#designer update

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A frightfully serious exposition on why we are publishing Camelot – The Court in November 2014, not Camelot –

The Tourney as advertised, and other matters, some of which are of little or no importance whatsoever.

So we had Camelot – The Tourney scheduled for release in six months, but one morning I woke up knowing

that it’s not ready for publication and it’s now too late to sort it in time. This produced a fit of the shakes that lasted

halfway through the third bottle of gin. What to do?

I guess other publishers wrestle with the same sort of scheduling problems as we do, but it falls on each of us

to solve it on our own in our own way. The weasel word here is ‘solve’. It implies a proactive, even intelligent

approach to a perfectly rational situation. What Laurence and I did was chase each other round the office

screaming and wailing and bashing each other with rolled up newspapers. A very professional way to do things,

in my opinion. Well, Old Farts can’t keep that sort of thing up for very long and within a minute or two the sound of

wheezing and coughing brought the mayhem to a stop. That’s when we remembered ‘The Filing Cabinet in The

Corner’. This is a relic from Wotan 1. A file and forget destination of last resort for the various projects, designs,

briefing notes and related detritus of a lost age. The FCitC might just be our last, slim chance of salvation. We

tippy-toed over and there it was. The rusting steel filing cabinet labelled ‘Design Vault. Beware – Toxic Hazard’. I

use the words ‘rusting’, ‘steel’ and ‘filing cabinet’ advisedly. ‘Rusting and steel’ imply a process in which not all the

steel is turned to brown and flaking scabs and where oxygen might wander over to the cabinet, poke about a bit

and say ‘Aha! Steel. Yum. I’ll have some of that for breakfast.’ ‘Filing Cabinet’ implies a degree of order; a feeble

stab at halting entropy’s advance, an imposing presence that suggested the holding of chaos at bay. This FCitC

was none of these things. The only thing holding this together was habit, dust and a haughty indifference to the

ravages of time.

We stared at it in bemused awe. Laurence tried to blow some of the dust away. Big mistake. Saharan sandstorm

eat your heart out. This was positively Martian in its intensity. The coughing and wheezing resumed. After we

staggered back from the hospital and a somewhat trying course of injections against Bubonic Plague, Pharaoh’s

Foot, The Dropsy and a number of other historical diseases we thought we might explore a bit more and a bit

more carefully. The drawer scraped open and we stared into the abyss. Was the toxic hazard inside or outside

the cabinet? Is this where that intern who mysteriously disappeared in 1993 had ended up? A rank smell of decay

oozed out, spotted our noses and wandered languidly over. Yep, that’s the pong of long dead intern. We sucked

in the breath somewhat, took life into hands and a number of other precautionary measures then delved down into

said abyss.

Amongst the dead flies, empty crisp packets, back issues of White Dwarf (White Dwarf?) and, ahem, assorted

bones there were some crumbling folders in water stained and curling brown cardboard. The writing on the covers

was faded and almost unreadable but clearly hand written. Hand written? You ask in shocked disbelief. Yes,

promise you. In blue fountain pen ink, no less. There was no email address, no URL, no reference whatsoever

to pre-Web days. I know, I know. Man, these were old. Like ANCIENT. I reached in and my hand closed round a

crumbling file. We took it to the table and carefully opened it. And there it was. A perfectly preserved specimen

from the Old Regime blinking in the light and muttering ‘About bloody time too. You try nineteen years in a filing

cabinet with a dead intern and see what you smell like. He took weeks to die, by the way. Just thought you’d like

to know that.’

We ignored the muttering – games can be peevish at times. Open the cover. Game Board on the finest

parchment, hand illuminated in rich golds, reds and lapis lazuli blues. I know these medieval chaps didn’t do

perspective, but hell, this was awesome. Rules in Latin, playtest notes from various corners of the empire: some

in Saxon, others in recursive Pictish ‘A’. It looked complete, perfect and playable. A faint memory stirred. This was

the pre-publication prototype of Down with the King that had crawled out of the filing cabinet. Nice game that. Set

in a medieval court. Fast, fun, vicious. Only three rules, thirty minutes to play... yadeyadeya. Just what we needed

in fact.

And that explains just about everything. Well, everything if importance. Had to change the name, natch. Did a load

more playtesting. Got some clever blokes to do some drawings and some more clever blokes to print it. That sort

of thing. Nuff said. November. Start saving now is my advice.

