I must start by confessing that I
am an avid euro-gamer and that worker placement games rank very high in my
preferences. It has been my dream as a board game designer to make such a game
myself, one that will stand out between the many good games of this genre.
Praetor is a strategy game
evolving around the worker placement mechanism, set in the Roman Britannia.
Even though it is not the most complex game I have ever designed (that honor is
still held by Exodus: Proxima Centauri), Praetor is the game I have been
working on the longest and the game that got most of my attention over the past
18 months.
Ever since I started playing
modern board games and fell in love with “euros”, I felt that one thing was
constantly lacking, the fact that no matter how much I used a worker he would
never gain any experience. It was always the same worker, no better and no
worse than at the very beginning of the game. I thought to myself that this is
one idea worth considering and if I would ever design such a game it would overcome
this lack of realism in worker placement games.
Ancient history
I started working on Praetor in
August 2012 with this single idea in mind, to create a mechanism in which the
workers would slowly gain experience. My first worker was represented by a
fairly large wooden disc and his experience by additional wooden cubes. Don’t
get scared just yet, seeing the ridiculous amount of parts a player would have
to manage with just a pair of workers, I soon realized that there’s a reason
for which in most games workers are wooden meeples or cubes or discs or, at
best, plastic miniatures. I was not very proud of this initial idea so I chose
to stay quiet and “forget” to share this even with the members of NSKN Games.
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| The first concept of experience (image source: etsy.com) |
Shortly after dust had settled
over Essen 2012 and the euphoria of such a great event, I realized that dice
are the most elegant implementation for the experience of workers. My initial
idea was to simulate real life and look for a non-linear evolution of the
experience in time, but I did not want to push my luck and people mathematical
skills above an acceptable limit. So, I went with the dice and I started
building the whole game around them.
By December I had already figured
out most of the concepts of the game. Since it all started with an abstract
idea - workers gaining experience - I went along the same path and built the
game around abstract concepts. The workers would help generate up to 5 – 7
resources which would be used to build “stuff”. Now, “stuff” was way too
abstract and I went with the idea of buildings. In just a few days I had a list
of 60 buildings which would all be tied together, allowing the exchange of
resources for points, give special abilities and allow players’ workers to gain
experience. The mathematical model quickly became very complex and difficult to
follow. The first time I presented the concept to the outside world I lost
people about half way through the explanations. Abstract games tend to have
simple rules and my project was far from that.
The search for the theme
When it came to finding a theme,
all I knew at first was that I would not name my game after some famous
medieval city or country and the workers would not be farmers. It’s not that I
don’t enjoy farming in Agricola, but there are simply too many games with in
this limited universe. Since I love history and for a worker placement game a
historical theme is a plus, I started a process of researching relevant moments
in our past when people built something… relevant. Starting in the ancient
times, I went through the world history and the first thing that I stumble upon
and liked was the Chinese wall.
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| Great Wall of China (image source: shedexpedition.com) |
Sadly, my knowledge of that specific part of
the world was limited so I had to admit defeat and look for something new. Just
a few hours later I rediscovered the Roman Empire with its impressive
coliseums, aqueducts, amphitheaters and legions and it felt like a revelation –
that was the theme I was looking for.
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| Hadrian's wall (image source: Wikipedia) |
The process of “dressing up”
abstract concepts into Roman constructions was very intense and I will not bore
you by describing every step of the way. What I can tell you is that I had to
discard more than half of the mechanisms I had built and to add a few more to
make everything fit together like a giant puzzle. And speaking of puzzles, that
was also the moment when I discovered that “the game” would also be a
tile-laying game.
I called it “the game” because
back then it was still missing its title. My first impulse was to name it
Caesar, but that would create huge confusion and mix-up with computer games with
a similar name and theme. Plus, it would not fit the theme. I knew that players
would strive to become the “big boss of a Roman city” and that position was
either a Magister or a Praetor. I chose between the two and, from that moment on, my project became Praetor.
Praetor 1.0
Because of my background of
computer programming, I have the habit of numbering every single version.
Praetor 1.0 was the first prototype and probably the biggest breakthrough
because every relevant abstract concept found its way into this themed board
game prototype.
The core concept of Praetor did
not change ever since, even though I put it through “fire and axe” in multiple
sessions of play-testing over more than one year. Every player starts with
three workers which he uses to build new districts into the city or to activate
already built districts and thus gain various benefits, usually resources and
favor points. Players can recruit new workers while the old ones gain more
experience and retire, being a burden rather than an advantage. At the end of
each turn, player will pay wages for their active workers and pension to the
retired ones – a system which resembles the modern world but was first defined
as a similar concept by the Romans.
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| Praetor 1.0 player board |
What I must admit is that Praetor 1.0 was quite heavy, significantly more than I realized in my solo tests. The very first 2-player game took longer than one hour and the first 4-player game… well, I won’t really say because I don’t want to scare you off just yet.
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| Hexes from the first prototype |
Praetor 1.0 was meant for 2-6
players and had almost 85 hexagonal tiles. Each tile had a cost to build, an
instant reward made of a number of points and some initiative and an activation
area. The activation area contained a benefit which was sometimes dependent on
the experience of the worker and a cost that would be paid by the player
activating the tile to the player owning the tile. With the exception of the
initiative, every other concept can be found today in the box.
That's all for today, stay tuned tomorrow for part II!
