ichthyoid

Continuing from last week's post, in this week's blog, I want to talk about why I'm making Of Duchies and Polities and how the development has come along so far. If you didn't see the previous post, you can take a look at it here.

So without further ado, here's why I'm making this board game!

The Initial Inspiration

I've actually been working on this board game for nearly 6 years now. Of course, “working on” may be a bit misleading, since it was mostly “thinking” and “planning” and “procrastinating” with only a little bit of actual action.

The initial inspiration came from Sid Meier's famous video game “Civilization”. Up until around 2013, I had actually never played through any Civ game, since I was more into real-time strategy rather than 4X turn-based games. I was exposed to it a bit when I played through some of the earlier Total War series games, but it wasn't until Civilization V received its second expansion that I decided to dig in and explore this grand strategy title.

I quickly grew to love it. It was like a combination of Risk and Settlers of Catan, but stretched across the span of known human history. However, at the time, I didn't have the best computer to run it, and the waiting times in between turns seemed to stretch for hours as the game stalled to calculate the moves of the computer opponents. When all was said and done, while I invested lots of hours into the Civilization experience, I found myself starting games, but never finishing most of my campaigns.

This was partially due to the fact that, I was having less and less long-stretches of time with which to play any kind of games. I would only have a few hours a week of free time, and when I got back to my computer to play Civilization V, it was difficult to re-engage, since I often forgot what I was doing in a prior session.

The other much more major part, however, was the social aspect of gaming. Some of my fondest memories of playing strategy board games like Risk involved a lot of interaction and politicking. I remember times when my friends and I were locked in stalemate battles on a global scale, each trying make deals to help relieve one front while grappling with another player on the other side of the board.

It was rare to get such a game in Civilization. Since each match lasted so long, I could really only play single-player. Additionally, the mechanics of the games were so that it didn't really matter whether you interacted at all. You could blitz through the game just doing what you want, rather than needing to rely on diplomacy to having a fighting chance.

That was when I decided to make my own game. Since my programming skills are pretty rudimentary, I resolved instead to make a board game. I basically set out to bridge Risk and Settlers of Catan. There were 5 resources, cities and fortresses, and a variety of armies you could build to enhance your empire. There were even world wonders, weather effects, and barbarians!

I normally work through ideas and inspirations by writing a bunch of things down in some word processing or spreadsheet program. This allows me to organize my ideas quicker, and since I'm a decently quick typist, I can get out the ideas just as fast as they come to me. In this case, I was able to get the idea down in less than a few weeks, create and print out the token pieces when I needed to (I borrowed a lot of assets from my Risk and Lord of the Rings Monopoly games), and get them ready for my friends and I to try.

And....honestly, it was kind of fun! Along with four of my friends, we started to play this early inspiration (at that time called How to Build an Empire) and see where the holes and balance points were in the game.

But there was a single problem. While I had done away with “technology trees” and epochs and eras, the game pace was still incredibly slow. Much of the slowness was due to resource collection, and though each game could have theoretically snow-balled into all-out chaos and fun, as play group, we never got there. For the most part, there was so much to do in the beginning that we were sitting for hours durdling around while attempting to combat barbarians and collect meager resources simultaneously.

With no idea how to fix it, that iteration of the game was shelved. I ended up physically moving away (unrelated), and the whole game as a printed entity was scrapped.

But the idea kept nagging at me.

Inspiration, Part II

Fast forward a couple years. In the interim, I had revisited How to Build an Empire a few times, even at one point having a back and forth with my brother on producing actual assets and parts for it. But most of those plans fell by the wayside, as life and work required more and more of my attention.

After getting married, during my free time, I would sometimes try to play Civilization again. However, once again, I would be unable to really engage with the game, given now even less time to do so. On the contrary, I instead found myself playing old Total War games again. Specifically, I was playing Medieval 2: Total War. The grand strategy part of this game wasn't as complex, but the political element could be very intriguing.

For those who don't know, in Medieval 2: Total War, you can play as a Catholic-oriented faction in the Middle Ages. By playing as a Catholic faction, you gained access to the Pope, a religious figurehead by title, but a political figurehead by mechanics. By gaining favor with the Pope, you could guarantee more safety for your lands, fight better proxy wars in Western Europe, and even call for crusades when you needed to get rid of your enemies. It wasn't perfect, but good enough as a basic political game.

And so I was finally scratching that itch. But this time, it was more palatable. I could see some of the changes needed to make my old game work. And so, on a Sunday afternoon with my wife driving home, I took out my trusty laptop, and began a complete re-work of the game, eventually renamed to Of Duchies and Polities.

What a Weird Name

I decided this time to focus on a single area, rather than the whole world, and within a single timeframe: Medieval Europe. At first, in order to make map creation a little easier, I decided to go with France. The problem was that France doesn't have many obvious geological features (such as water) which helps to divide it and make strategy and tactics more interesting.

Thus, I shifted the game's locale to the British Isles, which has nearly everything to make a game more interesting. There are its difficult to conquer English mainland, its across-the-water rivalry with northern France, its geographic chokepoint to the north, and difficult to assail Emerald Isles to the west. However, the British Isles are confined enough that potential interactions between players are kept tight and frequent.

Once I decided the location, a time period was required. I really like the political drama of the War of the Roses, but I couldn't really find any good maps of territories for that period. After awhile, I decided to instead base this game's territories off of Crusader Kings II, another grand strategy video game. I screenshot and superimposed parts onto real maps, and then traced the territories. Some were altered in the process, but I kept most intact.

Originally, the game was called “Artifice”, referring to the ideal politicking that I wanted the game to be. But that name was also a bit generic. Since the game was now definitely based in medieval Britannia, I wanted the name to have some reference to the period. After working through many, many names, I settled on Of Duchies and Polities. Duchies, because it was a generic name for a territory under a duke or duchess. And Polities because I had just learned the word, and I liked it.

To Be Continued...

Wow, that was longer than I expected. I'll be talking about the other parts of development so far in the next post, going into the more recent happenings, where play-testing and balance have become the more pressing issues.

Hope you enjoyed!

Continue reading with a Coil membership.