The Beginning: GENTES Expansions

 

During the development of GENTES, there were several ideas for rule variants and additional components that I did not pursue or removed to keep the game focused and as smooth as possible. When the game was released by Spielworxx in 2017 and the first edition sold out quite quickly, the interest in expansions seemed apparent. Apart from the expansion "New Cities" published in the advent calendar, nothing more happened initially.

 

Nevertheless, I continued working on some variants because the core mechanism of GENTES serves as an excellent starting point for variants and new ideas. The mechanism, which involves taking an action marker and performing the associated action, is intuitive, and the limited number of different actions makes it easy to learn: buy cards with buildings, play them if you can meet the requirements for further cards, or train professions and build cities to meet the prerequisites.

 

With the variants and expansions, I focused on individual aspects of the game, such as the training of specific population groups, special functions of the cities on the map, and new supplementary elements that should open up new ways to earn victory points. My notes eventually included more than a dozen modules or scenarios.

 

While testing various variants, it quickly became apparent that the original components developed for GENTES imposed tight limits, as they were not created with considerations for new rules and variants outside the game.

 

A concrete example is the rule variant "Road Construction," where we introduced roads between the cities on the map as a new element. The roads should always connect two cities specifically. However, the game board of GENTES contains only individual cities without any geometric or regular arrangement. Therefore, it was practically impossible to determine which cities are adjacent to each other or to which neighboring city a road lying more or less lost in the sea should lead without changing the board.

 

Additionally, I aimed to integrate the home cities from GENTES, located at the edge of the game board, into game play and thus assign the respective home city to a region.

 

Another trigger for a fundamental revision of the base game was the high cost of city building. Many players found it frustrating when they wanted to play a civilization card that required a city, but the construction of this city consumed many spaces on the time track, and the city became more or less uninteresting after playing the card.

Against this backdrop, I had many discussions with the publishing partners of GENTES. When it became clear that the release of expansions, etc., would not happen, or at least not in the near future, I decided to fundamentally revise GENTES and immediately consider the options for variants and expansions.

 

The Misstep: Legacy Campaign as a Starting Point

 

This was around 2018 or 2019, and everyone around me was caught up in the "Legacy fever," whether due to Pandemic, Risk, or Charterstone. Since I had several different approaches for scenarios, I decided to follow the trend and connect these into a campaign.

 

Like the major trendsetters, I envisioned a large-scale Legacy campaign spanning at least 12 games, with new rules being added continuously and materials being discarded, supplemented, and replaced. Ideally, I wanted to include a large number of different branches in the campaign, where not all scenarios and materials would be discovered, maintaining the allure of replaying the campaign.

 

However, I soon realized that playtesting unfinished scenarios within a Legacy framework was not practical. The preparation for test games and the thoughts of the testers were spread across too many different aspects, preventing clear insights from being gained from the sessions.

 

The enormous effort required to repeatedly change and sort out materials, or to re-sort them for the next game, exceeded the time resources I could dedicate to game development.

 

Moreover, at that time, it was challenging to assemble stable test groups that could meet for multiple games with the same participants.

 

The Solution: Campaign, but not Legacy Game; First the Scenarios

 

Simultaneously, I came to the conclusion that a Legacy game was not the right concept for my project.

 

The disadvantages of a Legacy concept became increasingly clear through my own experiences. In our gaming groups, we had several sessions within a Legacy campaign that we really enjoyed but couldn't replay. Additional rules and covered materials in subsequent games made it impossible to replay our favorite variant. The large number of new and increasingly complex rules dampened the enjoyment towards the end of a Legacy campaign. Often, the last games were played just "to finish it." The group had little interest in even more new rules. The thirst for discovery of new challenges in terms of additional game options was sated.

 

From this, I concluded that for the new project, the individual scenarios should be playable independently, and the number of games in a campaign should not be so high that players lose the genuine desire to discover the next scenario.

Independent scenarios offer many advantages. During development, the scenarios can be tested simultaneously, as there is no need to consider the results of the previous scenario's tests. Changes in the first scenarios do not affect the later ones.

