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However, let us start from the beginning...
In November 2008, we – my wife Stefania and me – came back from the Lucca Comics and Games fair with good news: Our small game African Park and the more challenging Rhein River Trade had both attracted the interest of publishers. (African Park was published in 2009 by Giochix.it, while Rhein River Trade was announced in 2012 by Stupor Mundi.)
That outcome gave us courage, and filled with enthusiasm we started thinking about a new and ambitious project. We were thinking about a game about building, but what were we going to build? Neither a castle nor a palace – too obvious. Moreover, not an entire city. The right idea came on a Sunday morning after a sleepless night – the night is the mother of counsel! – building a ship in the shipyards of the Serenissima Republic of Venice, a few centuries ago.
The aim of the game and the scenario had been established, so we started thinking about the main characteristics of the game. First of all, we did not want a game in which building a part of the ship gave a fixed score. We were looking for a factor that could vary the score, yet not in a completely random way.
The first problem with this idea, though, was how to relate this factor to the ancient Venetian shipyards? We imagined that someone very important had ordered the ship, someone so important that he could change his mind without anybody raising objections. We thought of the Doge, the highest authority of the Republic of Venice in the time when the game was set. The idea was that the Doge, periodically (that is, every round) changed his mind about the ship project and as a consequence adjusted some characteristics of the ship under construction. The players, being constructor chiefs of the Venetian shipyards, have to try to comply with the Doge's wishes in order to obtain his favors.
For simplicity, the main ship characteristics had been represented by five colored parameters; at the beginning of each round their value were changed (increased or decreased). The victory points given by each part of a ship depended on one or more parameters. Consequently, building a part of the ship could earn a player more or fewer points, depending on the mood of the Doge.
The next step was the definition of the game phases and their sequence:
-----• First, purchase raw materials,
-----• Then build the ship.
Raw materials usually have a cost. Thus, some money was necessary. Being in a Venetian shipyard, we thought that the easiest way to earn money could be constructing and selling a gondola. (Actually, the gondola is a complex ship, too, but it's far smaller than the Doge's state galley...)
Another typical element of the game should be the so-called "high water", the idea being that sometimes the level of the lagoon rises and the water floods the shipyards, delaying the work.
The First Prototype
Within two months, a first playable version of the game – designed for 2-6 players – was ready. Each player was a constructor chief of a shipyard, called by the Doge to a challenge: Build the ship that could become the state galley of the Venetian Republic. Fame and prestige were the awards for the winner.
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We drew the first version of the ship, dividing it into fifteen parts (with nine different types of tiles). The size of each tile was exactly the size of the building tiles of Puerto Rico; it seemed to be the right dimension for a playing piece.
The front side of each tile showed the drawing of that part of the ship.
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On the rear side were 2-4 colored squares (the parameters!) and a yellow coin indicating the cost of the tile. Since each player would be building his own ship, a huge number of tiles were necessary – 135! – and we spent a lot of time with .xls sheets before and with CAD after. In fact, each tile differed from the others.
The game became a classic worker placement game (four workers per player). We divided the playing time into twelve rounds (i.e., twelve months), and each round was then divided into four phases (i.e., four weeks). During each week, the same sequence of actions was repeated:
-----1. High water
-----2. Worker placement
-----3. Purchase of materials
-----4. Work in progress (construction)
-----5. Sale of gondolas and assembly of the ship and barriers
-----6. End of the week
Each week played very fast, but the total time of the game was still too long.
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Each player had her own small board. On the bottom of the board was a grey space for the construction on the ship. Tiles were placed on the matching grey drawing.
There were also spaces for the construction of gondolas and of the barriers.
Constructing part of the ship, a gondola or a barrier required two or four workers.
There was also a spy figure, on top. The spy allowed some "unfair" actions against the other players.
Finally, on a table at left the player could track the parameters of the ship under construction.
A very complex game? At first sight, yes, but after a few rounds, the game became intuitive and straightforward.
At the end of each month, an additional phase was played: the Doge inspection. In this phase, the characteristics of the ship (the five parameters!) were changed. The change couldn't be absolutely random, though, so a set of colored dice, for example, couldn't be used.
