Is There a Nocturne in the House?

Tuesday, January 8, 2008

As the weather turned chilly, I went back to Germany to attend the Essen Game Fair, the largest tabletop game convention in the world. There, as you may have seen on the Paizo blog, dozens of demoers showed off ten different Stonehenge games. Hundreds of players hopped from table to table trying all the games.

But none of them got to see what you get to see now. Here I'll describe all of the games in the first Stonehenge expansion, Nocturne. This expansion provides new orange and black pieces for use in six- and seven-player games. And we got four more of the greatest board game designers in the world to invent three clever new games with a nocturnal theme. (Then I snuck one more in under the cover of night. More on that soon.)

Sun & Moon, by Klaus-Jürgen Wrede: With many apologies to Puerto Rico and Settlers of Catan, for my money the single best game of the German revolution is Wrede's Carcassonne. So, after it became clear that the Stonehenge main game was in good hands, I made a beeline for Klaus-Jürgen. As the most German of the Stonehenge designers so far, Klaus-Jürgen turned over the most German of all the Stonehenge games so far.

Sun & Moon is about cults. Specifically, there are two: the Sun Cult and the Moon Cult. Players divide into two cults of one, two, or three cultists each. They spend the rest of the game manipulating druids to move the pieces of the giant trilithons. (This is the first Stonehenge game to start with the trilithons in their component parts.) Your fellow cultists can help by marshalling resources, but the opposing cult has a chance to take control of those resources before you can get to them.

There's some very nice game-designer sleight of hand in this game. You think you can see all the cards you need in front of the other players, but just before you get to use them, somehow it doesn't quite turn out the way you'd planned. I'd expect nothing less from a master like Klaus-Jürgen.

The Star Gate, by Bruno Cathala and Serge Laget: In my quest to get every game designer named Bruno to work on this line, I asked original Stonehenge designer Bruno Faidutti to introduce me to his frequent co-designer Bruno Cathala. Bruno C introduced me to his frequent co-designer Serge Laget, and the two of them enthusiastically set to work on one of the best-themed games in the line.

Bruno and Serge suggested that to them, Stonehenge was the perfect star gate, a way for archaeologists to unlock the secret of travel through the stars. To open the gate, the rocks of Stonehenge must be triggered in a specific order, and the archaeologists must puzzle out that order. And so the game becomes a strange and delightful guessing game, a la Clue, where everyone has some information but no one has all of it. You pick a stone, and the player who knows its location tells you whether you've gained any valuable information. When you think you've figured out the location of a triggering stone, you can lock in your guess. But if you're wrong, other players will leap ahead of you.

We spent a lot of time trying to figure out whether there was a particular strategy that would always work. Everybody had a theory, but no one could consistently win. That pleases me greatly. I've never seen a game like this one, and am thrilled it's in Nocturne.

Stonehenge Hippie Festival, by Andrew Looney: If I asked a room full of the top 100 game designers to guess which of them had designed a game called "Stonehenge Hippie Festival," 99 of them would say Andy Looney, the permanently tie-dyed owner of Looney Labs. The one who wouldn't get it right would be Andy, who would be too busy flashing back to Woodstock to realize the question had been asked. Hey, we only go to the professionals here.

Speaking of professionalism, Andy blew me away by having his game designed before I could send him a set of pieces. (You can read about that in Andy's blog.) In the game, you are attending the Stonehenge Free Festival, a real-life musicfest series that ran from 1972–1985. You want provisions for the festival, and go from booth to booth trying to get them. Actually, you can do a lot more than that. You can hang flags off the trilithons. You can bogart someone's bottle of water. And you can dance. Oh boy, can you dance. That's about all I can say about this game that will make sense until you pick up the rules.

And hey, how about that fine Howard Lyon piece of art at the top of this section? I'm sure I speak for Andy when I say that's a festival we'd both want to attend.

