Arne Thomi: Behind the Scenes of Merchants & Marauders

[Editor’s note: The board game Merchants & Marauders has been sailing just over the horizon for several years now. Here, Thomi offers a personal take on the history and current status of the game.]

Twenty-eight-year-old Dane Christian Marcussen is familiar with the notion of time splitting out of control, not only from the work he did composing music for the video game TimeSplitters: Future Perfect, but also because of his many other ongoing projects. For one thing, he composes music in the computer games industry and for short films; for another, he is a student of philosophy with a major in communications who is wrapping his studies around his music-making career.

On top of that, he and his girlfriend take care of their two-and-a-half-year-old son Storm, a name that Christian says is very fitting. Perhaps those young gusts helped put the wind in the sails of another one of Christian’s ambitious projects, the creation of a board game titled Merchants & Marauders.

May the “Yarrr!” Commence

The first glimpse of M&M came in 2003 when Christian and friends sat around after a boardgame session pondering whether they could design a board game themselves. They felt up to the task and tried to think of what they hadn’t yet seen in analogue gaming that they might be able to convert into cardboard.

Christian came up with an idea that would mimic the game play of Sid Meiers’ Pirates! computer game, and together with co-designer and friend Kasper Aagaard, he started developing the game. The first version turned out to be a ten-hour dice fest, and while they loved it, they knew that it wouldn’t score big time in the commercial market, so the process of refining their game had just begun.

Both Christian and Kasper invested a fair amount of time and money in their project, with Christian even taking six months off work and everything else to do nothing but work on Merchants & Marauders. They wound up investing more than US $20,000 in artwork and copyrights, with the largest chunk of that money – $7,000 – going toward the modelling of plastic ships. Christian describes himself as a haptic person and since he knows that other gamers also delight in having exquisitely rendered figures, he approached a company dedicated to miniatureliciousness, one that has produced figures for Fantasy Flight Games’ Tide of Iron and War of the Ring. It took six development cycles before he was finally pleased with the models of the galleon and the frigate, the flute and the sloop.

My Name Is … TBGFKAMM

Merchants & Marauders is to board games what Prince is to the music business – at least in terms of the shifting names, that is. What started out being called Merchants & Marauders – and what for now bears that title once again – was called Age of Piracy for a period of time in-between. What happened to lead to that new name?

In 2006, German game publisher and distributor Heidelberger Spieleverlag approached Christian – who had been marketing the game on BoardGameGeek and his own Bloodline Games website – to ask for a German copy of the game, something that he didn’t have available at the time. This got Christian thinking about finding a publishing partner that could produce more copies than he could at lower costs, which led to conversations with Glenn Drover and a suggestion of German publisher Pro Ludo.

Christian sent a prototype of M&M to Pro Ludo, and in practically no time the company jumped on the project. Sure, some adjustments would need to be made, but given their agreement on the basics of the game, they signed a contract and all lived happily ever after.

Well, that was the idea anyway, but given that M&M is a game of piracy and not a gumdrop-filled fairy tale wonderland, perhaps it’s no surprise that things didn’t turn out as expected – not through cutthroat behavior and deceitful action, though, so much as unprofessionalism.

The bubble burst about 18 months into the making of the renamed Age of Piracy. By that point, the game had been streamlined, with artwork uploaded on BoardGameGeek for geeks all over the world to see. All that was missing was the release of the game itself. At this time, however, a new investor transformed Pro Ludo from a publisher to a distributor, which meant that Christian’s game was at risk of not being produced. Christian’s contact person at Pro Ludo, who moved to Phalanx Games, was confident that Age of Piracy would still sail into a welcoming sunrise, but he turned out to be wrong. Phalanx Games had a pirate game of its own in the making, and after playtesting Christian’s game, the company called the whole thing off, with eighteen months of work ending in a four-line email to Christian from a person whom he had never previously heard of. (The title Age of Piracy might be reborn on a future game release, but it will have nothing to do with Christian’s design.)

Why Come Aboard?

If you’re looking for a game about piracy that captures the feel of Sid Meiers’ Pirates! you’d better keep an eye on Merchants & Marauders. Aside from the stunning ship models to which Christian still has the rights, the game has enough piratey badness – boarding parties, ship cannons, intercept maneuvers, port actions, merchant raids, bounties, trading, treachery, rumours and missions – to make even Jack Sparrow jealous.

You can tell from the game design that this student philosopher has a weakness for theme, story, and of course, fun. While there’s not denying that the game can throw you huge swings of luck both good and bad, there’s a great deal of decision making and with each new round players have to ask themselves how to best achieve their goals, starting with the decision to lead life as a pirate or follow the path of a merchant, a decision that you can change anytime during the game. According to Christian, the winner in most cases is the person who has been the most effective decision maker.

While both theme and functionality are critical to Merchants & Marauders, for this type of game Christian made the decision to favor game play over history. Thus, the pirate coastlines of Belize and Florida don’t make it into the game or else the gameboard map would have to be far larger, making it unwieldy both visually and practically. What’s more, Spanish ports are already well represented in the game, so adding two more would be overkill.

A Distress Call to Publishers

Due to the cost of the artwork and components, Christian knows that Merchants & Marauders will be an expensive game, which is why he hopes for a financially strong and ambitious publisher to pick up the game and product it in as lavish a format as he and others want to see it. Prototypes are in these publishers’ hands now, and while Christian doesn’t presume to know their customers better than them, he feels that the market’s desire for the ultimate pirate game remains unsatisfied, which makes his game of great potential interest for those looking to hoist the sail.

What will the future hold if no publisher picks up the game? Perhaps a preorder system for a small, break-even print run in the range of five hundred copies. Another option would be to bite the bullet and self-produce the game on a grand scale, but due to their previous investments the designers don’t have the funds to do so now.

Until that publication day comes, whether through a large publisher or a self-production, those who eagerly await this particular game will have to be satisfied with dropping by Christian’s castle in the Damhusvej in Odense in order to get a taste of this giant M&M…

Comments:

< Back Home