:strip_icc()/pic3259102.png)
Well, we didn't, so this is more of a "Designer's retroactively puzzled-together story of how we prefer to remember the way we ended up with this game in our hands". It's maybe a bit more interesting, and, at the very least, casts a better light on our abilities as game designers. It is also very sketchy and ignores a large portion of what actually happened. But hey, water down the river et al.
Tobias: Unlike Heiko, I have perfect photographic memory, so I can recall every tiny detail about the whole process. It's like I'm a machine. A sentient robot. A neural net processor, a learning computer.
Okay, that may be a bit exaggerated. Possibly even a lot exaggerated. Or, actually, totally made up. The development of this game has been going on, intermittently, for years, after all.
:strip_icc()/pic1289390.jpg)
Roughly 2005 I was sharing a flat with Tobias, and also our weekly games' night, an unhealthy obsession with nuclear tanks, and a high-sugar diet — the perfect breeding ground for stupid game ideas. If you ever played bicycle-racing board games and gave all bikes large nitro tanks, flak guns, and flamethrowers, you probably know what I am talking about.
At least with myself I also shared my personal obsession with hunting "valuable things" at flea markets, especially obscure board games rising from the ashes of time. So I proposed to the assembled games' night folks to play this probably amazing game I just bought last Saturday. It had tankers and oil and drilling and pegs you put in holes and stuff.
A guy on the cover, with a BP logo crudely photoshopped (probably still in a real photo shop at that time) on his safety helmet lent further credibility to this Ravensburger title.
This obsession with getting obscure games from flea markets has, in my opinion, met with somewhat mixed success. At first glance, this game looked like an incredibly retro and incredibly clumsy piece of marketing. The second and third glance did little to change that impression.
The "clumsy marketing" aside, we immediately liked the theme. One or two years before, the media had been full of images from the recent large oil spill on the coast of France and Spain. Obviously, this had to be a game about sinister large oil companies exploiting the environment, all for the greater good of making profit and helping the world economy grow. You probably would backroom deal with other players, try to forge tanker papers, sink enemies' tankers, and earn a shitload of money. Presumably, Ellis or Ennis would have written the script, and you could play as any James Bond villain you liked.
It should, perhaps, be pointed out that what Heiko describes are things we absolutely love in games. I mean, who doesn't want to be a Bond villain? Who doesn't want to poison vast stretches of pristine nature just to make a quick buck? It's probably a basic human need, I guess.
:strip_icc()/pic1661228.jpg)
While some of our hopes were indeed, and surprisingly, and probably unintentionally, correct, most were not. You could move funky tanker miniatures with holes that held oil pegs around the board, and load off oil at refinery centers. Drilling was somewhat fun; at the fate of a die roll you moved pegs on a drill board deeper and deeper into the unyielding soil, sometimes to strike a rich vein, sometimes to no avail.
Another peg board was reserved for more cool bookkeeping stuff, and there was money and named oil fields from real life and shipping contracts and the North Sea and, to be true, a roll-and-move game at the core that happened on a track suspiciously similar to Monopoly. Well, it goes around a board, a rectangular board, and there is a Start spot where you collect income.
The whole thing lacked some proper sort of ending condition, and after a few hours we decided that we had reached it all the same. We multiplied our red plastic chips with moneys and some other things happened and one of us had won. But still, cool tankers.
The biggest problem was that everything was terribly nice. There were no morally questionable things to do, no trade wars, and precious few ways to screw another player. The company you played was totally law-abiding, responsible, and honest — which is a bit much to swallow in a game about Big Oil. Anyway, this was a huge pity because many ideas in the game were pretty nifty.
A nondescript amount of time passed.
We decided that the tanker miniatures were just too cool, and we needed to use them in a new version of this game, a proper version, with slush funds, weapon trading, black markets, oil spills, nuclear tanks, nepotistic regimes, general mayhem, and a real end. Over a few different versions, sometimes with a year or so in between revisiting the game, sometimes only days, we kept adding things we liked at the time and removing ones that didn't work.