Battle of the Beanfield, by Mike Selinker: Or maybe I wouldn't want to attend that festival, as the events of this game will show. I certainly didn't plan to put another game of mine into the set, but when I read Andy's rules, my eyes turned to the history of the Stonehenge Free Festival. It ended on June 1, 1985, when jackbooted British cops took truncheons to busfuls of hippies in a nearby beanfield. This terrible incident became known as the "Battle of the Beanfield." This was an unjustifiable tragedy, which I looked at and immediately said, "Game."

So, as a tribute to my boy Andy, I designed Stonehenge's first solitaire game, and the only one not to use the board. Instead, you use the card box as a "bus," and bars which represent hippies. The eight figures represent bobbies looking to crack some hippie skulls. Your job as the driver of the bus is to play cards in front of these bobbies, freeing the hippies from the cops' clutches and getting them back on the bus. As in solitaire, you want to get as close as you can to clearing the board.

This game might not have been included in Nocturne without Paizo CEO Lisa Stevens, unbidden by me, dedicating her nights to playing about 80 games of it, and keeping meticulous records of how close she got to a perfect game. Now, Lisa's a busy woman. But I figure if she decides to play 80 games of something, we should give you a chance to play it as well. So Battle of the Beanfield snuck in as the final game of the set. If you lose a few weekends playing it, blame Lisa.

Of course, the other great advantage of Nocturne is that for your Stonehenge games, you now have a bunch more pieces. If you've wanted to bring in more players, now you can. Or if you just really like the colors orange and black, now you've got orange and black. And, oh yeah, four more fun games, with the promise of lots more to come. Have a great night.

Mike Selinker
Titanic Games Brand Manager

Mike Selinker is the Titanic Games brand manager. He has helped design and develop Stonehenge, Key Largo, Axis & Allies, Pirates of the Spanish Main, Gloria Mundi, Unspeakable Words, Risk: Godstorm, and many other games. He also directs the design studio Lone Shark Games, Inc.

by Mike Selinker

This past week, I was at Games Expo in Las Vegas showing off Stonehenge to retailers and distributors. When asked how to play the game, it delighted me no end to say, "It's not a game per se; it's five games, and I can show you how to play all of them in just a few minutes."

And now, after all these months, I'll show you. Here are the descriptions of the five games in the box, each with the art that accompanies it in the rulebook. These illustrations, by the supremely talented Howard Lyon, are shown for the first time here.

I'll present the games in the order of the puzzles on this website. Oh, did I mention that? Each of the puzzles you might have solved related thematically to one of the five Stonehenge games. We started out with a puzzle about the rocks of Stonehenge, then one about druids, then one about King Arthur and his knights, then one about aliens, and finally one about spellcasters raising the trilithons of Stonehenge—those are the five themes of the games in the box.

Auction Blocks, by James Ernest: James is a droll cat, and so it's not surprising that his game is about selling off the rocks of Stonehenge one by one. Those monoliths have been blocking the locals' view for a long time, and it's time to sell them off cheap. James starts the game by placing colored rocks around the exterior ring, on spaces 1–30. An auctioneer pawn moves around the board, offering the rocks for sale one at a time. There's a delightful bidding mechanic based on color, and as you accumulate more stones of the same color, the higher your score will be for each rock you get.

There are some lovely tricks in this game. One nice twist is that when you win an auction, you get no new cards. So you can peak early, and then spend several turns wondering how all your friends are zipping ahead of you. I also like the use of the inner horseshoe of bluestones as a scoring track. Everything fits together nicely for a very German-style bidding game experience.

The High Druid, by Bruno Faidutti: Bruno's game focuses on a druidic election. Using bars, the outer ring is divided into seven colleges. You take turns placing your druids into colleges or moving the bars that define the colleges to change their constituencies. At the end of the game, you get points for the druids in each college—if you have the highest non-tied number of druids in that college.

That "non-tied" business makes for some very bizarre decision-making. Sometimes you want to invest your druids in a college, and sometimes you want other people to fight over it so you can win. It's a real brain-bender of a game, and might be my favorite of the lot. Or it might snap your head in half. Try it and see.

