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It also had a couple of impacts on me. First, I had to repurchase the rights to my games and get back prototypes for games Sandstorm had not yet put under contract. The owners of Sandstorm were fair and accommodating with me about this, in the midst of a lot of frenetic activity for them. Then I unexpectedly entered into rushed negotiations about possibly immediately reselling the rights to the games to other companies that expressed interest in them, but these did not pan out for reasons I won't discuss here because they touch on other people's businesses and need to remain private.
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Waiting for a new home
Besides, if I am going to spend money, I would rather have it be on the next game rather than the last game. Now having no real relationship with an extant game company, I started to think about self-publication once more and designing a new game well-suited to self-publication.
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When I repurchased the rights to Cambria and Hibernia, I also bought the rights to the beautiful artwork that Brent Knudson had done for the games. He had been a full-time employee of Sandstorm rather than a freelancer, so I got not just the final art for the games but early drafts, artwork developed for the games but never used, etc. Going through this trove of art I now owned, I thought about the possibility of creating a Cambria card game that might use the same artwork. While I quickly realized that not enough art existed to do the card game the way I wanted to, my fondness for the Cambria art – which I still consider to be Brent's best work to date – got me thinking about making this card game, Romans Go Home!. I also learned a bit about graphic arts by taking apart the layers of his Illustrator files and seeing the evolution of his final artwork over several iterations.
I started out by trying to envision how I would translate Cambria into a card game. This is probably my favorite kind of game design puzzle, trying to move a mechanism from one gaming medium to another – like turning a dice mechanism into a card mechanism, or vice-versa. I did not end up directly translating any mechanisms in this case, though; rather I tried to put essential elements (a phenomenological term) of Cambria's gameplay into the new game. So what were these essential elements? Collusion of player actions to create outcomes, the game needed to feel "fighty", it needed to have fast play, and of course it needed to be a game about laying siege to fortresses. I tried to have the game include a network, as Cambria does, but that led toward a board-made-out-of cards game, which I never like. I decided the essence of the network mechanism in Cambria was to be able to build an outcome out of a series of plays that have an interactional effect; in other words, I wanted players to build up a multi-card play over time somehow.
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I then landed on the idea of having a pre-programmed row of Fort Cards that the players would compete for in the order of the row. The players would each have their own deck of warrior cards to use in bidding, as in Knizia's Great Wall of China, because I think that is more balanced than having all players draw from the same deck, as in Condotierre. To make the game faster and distinctive from those two games, I decided to use simultaneous blind bidding rather than a standard auction mechanism. Players each bid one card, and the high bid takes the next Fort. The winning player discards her bid, and the other players keep their bid on the table and add to it. Over time, the bidding is not truly blind, but more like a partial information bid. Winning one of the later, larger Fort Cards requires an effort to hang back and build up.
After trying this with nothing more than numbers on the warrior cards, it quickly became clear that the warriors needed to have special powers. I put a heavy emphasis on balance in my designs, so I used the text effects to balance the numerical battle strength of the card: the lower the battle strength, the more positive the power for the player, and the higher the battle strength, the more negative the power for the player. I also tried to use these powers to put some clear theme-mechanism relationship into the game; the best example of this is that if multiple Chariot cards are played at the same time, they crash into each other and are discarded. I don't feel that some of the geek-griping about my prior games being abstract is entirely fair, but I did try to head it off at the pass this time by making the theme a little more in-your-face.
At this point the game "worked" – that is, mechanically it was sound. However, the playtesters weren't enthusiastic about it. After debriefing them, I discovered this was because the choices on any given turn were too obvious; there weren't any tricky decision points. I also didn't feel like the game had its "money note" yet – the mechanism or gameplay aspect that would make it stand out from other games.