Regulars of our games' night started to fear "the oil game", and we had to come up with all sorts of annoying ploys to make them play it. Sorry, guys, but if you are reading this, that cousin of mine neither suffers from a highly contagious blood disease nor licked all of my other games.
Over time, this game has probably used most mechanisms a game can use at one time or another. We had, at various points, roll-and-move, fixed move, everything controlled by dice, diceless, what have you — except a hex grid, which somehow never made it in. Weird.
:strip_icc()/pic3208736.jpg)
The playtest for our great new game, lovingly dubbed "Blut für Öl", was still a mess, but it was ours, and one we liked better.
Allowing each action to be taken in a more effective version, called "dirty", which also brought the potential of causing a PR disaster, made you feel like the bad overlords of oil dealing you were supposed to be. The roll-and-move track on the other hand decidedly did not. We kicked that out for the next one.
The roll-and-move track also cluttered the board and was just ugly.
:strip_icc()/pic3209280.jpg)
The drilling had been abridged to a simple die roll, and there were several spots you could "control". To trade weapons, you needed to control cards (corresponding to spots) with at least one left (origin country) and one right (key market) half of an AK-47. I can't really be bothered to search for the rules on old hard drives, and, in fact, am highly surprised I even found these images. To be honest, I have no idea what the turn structure was in this version.
What I do remember is that you had secret accounts for especially dirty deals. They did not hold any money or anything, but if you were required to pay money from such fund, you just flipped one of your "secret account" cards on its used side. Control over certain regions (South America, I guess) gave you access to more secret funds, and some money laundering action allowed you to flip them back to their active side. Hm. Tobias, remember anything more?
The game was pretty complicated at this point, if I remember correctly. You could do a lot of things, but pretty few of them were simple, or even — gasp — automatically successful. I think it would have been very difficult to get into the game unless you had been evolving it for months.
:strip_icc()/pic3209303.jpg)
V3 and V4 are lost in the haze that is the past. By the time of Version 5, the shipping routes had been opened to allow for less linear movement and for jockeying for good tanker positions at the refinery centers. If your tanker suffered a disaster, the place it happened was of great importance for the amount of money it cost you to get a hold on the ensuing PR disaster. A disaster around Europe or North America was quite the costly indulgence, whereas sinking your tanker around Africa or in the open Atlantic didn't really concern anyone.
Drilling had been further abstracted into cards, and tankers had a "cool down" phase at the refineries, where you could not retrieve your tanker until all spots had been filled.
Oh, right, to make more profit, you wanted to first destabilize regions, then take control of them. Stabilizing an opponent's region at the wrong moment could really mess with plans. Mercenaries were a central part of every thriving oil empire. Also, building pipelines for the greater good (and a lot of money).
There's still information overload in this version. Even with Heiko's love for clean design and minimalism, there's loads of different symbols and references and little fiddly stuff. The pipelines are a good example; you had to construct the things piece by piece, and the earlier versions were so difficult to complete that the whole pipeline thing was pretty much useless.
Ah, also, there was, I think, a really nice area-system that allowed your general influence in a larger area to filter down into a specific control over one region in that area. I have to admit I introduced it somewhat secretly, bypassing Tobias, and he never liked it. In retrospect, I totally agree, but can also relate to past Heiko being incredibly annoyed at the blasé reaction of his to my great innovation. Also, they look good. Sucker.
/cough/ Yes, well, it was a really nice system. It just sucked. Seriously, I'm pretty certain that a lot of the sub-games from those early versions could be developed into full games on their own, actually. The area control part was something like that: an interesting new game, but too unwieldy to bolt onto this one.
Even so, I still think we should have put a hex grid on the ocean, and added Attack, Defense and Move stats to the tankers.
Somewhere during these versions, we also read up on oil: where it is, who uses it, and how much it costs, along with which routes it is usually shipped upon and what the dangers are. Why are oil corporations so evil? How does the pricing in refineries actually work? Is oil from the North Sea or Canada an important factor, globally, and which refinery centers are actually important, nowadays? How does all of this relate to nuclear tanks? Is "Peak Oil" actually "a thing"? That kind of boring stuff.
