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Twenty years ago, my main gaming hobby was Warhammer; I played Warhammer: The Game of Fantasy Battles (6th Edition) (Dark Elves), Warhammer 40,000 (Orks) and Epic Armageddon (Orks), first as a home player, then a club player, then a tournament player. Over the years, I transitioned into tournament organizer, then convention organizer, then to working directly with Games Workshop as distributor of miniatures games, board games, RPGs and puzzles. I visited Nottingham, worked with stores on how to grow their business and was deeply involved in using, playing, promoting, reading, selling and enjoying the games and worlds created by Games Workshop.
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Miniatures gaming is a very creative hobby, and if you do not enjoy painting, you will not be involved for long. I especially like to create terrain and buildings, most likely due to the model railroads I played with and built buildings for as a kid. As a RPG game master I built experiences, using existing worlds. I had made Risk clones and enjoyed custom roll-and-move games my dad made when I was small, but to create published games still felt like a completely separate thing, something for experts.
I am now a full-time freelance board game designer. While I am not listed on any top designers list, I must consider myself an expert after working in distribution, in publishing, at BGG, and after designing a bunch of games, such as Nations, Tribes: Dawn of Humanity, and HexRoller.
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Being a designer is not only about the game itself; you need to know the industry. One thing most new designers do not consider is that their design must participate in a wonky sort of word-of-mouth game in which it must be presented by people with incomplete information to other people in a long chain, most of who will not have played the game. The designer must present it to a publisher, the publisher to distributors, distributors to stores, stores to customers, customers to their friends. If the game fails to grab attention at any of these points, it does not get played. Thus, it does not matter much if the game is great after three plays if it never gets played once.
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When I got the chance to work with WizKids and Games Workshop on a new game, I was very excited! Creating a custom new game of your own with complete freedom is great, but it is wide open. I like to do it, but I also like to have constraints of as many types as possible because it makes the options clearer and forces me out of my usual paths of thinking. Testing unusual things that have not been done before most often leads to something that does not work, but once in a while you can find something that works great.
For many years Fantasy Flight Games had the GW license, creating very popular miniatures-heavy games, like Forbidden Stars. After the end of that license, GW have a new structure for board games, doing miniatures-heavy board games themselves (like Warhammer Underworlds: Shadespire and Blitz Bowl) and licensing other publishers to do board games without any miniatures.
So one of my constraints for this project was to not use miniatures. How could I make maximum use of the rich background material for what is normally miniatures-heavy games, without the miniatures? I realized that using miniatures was in fact the real constraint as it limits both the number of different sculpts you can use, as well as the total number of units available, so I made a prototype using an absolute ton of different units — then had to suffer the consequences of that decision during the whole development as I created a matching ton of different abilities and effects that all needed to be interesting, balanced, and thematic.
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Another important factor is the common separation of miniature and the description of the miniature on a card. It takes effort to understand the game state of ten individual miniatures on a board when all miniatures have their own details. Huge Warhammer armies usually have large amounts of identical miniatures to make it manageable, but an experienced player who knows all the hundreds of values and effects by heart has a huge advantage and can understand the real game-state and make informed decisions.
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Miniatures and their reference cards from Shadespire,
painting and photo by Peter Cooper
So my no-miniatures constraint actually creates a higher complexity budget for units on the board, compared to if each unit had been a miniature. Even with this, I (as usual) overestimated the total complexity budget at first, and I had to cut and streamline a lot. This is extremely common for designers; I know of no one who starts with prototypes that are too simple.
I believe the reason is that when a game is too simple, it is not fun, and it is extremely hard to see that some small addition could turn it into something fun. When you have something large, it is easier to see that reducing it a bit could make it better, so you test until you find what can be removed. When you cut something, test, and realize the game is no longer fun, you put the thing back and have learned a valuable lesson. The thing is part of the core of the design, at least right now, and you need to test to cut other things.
I like to try to cut most parts of a design to find the core of the game. It is a lot of work, but some of my best breakthroughs have come from this process. I have now done so many complete projects that I start to recognize breakthroughs as they happen. I think of them as the point when I know a game will be published in a format where the core is close to what the core of the prototype is at that point. A breakthrough is a fantastic experience; for me it is comparable to holding the actual finished physical box in my hands.
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For Warhammer: Age of Sigmar – The Rise & Fall of Anvalor, the breakthrough was when I made all three types of enemies attack when there are three enemy units on a side. The enemies are Skaven, Khorne and Orruks, and I wanted each of them to feel as distinct as possible, so I had made them attack when they had five, three, and four units on a side. This was different, but it did not make the game more fun.
Khorne worked best, with three units. Many, many tweaks and tests to make the other enemies work better failed. I had invested so much into trying to make this 3/4/5 structure work at this point that it was hard to look at the situation with open eyes. But instead of trying to improve the non-fun enemies, looking at why Khorne was fun provided the breakthrough. After one test game with three-tile attacks by Skaven, this was clearly a huge improvement. Variation could be provided in other ways, and after a big restructuring the horde feeling of Skaven was back.
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Example Skaven, Orruk and Khorne enemy tiles
I believe the most important reason that five-tile attacks were no fun is because they reduced player impact on the game. With five slots per side, filling it up meant that there would be enemies on all slots regardless of where an enemy was placed first. The enemies were placed face down, and I provided various ways to look at enemies, but keeping this information in your head did not work as well as I had hoped, especially with so many enemies all around.
In the game, players are building the city "together" as one of the six player factions, defending it against enemies. You try to make maximum use of what the other players do, hindering them and placing enemies that will hopefully crush them. The reverse deck-building process is fun, easy to learn, with a long learning curve. The replayability is enormous. But it is balanced on the edge of being just as complex as it should be, so unintentionally removing a critical element of player interaction with Skaven completely filling up a side with enemies crashed the game.
Reverse deck-building might be a strange term for what you do with your deck of tiles in the game, but I think it is fitting. You start with your full deck, have tiles in hand, and play tiles to the table by discarding other tiles as resources. Your deck shrinks as you get more and more tiles on the board, and the decision about which tiles to place has a big impact on what you can play later as the resources represented by the played tiles are no longer accessible to you until they are killed or destroyed.
Tuning and tweaking was a long process, but after the breakthrough I felt confident in the core game. I hope I have made a game that will bring a lot of enjoyment to both Warhammer players and those who have no idea of what Warhammer is! After many more tweaks and changes The Rise & Fall of Anvalor will be released on April 3, 2019.
Rustan Håkansson
More information:
* Rulebook
* Seven-part series about the details of the game
Reviews:
* Written overview and review
* Video overview and review.
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