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Fortunately, I still (so far) have plenty of ideas to work on, so we don't tend to seek out new prototypes. However, from a designer's point of view, co-designing is a great way to get more inspiration and motivation because the range of a single designer's ideas is limited. Simply put, co-operation can bring more "energy" to the process of designing new titles.
Ross mentioned in the BGG message that Woodcraft is a Eurogame, so I asked him to send me the rules. While reading them, I realized that the most important mechanisms in the game were based around worker placement and dice, with the different colored dice representing different types of wood. Players then had to fulfill orders for their customers using these woods.
I found this dice-manipulation mechanism, together with the theme of woodworking, intriguing. I tend to enjoy games with clever dice mechanisms, such as [thing=55699]Macao[/thing] or Tekhenu. After finishing Pulsar 2849, I considered designing another game in which dice would play a very important role. The rules and theme of Woodcraft were interesting and "close to our taste", so we asked Ross to send us a printable prototype so that we could test it out.
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Up until then, the only co-design I had worked on was Messina 1347. After the first games of Ross's prototype, we had similar feelings to those that we had after testing the Messina prototype when it was in its early stages. The game included some good ideas — an original theme, and the way of using dice as a resource, while also being able to manipulate them by cutting and gluing the resources together. (Not literally, but within the theme of the game!) On one hand, we found the game to be fun and enjoyable, but on the other, the central action-selection mechanism was worker placement — a well-known and oft used mechanism — which didn't have any prominent innovation.
The arc of the game still required some polishing, too, in our opinion, as after the first couple of test games with the prototype, it was clear that the players gained a lot of advantages, then they simply fulfilled the orders and gained VPs, making gameplay rather linear. Woodcraft was not ready for publishing at this stage, but the game had plenty of potential to become something publishable after a few adjustments and more playtesting, so this is why we offered to co-operate with Ross on Woodcraft. We suggested co-designing without any promises of Delicious Games publishing the title. For us, normally a determining factor for publishing a title is having received good feedback from playtesters, which of course we didn't yet have.
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As I already mentioned, I like games that use dice very much, so I had a lot of ideas on how to improve the game. In the next two months I suggested adjustments so that the prototype could be reworked. I suggested that the whole theme of the game shift more towards the story of building your own workshop in the woods, a workshop that you have to upgrade, buy improvements and new machines for, and staff with helpers to assist in fulfilling the different orders for your customers. We didn't touch the best main mechanism — cutting and gluing dice to fulfill orders — but some other mechanisms were adjusted and added, such as growing trees for your own sources of wood (represented by dice). Some other mechanisms were removed because they made the flow of the game more complicated than we wanted.
I also changed the main action-selection mechanism to one in which you choose one of seven possible action tiles, which is then moved to the next section, granting you a bonus depending on which section you picked, and this has remained in the game until its final version. Previously, the way you chose an action was a form of worker-placement mechanism, but the picking and receiving of bonuses made the game more dynamic. The mechanism worked, but it still required demanding tile manipulation and needed some development to make it work clearly on the board. Based on feedback from playtesters, I decided to rework the whole central system of choosing actions and adjust the way that some actions receive bonuses. I very much like this part of the design, and I think the way it is used in Woodcraft is different than anything in my other designs.
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This central mechanism was further balanced by Ross and was graphically adjusted by our graphic designer, Michal Peichl, but it has stayed the same since then up to the final version. After testing the game with this mechanism in place, Ross and I agreed that the game had a strong foundation and next we had to concentrate on balancing the secondary mechanisms.
During the autumn of 2021, I came up with some additional development ideas for Woodcraft, but it was still not ready to be published. Even though the game still had a way to go in its development, we (Delicious Games) had such a strong, positive feeling about the game based predominantly on the two core concepts of the innovative system of choosing actions (while also picking a bonus) and the unusual way the dice were utilized, we decided to publish the game in 2022 even before widespread testing of the game had begun, which was unusual for us. Such was our confidence in the project.
During the designing and balancing process, our communication with Ross was very intensive. We amassed over 250 emails with new ideas, feedback from testing, and even more new ideas! From my side, communication was not so easy because I am not an English speaker at all, but Google Translator did a good job for me in that regard, and I am grateful to be able to use it as a tool. Only with the help of Google Translator could I have co-designed both of our last two titles: Messina 1347 and Woodcraft!