I came close to giving up on the design, but then landed on the idea of having not just blind bidding, but blind PROGRAMMING. Instead of bidding one card at a time, then revealing, players would program six cards at a time, then reveal them one by one. This change required the revision and addition of some card powers, such as the Queen Card, which allows you to reprogram your remaining face-down moves. This really gave the players much more to think about and also made the card-revealing phase much more exciting; the effect is a little like 6 nimmt!/Category 5, although the choices are more strategic than in that game.
At this point the playtesters were really enthusiastic about the game, and I felt I had hit upon an original mechanism. There are certainly programming games out there – Marchands D’Empire/Himalaya and Ad Astra are my favorites – but I couldn't think of any pure card games with this amount of advance programming; Nuclear War has a two-card programming sequence, but it doesn't matter to the game play very much. (I write this knowing full well that Geekdom will soon inform me of the existence of literally dozens of card-programming games, fully half of which will actually be card programming games, while the other half of the responses will make little or no sense. I give the dog a spoonful of peanut butter, fully aware that he will be happy and preoccupied, making noise for some time.)
I knew I needed distinctive artwork for each card, so recycling Brent's Cambria artwork was out. I usually do my early card game prototyping with dingbat-font art and print it on business cards; this allows me to do rapid, low-effort re-prototyping as much as needed. When a game is nearing final form, I usually do better artwork, print it on Plaincards.com cards, then use that prototype to shop it to publishers. In this case, though, I made art in the style I used for Armorica, with serious theming. Since I had gotten away from the Cambria card game idea, I had reset the game along Hadrian's Wall during the same "Barbarian Conspiracy" period that Cambria is set in. I was toying with the names "Caledonia" and "Hadrian's Wall" for the game.
Around this time I learned to my surprise that Hibernia had been nominated for an Origins award. The games get nominated through a voting process by retailers at the GAMA Trade Show that happens in March. I was surprised because although Sandstorm had submitted my games for consideration, the company was out of business before the show took place, and there was no one representing or showing the games at GTS. So I belatedly made plans to head to Origins Game Fair so that I could be there in case I won. Loren Coleman, who had bought the inventory of Hibernia and Cambria as part of a larger Sandstorm acquisition, graciously gave me some demo space in the Catalyst booth at Origins.
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I had designed another card game as well, in addition to a card game and two board game prototypes that came back to me from Sandstorm, so I put self-publication on hold while I looked into whether I could use the bit of momentum I had to find a real publisher for any of my games. Hibernia did not win, which was not surprising given that it was up against a D&D board game in its category. Publishers considering my card games caused some delay in my self-publication efforts, but did not yield any deals ultimately. Friends of mine from Asmodee and FoxMind did like the game, although it did not fit their lines, and it was they who advised me to switch the artwork theme from serious to cute/comic. Jessica Blair, who is a skilled sales and marketing person and who I had worked most closely with at Sandstorm, kindly also set up meetings with publishers for me at Gen Con that year.
When I came home, I got a commission from Evil Hat Productions through my good friends at the game retailer Endgame to do development on their upcoming Zeppelin Armada card game, which eventually evolved into me redesigning the card game from scratch when development proved insufficient. A friend of mine who was working for My Witty Games in France also invited me to submit a prototype, and I ended up spending time redesigning one of the prototypes I originally did for Sandstorm to make it fit their needs better. I'll tell those stories later, but for now suffice it to say that there was a lot of game designing and testing to be done, and it was January 2013 before I really got back to working on the game that became Romans Go Home!
Now that I had a game in production with a real publisher again, I had second thoughts about whether I wanted to self-publish a game at all. However, I really liked this little game and I had gone all the way through 2012 without getting a new game on the market. Thus, I decided to go ahead with it.
Job #1 was revising the artwork. Ultimately I was happier with the cartoony artwork, which wasn't over-the-top humorous but subtly humorous and cute. I renamed the game Romans Go Home! to be more consistent with the cartoony theming. This also alludes to a sort of subtle Postcolonial theme that in my mind (and probably nowhere else) has always been part of the games in the Celtic Nations series. (One day I am going to do a game explicitly about postcolonialism; there are so many games about colonialism, after all.) I then got dumped by my significant other of three years, which initially slowed, then rather speeded up my self-publishing efforts.
