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Fact junkies: Add two hundred years to the dates below for a more accurate reading...
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December 1813
We first set out, from Australia and England, on a journey quite unlike the one that would shape our fate: to design a game about dwarves brewing beer. As with so many grand designs, our plans were dashed on the rocks and the expedition a failure. Over-complexity and ideas that didn't quite hang together saw us walk away from yet another promising adventure, but those initial dreams did bear fruit: a crumb of an idea in which dice were rolled, but no matter whether they were 6s or 1s, you'd have an advantage of one kind or another. Here, we had individuals rolling their own three dice, then using them to draft cards, each representing a worker dwarf: low rolls would get the first choice of cards, while higher rolls would use the cards they drafted more effectively. I still held some hope for the idea, but at the time it had too many issues. Hate-drafting was rife on low numbers, choices limited on high ones, and all 'round it was unsatisfying.
March 1814
Undeterred by our earlier failure, we set out with a new destination in mind. America! Matt laid out his plans thusly: Players still draft three cards each with their dice (lowest first), but now the cards bear a number of profession symbols (traveller, miner, farmer, etc.), and the dice give only a one-time bonus to the players, with the highest collection of each profession giving that player a bonus for the round — which meant that the drafting was also about long-term strategy with the professions rather than just short-term tactical play.
Actions saw players move caravans across the plains, mine the hills, build in new territories, fight off hostiles, and of course feed their hardy pioneers — but something still wasn't right. While we were now firmly on dry land and resolved to discover a new destiny, the dice mechanism still didn't sit well with us. Low rollers were still denying others the actions they wanted, and the compensation for the high numbers wasn't strong enough. Were we simply doomed to repeat our earlier failures?
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May 1814
A breakthrough! Dysentery and terrible weather had laid us low, but the skies cleared and we could clearly make out the way ahead. Instead of having different colored dice for each player, the dice colors represent disasters that may befall all our pioneers. Players draw one more die from a bag each round than there are players, then draft one die each, with the leftover die moving that disaster one step closer to befalling those brave souls. Colors represent illness (medicine required!), raids (there goes your money!), heat (your cattle will suffer!), and terrain (say b-bye to your wagons, which were holding all your stuff!) — with the dreaded black dice seeing all four disasters moving ever closer.
The game has five turns, with each player taking five dice each turn, for a total of 25 actions in the game. Each die can be used either for money (where high is better, with the money being spent on wagons, specialist workers, etc.) or for an action (with better actions being tied to lower numbers). As an added twist, your final set of five collected dice creates a Yahtzee/poker-style "hand" that gives bonuses at the end of the round. We feel confident in our new-found mechanism — but will it be another false dawn?
August 1814
We spent the previous few months on the trail with a more singular purpose, and it finally bore fruit! The answer wasn't poker; it was people! While we fine-tuned the mechanical side of the game, we realized what it needed were the personalities that made the original idea so compelling — the people themselves, now transformed into pioneers. These hardy folk have added a whole host of interesting abilities into the mix, adding more interaction between players and making the base actions far more varied and complex.
In addition to adding color, these pioneers have brought two levels of mechanical progression that have sealed the game's structure. The poker idea is gone; instead, your pioneers offer a new option to think about when choosing a die, regardless of what the number is. More specifically, each die now has a person randomly drawn next to it each round, and by choosing that die you can add the person to your wagon train. Better still, the pioneers each have a way of scoring endgame points, which helps you choose a particular path to follow — assuming you can keep them alive to the end of the trail…
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January 1815
An investor! Our very own Oregon Trail seems to have ended, in fact, in Utah — via Essen, Germany. In October 1814, we met with a character named Seth Jaffee who represented a company called Tasty Minstrel Games, a publisher we trusted to do the right thing by us and our game, then called "Frontiers". He took the game away to show it to his partners — and low and behold, we have ourselves a deal!
The difference between publishers is truly astonishing. Sometimes you can hand a game over and out it pops into the shops a year later with nary a detail changed, while with others you can be all but cut out of the development process. The game we gave them back then was rough around the edges, yet mechanically sound, and we'd spent the last few months going back and forth with them smoothing the edges — but if we thought we'd be able to hang our spurs up and relax this time, we were in for a shock! We were consulted every step of the way, with not a week going by without discussions of a particular pioneer's ability or the relative strength of a particular action. It's a long process, but worth every second because each week you know the game is getting better.
June 1815
While the trail was long and winding, and we often felt the end was in sight only to find another fork in the path, we continued to persevere. I was worried we may have taken too many rough edges away — this is the Wild West, after all — but in hindsight I can see the wisdom behind Seth removing some of the more trouble-making townsfolk. Who knows, maybe they can return one day?
Elsewhere, wagons now take damage rather than being destroyed by storms, which means you won't lose as many valuable resources! And as fun as some of the "take that" elements were, some of them were a little too crass for this style of Eurogame, especially when the key focus should be on the disaster track. You should be worrying whether bandits will take your gold if you let a disaster happen rather than worrying about another player sniping it from you. If I've learned one thing from all the game design blogs I've read and podcasts I've listened to, it's this: Find where the game is. For us, it is on that disaster board with the tension that it brings — that shouldn't be upstaged.
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December 1816
The end of the trail cannot be far away now! Many months of further small iterations have seen us create themed decks of townsfolk, while working on individual player board abilities. The game is now called Pioneer Days, and artist Sergi Marcet has been brought on board to bring the game to life. He's done an amazing job, even bringing some of our family members and playtesters to life on some of the townsfolk cards. You may even recognize a few of our fellow Cambridge, UK-based designers. The different decks of townsfolk help make each game feel different as you can mix and match them, with some adding a bit of randomness, others interactivity, etc. The varied player board characters encourage different types of play style. You get two to choose from at the start of the game, but each also has a standard pioneer on the back (always a solid choice), so you can still opt for a balanced game if that's what floats your boat.
October 1817
A limited supply of final copies arrived at SPIEL '17 via an aeroplane. Opening the first copy to find a beautiful game — but no dice — was a little terrifying! Especially after we opened the next and the next to find the same thing...
A few phone calls later, and we knew (prayed) they'd arrive the next day. They did — and the few available copies soon sold out, leaving us waiting on the rest to arrive by boat, perhaps even in time for Christmas?
Once again, in a fitting nod to those hardy pioneers of old, transportation of the game across the seas hit rough waters. Despite what clearly must have been a succession of black-dice-level disasters, we never lost hope — and in April 1818 Pioneer Days finally completed its troubled journey to the USA. We hope you like it! (Much love to co-designer Matt Dunstan, who also wrote the original draft of this diary.)
Chris Marling
[Editor's note: Pioneer Days has a U.S. street date of April 11, 2018. —WEM]
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