It's incredible how Wikipedia has changed the way we access information. Why, when I was younger…!
With all that research, we definitely wanted to avoid being preachy. This was a game first, after all. Still, we were (and are) impressed by games which are fun, mechanically, and also give you something to think about. We both like Soft Landing by BTRC, for instance. I think the final version of Peak Oil works very well this way. There's a solid game, with meaningful decisions and interaction — and it's also a commentary about how some things might possibly be not ideal in the real world without being in-your-face about it. I guess you can approach the game on either level. I like that.
:strip_icc()/pic3209773.jpg)
By Version 6, oil spills in most regions of the oceans didn't concern the public any more, and the refinery centers had lost their initial price granularity. Each had only a high and low price left, and changing it was not a function of ebbing and swelling oil streams any more, but solely controlled by the evil players.
This version introduced the current way of accumulating victory points in a crude and early stage. Playing the game involved moving around heaps of poker chip money, which you could use to buy into future techs. The little chart in the lower left corner could be influenced to manipulate your and your opponents' final scores. If you invested in, say, the tech on the right of a given row, you wanted the public to like it better than the one on the left of the same row.
Version 6 also had the first implementation of the worker majority action system. The control concept had degenerated into "controlling pirates", which was not really a bad thing.
:strip_icc()/pic3209774.jpg)
Not a lot changed for Version 7, with the notable exception being that the value grid for the techs evolved into a value wheel. The position of a single pawn on it at game end gave bonus points to that tech as well as the neighboring ones, although fewer. Prices at refinery centers again had a "degrading" function to them, and could only artificially be increased through the interference of companies.
Finally, we let go of the cool tankers, and all of a sudden, things worked really well. Instead of managing your ships and moving them around the board each turn, something you'd constantly forget, you just acquired shipping contracts, and each of these was good for one shipment. Also, major saving on the components.
It's really ironic. The tankers were one of the things we liked best initially, but removing them was a definite improvement. In the same way, most of the concepts or mechanisms which were crucial in the beginning got pruned along the way. And this made things better! I find it striking how much the final version differs from the early drafts.
:strip_icc()/pic3210512.jpg)
PEAK OIL PNP
This is pretty close to what we uploaded to BGG and "sold" to 2Tomatoes at SPIEL '15, the notable exception being that this version still used money, alongside oil, as a second resource and allow you to increase only the value of your own techs, not those of other players.
Generally, an unholy amount of playtesting with very diverse crowds happened to this game in its various incarnations, and the most valuable thing we learned from it, I guess, is not to do what playtesters want you to. Listen closely to what they say, try to locate what makes them say it, see if that source may be fixed, and work on that, but completely ignore any direct advice on how to make your game better.
Oh, another thing might be that if you have an idea you think is the funky shit, build it into the game and see what happens. And keep your playtesters bribed well. Beer and crunchy salty things work well. Visit different groups. Don't be shy as most gamers are delighted to play an unpublished prototype. Be nice.
Ain't that the truth. I vividly remember one evening when we got detailed feedback, looked at each other, and thought, "Let's just not do all that." Understanding the reason for feedback is much more useful than simply implementing every bit of advice you get — just like in real life, I guess.
The second lesson I learned is that sometimes you need to trash parts of your design. Don't be afraid to let go of things. Also, find your inner center. And consider Phlebas. Someone has to.
This pretty much concludes this "diary". Thanks for reading. To find out what happened after we found a publisher, check this development blog: Peak Oil - From PnP to Published Game Thread. (Short summary: Amazement at somebody wanting to publish this, lots of talking, lots of great development by incredibly skilled game designers, new art style, graphic design, Kickstarter, production. No nuclear tanks.) Should you be interested in meeting us for a round or two on the published copies, we will be at SPIEL this year, at the 2Tomatoes booth (7:K120).
:strip_icc()/pic3768485.jpg)
:strip_icc()/pic3762352.jpg)
:strip_icc()/pic3765714.jpg)
/pic3414531.jpg)
:strip_icc()/pic3762236.jpg)
