we were able to massage the game into a more dynamic version. Oh, and they also changed my playtest character names for some reason. I was very disappointed that my hard work naming them had gone to waste.
We also opened up the starting characters a bit after a few rounds of playtesting. Originally, you could carry only one weapon. This restricted the characters too much and left them too vulnerable to monsters that were immune or resistant to certain types of damage. Allowing the characters to have up to three weapons allowed players to branch out in different ways and to have a backup plan if something bad happened in the dungeon round.
One aspect of the cards is that a particular item will typically favor a skill and will also produce that skill if the card is converted. Card conversion is another twist on the tech tree mechanisms. Instead of just building out your cards in an ever-growing pile, you are often "upgrading" your items by converting an old item into a skill, which makes future purchases cheaper and potentially adds to the effects of some cards that key off of skills. It keeps the table layout a little simpler, since unlike in previous drafting games, you have to use the majority of the cards you draft during the dungeon fight portion of the game.
The competition for the monster trophies and the ability to move the monsters around adds an interactive element that I feel is important to avoid making the game feel like you are just building out a tech tree. There are four types of monsters in the game and you gain trophies for being the player who has killed the most of that particular type, along with the honorary title of Dragon slayer or Cow slayer or whatever the trophy confers while you hold it. Advanced players will look for every opportunity to end up with the trophies at the end of the round for extra scoring. There is randomness in both the cards you get in the draft and the order of the monsters in the dungeon, so the flow of the game will be different from game to game.
Prototype cards and stand-in components shown at Spiel 2012
Lost Legends is not a heavyweight design. You have decisions on which equipment to draft and which monsters to fight, but the game can be taught to players fairly quickly and casual gamers will pick it up easily. Expert players can play through a dungeon round in about 20-25 minutes, so a typical game of three dungeons will last about an hour to 1.5 hours for advanced players. Beginning players might take a little longer, and you can vary the number of dungeons that you play or the number of monsters you face in each dungeon to alter the game length as needed.
As with many of my games, this game has the potential for a number of variants. I am sure at some point rules for one or more cooperative versions will be produced, and the game can be played as a cooperative game as is by just changing the victory condition to surviving the dungeons, possibly giving the monsters extra attacks if players fall in order to encourage players to cooperate to avoid letting anyone die. It is also possible to modify the draft to allow for two-player play, although the monster interaction is not as dynamic with only one other player to pawn the monster off to. I also originally envisioned that you would be able to play with any subset of the draft cards. This is not the recommended version, however, as you can occasionally get fairly brutal combinations, but it is another option for expert players to look at. I think you will enjoy the game as published, but I already have a number of ideas on how to build it out because who puts out just a base game these days? Who knows – maybe when the game is published someone will say, "Hey, that's that cool dungeon drafting game by what's-his-name."
Happy gaming,
Mike Elliott
/pic1384601.jpg)
/pic1285421.jpg)
:strip_icc()/pic1458248.jpg)
/pic1420263.jpg)
/pic1276235.png)