One mistake that game designers and publisher have made on Kickstarter in the past is not getting all their manufacturing arrangements finalized before they launch their Kickstarter, preventing them from knowing their costs and timetable at the outset. So job #3 was getting quotes for printing the game. Once you launch a website that says you publish games, manufacturers in China start spamming you right and left, so I went through the emails I had gotten over the last couple of years and asking for quotes. The printer I had used last time could not do a two-piece box in the volume I wanted to order, and Aldo really wanted me to use a two-piece box this time instead of a tuck box. I also looked hard for someone in the U.S. to give me a feasible quote. I even played with the idea of having a "made-in-America" stretch goal for my Kickstarter. Unfortunately, U.S. printers have the capacity to give good prices only at very high volumes, so I ultimately had to go to China. I eventually found a printer who gave me a good quote, and I was able to look at some samples of their work and talk with previous customers of theirs; special thanks to Numbskull Games for their feedback in this regard.
I then had to plan Kickstarter rewards. I received a lot of good advice I did not take when it came to this. I say it was good advice because I think it was all optimal in terms of getting the most money. I didn't take it because I was priotitizing keeping my first Kickstarter feasible and manageable for me. I am a one-man operation, after all, and my philosophy with self-publishing has always been to start small and ramp up gradually. I have no idea going into this how much interest a Kickstarter I do by myself will generate, but if this one succeeds, I may be more ambitious next time. One of the things Fred Hicks and Chris Hanrahan had done for the Evil Hat Kickstarter was to have some cheap backing levels with purely .PDF rewards that could be delivered by email. This seemed wise to me since fulfillment by mail is clearly one of the biggest headaches that Kickstarters involve. Chris also convinced me that I should offer the game itself as a print-and-play PDF. I had the idea of sweetening the print-and-play pot by including expansions for my other games in an effort to appeal to whatever core fan base I have. (I hear from them, so I know they're out there. I just don't have any good info about how numerous they are.) I also wrote up and included a minimalist RPG that I created entirely as a joke. Some years ago, Ryan Macklin created a hilarious joke game, the rules of which fit easily on one side of a business card called Hit A Dude. I dreamed up an RPG that can be played in 5-7 minutes that I called Be A Dude, the rules of which fit on one sheet of paper. I played it with friends from FoxMind and Asmodee at Gen Con while we were waiting for our food to arrive at a restaurant. I wrote that up in as humorous a manner as I could and included it in the PDF "goodie bag". I also had to price shipping and attend to a whole bunch of other tiresome little details in preparation for the Kickstarter.
One of the biggest jobs was to create videos for the Kickstarter. Another thing Chris and Fred did that I liked was that they made a cinematic Kickstarter main video, then did a good "game instruction" video. However, Evil Hat could afford to outsource the videomaking. Me being much smaller, I would have to make the videos myself. Fortunately, I do know how to use Poser to do computer animation, and I have a little background in filmmaking. I ended up creating a Kickstarter video that I think looks and sounds different from most. I am not shy, but decided to minimize my presence in the videos as a stylistic choice. Because Kickstarter advises project creators to appear on camera and be personal in their appeal, I think this approach gets overused and makes the videos come out looking similar. The teach video by contrast was more of a boring chore to execute, but I was happy with the result; I erred on the side of being dry while teaching the game as efficiently and clearly as possible because that is what I appreciate in a teach.
Overall, my approach was to get as much as possible ready to go before the Kickstarter went live, so I got my banner ads drawn, I prepared my web page updates, and I even wrote most of this designer diary in advance of the launch itself. In the end, my Kickstarter exceeded its funding threshold (which admittedly I set very low) on day 1, and now as I finish this diary, I am mulling over whether to do some kind of stretch goal to keep things interesting. Thirty days is a long time to twiddle your thumbs...
Eric B. Vogel
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