This communication maelstrom, for example, was the way we designed many parts of Woodcraft. This includes the "tool collection" mini-game in which the player fills their attic with various tools. After all, a workshop needs tools to operate! Ross had an idea to improve this mechanism. The first idea was a bit too similar to one of the mechanisms in Newton, but I liked the idea of adding another mechanism into Woodcraft. Based on this and a lot of communication back and forth, we created the final version of this mini-game.
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A vast array of beautiful illustrations, graphics, and wooden products were created by Michal, our graphic designer, and while some fell by the wayside in terms of practicality, they were all still immensely beautiful.
Woodcraft — a co-design by Ross Arnold and me — will be released at Spiel '22, and we hope a lot of players will enjoy it as much as we enjoyed the whole testing and design process.
Vladimír Suchý
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When Vladimír Suchý, the designer of some of my favorite games of all time, told me that he liked my prototype and would like to collaborate with me, I was beyond elated. I explained it to my parents, who don't "speak board games", like this: "Dad, this is like Steven Spielberg suggesting we make a film together!" This is the quick story of how designing and building escape rooms led to my new game Woodcraft coming out in the final quarter of 2022.
In 2019, I was working as an escape room designer in the midst of building out four new rooms with short deadlines and limited resources. I was drawing up the plans for some large set pieces, and I needed to be as efficient as possible. I had to make sure there was enough lumber to get it done with as little waste as possible. This is when I first came up with the idea of a resource that can be cut up and glued back together, the main resource system used in Woodcraft.
Fast forward six months, and we were at the start of the Covid pandemic. A pandemic that we all thought would last a few weeks ended up giving me months off from work. I began really diving more into my board game ideas, especially those surrounding this dice-manipulation idea and how it could fit into a game.
As an avid woodworker, a lot of the broad ideas came naturally; the first thing you need are customers, which give you the orders, and those orders need to be completed by a certain deadline. From there you need tools to cut wood to size, glue them together, and manage your resources.
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You can make these beautiful things in Woodcraft
Initially, each round started with a row of customers, and each player bid secretly on how many "days" it would take for them to complete the order. Whoever bid lowest would have first pick and a tighter deadline. This didn't even make it into the version I sent to Delicious Games, but it helped me come up with the deadline mechanism that is still in the game today.
As I continued to develop the idea, I focused on the ways in which you can improve your workshop. You could purchase new tools at the hardware store, save money and build your own tools and jigs out of your leftover wood, and make friends with the local business owners to help improve the different action spaces on the board. I really wanted the players' workshops to feel like their own toolbox, filled with different "levers and pulleys" that they could use to get the job done. This came in the form of three different decks of cards in three different worker-placement spots.
After a year of working on Woodcraft, it had gone through multiple changes, playtests, and finessing to the point where it was finally a game that worked. I began sending out my sell sheet to publishers, while still testing and adjusting the game. I had some great responses, including a few meetings with one publisher that I was very excited about and that was interested in the game! Then they asked me to simplify it to a game that could be taught in 15 minutes. I was a little torn. I'd have loved to work with them, but I wanted to publish a game that I would love to play. I decided I may as well work on simplifying the game and see how things went. In the meantime, though, I continued reaching out to other publishers, one of them being Delicious Games. They replied that they were interested in seeing the rulebook, which got them interested in actually playing the game, so I sent them files to print out and play...and then I waited.
After playing the game, Vladimír sent me an email with feedback. He said they would potentially be interested in publishing the game, but not in its current form. If, however, I were willing to work on it together with Vladimír as a co-designer and improve it from where I had it, then we could see where it ended up. This being my first game, and Vladimír being the designer of some of my all-time favorite games, made this a no-brainer. This would be a huge opportunity to learn from someone I look up to, and I was eager to get started.
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Little helpers
I waited for Vladimír to send over a version of the game with his updates and changes, which I slapped together out of paper and cereal boxes, then played as soon as possible. Some parts of the game were streamlined, while others were expanded on. I played the game a lot, and from there we emailed back and forth, sharing ideas, feedback, and opinions while simultaneously playtesting 4,000 miles apart. The game changed a lot from my original version and would go on to change even more as Vladimír and I worked together, but despite all of the changes, I was happy that the game was still exactly what I wanted it to be when I first sat down to work on it.
My original prototype was created more than two years ago, and after a further fourteen months of co-designing with Vladimir, this brings us to today, two months away from SPIEL '22, when Woodcraft will be released. I learned so much during this process, and I couldn't be prouder and more excited to share this game with everyone.
Ross Arnold
P.S. Thanks to Mike Poole for the language corrections.
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