Designer Diary: Oranienburger Kanal

The First Ideas

Oranienburger Kanal is surely one of my "heaviest" games to appear in 2022, but originally it was not supposed to be like that at all.

I can still remember how I went to my favorite café with the mere idea and a few blank pieces of paper and made notes. After that, the game was almost ready — the rules, at least. I then spent several weeks designing one building tile after another and testing them in solo play. The buildings became more and more complex and required increasing care when planning during the game.

The game had seven action spaces, no more. I knew the game would get out of hand if I didn't condense it at the outset. I took inspiration for the game from Le Havre, but I designed the buildings as squares, made them on tiles rather than cards, and had no idea that I was taking my first steps toward making the "Legespiele" — that is, the tile-laying games — with which I am now familiar.

Oranienburger Kanal is a construction game, but it borrows from the Legespiele. During the Coronavirus period, I was looking for game ideas that I could develop without any players at all. Legespiele are strongly structured, meaning I could easily extrapolate from solo games to games with up to four players, so I developed one Legespiel after another, interrupted by a few attempts to design dice games as well. To be honest, my first attempts at Legespiele were made before Corona, but I had to pay a lot of "apprenticeship money" for these games, so the release of the design that I had originally called "Traffic Routes" now falls in a year in which up to five pure Legespiele of mine will be published. I almost hope that one or another game will shift to 2023, and I'm very curious to see how the individual games do. The first one, Framework, should already be on the market by the time this article is published.

Off to Oranienburg

A game usually gets its title from whoever publishes it. The author can try to find a good title himself. He can also simply call his game "Aufbauspiel [Building Game] Nummer 17". The title doesn't matter there, not yet — a good title is just a bonus for now.

I wouldn't have recommended my title "Traffic Routes" to any publisher as it suggests a rather abstract game: lay railroad tracks, maybe build roads, evaluate, and that's it — but Oranienburger Kanal is fortunately more. Cities like Mannheim and New York were designed on the drawing board like a chessboard. The player acts similarly in Oranienburger Kanal, except that they don't just lay out roads — and that made the search for a setting difficult. Why did it end up being Oranienburg, north of Berlin? Perhaps from a touch of romanticism since the canal was built in a once picturesque region. Fortunately, the degree of industrialization expressed in the game was never achieved in Oranienburg itself.

The seven actions in the prototype

Two Hours and a Fully Written Piece of Paper

Some ideas appear so clearly in your mind's eye that all that's left is to work them out. Looking back, I have to say that for such ideas, it's good that I didn't have any other ideas in parallel because I would have abandoned those clear ideas in favor of uncertain ones. Twenty-five years ago, for example, it took several months to go from the ideas to the realization of Mamma Mia!. Uncertain ideas are more exciting for me; clear ideas seem to me like a compulsory task, like a concrete specification of what I had to work out in the following days.

The ideas for Oranienburger Kanal were as clear as day, and they grew out of a fundamental consideration, from basic research, if you will, related to my game Le Havre. In that game, you construct one building after another, simply placing the buildings in front of you. In Ora et Labora, the first sequel game to Le Havre, if you like, I succeeded to some extent in giving meaning to the placement position, although Ora et Labora was still mainly about simply creating space for one's buildings. Only occasionally did the buildings make reference to neighboring buildings.

A second thing that had moved me during the development of Le Havre was that I allowed only two ways to use buildings, either as anytime options or as separate action fields. Even for Le Havre, I could have thought of more ways to use them, and in Ora et Labora I could have made more reference to neighboring buildings. However, by doing so I would have overloaded both games. If you put too much into a game, you're getting closer and closer to brain torture — but there is a way out: a new game.

Did someone say Ora et Labora?

The first idea for Oranienburger Kanal was to occupy the four edges of a tile — with what I didn't know yet — and to measure the yield of the building following this occupation. If you put buildings edge to edge, then you effectively occupy two buildings at once, which means it becomes necessary to think about the position of your buildings...so instead of thinking about occupying the edges, I should rather occupy the gaps in between: Streets and paths were the obvious choice.

But how do you expand on the idea when you have, at best, highways or dead ends? How do I get a thematic reference to the buildings? Thanks to the need to be able to name the buildings, I came up with rails and canals because with them, there can be stations, ports, and many other buildings from this environment in the game.

