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At the start of the game, nine starting cards – each with a single letter on them – are laid out in a 3x3 grid. Each turn, you place a new card over an existing card to try to create new words, scoring them based upon the number of letters on the cards that you use to make those words. (Each square card in the draw deck has letters or letter combinations on 1-4 sides. On your turn, you can either choose one of the face-up cards on display or draw the top card of the deck.) You can score multiple words with the same card play, so landing the best-scoring opportunities requires some strategic planning. Play continues for a number of rounds that decreases with more players.
• Cryptozoic Entertainment's DC Comics Deck-Building Game from designers Matt Hyra and Ben Stoll was released to stores in the U.S. on November 30, 2012./pic1492764.jpg)
• In an article about pitching games to Filosofia Édition, complete with a peek at the publisher's wall of prototype-filled filing boxes, designer Jay Cormier writes, "While we haven't made it 100% official, Filosofia will be publishing our game, Akrotiri for a release in the third quarter next year" – next year meaning "2013" and we meaning "him and frequent co-designer Sen-Foong Lim". It might not be official, Jay, but you've posted it publicly, so I'm shining the spotlight on you. Better follow through!
What's Akrotiri? The game doesn't have a BGG listing yet, but here's a short description from an April 2011 interview conducted by Tom Gurganus of Go Forth and Game. From Sen: "Akrotiri [is] a pickup-and-deliver game in which players are searching for the gateways to Atlantis", and from Jay: "My favorite game of ours is a game called Akrotiri that is currently under consideration with Z-Man Games. I am a sucker for tile-placement games and we came up with something really new and special. Without giving too much away, we found a way to have players search for hidden temples based on map cards that they have – but in each game, the temples are located in different places. It's really my kind of game!" And a picture of the prototype from another article about pitching Filosofia:
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Legends of Andor is unique in that there is no rulebook. Rather, players learn as they experience the game. Was this your goal from the beginning? How did this approach develop, or why did you choose this unique path?
As an illustrator I had suggested this way of learning rules a few times for other games, but no one was interested or believed that this approach could work. My experiences with computer games made me think it would be possible. When the publisher and I decided that there would be multiple legends (in the prototype there was only one adventure) I thought to make the first legend very easy, like a tutorial in computer games, and increase the level of complexity with each new legend.
Of course, this required a lot of extra effort, because the editor Wolfgang Lüdtke and I did quite a lot of tests on just the rules, rather than the game itself. We watched people play the game, and then wrote down when there was a gap in the rules or something they didn't understand.
I'm very thankful that the publisher agreed to this unusual method. In the end I'm very satisfied with it. The heroes in Legends of Andor begin their adventure immediately after the two pages of Quick-Start rules have been read, and then have to fulfill their first (and of course easy) tasks. When playing a computer game, you wouldn't say the game is too easy after playing the tutorial. Similarly, in Legends of Andor the challenges increase alongside your number of options. This concept really pulls you into the land of Andor.
I'm curious to see how this works in practice. Years ago, a friend commented to me that computer games seemed like an easier entry point for gaming for newcomers because you can often do away with the instruction manual, especially for things like the Wii in which you can hand someone a device and say, "Swing it like a tennis racquet." I seem to recall Hanno Girke from Lookout teaching Agricola along these lines at Spiel 2007: "Just do something and see what happens", with the idea apparently being that thoughts about strategy will only distract you from learning how to play the game.
As an illustrator I had suggested this way of learning rules a few times for other games, but no one was interested or believed that this approach could work. My experiences with computer games made me think it would be possible. When the publisher and I decided that there would be multiple legends (in the prototype there was only one adventure) I thought to make the first legend very easy, like a tutorial in computer games, and increase the level of complexity with each new legend.
Of course, this required a lot of extra effort, because the editor Wolfgang Lüdtke and I did quite a lot of tests on just the rules, rather than the game itself. We watched people play the game, and then wrote down when there was a gap in the rules or something they didn't understand.
I'm very thankful that the publisher agreed to this unusual method. In the end I'm very satisfied with it. The heroes in Legends of Andor begin their adventure immediately after the two pages of Quick-Start rules have been read, and then have to fulfill their first (and of course easy) tasks. When playing a computer game, you wouldn't say the game is too easy after playing the tutorial. Similarly, in Legends of Andor the challenges increase alongside your number of options. This concept really pulls you into the land of Andor.
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