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By the Sea
In April 2017, my wife and I booked a house by the sea in Normandy, France. After finally finishing the Andor trilogy, I had some time to work on a new project, and I started thinking about something that had come to mind years ago: Robin Hood. Fortunately, we shared the house with our best friends, so during the development of that first prototype, I had the luxury of having great testers who played everything I put on the table.
Let me note that nothing from these first drafts made it into the final game, so you can imagine that these early playtests weren't too much fun at all...
Thanks again, dear Karina, Graham, Max and Jakob, for your endurance.
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Love Is Bluntness
That same year we travelled to northern France again, this time accompanied by my son Johannes and my nephew Joel. Both were part of the development of Legends of Andor — great boys who grew up with board games — and both are great testers.
Joel in particular can be a bit harsh with criticism, but I know that's because he loves playing, and he compares a prototype to any published game. He doesn't sugarcoat his feedback just because it's a prototype. Actually, I think that's a good thing.
At the end of the holidays, I was disappointed with the results. I was still experimenting with different attempts of how to hide the grid on the board and find a new way of moving our figures. At this point it was still, as Joel pointed out, "too close to Andor, but without the fun".
However, when we packed our bags to go back home, a new idea hit me: What if I could add something to the base of each figure so that we can move as in tabletop games? That idea came out of the blue, and I was immediately thrilled. It was like opening a gate to a wonderful land in which game boards don't need grids anymore and figures can move freely, limited only by natural, illustrated boundaries!
I guess with his bluntness, Joel saved me a lot of time and stopped me from going further in the wrong direction.
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The Forest at Night
In 2018, I spent a lot of time in a small house by the forest. It was the perfect place to get into the "Robin Hood" mood, so I started painting!
As an illustrator, I'm used to offering my clients different approaches, different drafts. That's what I did when I developed my version of the famous Sherwood Forest as well. I experimented with size, lighting, and perspective. I reorganized the positions of the castle, the secret camp, and the village again and again.
In total, there have been more than twenty versions of the game board. Some may say I overdid it, but I felt like there was always something that remained from version to version. For example, for one version I illustrated the forest at night-time. Everything was painted in dark blue, and each guardian held a torch. That led to the idea that guardians can capture a player only when they're standing in the pool of light. I even considered naming the game "The Night of the Thieves".
When I playtested it with my friends Jost and Jörg, they didn't like the game — and especially not the title and the nighttime forest. They said they expected something entirely different when they thought of Robin Hood, and I knew they were right.
So after this I returned to the daytime forest — but the idea that the players can be seen only in daylight while being safe in the shadows remained. And I guess I'd never have thought of this self-explanatory rule without the detour into the forest at nighttime...and of course not without Jörg and Jost.
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She's Got the Book
In spring of 2018, "Robin Hood" became something playable, but I still had the feeling it could be too complex for a light family game. At that point, I used lots of cards to tell the story, trigger events, and display items and special abilities.
While I prepared the game for another playtest, my wife Steffi watched me. And because the preparation took so long, she said, "Nobody wants to play something so complicated."
I realized that the material itself was an obstacle and too much to handle. Facing this problem, it led to the solution: Instead of hundreds of cards, I'm going to use a book! It would contain almost all cards and most parts of the rules, and it doesn't have to be sorted or organized — it just has to be placed on the table. That was a game changer!
The only downside to this change was that it increased the effort to build new prototypes because after every change I made, certain pages of the book had to be updated — and because pages can be updated only a limited amount of times (otherwise paper turns into wood), we had to handicraft many, many books. "We"? Yes, we! Steffi helped a lot. She loved the book idea. She also thought that it fit perfectly to the theme of Robin Hood and that it will be great for parents and their kids to handle a book and read together. I agree. It might be old-fashioned, but reading together in a book is still something good. By the way, that's the reason why using an app was never an option.
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A Nice Trip to Florence
In early 2019, I ended my work on "Robin Hood". The problem was that it still wasn't the game I wanted to create. There were still too many rules, and everything felt too complicated.
Now, years later, I can see more clearly what the problem was. At this point, I wanted every rule to be thematically correct. Although that's usually not a bad thing, it didn't work. It wasn't a game. It felt like a simulation...or work. Back then, I thought of quitting the whole thing, and I was glad that I hadn't announced anything yet, that there were no commitments, no deadlines, and that I could just silently let all of this go.
Of course, I couldn't let anything go. Two weeks later, I returned to the game. With the designer in me still having no idea what to do, the illustrator took over. He can be kind of rough, and he was tired of painting trees, so he simply changed the whole setting. From "Robin Hood of Sherwood Forest", everything switched to "The Thieves of Florence".
And that was a great relief! It helped me see things from a different angle. I got rid of a lot of ballast. With this new draft, I eliminated the last remaining cards that were used for items and came up with the "cubes in the bag" system. Everything felt so light and so much better.
Funny, isn't it? Only a month after thinking of surrender, the game was finally ready to be shown to a publisher.
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The Adventure Begins
In February 2019, I sat in the office of KOSMOS editor Wolfgang Lüdtke, exactly the way I did nine years ago. (Maybe not exactly as I probably gained some pounds along the way.) Again, I had a prototype with me, and again I was very nervous...
...but it went great! Wolfgang liked the game right from the start. He was surprised by the "everything in one bag" thing, which I honestly never thought could be anything special.