How and when should the buildings be scored? The best time for this was obvious: At the moment when all four sides of the building are occupied by transport routes. (This was the umbrella term I chose.) However, this is not enough for a decent game tempo. The player should not spend several actions on the construction of a building, then have it result in only one payout. Do I allow each building to be an action space as well? But I already had to deal with downtime because I let the players decide on the position of their buildings and transport routes. It's hard to imagine what would happen if the number of action fields got out of hand as in Agricola and Le Havre...

I started looking for a second scoring point and was satisfied with the concept of scoring buildings when they were flanked by three transport routes — but then two immediate scoring points could come in a row. The problem with scoring after only two transport paths was that buildings would often be used as soon as they were built. I needed something new, a path marker that could be claimed by both adjacent buildings, just like the transport paths.

As you can see, I had the hardest time in this game re-inventing the concept of bridges. This idea must have taken me two pieces of cake at the aforementioned café.

You Must Cross Seven Bridges

I wanted to tie the game ending to the building of seven bridges by the player thanks to a song by the band Karat — "Über sieben Brücken musst du gehen" ("You Must Cross Seven Bridges") — but a good game ending has to fit the game and not be a gag.

"Survive seven dark years." I would have liked that since people in the industrial cities didn't see much sun, but "survive seventy dark years" would have been more appropriate.

For me, the bridges were the idea that made the game round. Buildings are now scored twice: once for four transport routes, and once for two bridges. "Two bridges." For a few days, that was also my title for the game — until I went to Google Maps to look for the port of Zweibrücken ("two bridges") to discover that, well, no such thing exists.

Bridges, yes, but...

In many games, the main buildings are upgraded; in my game, it is the secondary objects — the transport routes — that give added value. What I liked the most is that some buildings are valued first after four transport routes, while other buildings are valued first after two bridges.

Is Spielworxx the New Uwe Publishing House?

You may have noticed the unexpected logo on the box. For years, I've been trying to make games with the same people because we know each other, because the processes are tried and tested, and because the "other side" has learned over the years to deal with my idiosyncrasies.

It's like everything in life. Whether a multi-year collaboration develops depends upon how it develops. Every team should cover everything that goes into making games, and this team was now a completely new one for me, with Uli Blennemann as publisher, Henning Kröpke as editor, and Harald Lieske as illustrator.

What was special, though, was that I have known all three of them for many years. That's why the collaboration also had a feeling of old familiarity. At the SPIEL fair in Essen in 2019, Uli had wondered how I would fit with him when I thought of presenting a game for Spielworxx. Uli said that his publishing house was much too small for the kind of games I make, but he didn't know Oranienburger Kanal yet.

My experiences with Arler Erde drove me to Uli. Arler Erde was a big, elaborate, two-person game that had too much downtime for three people. Arler Erde was successful in its own right, ranked somewhere between #50 and #60 on BoardGameGeek for many years. Despite this great approval, however, the sales success is more in line with those games of mine that rank between number 300 and 400.

What's more, Oranienburger Kanal is even a little more brain-bending to play than Arler Erde, and the theme is — let's say — dirtier, with no trace of the idyllic homeland of that design. It's no wonder that my other publishing partners tended to pounce on my high-volume games and unanimously recommend my "dirty gem" to wherever it fit best into a publishing program...somewhere. Fortunately, Uli gravitated toward Oranienburg, and at Spielworxx, this design will join a line of wonderful games like Ruhrschifffahrt, Kohle & Kolonie, and North American Railways.

And Another First...

Oranienburger Kanal will become my first crowdfunded game. That said, it's not a big stretch goal event. It's also not primarily a pre-funding project. It's an opportunity for Uli to make the imponderable tangible. His customers are used to his games existing exactly one thousand times. For that reason alone, every Spielworxx game has always been very special.

For a game from my pen to exist only one thousand times, Uli feared from the very first second that we could possibly cause resentment. Personally, I don't like it when my new games are hawked on eBay at three times the original price. (In the noughties this happened with Bohnanza variants.) Crowdfunding on Gamefound allows us to produce exactly as much as we need of a game where the range of possibly needed copies is quite variable.

I wish you continued fun with our shared hobby. Soon everything will be like it used to be.

Yours,
Uwe