Page: History.Page10 - Last Modified : Sat, 19 Jun 10 - 1103 Visits

This page contains a series of mechanics that has been used in the development of the game but that did not work well. Still, this page contains ideas that could be a good source of inspiration for variants that you and I could decide to design.

Influence board

One of my friend said that there should be some sort of off board mechanic that could be used to influence the game. This is where the notion of influence came in with a 2nd way win without fighting. There has been many system being tested, especially with real cards, but this one is an interesting mechanic I designed that could probably get used for another game.

The concept works like this, there is a board made of 3 rows and 4 columns, when player get influence, they place cubes on any of the nine squares on the left of the board. Each of these square has a special ability and the player who wins the majority in the square would get the special ability. Now, there was 3 ways to resolve squares, each column use a different resolution method. The squares were resolved in a specific order to make sure there was no conflict of timing. You started on the left, at the top, and going from left to right, you ended at the bottom right.

Now, there was a catch, for each square resolved, there was a way that some of the tokens you invested ended up as corruption in the 4th column of the board. If you accumulated too much corruptions, or if you had majority in the corruption square, a bad effect occurred to your kingdom.

Now as you can see, that was a very interesting mechanic which was very euro style. The problem is that it was too heavy for my game. I made that side board being a game in itself and felt like I were playing 2 games at once. I think it could be a good idea if that was the central part of the game. Maybe I could make a game of political influence game where all the action and changes are played on this board and you have a simple map where you mark which player control which territory. It could make a fine pure euro game similar to louis XIV.

Initiative marker

In the early design, players could control various kingdoms that stayed on the board until getting erased like that was the case in Britania. Since I did not want the same player to play all his kingdom at once, because it would have been too powerful, I had to find a ways to determine which kingdoms was going to get played.

So each kingdom of each player had an initiative maker which was set up in a list. When a kingdom finished it's turn, the marker was slide halfway up. Players continued like this with every kingdom in the list and at the end of the turn, the player which was first in the list had his marker sent at the end of the list.

Now, when a player was invading, his marker was placed at the top of the list upside down to indicate that he is an invader. After his turn was done, the token was sent immediately at the end of the list so that the invader could get reinforcement and attack again. When his second round was done, he flipped is initiative token up side up and was now acting like a regular kingdom. When a player eliminated another player's kingdom, he took his opponent's marker as a reward trophy which gave his points every turn.

This system was removed in the middle of the design process when I came up with the idea that each player could only have one kingdom at a time. It made the need of initiative markers obsolete and I was quite happy since it simplified the game pretty much.

Artifacts and Buildings

There have been various buildings sets in the game, the one we see in the picture on the side was the barrack-palace-wonder set which were respectively giving troops, influence and victory points.

At the bottom of the picture, there are tokens with weird symbols. These were more generic tokens than anything else, but the idea of using these tokens was to implement artifacts. Through the game, players would have the choice to create artifact objects which would either have given victory points or special abilities. What was special about artifacts is that they were placed on the board and they could actually move and get captured during the game. So this is why I needed tokens to represent them.

I like the idea of having objects that could be passed from a generation to another and worth points. It strengthen the notion of making the game evolve as time advance. It might make a player a better target if he collected a lot of artifact. It is possible that I design a variant for creating artifacts that will probably score points since there is too few special abilities idea left. I am thinking of using the "A", "B", "C" tokens supplied with the game.

Event Cards

I had this problem when playing the game that when a invader comes in, the game gets unbalanced and after the invasion is done, the game reaches a balance of power that makes the player stay where they are and not attack each other. I wanted the game to be in constant movement.

So my first idea was to design event cards. The concept was that at the beginning of each turn, a card got flipped and something happened. It was either some immediate effect on the board, or a rule change that lasted for the whole turn. It also had the advantage of being able to use the cards for counting turns.