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Instead we designed a small deck of cards: the Doge's cards. Each card had the variations (+/-) of the five colored parameters as well as certain marked parts of the ship (which would give extra victory points) and a die symbol to be used to show the risk of flood from high water. Since the level of high water isn't predictable, we thought that in this case a die was the right solution. If the level of the high water was higher then that of the barriers, the player would lose some workers in the next round.
Finally, we added another board – the Doge's board.
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On this board was another table with the five parameters, a player's aid, a place for the Doge's cards, and last but not least, the scoring track!
In this version of the game, we had a lot of tables and of tracks. An additional money track would have been excessive, so we used small coins (1 euro cent). The Bank was the common reserve for the coins.
In January 2009, I went to the Incontro Degli Autori di Giochi (IDEAG), a meeting of game authors that's probably the most important gathering of Italian professional and hobbyist game designers. (We couldn't go together as we couldn't leave our sons alone at home.) The meeting offered important playtesting sessions, and I knew a foreign publisher there that seemed to be interested in the game.
In that month all seemed to go the right way. Within a few weeks we had our first contracts for the publication of African Park and Rhein River Trade, so with enthusiasm, we translated the rules into English and worked on the game. After more playtest sessions, some modifications were needed. Finally, after two months, the prototype was travelling to Germany...
From Alhambra to Carcassonne
After some months, however, the prototype came back to Italy. The publisher, extremely kind, explained that the interaction between players was too poor and that the game was still too long.
When the disappointment faded after a few days, we started to work on a second version of the game based on the publisher's feedback. The first idea was to go from Alhambra, in which each player builds his own palace, to Carcassonne, in which the players build the city together. We wanted to make that transformation, with all the players building the ship (only one!) together.
The difficulty of this change was high as we had to find the right size for the ship, depending on the number of players. The second problem was the balance of how the five parameters varied during the game. A lot of simulations with .xls sheets were needed...
First, we reduced the game duration from 12 to 6-7 months, depending on the number of players. Then, we designed two game boards: one for 2-3 players (see example below) and another for 4-5 players. Yes, the game was now limited to a maximum of five players as to add the sixth player would probably require another board and too much game material.
The stem and stern of the ship became fixed, with players no longer needing to construct these parts; the areas under construction were still in grey, as in the previous version of the game.
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The board also gained, for the first time, some bonuses – prizes for the first player who assembled a specific part of the ship in each round.
As before, the game included nine kinds of tiles, but in this version the tiles – the same Puerto Rico size as before – were vertically oriented.
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A first, real advantage of this version was the reduction of the number of tiles from 135 to 72!
In addition, the player board was modified to include fewer and easier symbols, more free space, and more colors!
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The number of workers needed to construct barriers, gondolas, and parts of ship were cut in half. A golden gondola appeared on the board (in a limited number of copies), with this gondola providing a larger income.
In the first release of the game, barrier tiles were very small as we had only a little space on the board. Now, we had more space, so the barriers became the same size as the other tiles.
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The main difficulty came in balancing the Doge's cards as the more players in the game, the faster the parameters moved. Thus, we designed four small decks, one for each player count. We also introduced a second high water die (d10).
Finally, a third small two-sided board was introduced, again with one side for 2-3 players and the other side for 4-5 players. On this additional board players tracked the rounds, the player order (and the related bonuses, and a special bonus for the construction of the golden gondola.
After one year, in the first half of 2010, the prototype was on the road again: destination Germany (at a different publisher). But after the summer, this second prototype also came back. The game had been carefully analyzed, which made us proud, but it still had problems and defects. The most important defect was having too many actions to do and too many small pieces to move. In a single phrase: too slow.
Alea Iacta Est
What should we do? Try to contact another publisher and submit the same game, or modify the game for the second time? After a few months, we took the (right) decision: We decided to work on the game again, starting (almost) from zero. No more workers, no more tables with parameters – a fast game and a reduced number of game pieces.
First, we turned the tiles – gondolas, barriers, and parts of the ship – into cards as this would allow the game pieces to be larger, giving us more space for symbols and drawings.
But this created a real problem when considering the size of the ship, since cards were much larger then the tiles. The risk was that the built ship would require an excessive amount of table space, so we decided that the ship cards should be partially (50%) superimposed: on the left of the card was the drawing, and on the right we had space for symbols and information.