Arthurian Ghost Knights, by Richard Borg: Richard wanted to design a war game, but there weren't any obvious historic battles near Stonehenge. However, there is the great legend of Loe Bar, a nearby hub of ley lines where a ghostly army of knights supposedly appeared in 1936. Richard adapted that legend into a conflict between long-dead Knights of the Round Table who come forth in the darkness to struggle over Stonehenge. His game involves placing knightly guards at the trilithons, working to gain majority control over the stones. The more control you get, the further your knight advances on the glory track.

My favorite trick in this game is the struggle round, where you can go from controlling your destiny to controlling nothing at all. In the course of the game, you place swords on the altar stone. When a struggle round occurs, you can use your swords to supplement your guards, or to kill your enemies' guards. But if you go crazy using your swords, you'll have no defenders when the next struggle round occurs.

Richard Borg's game is probably the most complex of the five in the box—although all of the games are simple enough that the rules for each take up only a single two-page spread in the rule book.

Chariots of Stonehenge, by Mike Selinker (Hey, that's me!): Traders, druids, knights—there's a lot of history in those first three games. Me, I wanted to do something a little more ridiculous. So I went back to historian JG Gurdon's cockamamie theory that Stonehenge was built as a racetrack for chariots. (Too bad Stonehenge was built a thousand years before chariots showed up in Britain.) That didn't make sense, but merging it with wacko Erich von Daniken's Chariots of the Gods gave me a theme I couldn't resist: alien chariot racing. You get a chariot with a telekinetic beam on the front, which you use to knock stones into the paths of your opponents. That, I figure, is why the rocks of Stonehenge are in such disarray today.

When playing my game, I'm often surprised how frequently a player finds himself skidding around—or even into—a rock wall, and I'm especially surprised that that player is usually me. Being overly aggressive with speed in this game will smash you into a conveniently placed trilithon, but being too careful will leave you in your opponents' alien chariot dust.

Magic of Stonehenge, by Richard Garfield: Richard Garfield wrote a game about magic. (Okay, so that probably doesn't surprise a lot of you.) You play a wizardly druid trying to cast a spell to raise up one of the trilithons from the earth. This requires getting your apprentices onto the board. You can play them into certain spaces using numbered cards in a bid, but quite often your best plays are countered by someone playing a trilithon card, nullifying the bid. So it becomes a bluffing game—is a player playing a high enough card to get on the board, or using her trilithon card to thwart you?

If you lose a bid, however, things can get ugly fast. One of your apprentices needs to move down the board by the number of spaces you bid, and if they have to move below the first space, that apprentice gets sacrificed. So playing a high bid can get you on the board, or it can knock you off the board. Nice subtle trick, that.

Those are the five games in the Stonehenge box. But there are lots more to come. New designers are already working on games for expansions and for magazines (you'll certainly want to check out Paul Peterson's "Stonehenge Rocks!" game in an upcoming issue of Knucklebones magazine) plus there will soon be a number of additional games available here on this website. In fact, we'll be opening up the game to anyone who wants to write for it—if you'd like to write a Stonehenge game, there will be a place for you to post it for everyone to play. Maybe even the five guys above will give your game a try.

As long as it's not about alien chariot racing, of course. That's all mine.

Mike Selinker is the Titanic Games brand manager. He has worked on Axis & Allies, Pirates of the Spanish Main, the Marvel Super Heroes Adventure Game, Risk: Godstorm, and Dungeons & Dragons. He also directs the design studio Lone Shark Games, Inc.

by Mike Selinker

There I was, walking through the Essen game fair with my friend Patric from the German distributor Ulisses Spiele, when my heart stopped. I'm sure Patric was saying something very important, but I couldn't hear him. All I could see was heaven.

Heaven for a game designer, anyway. I could only gaze at the wonder that was the BEDI Holzspiele booth, which stocked dozens of colors of spare game bits. I immediately ran to get some cash. My haul from the BEDI booth was 1,000 Settlers of Catan roads, 1,000 Vinci pawns, several dozen Sorry! pawns, and 200 fewer euros.