 

For the players, independent scenarios mean no "overkill" of rules, but only the additional rules for the base game needed for the current scenario. This allows players to engage with the newly discovered rule set without being burdened by the rules of the previous scenario. From my perspective, one of the most important advantages is that individual scenarios that the group enjoys can be replayed repeatedly.

 

Thus, the decision on the next steps was made: I would take a step back, exit the Legacy or campaign development initially, and focus on developing the individual scenarios.

 

From these considerations, it became clear to me that a fixed set of approximately 8 to 10 scenarios should be created, which can be connected through a meta-level as a campaign but must also be playable individually as a complete experience.

 

The Restart: Base Game EPOS and GENTES Online

 

To integrate the home cities more into game play and optimally utilize the game board for various scenarios, I began a revision of the GENTES board. I retained the general structure of the cities but arranged them slightly differently, creating a more or less symmetrical hexagonal grid. In GENTES, the home cities have different functions as they do not provide income in the form of tokens or money but instead offer actions or modifications of actions. To maintain this special status, I could not simply place the home cities among the other cities but instead positioned them in a ring around the "normal" cities, associating them with the neighboring cities of a colored region. Thus, the home cities, now called provinces, can also be activated when another city in the region is built, which was not possible in GENTES due to the lack of region-specific assignment for the home cities.

 

To facilitate meeting card requirements and bring more activity to the game board overall, I split the city-building action into smaller steps. Instead of one large, complex action to immediately build an entire city, players can now place pioneers in the form of round discs on the game board with "minor" actions, move them around, and thus take control of city-building spaces through majorities. When six pioneers are together, they found a city, which can be used as in GENTES. Without a city, the pioneers can also use the benefits of the city-building space, though at the cost of one pioneer being removed from the board.

 

Ideas involving military elements, such as eliminating foreign pioneers or destroying cities, were out of the question for me, as this would go against the game's nature. GENTES is a game about building and racing for the best positions and opportunities, not a conflict game.

 

During this redesign phase, the COVID-19 pandemic broke out, unexpectedly ending all playtesting sessions at the game table.

However, there was a lovingly implemented online version of GENTES by Jason Dinger on the Vassal platform. During the pandemic, I also experimented a bit with other platforms. The great advantage of Vassal is that it is easy for non-experts to incorporate graphics for cards, game boards, and tokens, and the game moves can be recorded so that sessions can be replayed and analyzed.

 

Since the Vassal modules are also publicly accessible, I was able to create my own module based on the GENTES module – of course, in consultation with Jason (thanks again at this point!) – in which I incorporated the revised game board.

As more and more players overcame their reluctance to online sessions during the pandemic and became familiar with the online platforms available, we were soon able to start playtesting sessions over Vassal.

 

In the run-up to the online SPIEL 2020 fair, I came into contact with André, who also did "booth duty" at our online OSTIA booth, so we chatted and discussed a lot. We started a regular online testing group with Robert, who lives nearby, meeting every Sunday evening, which became the core of all development work. The valuable and often brutally honest feedback from test rounds is extraordinarily valuable for the development of a game. Coupled with extreme enthusiasm to play a game over and over again to make the best of it, the contribution of testers cannot be overestimated. Later, other test groups joined with Carsten, Helge, Martin, Anna, and Jörg, who met on other weekdays and sometimes used Tabletopia.

Thus, partly "thanks" to the pandemic, a testing team was built across half of Europe, from Oslo to Wolfsburg, Hagen to Liechtenstein.

 

The online tools have the advantage that small changes to cards, etc., can be quickly implemented and tested, as you do not have to print and craft every time you change something in the file. This allowed us to quickly test several adjustments to card costs and effects necessitated by the new city-building and pioneer placement actions.

 

 

Apart from the action markers for the Navigator action, I only changed the starting player action marker and the price track for the card display. Whoever takes the starting player action marker, after it has been ignored for some time, receives a higher bonus – indicated on the back. The card purchase with high values was made more attractive by adjusting the price tiers and virtually integrating the cards from the discard pile into the display.

 

https://gamefound.com/en/projects/spielworxx/epos-a-gentes-game