We reduced the number of parameters from five to four, and the number of ship cards now stood at 84. We wanted to remove all the boards and replace them with action cards, but this idea created some high hurdles:
-----• The number of actions was high, and a deck of cards for each player meant too much game material.
-----• A deck of shared action cards, on the other hand, would introduce a random factor. We had to balance the luck with a different playing cost of the cards. Not so easy to do. Finally, it could happen that players were blocked (and annoyed) because their hand was full of useless cards.
When we analyzed this idea, we created a list with all the available actions. We'd rejected the idea of the action cards, but we still had a list of the actions; maybe that could still be useful...
Some months earlier we had purchased on eBay a lot of colored dice (d6) that we needed for the creation of a prototype of Soccer3 (a project still under way). These dice gave us the idea of pairing up the action list, the action costs, and the dice. In this way, we could balance the different weight of the actions and at the same time introduce a factor that would give variability to the game. Since the action list was shared by all the players, the dice did not introduce a luck factor. We drew a new game board based on the action list and on the six colored dice.
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The 36 available actions (two sets of 18 actions) were related to the six dice. In a two-player game, only 18 actions (three dice) would be available; in a three-player game four dice; and so on... The game duration was now seven rounds, and during each round, players could carry out up to five actions. Also, for the first time we introduced a money track on the board. Coins had been definitively removed from the prototype.
Since we had deleted the parameters table, the only reference for how the parameters scored was the Doge's card. This looked similar to the previous versions, but the ship cards were completely new since the parameters had been reduced from five to four and the scoring method had been radically changed. The advantage of this new scoring method was that the number of Doge cards had been reduced to 24. The "high water" rule was also modified a little bit, but was still related to a die roll.
The real novelties in this version of the game were the barriers and the approvals. In fact, the barrier cards, now larger than before, offered more space for symbols and notation, and therefore they could play a more important role in the game. In this new version, each barrier offered a bonus action, thereby making the game play faster and allowing players to create different strategies based upon the built barriers.
Since each player normally built 3-5 barriers during the game, however, if each barrier provided a bonus, the game would probably be chaotic. Thus, we decided that the bonus would be active only on the barrier last built by each player. With this set-up, players should now also plan the right time and the right order for building a new barrier, with the possibly conflicting concepts of wanting to use a bonus while also wanting to improve the protection against high water.
The second novelty was Approvals – that is, counters won with specific actions or after building some parts of the ship defined by the Doge's card. Approvals had been turned into victory points at the end of the fourth and the seventh round when the Doge came and inspected the shipyard. The final inspection, at the end of the seventh round, could completely change the chart of the players and the winner. This kept suspense high until the end.
The Last Barrier
This completely revised version was sent to Giochix.it in January 2011, and while the first reaction seemed to be good, we understood that the road to the publication was still long. The publisher, after some testing sessions, required numerous modifications.
First, the game should end when the ship was completely built, not after a fixed number of rounds. We made some simulations to establish the right size of the ship, eventually reducing the ship from three vertical levels to only two. As a result, the number of ship cards came down to 36 (from 84!). Consequently, a track for the number of played rounds was no longer necessary, so in the space left free, we introduced a turn order track.
The action panels on the board have been modified several times as we spent a lot of time looking for the right position for the "Change the Doge's card" action.
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Our prototype vs. the final Giochix version
In addition, the Doge's cards were modified once again, since the Doge's inspections could no longer be based on the number of played rounds. The Doge's card itself should trigger the inspection (in the same way that it triggers high water).
Finally, we introduced a priority number on the barriers, which had three positive effects:
-----• The powers of the barriers were better balanced as the barriers with powerful bonuses had an higher priority number.
-----• Player order was now established in an easy way and was under control of the players. (Whoever has the lowest priority number on his most recently built barrier plays first.)
-----• The number can break ties at the end of the game.
The Launching is Near
July 2012 – the game material has been skillfully revised and drawn by Giochix.it. The final version of the board has as background the historical Arsenale – the main shipyard – of Venice. The cards have been turned into large tiles once again, and the rulebook is finally defined. The launching of The Doge Ship is scheduled in October 2012, not in Venice's lagoon but at Spiel 2012 in Essen, Germany – and we will be there!
Marco Canetta
Testing the game with five players at Play! in Modena, Italy
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