Ignacy Trzewiczek: Game Designer’s Journal #5 – Playing with Pillars

[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. Links to segments #1, #2, #3 and #4]

I remember how I learned many years ago, that one of my favourite fantasy book authors, Feliks W. Kres, does not read any fantasy literature. None. He’s not interested in what others write; he doesn’t like the style and has no intention to start reading it. In our gaming field Reiner Knizia gave me a similar shock. I learned from Jacek Nowak’s great article, printed in Swiat Gier Planszowych (Board Games’ World), that Doctor Knizia doesn’t play other authors’ games.

While Machina (Machine) and Zombiaki (Zombies) were created exactly like Kres’ books, meaning that I had no other board game experience at the time, Witchcraft and Stronghold are titles created by a conscious Trzewik, an author with some gaming experience who knows many solutions used in games, an author who is able to find ready solutions in other games and implement them in his own prototype in order to achieve a particular result.

I wrote about being influenced by Prinz’ track recently, and today we’ll throw in the craftsmen cards from The Pillars of the Earth. I tried to borrow those, too, and use them in Stronghold as a tool in the Invader’s hands.

The player attacking the castle needs to take various actions. Some are standard, like building a machine, resource collecting, or troop movement. Some are special, like sending a saboteur or calling in reinforcements. This division of actions quickly brought The Pillars of the Earth to my mind, as that game includes craftsmen cards, with players picking a few standard ones and adding two special ones as well. It seemed like an interesting trail.

I created eight standard cards and a bunch of special cards, so let’s go to battle. Among the standard ones were “resources collection,” “machine construction,” “moving forces to walls,” and “assault on the walls”; among the special ones were such nasty toys as “poisoned water” and “fury on the walls.” From those eight the player would pick five at random, adding one special one, and this would comprise his deck of actions for that turn. He would know what he could do by looking at his deck.

Advantages? It was quick. Simple. The deck told the player straight out which actions he could take in his turn. There was some randomness, but it was potentially interesting. You know, sometimes he would be without machine construction, sometimes without resources. His life wouldn’t be easy. He’d have to pick his way, wheeling and dealing how to best use the cards he just picked and how to secure himself from an unlucky future draw. The theory was very tempting as we’d be forcing the player to plan for the future – “I need a lot of wood to start some serious machine building from the third turn on” – rather than allowing him to create short term plans: “In the next turn I’m going to collect wood and construct a catapult.”

No such luck. The system didn’t work. The attacker would get his cards and not plan anything, but just do what the cards dictated. The randomness was extreme. When the number of standard cards was reduced, the randomness would disappear, but the game would become boring (through the small choice of actions). When the variety of cards was increased, the game would become more interesting because it gave more possibilities of play, but it would also become extremely random. We toko the actions that we had drawn, not what we had planned. We didn’t make decisions. Fate decided what we got and what we played.

Transforming the craftsmen cards into action cards in Stronghold didn’t work. The idea of using six standard cards and a few special action cards didn’t provide what we had expected. No planning was possible, and there was no satisfaction in the multitude of available actions. With an aching heart I packed the cards into an “Archive” folder and started thinking about another solution. Completely unexpectedly I then invented something that became one of the main engines of Stronghold‘s mechanics. And it wasn’t borrowed from any other game. Well, maybe slightly…

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