Kris Hall: Jarratt Gray and Endeavor

Like many of you, I check out the Essen preview from time to time.  One game that caught my eye was Endeavor, a game being published by Z-Man Games that was designed by Carl de Visser and Jarratt Gray.  Mr. Gray recently agreed to answer some of my questions about the game.

Kris: What inspired Endeavor? How did Z-Man Games come to produce it?

Jarratt: Carl and I started having lunch together 2-3 times a week to play Zertz. In between the playing we would talk about games we were paying and enjoying and games that we were currently working on. Both of us had a few prototypes that we had made in the past or were busy testing when we could get the chance. Once we’d unlocked most of what we wanted to get out of Zertz we kept having lunch, continuing to discuss what we liked and didn’t like in games, game theory, game strategy, you name it we talked it.

In the end we thought it would be fun to work on a design together. We discussed some ideas that were floating around in our heads, but hadn’t done much work with. It is actually great to work with someone else because you get to bounce ideas around. We basically decided that we wanted to make a development style game with a growing city. That was kind of where Endeavor started. Thematically I think we were interested in 18th century because it hasn’t been explored that much in games. It also seemed like an interesting period to set our game about a growing city. We ended up doing a bit of research on the era and everything kind of grew from there. Our first prototype is nothing like the Z-Man version, but I think that is part of process. You need to work and play and develop to get to right game at the end.

So I guess the inspiration is a mutual love of games and of designing them, though the spark for us forging a much stronger friendship was certainly Zertz.

As for the second part of your question, I’d have to say that Zev is doing a really nice job getting new designers published at Z-Man. This is our first published game and most companies don’t take submissions. Z-Man is an American publishing company that suited us because we are English speaking, and he takes submissions. Carl actually did a lot of research on companies, and Z-Man was the only realistic company that we could send to. Not that I think that is a bad thing, because Z-Man seem to be doing a great job with their games at the moment.

We basically went through the standard procedure for these things, a email submission which was accepted so we could send a prototype, which was liked, then we ended up with a contract and hopefully pretty soon a published game.

Kris: What is your background as a game designer?

Jarratt: Well this is going to be my first published game, though I’ve been working on stuff for years. I’m actually one of those people that just kind of does this because I like doing it, and I never really thought about getting anything published. I was designing games back when I was 8-14, mostly war games or rpgs, but board games as well. It wasn’t till I started going regularly to Carl’s gaming group about 6 or 7 years ago that I started working on designing games again.

Kris: Did you do a lot of historical research for the game?

Jarratt: Yeah, we would read wikipedia a lot among other things. I know I would get distracted by something in history and then keep reading. In one of our initial versions of the game there were a lot more historical developments. An example being the Cotton Gin. As the game progressed a lot of that stuff disappeared, but we always kind of had it in our minds. Endeavor is actually an abstraction of the period, but I think we needed to know a bit about it before we could get to the point that we have.

I also did a lot of research into the architecture, finding lots of pictures of period buildings so I could do all the designs for the prototype. Josh has kept a lot of my initial designs which I’m pretty pleased with, but redrawn them so the game as a consistent style. I think he’s done an awesome job.

Kris: Can you give us an overview of the game’s mechanics?

Jarratt: The basic idea of the game is the development of a nation into an empire during a time of trade and new markets.

As the game progresses you’ll get new buildings which give you new or more actions. On each turn you’ll use your actions to affect the game board and grow your empire. The main way in which your empire grows is by developing your tracks--the better your tracks are the more advantages you will have. So the Industry track gives you access to better buildings, the Culture tracks grows your population so you can use more actions, the Finance track allows you to open buildings back up so you can use them again, and the Politics track lets you hold more cards. In terms of basic mechanics Politics is the least important because cards really just increase your tracks. The main mechanic is centered around the interaction of your population and your available actions. So the more available actions you have the more you can do as long as you have a large enough population. Though if you have better buildings then you might be able to do more for less.