Pip, pip.

Camelot - The Build Published

Now Camelot – The Build is published, into distribution and well received, I can turn my attention fully to the next few games. There are four things on the design agenda:

Camelot - The Four Towers, an expansion pack for CtB

Camelot – The Guilds, another expansion pack for CtB

King Arthur’s Noble Knights

Excalibur 2nd Edition

The Four Towers

Some creations we could name can only manage two towers. That’s pathetic! We can do four without breaking sweat. TFT expands CtB upwards! In this game expansion players can build towers onto the basic game plan: King Arthur’s Tower, Guinevere's Tower, Lancelot’s Tower and Merlin’s Tower. To build a tower a player places a stairway tile followed by a tower block. The tower block occupy the space of four tiles (90mm x 90mm) and are 70mm high. On the top of each tower block are spaces for four regular sized tiles. The scoring for these extensions are fairly regular, but their strategic importance has to be grasped early in the game as the game is won or lost in these towers.

So far, so regular, but we couldn't leave it like that could we? Also in the pack are tiles and stands for the four characters, King Arthur, Guinevere, Lancelot and Merlin. Once a tower is built and identified by laying a tile from that character’s tower, the character appears on the board. As part of their turn players get to move a character. Now it gets evil! Each character effects the castle differently.

Merlin, for instance, when placed on a tile will score that tile’s value for the player, but then a blanking counter is placed on the tile and it can not score again during the game. Guinevere scores the tile value against another player nominated by the moving player, and so on. Even more evil is if two characters end a turn in the same square. Arthur & Guinevere together in the great hall ores points for a player, while Merlin and Guinevere together is bad news for some players. Most disruptive of all is Lancelot and Guinevere together in either of their towers. To loud cries of ‘Bonky, Bonky!’ the leading player loses 10 points, the second placed player loses 5 points. The third placed loses 3 points! Ah! What fun….

Camelot the Guilds exists at the moment as a concept, but is not as yet in playtest. This introduces medieval guilds into the game. Each players controls a guild that owns the rights to building and scoring on particular tile types. That’s pretty much as far as the idea has got at the moment because we have to finalise CtFT before we can move on to CtG.

Next Designer’s notes will include an update on King Arthur’s Noble Knights.

PUBLISHING STRATEGY:

It was May when I last updated on our design projects, which does seems stretching the definition of Laurence’s suggested monthly updates somewhat. The reality, however, is more prosaic. At the moment, both Laurence and I work on Wotan Games part time. So, not only are there significant fallow periods where little appears to be happening, but what needs to be done can often be fairly tedious stuff even when we are Wotan focused. Production issues, creating the company structure and Kickstarter have taken significant chunks of time recently – all of which must be done properly but is hardly gripping to read about. Now, though, we have two things that may be of interest. The first is the final box cover for Camelot - The Build, which is shown on the left. The second is the slow evolution of a publishing strategy for the company which can be summarised thus: We will be evolving two lines of games which we will publish ourselves. Both lines are rooted in the Arthurian legend. Aha! You say, but which Arthurian legend? The sub-Roman, “historical” one, the Victorian romantic one or the medieval sources (Mallory et al) one? The answer is Sir Thomas Mallory’s Le Morte d’Arthur. Not only is it the largest and richest of the versions, but it is set firmly in the late medieval era (published in 1485) and has the biggest cast list with all the characters fully formed.The first games line, The Camelot Chronicles, will be a series of easy to play games with a target of three rules, maximum of one hour play time and universal playability and appeal. Camelot – The Build is the first of this series having three rules, a play time of half an hour and bright, humorous graphics. It is now printed and waiting to ship. We will have stock for Essen and it will be in retail in November. Two expansions are being developed for this game. Camelot – The Guilds will be the first to be published and introduces medieval guilds into game play. Each player controls a guild who may or may not co-operate in the completion of Camelot! Camelot – The Four Towers extends the game vertically as Merlin, Lancelot’s, Guinevere’s and Arthur’s towers are built. Other games in this line are Camelot – The Court which is a faction building and dodgy deals card game and King Arthur’s Noble Knights – of which more below. The other games line will be the Mallory Series. These will be more complex games and the first two will be new editions of Excalibur and Merlin. These will be two hour games with as many rules as necessary and will mainly appeal to hobby games players. One other game in this group is The Quest for the Holy Grail which currently only exists as ideas in my head, so don’t hold your breath for that one. That leaves a second edition of Robin Hood and Londinium outside a series envelope, but that doesn’t mean they will not be published when they are ready. Provided Camelot – The Build does well enough, we will follow up with King Arthur’s Noble Knights. This is a medieval, tournament melee game where Knight of the Round Table grab a weapon or two, don armour, jump on a horse and try to beat other knights into submission. A few intuitive rules and our artists' sense of fun should make this a hoot. Playtesting of V2 is underway and the feedback so far is good. Some fine tuning needed before V3 goes out to playtest groups. Scheduled for May 2014. We will be playtesting this at Beer & Pretzels in Burton Saturday 12 October. Otherwise, more details and some photos next Update.

