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Looking back, that initial offering was a real dinosaur: cumbersome, slow, and without novelty. So after twenty-odd years on the back burner, what's new? Answer: Patriarchs. These represent those familiar gaming characters of priests, merchants and farmers, and they ride the units of population that occupy the map, so the game has military and civilization building with some resource management on top. And then there are two variable objective tracks, one that provides extra tactical abilities and victory points for spending coins, while the other generates victory points for achieving unit positions on the map.
Okay, so bullet points as to what else you can expect in the game:
-----• A history of the Promised Land from Joshua through to the Babylonian captivity
-----• 2-6 players
-----• A two-hour playing time
-----• 54 Kingdom cards divided between Hebrews and Heathens
-----• A game with dice (Ragnar-modified)
-----• Simple alternative rules without dice
-----• Canaanites, Philistines, Arameans, Egyptians, Phoenicians, Edomites, Ammonites, Midianites, Moabites, Assyrians, Babylonians
-----• Joshua, Gideon, Samson, Saul, David, Solomon, Omri, Jereboam, Hosheah, Zedekiah (and more)
-----• Cities and temples
-----• The Ark (of the Covenant, not Noah's)
-----• Coins for farming, trade and culture
-----• Artefacts that are bought, used to strengthen position, and add to a victory point tally
-----• A stunning map
Here's a breakdown of some key elements and how they came to be designed.
Who Plays What?
We tried a range of possibilities, the most extreme being that each player played one of the twelve tribes of Israel, battling against "automated" enemy opponents. Now players are in two teams, out of which just one individual will be crowned the winner. Hebrew units are split between Northern and Southern kingdoms, but Hebrew players will have the opportunity to use both of these factions through the game. Similarly there are eleven Heathen kingdoms for the Heathen players to use.
Kingdom Allocation
Time track or cards, time track or cards? In the end we chose both, though the time track is simply an aide memoire. Using cards allowed variability of player order. The order of historic events and personages was set from the start, but we reduced down to about half our original number. There are now three Books of nine cards for both Hebrews and Heathens. After many alternatives, we discovered a distribution formula of dealing a set number of cards per player, with each player then discarding one card, e.g., receive four in the deal, then discard one. Simple – can't think why it took us so long.
Conquest
Joshua's invasion of the Canaanite lands was generally less successful on the plains as the Canaanites had chariots. This salient fact underpinned the combat mechanisms from day 1. There are two terrains – hills and plains – and each kingdom is designated a combat ability in both. This amounts to one, two or three dice which are rolled against one die for the defender. The defender adds +1 for a city or for a stacked unit or if the land is the starting land for that kingdom. "Force Victory" can be achieved if there are no +1s for the defender, in which case no dice are rolled, but the attacker may forfeit a unit or "half unit". Players of A Brief History of the World will feel in familiar territory. Players who have an aversion to dice can opt to use the "no dice" alternative rules.
Patriarchs
The idea of play happening at an individual, human level as well as at the movement of nations level appealed to us. It also enabled elements of scoring to be made more comparable, i.e. a small kingdom such as the Edomites might punch its weight rather better against a larger kingdom such as that of the Solomon empire.
There is an element of Carcassonne in the design: Each player has two farmers, two merchants and two priests. A number of these can be placed after conquest into lands occupied by the kingdom just played. Farmers collect two bronze coins for plains and one bronze coin for hills. Merchants collect two silver coins for ports and one silver coin for roads. Priests collect two gold coins for temples and one gold coin for cities. Players may have only one of their patriarchs in any one land. Players may share occupation of a land, but only one type of patriarch can be in each land. Patriarchs may retreat, but I won't go into more detail now. Here's an example:
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Apologies for the quality of pre-production graphics; hope you can work out what it shows.
Artefacts
At one point the game featured a rondel system, and included in that were "Siege-craft" and "Masons". Once the patriarchs were introduced and revenue collected, it was necessary to expand the number of abilities and effects to create a bank of Artefacts to be collected and used. The game now includes 72 Artefacts, generally three of each type that require payment of one type of coin. Twenty Artefacts fill an array at the start of each Book. They cost 3, 6 or 9 coins and are worth 1, 2 or 3 points respectively. Number crunching was prolonged before finally settling on this simplest formula (again).
Objective Tracks
Quite late in the day it was suggested that historic objectives might give the game more feel. Britannia and Ancient Conquest were cited as examples. More importantly it became clear that there needed to be a greater range of strategies for players to choose from. Both the Kingdom track and the Royal track started off with fewer spaces than there are now and were more prescriptive. A random draw of chits is now used, with twelve on the Kingdom track, such as this one:
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and eight on the Royal track, for example:
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And Finally...
Just prior to Ragnar Brothers producing A Brief History of the World in 2009, there had been a period of activity in which Promised Land almost reached design completion. In the end that particular version morphed into other versions, long before today's final game started to materialize in the middle of 2012. However, it was serious enough for us to commission box artwork from Colin Jones, the artist responsible for the box art on Canal Mania and Monastery. As ever Colin did not let us down:
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We have now commissioned Vicky Paul to design the map and component graphics. To date we have received sketches and are well on the way to a finished map in time for our crowdfunding launch. If we reach our target of £10,000, then Vicky will press on to completion and we should have the game in production over the summer.
We'd be delighted for support on our first launch on Kickstarter UK. After twenty-five years and fifteen previous games, this is an exciting venture for us. As ever, we don't anticipate making a fortune, but do hope that this platform will enable us to capitalize this and subsequent Ragnar Brothers games currently in the pipeline.
Gary Dicken
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