This part of the game kind of plays like a mix of action points and worker placement. The key thing is that each player has their own variable set of actions and actions are only played out one at a time. Interestingly at one time in the testing a player could play all actions at once just like an action point game, but we found this led to over analysis and lots of downtime. It also made the game longer. We certainly couldn’t have made the game for 5 players while that was still in effect. It works a lot nicer when players get one action at a time and actually increases the tension throughout the game.

Kris: Can you give us an example of some of the actions that the buildings allow?

Jarratt: Well there are only actually 5 actions, 4 basic and 1 special. The actions are Ship, which lets you ship to the trade route tracks on the board; Move, which lets you take control of one of the cities on the board; Draw, which lets you draw cards; Attack, which lets you take control of a city from another player; Dismiss (I might have this one wrong because I know it’s been changed), which lets you free up a building for use again.

The better buildings just combine these in different ways, sometimes with or without track improvement. So for example, a Shipyard gives you a Ship action and a Culture track improvement. A Guild Hall gives you a choice between a Ship action and Draw action when you use it. And the docks gives you a Ship action, and a Move action, which allows you to take both actions, or if you can’t use them both then either action.

Getting the building and action mix right was one of the more complicated parts of developing the game.

Kris: Can you tell us about the tracks on the game board?

Jarratt: The whole game is about tracks really. There are the 4 development tracks on the player board. Industry, Culture, Finance and Politics. I’ve talked about them a little. There are also the trade routes on the main board. To play to the trade routes you take a Ship action and place one of your markers in the next available space on the track. Once the track is complete it opens up that region so players can do other actions in there. In this way the game board grows as you play the game. At the start only the Mediterranean is readily accessible to all players, and even once a region is open, only players that have markers in trade route or open sea can actually do anything there.

Kris:  The fact that the game board grows during the game is fascinating. How did you develop that mechanic?

Jarratt: I think it was one of the early mechanics in our initial design though it has changed a lot obviously. Back then taking a certain building would allow you to put a new map into play and these maps went between players on the table. It was very modular. I think it would be cool to try and get that back into a game sometime but it didn’t turn out to be Endeavor. Instead we redefined it with the tracks and put everything on one board.

We were looking for something that wouldn’t be immediately overwhelming to new players, but we also wanted that feel of exploration. Thematically it isn’t actually exploration. All these subcontinents have actually been discovered. But it does tie in well with the idea of an expanding trade empire. It also turned out to be a pretty nice fix for the scaling issue between a 3 player and a 5 player game. In Endeavor you set the board up the same each time, but you might not open up every region.

Kris: On a Boardgame Geek thread I saw that you mentioned that wars can break out between players. How are wars fought in the game?

Jarratt: Wars are a pretty costly exercise in Endeavor. You don’t get a lot of population throughout the game to play with and using the Attack action costs you a bit of manpower. In the end you need to weigh up what it gains you versus what you lose.

Simply though, to initiate an attack you activate an Attack action (that cool looking cannon). Activation takes 1 population. Then you target another player’s city. You lose a population, then they lose the city and finally you take the city over with another one of your population makers. So it takes 3 markers to get a small advantage. And you have to do the whole thing, you can’t only do half the action. When used right it can be well worth it, but more often than not players end up getting Attack actions to prevent another player with an Attack action from attacking them. When that happens it can turn into a waiting game.

Kris: When can we expect Endeavor to be published?

Jarratt: Well last I heard it was scheduled for Essen 08, so I’m hopeful that is still the case.

Kris: What other gaming projects would you like to work on?

Jarratt: I’ve got a couple of board game projects I’m working on at the moment, one that I started before Endeavor was even conceived. That one is basically done. I think it’s pretty good, so I’d like to try and get that published.

While I’m not working on one at the moment (I do have a discarded prototype though), I would love to do a rail game. I know there are a lot out there, but they are a genre that really appeals to me. I like development games and for the most part rail games tend to be about developing a network.

I’d also like to explore the period that Endeavor is set in a little more possibly using some of the same mechanics in a quite different way. I’m particularly interested in a Napoleonic Wars games and have been thinking about it more and more recently.

Kris: Thanks for the interview.

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