1. Allan B. Calhamer – a Tribute:

Allan B. Calhamer, who died in February this year, was the designer of the Diplomacy boardgame. The UK national press and Board Games Geek, amongst others noted the event and I have been meaning for some time to pay tribute to this gaming pioneer whose game and name seem to have slipped into something of a twilight zone in today’s hobby gaming scene. So let us be clear about this; Diplomacy was a landmark product, a gaming revolution. Probably the most important game created since the likes of Chess and Go and the starting point of so much modern game design. Like many lifetime gamers of a certain age, Diplomacy was one of those games that lit up a drab, grey world for small boys in early sixties Britain. While the Beatles, Twiggy and the Kinks may have been enjoying themselves greatly in what the media now calls the swinging sixties, I assure you that they swung by not a single degree in a certain boarding school in the depths of rural Norfolk. We played boardgames instead. Cluedo, Formula 1, Risk, Campaign and Stratego amongst others. But these were soon despatched to the locker as we gawped, slack jawed with awe at the wonders that were (and to a certain extent still are) Squad Leader, Kingmaker and Diplomacy. It is with some regret that I have to admit that the diplomacy inherent in Diplomacy was somewhat beyond us. Our negotiating skills rarely stretched much beyond a fist to the solar plexus and my guess is that the few games of Diplomacy we started ended rapidly in violence both on and off the board. A game of Diplomacy may have conjured a shimmering vision of the sort of quiet, controlled achievement that we aspired to, but we fell well short in the subtlety department. Nevertheless, it made its mark and I would like to think it both created and lit a path to a gaming and even emotional ‘otherness’ that was deeply significant. Such is the power of gaming. So why was it such a revolution? OK, let’s start with Kingmaker. This was probably our favourite boardgame, but while the depth and richness were of a level far above Risk and Campaign, they were clearly of the same family. Turn based, card/piece driven, action and board-centric games. Diplomacy was none of these. No player turns, no cards and the centre of activity was away from the board. Altogether a vision that startles and delights in equal measure. Even today there is nothing quite like it. And from this singular vision came all negotiated, simultaneous action games which in turn enabled postal and then computer-moderated gaming. Written orders in our own Excalibur and any other such mechanic are a straight lift from Diplomacy. The simplicity of both board and pieces are a clear and enduring lesson to any game designer. Any old fool can pile on the pieces, and most fools do (me included). To par your pieces down to a level where each of the very few in play are a major statement of strategic achievement is an object lesson in game design that anyone aspiring to separate gamers from their cash should study with due reverence. Calhamer may not have designed another game worthy of note, but this matters little. Diplomacy itself became a cult in the manner of Chess and Go that alienated many non-players, but this counts for diddlysquat. The game is judged flawed by modern standards because players can be eliminated, but this is a matter of opinion and no more. What you cannot escape is the fact that Diplomacy is a landmark in gaming. It was then, is now and probably will still be in a thousand years time. Hat’s off, then to Allan B. Calhamer. Let’s celebrate one of the few real heroes of the gaming revolution that we have. Thanks, Alan. You rock.

2. ColePowered Games, Wotan Games & Camelot - The Build

We are delighted to announce that Wotan Games and ColePowered games will be working together to bring Camelot - The Build: The App. to the world some time in the fairly near future. I say 'working together', but actually Cole Jefferies will be doing the clever stuff, while Laurence and I will be standing around trying to look intelligent while making small gasping noises as the all-singing-all-dancing CtB-TheApp dances and sings to us. Cole Jefferies has a record of achievement in the app field, being the creator of Megacity. His current solus project - Six O'Clock High - is looking devestatingly cool and he will bring a whole new skillset to the Wotan camp. The ColePowered website is here: http://colepowered.com Well worth your time to investigate. This is a very exciting project for us all. We think we will be able to bring to market a number of our existing board games that have real potential as apps. We hope that having both software developer and board games developer in the same camp will produce a better game, but only time will tell if this proposition is correct. Meanwhile we will be Kickstarting this project soon and will announce that in due course.