Okay, you're thinking "that's nice, Mike, but who needs a thousand Settlers roads?" Well, I did, because I wanted to make 15 sets of Stonehenge for playtest purposes. Normally, when making a game, that kind of thinking wouldn't work (it's hard to imagine "I'm going to need 1,000 Russian aircraft carriers"). But in Stonehenge's case, it was exactly what I needed to be thinking.

To explain that, I need to go back about 18 months to when we were first planning the components for Stonehenge. We'd pretty much figured out what kind of board we needed (see my last diary), and now we needed to know what went with it. We still hadn't designed any games, so we had to figure out in abstract what we would use.

The one thing everyone agreed on was that the game needed rocks. Of course, we didn't know what we could make rocks out of (actual stone seemed right out). So we cast about for the nearest thing. Well, James did, and when he casts about, he finds LEGOs. So we made LEGOhenge, which had five brightly colored trilithons, each about a half-inch high. (Not exactly epic, I know.) We also added in an altar stone, representing the flat rock that the trilithons surround.

We imagined the outer stones fitting together in a neat circle of interlocked LEGOs, but this soon seemed impractical. The outer ring stones had to be separable for them to be of use in making games. So we settled on "bars" (Settlers roads, which are basically wooden sticks), and "disks" (Vinci pawns, which are squat cylinders). These were things we could move around freely, assigning them various roles like "apprentices" and "energy crystals." Whatever we needed a lot of, we could get with these. We started with twelve of each of these in five colors, one for each player.

At some point Richard Borg said, "Can I have pawns for my knights?" His game wanted a single piece to represent each player, and we all thought that was a swell idea. Suddenly, my little Vinci pawn representing my chariot could become... well, it could become a Sorry! pawn. Not much of a step up, but meaningfully different. Later on, we added one pawn of a neutral color (actually a Settlers robber pawn) because James asked nicely.

At this point you may wonder, "why not a chariot?" or "why not knights?" The answer was that we didn't want to lock down preconceptions in people's minds. If you had a piece that looked like a chariot, you'd make a racing game. If you had knights, they'd hit each other with pointy sticks. We needed generalities, not specifics. (Incidentally, my favorite section of the rules is the spread that defines the pieces, as it doesn't tell you what anything is for. Try finding another game like that.)

Our final component was a deck of cards, because we needed some method of randomization or number assignment. Again, we didn't want to get too specific. We had numbers on the board, so we replicated those, coming up with sixty cards, with a "left circle" version and a "right circle" version of each number from 1 to 30. At Richard Garfield's suggestion, left and right eventually became "day" and "night." We added in five wild cards representing the trilithons, because as Richard always says, "every game's better with specials."

As we developed through the year, we pruned away things we didn't need. Every game worked with only ten of each bar and disk, so we dropped two of each. And amazingly, none of us used the altar stone as anything more than a flat surface for storing pawns, so we ditched that too.

A year after we started, I dumped the remaining items in art director Sean Glenn's lap. Sean made a set of cards, and had artist Jeff Carlisle draw up some rocky disks, bars, and trilithons, plus a vaguely humanoid pawn. Again, we tried not to make too obvious what this guy's purpose might be. He could be a druid, a ghost, an alien—pretty much anybody mysterious.

  

Sean's versions are a long way down a very good road from where we started. After a year of playing with LEGOs and little bits of wood, it's going to be great to start playing with these nicely realistic pieces. Soon I'll be able to build a fully realized Stonehenge on my tabletop. Maybe you'll want to as well.

Next time, I'll actually talk about the games in the box. I promise.

Mike Selinker is the Titanic Games brand manager. He has worked on Axis & Allies, Pirates of the Spanish Main, the Marvel Super Heroes Adventure Game, Risk: Godstorm, and Dungeons & Dragons. He also directs the design studio Lone Shark Games.

by Mike Selinker

Early in the design process for Stonehenge, our group of game designers agreed on exactly one thing: we needed a board. We were, after all, designing a board game. And with the real Stonehenge sitting on Salisbury Plain—emphasis on the "Plain" part—a flat surface seemed to be the best thing to build our stones upon.

But which flat surface was dramatically unclear. So, being the enterprising game designers that we are, a number of us started making boards. And we quickly reached what would be the first of several intellectual conflicts on the way to making Stonehenge.