The second set of cards each have a number ranging from 1 to 3. Each city on the map also had a number ranging from 1 to 3. When you draw your event cards, all the cities with the matching number received the effect of the event card. I got this idea from romance of the three kingdoms where there was events like poor harvest, typhoon or locust plague could hit a certain number of cities on the board.

The main problem is that there was little thing that could change on the board. Each city could have 1 building and units. All event were actually modifying these elements. In order to broaden my range of effect, I even made some event place pawns on cities. Cities with a pawn on them was under the effect of the event. So I could use rule changes effects (like prevent unit movement) and it was easier to see and remember that this city was under an event effect.

But later in the design, when I made the buildings stay into play, it almost made the event cards obsolete. This is also when I decided to convert the event cards effect's as knowledge cards.

Raids

When the buildings were staying permanently into play, since the only thing events could do is move or destroy units, I decided to implement raids where it's only function was to destroy units. The goal was to unbalance the game and force the game to move on.

The idea was simple, before the invasions are done, the last player in the score chose a X target cities where X is the number of players. The target city must be adjacent to the edge of the board by sea or by land. Paths with invasion blockers could not get used. The player rolled 2 or 3 dice and removed a unit for each roll of 4+. I think public knowledge were applied.

This raiding system was kept until almost the end of the design. I decided to remove it in the last version of the rules. I think it was because it was too cheap and too abusive because the raids were done before the invasion. Maybe it could be re-implemented by making them weaker, by using only 2 dice, and make them after the invasion. The good thing about it was that it was some sort of catch up mechanic for the last player to give him a chance to target the leader or give him some space to expand.

Action Cards

In the early design of the game, I decide to add action cards so that you could do other things than just producing units and cities. There has been various sets of cards through the design. The first set had 3 actions per cards, when you played a card, you could chose one of the 3 actions on the cards.

The second set was very similar except the abilities were played differently. The top ability could be played on your turn like an action card. The middle ability was used when playing a card face down in from of your opponent. This effect would trigger on that player's turn. The last effect was use to bid on battles. If you guessed correctly who would win in a battle, you would receive victory points for this.

Wonders

When I was using the map with trade routes system, I had this mechanic that allowed players to create wonders. The concept was simple, each wonder card had a number of turns to build and a number of resources required. I think you had to pay the resources every turn. When the wonder was complete, it gave you a shit load of points. The problem was that you had to make sure that your kingdom stayed alive during the wonder creation process. If your kingdom falls, so was your wonders.

This is an idea that I might re-implement as a variant. I was thinking to have cards that shows you which resources you need to have access. You do not use production tracks, you need to have square or circle resources on the turn you want to build it. Then you place your wonder card face down in front of you. If at the beginning of your next turn, if you are still alive and if you still have the resource to build the wonders, the wonder get's build and you score a shit load of points.

Heroes

First, there was heroes because Britania had heroes. The only difference is that since my game was not an historical game, player had to choose when their hero would come into play. The basic idea was that each kingdom had an hero and when the kingdom was in trouble, the players could summon their one time use hero either to attack or defend themselves. Heroes basically gave bonus in combat like adding a die, but it also had the ability to move from a battle to another if the next battlefield was actually adjacent to the location of the hero. So the hero could participate to a chain of battles which in the end improve your combat odds.

I intend to re-implement the heroes by using the extra flag marker. It would be a one time use unit that would probably add 1 die in battle. Not sure if it will be able to jump from a territory to another. It should be possible to summon it when getting attacked which is useful when you play last.

Conclusion

So I hope you enjoyed the historical development of my game. As you can see, things does not actually evolves the way you originally designed it. I think that with Fallen Kingdoms, I tried many divergent mechanics which slowed down the design process. I hope for my next design to be able to focus on what I need right from the start to prevent me from design many other things that will never get used. So you understand why I am now pretty happy that the Fallen Kingdom project is over. It's because I have been working a long time on it and I designed a lot of things that did not lead anywhere. Like I said, I might eventually add variants to the game, but I'll would like to see user made variant first.

Thank you and have fun.

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