Ignacy Trzewiczek: Game Designer’s Journal #1 – Stronghold

[Editor’s note: Portal Publishing’s Ignacy Trzewiczek, co-designer of the 2008 title Witchcraft, has been penning a weekly “game designer’s journal” for Games Fanatic.pl, detailing the origin and development of Stronghold, Portal’s 2009 Spiel release. This article series, now in English, will appear each Saturday on BGN until Trzewiczek runs out of material or Spiel is at our doors – whichever comes first!]

I remember it as if it were yesterday. I was in a pub, the Kredens, with the slowly developing gamers’ circle in Gliwice, a city in southern Poland with a population of 200,000. Goor, Tiju and Bors were all new acquaintances, and I didn’t know them very well at the time. As part of our “getting to know one another” efforts, I brought Neuroshima HEX to one of those meetings. My new acquaintances looked at it, shook their heads and said, no, they’d rather play something else. They perceived the game as exceptionally uninteresting. Many months later they became great fans of the game, taking part in tournaments and regular matches – but back then, that first encounter with NS HEX had been extremely negative: Some tanks, some mutants, whatsgoin’on…? Let’s play something else.

At the time I discussed NS HEX at length with the head of Rebel.pl, Piotr Katnik, who would argue as follows: “Trzewik, it’s a great game, but its subject puts off a great majority of customers. No one will buy a game about mutants fighting gangsters, about future robots and some partisans. Convert it to wars of elves versus dwarves, make a new printing, and the sales will go up 300%.”

Hardly anyone remembers such conversations now because Neuroshima HEX is the biggest and best-known Polish game, but three years back the game had two distinct features: great reviews (reviewed by Pedrak and Folko; praised by Bazik and Pancho among others) and practically no sales. It took many months of hard work promoting the game and traveling to visit conventions and organize demonstrations to finally bring boardgame fans around. Suddenly the sales soared, suddenly the print run sold out in no time, and we could start considering a reprint – but the beginning was terrible.

Our hard times with Neuroshima HEX gave us a lot to think about. When you look at the shelves in a game store, what hits your eyes are boxes of Pirate’s Cove (game with pirates!), Galaxy Trucker (game with space smugglers!), Ghost Stories (game with exorcists!) – games with such theme that you grab the box without even thinking about whether the mechanics are innovative, whether the game comes from a recognized author, whether the price is $20 or $25. You look at the shelf, see a game about zombies, and automatically think: “Braaaaaains!”

I won’t say that the subject matter of a game is most important, that it’s more important than the mechanics, but I have no doubt today that the two are equally important, that if you have two solid games with well-written rules, you’ll pick the one with Formula 1 and not the one about goat grazing.

Somewhere around the beginning of 2008, when we knew we would be releasing Witchcraft that year, we sat down in Portal and discussed our plans for 2009. We decided we needed an interesting subject for a game, one that we believed in ourselves, one for which we could create cool rules, test it all nicely, and balance it all, too. But before this could happen, before we’d launch into creating cool rules, we’d have to find a good, interesting theme. I remember saying to Michal Oracz, “Listen, let’s take a piece of paper and put down all the cool, colorful, adventurous themes we can. There are loads of games about Vikings and pirates. We need something similar, something associated with our childhood and things that used to fascinate us. Days Of Wonder does it this way and has an impressive list of games, from gladiators to Cleopatra to King Arthur’s knights.”

It was the beginning of 2008, so we didn’t hurry as we knew we had a lot of time. We explored the childhood memories in our heads and wondered which of those could be converted into a board game, a game that would bring positive feelings just by standing on a shelf in a store.

“Stronghold!” I said one day as I entered the Portal office – “a stronghold.” A few moments passed before Michal and Multidej got it, with me standing in the doorway, awaiting their reaction in suspense. Finally I saw in their eyes what I felt myself. That was it: Stronghold.

“Sounds good,” admitted Michal.

“This can be done nicely,” I thought. “We’ll make a Westerplatte” – the peninsula in Gdansk where the Germans launched the invasion of Poland and World War II by sending thousands of troops against a Polish garrison holding only 182 soldiers, a garrison that still held off the attack for six days despite the lopsided numbers. Westerplatte is the first thing that children in Poland learn at school, and it is a huge symbol of courage and patriotism in our country.

“The defenders are few, and they defend a stronghold, surrounded by enemy forces. The attacking player will have an unlimited number of forces, simply heaps of troops, so he doesn’t care about losses. The defender has only a dozen or so on the walls, so every fallen man on the wall means carnage to him. And you know, siege engines and lots of them, catapults, ballistas, trebuchets, projectiles flying and smashing the walls, defenders pouring hot oil onto the enemy forces, but it won’t be enough because there’s just too many of them. A section of the wall gets knocked down by a catapult, and more forces are required there, but there are no more soldiers to send. The defender’s lost three men, and he can’t fully man the wall, there are gaps to be filled, and the invader storms relentlessly, another catapult’s volley is launched, targeting the hospital in the castle...”

I stood there in the doorway, or maybe already inside, I don’t remember. I know I was in that castle, I saw that encounter, I saw the swarm of attackers and those desperate defenders, that handful of soldiers, redirected from wall to wall by their commander, responding to a threat in one section, then going somewhere else because the invader broke through from the flanks, and the rear, and there and here… I felt the emotions. I imagined the evil consequences of the attackers’ actions and the desperation of the defenders.

A castle siege. Catapults, cauldrons with oil, heroes fighting on the walls.

That was it. We had a theme.

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