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We are just ending a game of Offerings, called "Offrandes pour Troie" in the prototype at this time, when Cédric proposes a friendly but challenging offer: "How about designing a game together?" For my part, I do not feel like a game designer at all, so I answer, "Bah, I am a game reviewer, a game tester. I make a lot of things about board games, but I am not a game designer through and through!" Cédric does not take into account what I am saying and stresses that he has experience with board game design. At this date, he has a huge number of prototypes in differing states of progress.
I eventually give in, but on one condition: The design must be a cooperative game – I love co-op games! – based on Norse mythology. Cédric immediately subscribes to this theme because he is also keen on it. What remains to be done is to find a mechanism...
From the Beginning There Were Dice
A basic game mechanism soon arises from Cédric's productive mind, which is able to invent mechanisms almost non-stop! The game will be based on loads of dice. Every player rolls these dice at the beginning of his turn; he can keep them in groups in order to use them advisedly on the game board. This game board already represents Yggdrasil, the cosmic tree and its nine different worlds on which the players can perform different actions.
There is also a die that fixes, at the beginning of a player's turn, which Enemy is active and another die that is used when you want to move in Midgard, the world of mankind in which the players can perform sagas. (The idea of the bags in which you take resources blindly is already present.) Naturally, the players are the Norse gods – Odin, Frey, Thor and so on – and they must resist the enemies by balancing the good and evil forces on a power track before the end of the game.
At this stage, the game is mainly based on the dice; the blind taking in the bags is already in place, as Yggdrasil is in the center of the game board. But several things bother me: First, there are too many dice rolls that give a feeling of repetition and carry a lack of pressure among the players. Second and more importantly, the action on Midgard, which is critical because the players get troops there through sagas, is tedious. Progress on Midgard takes a long time. To cut a long story short, the game is boring!
Enter the Card-Carrying Serpent
At this point we're questioning the main game mechanism, so we decide to keep the ideas of the bags and the "tree board game" while saying goodbye to the dice. Instead, the evil forces will now be managed with cards, which allows us to control the probabilities of each enemy's action. (Nevertheless, the use of cards can allow one enemy to act several times in a row.)
Nidhögg, the big serpent who poisons Yggdrasil and whose actions announce the end of the game, becomes much more important because he gives precisely the time of Ragnarök. Let us add that the Gods, who were present on the board in the form of miniatures, dematerialize – they are divinities after all! – and lose their individual power. We think they are useless at this stage.
When Time Becomes the Heart of the Game
We like this mechanism, and the game flow already resembles what turned out to be the final version of Yggdrasil, but that doesn't mean that nothing changed after this point.
The main change would be the addition of a stopwatch. At my insistence about the lack of pressure when Ragnarök is about to occur, we decide to adopt Anne-Cécile's proposal and add a stopwatch to the game. Now the action of Nidhögg reduces the time remaining in the game. This "stopwatch" shortens the duration of the game permanently and creates a devil's pressure for the players!
This works perfectly, and the other changes we make are just details by comparison.
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Nidhögg rises from below...
But What About Dialogue?
While all of these changes work and are validated during a subsequent playtesting session with six players, something bothers me. As I am thinking, I don't realize how my face looks – but that worried look drives Cédric to ask me what's wrong.
The problem is that the stopwatch is too effective. The players are under such huge pressure from the stopwatch that they have no time to talk to one another anymore and make rought mistakes as a result. In the end, cooperation is not the heart of the game anymore, and that is really a problem.
A long discussion, an adjournment of the "time system" and a change to Nidhögg's action follow, and since changes never come singly or without other repercussions, we said goodbye to the good-and-evil power track, goodbye to the Nidhögg ladder, and welcome shared pathway for the advancing enemies. From that point in, the enemies will put pressure on the players all together.
Even after that last big change, other details are added later, such as the dwarf tokens you discard to get weapons (removed from the final version of the game), the giants with negative effects whenever Loki is taken; and the individual powers of the Gods. (What were we thinking? Gods without power is unbelievable!) We are now at March 2010, two years after the start of this challenge.
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Three turns in during a later playtest game
Ludonaute and the Show Must Go On
Ludonaute was born, and the first release under the brand was Offerings, an auction board game designed by Cédric. The second one is Yggdrasil, originally scheduled for release at Spiel 2010 in October, then postponed to March 2011 in order to have time to get the right distribution deals, such as Ludonaute's partnership agreement with Z-Man Games.
Hats Off to the Artist!
To bring that dream to life and make it complete, the artwork must match the game itself. Pierô was already a friend of mine at that time, and even though I hoped that he would be able to use his talent to bring Yggdrasil to life, I knew that he was very busy at the moment.
We started to ask other artists about creating illustrations for the game, but during the 2009 Cyberludiques as we are playtesting the Yggdrasil prototype, Pierô tells us that he'd appreciate creating artwork for the game as the Norse myths inspire him! In the end, he gave the game a strong and original graphic personality. Without his work, Yggdrasil would not be the same at all!
As you can see, Yggdrasil is above all a friendship story, and this story is still going on. I hope that lots of people will enjoy playing the game as much as I enjoyed designing it with my friends.
Fabrice Rabellino
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