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About the Story
Generally, I'm not much into television series. It's hard to get me hooked on a story in the world of some specific heroes so much that I would spend hour after hour glued to the television following their fate. In the winter of 2008, however, I experienced an exception to this rule.
My wife Alicja and I are both fans of fantasy and science fiction. One of our friends told us about the TV show Battlestar Galactica. Out of boredom, we tried watching the first episode, and that's how the madness began. Every day we returned home from work, made something good to eat, and sat down to watch. During a few weeks we thus watched all four seasons of the show. From my perspective today – as the parent of a small child – it's hard to believe we had so much free time then.
The world of Battlestar pulled us in for good. It's hard to summarize this epic space opera in a few words, but I think that the aspect which I liked the most was the sleeper agents and the paranoia this created among the characters in the show. Who is a cylon hidden in human skin, without even knowing it? Maybe even me? Or maybe the real cylon is turning everyone else against an innocent crew member? By means of the paranoia about who is a cylon, the show's creators generated a lot of tension and strong emotions, thanks to which this show is so good...
Games in the Game
I'm a game designer, and at that time my debut game – Little Insurgents – was ready for publication and I had a few other prototypes in the works. Unsurprisingly, I quickly started thinking about making a game in the world of this program which had captured our attention so strongly.
At that time I walked to and from work. Since it was winter, when I left work it was already dark; every day I walked nearly an hour in the dark thinking about how to transform the dark climate of Battlestar's paranoia into a playable experience.
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"There are many copies" became "Hypnosis"...
It's worth mentioning another inspiration which came from another game I was playing a lot at the time. It often happens that a game I play a lot influences me when I'm designing my own games – not specific mechanisms of another designer, but more often some element of the experience of playing the game. It could be some kind of emotion or atmosphere or a dilemma which the game presents to the players.
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This element was one of the things I wanted to see in a game about cylons and humans. But wait – there were a lot of cylons! That's how I ended up with the characters who are in the game now. Three of them are cylons and six are humans. The player leading the cylons knows from the start who is who. The player leading the humans knows from the start the identity of two characters who for sure are humans (and it was just one character at the beginning of the game's development). This sounded promising, and I quickly started my first tests.
Playing Two-Player
I did the first playtests with Alicja. We would finish watching the next episode of the series, then sit down to play. We tested wherever we could: at home, in a pub, in the backseat of the car during a long drive to the Alps to ski. The game worked from the start, as in it was possible to play a complete game from beginning to end. That's always a good sign. I designed it thinking mainly about two-player as it was intended as our game, something which I was making for my wife, a fan of the show. I couldn't imagine how many playtests lay ahead.
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While "Sacrifice" remained "Sacrifice"
The two of us managed to weed out most of the game's problems. Alicja is always objective and honest as a tester. That is a rare trait when you test your own games with family or friends; usually they have a tendency to overpraise your work, which of course boosts your ego but doesn't help create a good game.
At some point it became clear that the game would not remain our personal game. We decided that it would be a waste to keep it only for ourselves – and while it was Alicja for whom I designed the game, with whom I tested it, it was also Alicja who came up with the vampire theme when it became obvious that we needed to give up the cylon and human theme. Although I miss the original theme, I am happy that the new theme suits the game well. When I was coming up with new names for the cards and mechanisms, everything was obvious and all the pieces of the puzzle came together perfectly.
Tests, Tests and Let's Check the Balance Again
It's impossible to describe all the tests and all the people who took part in them. Suffice it to say that the game was playtested more than 250 times! I have a few other published games, some of which are definitely more complex, but none of them had even close to that many tests. Why?
When a game is designed for publication, there is usually some deadline. You need it for Spiel, or for an event which the game is promoting, or the publisher has some concrete deadline. In most cases, this is very good. A concrete deadline enables a good disciplined work ethic and is a concrete goal to aim for. A deadline helps organize your work. A deadline forces you to look for solutions when the game isn't working. You don't have time to cry when the theoretically ingenious mechanism is rubbish. Deadlines generally are a designer's ally. I know of situations in which designers keep polishing their work for years, and as a result...they never publish it.
So deadlines are generally a good thing while creating a game. On the other hand, it's wonderful to have such a project with no time pressure, so you can peacefully polish it and search for the best possible solutions. Vampire Empire is for me such a precious gem. I wasn't in a hurry, I checked all the possibilities, I searched for the best mechanisms and meticulously checked them. Finally the play balance testing began, which for an asymmetric game like Vampire Empire lasts a long time.
The Result
As a result, although the process lasted four years, I have a game which truly works like I wanted it to and which is insanely well balanced. The element of the game which most satisfies me is its atypical dynamic with respect to the asymmetric player goals. At the start of the game, it seems like the vampire player has the upper hand. He knows everything, he knows who is who, he deviously strikes the weak points of the humans and eliminates them one after the other. The human player knows little, sometimes even attacking his own characters while desperately flailing for clues about who is a vampire. During the game, this power imbalance gradually decreases. In the midgame, there is a balance of power, and later on the situation gets progressively harder for the vampire. In the last turns he typically defends himself desperately with his last gasps of strength against the human attacks.
And similarly to the dynamic within the game, the players' impressions change. During the first few games, players usually think that playing as the humans is much harder, but my most experienced testers think that the vampires are at a slight disadvantage. Vampire Empire is a game which you can get to know over time, discovering its treats, tactical play, and unexpected ways to use the cards. The game sprang from love, and although I shouldn't judge my own work, I think that it's the best game I have created so far. I hope when you play the game some evening, you will feel warmth in your heart, and you will have a special experience in the dark world of the vampires.
Filip Miłuński
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