He wasn't sure about the Florence setting, though, and voted for the Robin Hood theme as soon as I mentioned it. The only thing he didn't like was the "story" part. At this point, information that we got from citizens lead to a rather abstract point system. It took a while for him to convince me, but then I agreed to go deeper into the story, and that was great advice because the following work — the writing of the story — was the most pleasant part of the whole development. Wolfgang even came up with a name: "The Adventures of Robin Hood".
In March 2019, the fun began! Finally* I returned to Sherwood Forest! On that short Florence holiday, the game lost a lot of weight, and that felt great. I began writing the story from the view of Prince John, the villain. I thought about different intrigues he could come up with to get the crown of England. I ended up with three stories. Two of them made it into the game, and players decide what thread they want to play.
I'm so happy Wolfgang pushed me, very gently, in this story direction. He's a great editor who gives the designer a lot of freedom, but also can be adamant when he senses that there is a better solution!
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*Above I wrote, "Finally* I returned to Sherwood Forest!" Well, that wasn't entirely correct. There was this one week in May 2019 when I thought that maybe "flying islands" would be a better setting for the game.
Honestly, I don't know what bit me back then, but for a crazy but highly motivated week, I switched everything to a new setting.
And after that, I returned to Sherwood Forest for good.
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Something to Identify With
Since starting the game's development in 2017, I had been thinking about the cover art, so whenever I got into the right mood, I started sketching but without any pressure.
When the project got more serious in 2019, I discovered that the most important thing for me was to create a really cool Robin Hood. I wanted the artwork to appeal to kids or young adults so that they could identify with the character.
As an illustrator, I've observed for years that regarding the cover art and settings of games, most German board games leave a strange gap for kids who are between 7-16. I don't want to sound precocious, but I believe it's during this period where we lose them to the PS4.
I remember when I was at this age, I was drawn to heroes to identify with and to adventure settings. I loved Star Wars, Batman and Captain Future, and it's a shame that the very few games I knew that took place in an adventure setting were just dull licensed games. Even Batman couldn't fix this. Maybe if I had encountered a good Spider-Man board game, I'd have become a player much earlier...
I guess what I want to say is that we adults shouldn't whine about our "PS4-addicted kids". We should provide alternatives. That's why I wanted the cover art of Robin Hood to look like it could have worked as a PS4 cover, too. That's why it had to be cool.
After many different approaches, I finally found a nice composition, and I was glad that everyone at KOSMOS voted for this draft, too.
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Last Playtests Before...
Early in 2020, I had the chance to take my prototype to a gathering for players hosted by Inka and Markus Brand. Over two days, I invited four different groups into my room and let them play The Adventures of Robin Hood. Luckily, I brought everything with me to adjust the prototype after each group.
The most difficult adventure to develop was the tutorial. To find out how many rules can be explained at a certain point of play, and to notice the moment when it becomes too much information is a very complex task. At the same time, you have to make sure it's interesting enough that the players want to continue. The even bigger problem was that after a group had played it once, they were "burned" because now they knew how it worked, so with every change, I had to find someone new.
But despite the huge effort, I had a great time back then. To see my game being played by experienced players, seeing them having fun and doing things I never anticipated (but that the game could handle) was very rewarding! I cannot thank those testers enough. For me and my prototype, they spent hours of their free time.
What no one could have known was that shortly after this event, the pandemic hit us and these tests would be the last ones for a long time.
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216
The spring and summer of 2020 was an intense phase in which I had to constantly change the board, change the positions of guardians, items, and citizens. I cannot stress enough how difficult it was to develop a board that refers to a story that hasn't been written yet — and it's no less difficult to write a story that refers to a board that hasn't been painted yet. I know that some of the numbers on the board seem to be placed a little chaotically, but the reason is this highly difficult process in which everything is connected to everything and changes in one detail cause numerous other changes.
Another nerve-wracking thing was the book. KOSMOS and I agreed on 216 pages, which meant that my nine adventures had to fit exactly into these 216 pages! No more, no less!!
Here I have to say a big "thank you" to Christian Fiore and his employee Dorothea Wagner, who handled the huge amount of text professionally and carefully! If you take into account how many links there are between numbers and page numbers and tiles on the board, it's simply a miracle that they made absolutely no mistakes. And there was a lot at stake. One wrong number could have ruined a whole adventure. Chapeau!
With every day, the book and the board got closer to the final version. Once all positions were fixed, it was a pleasure to finally start with the "real" illustration. Everything until then was just prototype sketching, and I was happy to finally illustrate this world for real.
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Sitting by the Campfire
In September 2020, we finished the book and the board. We created the packshot and flavor texts for the box. Obviously, the surrounding work like creating the homepage, holding marketing meetings, and designing advertisements started then, but yes, the game itself was finished.
In many of the adventures, we advise the players to put their figures around the campfire when they win. Gamewise this has no deeper meaning, but as a huge fan of Asterix and Obelix, I think every good adventure should end with a feast at a campfire.
Surrounding the fire, the protagonists tell the others what they experienced on their adventure — and this is what I wanted to achieve with this designer diary. I'm so grateful for all the help I received along the way, and I wanted to tell you about it, about our "Adventures of Robin Hood".
Thanks a lot for your interest.
Micha Menzel
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