1. CAMELOT THE BUILD:

All the design and artwork is now finished on this project bar checking the print-ready PDFs. I have now made up a playtest copy of the game using the actual artwork for a couple of upcoming games conventions and a typical in-play view is shown in the top left photo. If that looks like three ladies in a bath tub and The Round Table then that's because they are. The other tiles are a corner tower, a blank and a garden tile. On the right is a detail from one corner of the board. Artist Dan Peterson has done four simply wonderful vignettes from medieval life and they are little masterpieces. The tiles illustrate a wicked sense of humour (again, by Dan) and the look of the whole game bring that joy to playing the game that only world class illustrators can.

2. EXCALIBUR 2nd EDITION:

Some quiet developement work going on here with progress on a number of issues. The overall objectives with V2 are as follows:

(i). To shorten the Game: From about four hours to about two hours. That's as long as most of us want to play a game, so that seems to be both a natural and reasonable game time. Let's be straight here. If a designer can't pack an intense and exciting game into two hours, he's got no business asking for your money.

(ii). To make it more Arthurian/Medieval: 'Le Morte D'Arthur' by Sir Thomas Mallory, on which all Wotan's Arthurian games are based, was printed in 1485, at the last flowering of the high medieval period. Mallory wrote as if Arthur were alive in his own era and thus in this version of the legend (and there are others with equal validity) the medieval and the legend are the same. The three pillars of medieval life were the land, the church and the warrior/ruling class. Excalibur should aim to both include and balance these threads into a game in which the exercise of power elides seamlessly between three three estates of the Arthurian realm. Reading that back, it sounds a bit hi-falutin' and hoity-toity, but I'll go with it and take the flack. Games designers can have flights of fancy too...

(iii). To rebalance the game away from combat: By upgrading the church and economics players have more levers to pull in their quest for Victory Points, can use different strategies to get there and have more tactics to gain manors.

This translates into these changes in game rules/mechanics:

(i). The Excalibur 2 Game year is now 3 seasons, not four: OK, Excalibur 1 players. Panic ye not. Eliminating Spring hasn't made your lives any shorter or brought the second coming and/or the apocalypse much closer. It's better this way - no really. Sit down for a few minutes, do some deep breathing and think of butterflies in a sunlit forest. Feeling better? Right. What I have done is combine Spring and Summer and called in 'Campaign'.The other two seasons are Autumn and Winter. So there are now just two seasons per year now where you can go out and put the world to rights. But bear in mind that Autumn is harvest and knights need to be in villages collecting taxes. So really only one season of pure conquering time, and any blood-soaked revenge meeted out in Autumn will come at a heavy price. It's OK to panic now.

(ii). Taxing manors has been simplified: Only one type of reeve and income depends on whether a manor has a reeve and whether a knight is in the manor or not. Income doubles for each, so good planning in Autumn is a game changer. Actually, Autumn is now so stressy that even thinking about thinking about writing Autumn orders gives me a migraine.

(iii). Mills & Churches: Key manor development pieces these, as churches bring loads of Victory points, influence and income, while mills can be used to tax other player's manors, and are VP-able too. Sneaky? Oh yes. And very, very annoying. And they can be used to detatch a next door player's manor without combat. The evil laugh is doing overtime.

(iv) Win by Victory Points: Swathes of conquered territory do not, in real life, translate into prosperous and satisfying estates where your rosy-cheeked peasants prosper mightily and pay their taxes with a smile. Nor do they in E2. With limited cash and an upgrade race in place at the centre of the board your board edge and side manors start to turn a bit smelly. Low returns, difficult to defend and needing squillions to make them VP-able. Maybe having the most manors is not the path of wisdom. VPs turn player's thoughts away from the purely physical to a more rounded, contemplative and stateman like view of life. For some of the time, at least. Then it's back to how to get enough knights together to take Barfield with its church, its castle, its reeve and its reach.....

(v). Five Years Only: Yes. Only five full years. Ten campaigns. Concentrates the mind wonderfully!