Interview: Galen Ciscell on Atlantis Rising

Galen Ciscell's first board game – Atlantis Rising – will be released in Q3 2011 by Z-Man Games. Ciscell has been posting designer diary installments on the BGG game page every week or two, but I wanted to know more about the game and sent the following questions his way. Admittedly these questions might make more sense if you've read the rules for Atlantis Rising (PDF)...

WEM: What inspired the basic approach to Atlantis Rising? Why a co-op game? Why allow 2-6 players? Why set the game in Atlantis?

Galen Ciscell: As I detailed in my first Design Journal here on The Geek, Atlantis Rising was, from the start, a game created to my own preferences. It's co-op because co-op games are my favorite type of game; it can play with only two players because I usually play games with just my partner Chelsie; and it plays up to six because Chelsie and I usually play games with other couples when we play with other people, so capping a game at an odd number (like five players) is just frustrating for me. I chose the theme because (at the time of conception) there were very few good games with the Atlantis theme and because I enjoy fantasy. The theme also really drove the mechanisms of the game.

WEM: What pitfalls did you encounter and overcome when designing and developing the game? And how did you know when it was coming together as a finished design?

GC: Surprisingly, the game just flowed from the very first playtest. It has been through a fair number of tweaks since that initial session, but right away I knew I had hit upon something special with the press-your-luck, worker-placement element of the game. One of the biggest pitfalls was balancing the risk and reward of the various placements, which was resolved by changing the penalty for a bad placement from the permanent loss of an Atlantean to the temporary loss of that Atlantean.

Another design challenge was ensuring that the different options in the game were not only balanced against one another, but that they were also all fun for the players. I had to make changes to several councilors' special abilities, as well as the entire "Athenians Attack" phase, in order to make those councilors more fun for the players and to make contributing Atlanteans to the Atlantean Navy more enticing.

I guess I knew Atlantis Rising was nearing completion when everyone who playtested it had very little but praise to offer me. It just sort of felt finished (plus I was exhausted from dozens of playtests), so I sent it off to Zev at Z-Man Games. I actually did several more playtests after signing the contract with Z-Man, but those were mostly fine-tuning, not major overhauls to the rules.

WEM: Assuming you have some familiarity with the genre, how does Atlantic Rising differ from other co-op games? What might entice a player who hasn't enjoyed other co-op games? What might turn off a fan of Pandemic, Ghost Stories, etc., if anything?

GC: As a huge fan of cooperative games, I am extremely familiar with the genre. I own the games you mentioned, along with many other cooperative games and certainly drew from my experiences with those games when creating Atlantis Rising.

Aside from the recently released Brazillian game, Mehinaku, I believe Atlantis Rising is the only major worker-placement co-op game on the market, a feature that may attract players who might otherwise pass over the many cooperative games currently available.

A possible drawback for cooperative game players would be the lack of a current option for solo play, which I know is a much beloved feature of games like Ghost Stories and The Lord of the Rings: The Card Game. Atlantis Rising is easy enough to play solo by controlling two councilors, but I hope to release an official variant which will allow for a single player to play the game while controlling just one councilor.

WEM: How does the game play differ with the minimum and maximum number of players? I know that the attack track shows a different threat level for different player counts, but what differs in the pace or challenge of the game? What's your favorite player count and why?

GC: I honestly don't have a favorite player count, which is somewhat odd. I have played the game over 100 times with every different number of players and I enjoy it with more or fewer players for different reasons.

With fewer players there is more time to slowly develop a strategy and it's much more reasonable to take a few more risks, since fewer island tiles are likely to flood each round. The real challenge is getting all ten components built before the Athenians completely overwhelm you.

More players means more misfortunes each round, which makes for a more frantic game with a lot of tense, nail-biting moments, which I always love! The challenge is really more about coordinating who is building what, and you're more likely to lose from the misfortune cards than from not having enough Atlanteans to defend against the Athenians.

WEM: The Athenians come across as being a clock-like mechanism – not saying that's a bad thing! – that spurs players to action, while forcing them to divide their forces. Were they present from the start, and if not, how did they enter the design?

GC: The Athenians are indeed a mechanism that forces the issue of the destruction of the island in a set number of rounds. They were present almost from the very beginning of the game, and included for several reasons.

First, the Athenians-as-enemies-of-Atlantis are in Plato's account of Atlantis and theme was very important to me when designing this game (as I hope I've communicated in the rulebook). Second, the Athenians negate the possibility of the players simply collecting enough mystic energy each turn to cancel all of the misfortune cards and stall the game forever. Third, they allow the game to scale properly for a variable number of players. Fourth, the Athenians provide yet another placement option for players' Atlanteans – I really liked the idea of having one threat the players can't really anticipate or control (the misfortune deck) and one that they can (the Athenians). Fifth, because players will often lose the battle against the Athenians, resulting in the loss of one or more tiles, the Athenians provide one more opportunity for group decision-making (choosing which tiles to destroy) in the game.

WEM: Possibly tying in to the previous question, you've written in your diary about the challenge of getting the difficulty level right (while eventually conceding that having only one "right difficulty level" is an illusion). What is the difficulty level of Atlantis Rising for the various levels of play, say, as a percentage of wins to losses? How do those percentages change over time? What do people learn about the nature of game play that makes them better? What mistakes will first-timers always make?

GC: In terms of difficulty, I like to think of the levels in terms of what needs to happen for casual players to win, rather than a win/loss percentage. For instance, at the beginner level I expect anyone to be able to win, even if they are a bit unlucky, so long as they have any strategy whatsoever. Normal difficulty will take either a bit of luck or a bit of strategy to win; hard will take both; and cosmic difficulty will require some very solid strategy combined with good luck. All of the above difficulty levels approximate what I expect casual gamers to encounter in terms of difficulty. The removal of the starting mystic energy token for each player makes the game about as challenging for hardcore gamers or experienced players at each of the above levels as it would be for casual gamers playing with starting mystic energy.

In terms of the learning curve, people learn over time the value of always having enough mystic energy on hand to cancel a basic Flood misfortune, and the value of recruiting new Atlanteans early in the game. The latter is usually obvious to experienced gamers, but not always, while the former generally takes a few plays to realize for most everyone. First-time players almost always place their Atlanteans lower than necessary to achieve the same benefit (several tiles provide the same benefit, but some are closer to the sea than others) simply because they don't pay close attention to the tiles, and many first-time players will ignore the Athenian threat until it is too late! The biggest difference in strategy comes when groups actually begin to coordinate their actions rather than simply pursuing their own individual goals – this makes a huge difference in the win/loss percentage.