Designer Diary: Minute Realms

Hello! I'm the designer of Minute Realms, and I'd like to share some of the development phases of my new game.

It’s been a while since I decided that I wanted to design a card-drafting game. My goal was to scramble the typical clockwise/counterclockwise draft a bit, replacing it with something more…multi-directional. Thus, I started experimenting in several ways, thinking of new ways to pass cards among players, while trying to give players deep choices and a fair amount of control over the draft.

Set-up for a four-player game

I thought about a typical medieval setting for the game, using the very nice Travian buildings for the prototype! Players would draft buildings with various effects in order to develop their personal realm.

After some attempts, I understood two things. First, secret and simultaneous drafting had to be ditched in favor of a turn-based structure in which each player takes a turn to draft. Second, due to this turn-based structure, I could not allow lots of cards to be displayed at the same time.

The first prototype of the game

This brought me to the point that each player would draft just one card per round. This stands in stark contrast with games like 7 Wonders and Fairy Tale in which players draft entire hands of cards. The result is a game based on what I call asynchronous draft, and I happily discovered that it worked quite well.

Development of the cathedral card, from prototype to production

Most importantly, playtesters liked it a lot — or at least they didn't boo me when I brought the prototype to the table, which is, per se, a very satisfying achievement!

Furthermore, thanks to the idea of placing only two cards in the middle of the table in addition to one in front of each player, I understood that I could trigger specific effects based on the position of cards drafted by players, i.e., there is an important difference if I pick a card from the middle of the table, from in front of another player, or from in front of myself. Is it worth mentioning that of course once a card has been drafted, nobody else can take it away from its owner!

The cards show a specific bonus/penalty — highlighted in yellow — that triggers when a player drafts the card;

these triggers have a different impact depending on the position of the card on the table

After a few tests, the two main mechanisms of "Realms" had finally been tuned: the asynchronous drafting (or whatever you want to call it), and the "triggers" on the cards. While continuing to design the game, I added some twists to spice things up:

• Coins to balance the strength of the different cards and to introduce some micro-resource-management. The higher the cost, the more the points it would score at the end of the game — provided that you manage to defend it from invaders.

You must pay 2 coins to build the Monastery. At game's end, it's worth 9 victory points minus the number of coins you have

• Invaders as an unpredictable threat that menaces the realm of every player. They bring climax, suspense, and more emphasis to the overall experience.

These bad guys march on your lovely realm, so build enough shields to keep them out!

• A defensive bastion on the back of every card in order to give players more choices while drafting by always giving them a chance to defend their realm from invaders and gain coins.

Every card has a defensive bastion with two shields on the back

Bastions are useful for defending yourself from invaders. If you erect a bastion, you immediately gain two coins and two shields. However, you also renounce the chance of building the wonderful building on the front, which would have given you victory points at the end of the game!

Luckily, some buildings provide shields even on the front of the card!

This has been a "one shot-one kill" operation: I went straight to dV Giochi to propose the game, and they were immediately very interested. Since then, the development of the game went quite smoothly, although it required a lot of time to make sure everything was well-balanced.

Regarding the final title, it is not very different from the original. Both the publisher and I wanted to keep the word "Realms" in the title, and in the end we decided to add just an adjective to underline the quickness of the gameplay and the short length of the game. We went from "Small Realms" to "Tiny Realms" (naaah, too many "Tiny" games around) to "Little Realms", then the publisher came and said "Okay, let's add 'Minute' to it." The word fits because it identifies something small — heck, a realm of just eight cards! — and at the same time it reminds you of minutes, which is fitting for a game that literally takes minutes to play.

Stefano Castelli