There were two camps, which I would call the "minimalist camp" and the "maximalist camp." Except I don't really know what the word "maximalist" means (I think it has something to do with Russian politics), so I'm just going to call it the "hungry camp," for reasons which will soon become clear.

The minimalist camp argued for the barest amount of information on the board. Alan Moon did up a board that a number of us liked, because it just showed the positions of the rocks. His version, shown here, is a black-and-white blueprint of the land, with the presumption that each game designer's game would place the rocks in realistic positions either at the start or over the course of the game. Which was a great idea, assuming you'd finished your game design and all you needed to mark was the positions of the rocks.

The problem was, none of us had finished our game designs. None of us had even started, in fact. We were in the interesting position of having to design a game board for each other to use, with no idea what any of us would need. So we started to think out the theoretical possibility that, if we were building Stonehenge from a game designer's perspective, what features would it have?

Number one, of course, was positions for the rocks. James Ernest and I started to research what rocks Stonehenge actually contained. Everybody knew about the trilithons—those monstrous three-stone megaliths—but what else was there, and how could we use it?

James started with a LEGO model of Stonehenge. Inside the horseshoe of five trilithons were 19 bluestones, easy enough to represent in a U-shape. And inside those was the altar stone, a huge flat rock. From the LEGO model, James drew a sketch of the board that was starting to take shape in his head.

One of the more interesting areas was the outer ring, which (assuming you believe that it was a regular shape) had 30 horizontal stones balanced on 30 vertical ones. To James, that screamed "numerical scoring track," like on the outer edge of hundreds of German board games. Certainly we wouldn't all use it that way, but a track numbered 1–30 seemed like a great idea.

In real life, inside of that ring were 56 pits, which may have held much smaller stones. One day, James asked me how I would feel if there were 60 instead of 56. I recoiled in horror, and then enthusiastically agreed. Sixty small stones matched up perfectly with 30 large stones, allowing the smaller stones to (mentally, anyway) be counted as "1A and 1B," for example. He added a ring of 60 stones in his next draft.

This allowed us to use two different color schemes—again, without really knowing why we would need them. We could color the trilithons and outer-ring stones with different colors, in a regular sequence, because sometimes game designers need colored sequences. And we could alternate the 60 small stones in black and white, or what Richard Garfield would eventually call "night and day."

And so James put it all together in a prototype board. A regular pattern of lines separated the various components of the board from each other, so that we could say "this is space 9," or "this is the blue space." And then the fighting began.

The minimalists argued that the board was cluttered with things that didn't exist in the real world. The maximalists argued that the board was now useful, because we could now refer to objects on the board as being in particular spaces or having particular properties. And the maximalists won out, for the simple reason that we were shopping hungry.

You've done that, I'm sure. You go to the supermarket to buy a gallon of milk, but you're famished, and so you walk out with the maxi-size carton of Ho-Hos. We did the same thing. We were hungry for functionality to give our as-yet-undesigned games features to hang upon, and so we went with a build that would allow any one of us to use the blue spaces for negative points or the night spaces for card-drawing prompts. Or whatever. They were there in case we needed them, and it turns out we all did.

Eventually we pared away things we didn't need so it didn't look like a dartboard. Then we played games on them for a year and ended up with a functional board as seen in James's final design.

Later on, it came time for our graphic designer, Sean Glenn, to take James's brightly colored prototype board and make it into something you wanted to see on your coffee table. Sean thought that the grass of Salisbury Plain from James's layout was a nice touch, so he borrowed it—and an image of real grass, which he spent hours turning into a usable backdrop. The background squares became shaded light and dark, as if a great lawnmower in the sky had come down to smooth it out for us.

The outer ring became a continuous band rather than individual blocks. That's closer to what it actually looked like, though of course the real lintels were all grey rather than an assortment of rainbow hues.

Then it came time for the inner ring. Where James had circles, Sean put actual stones. Each rock is individually shaped, as if they were pulled from the plain itself. The altar stone and the trilithons are shown in their real-world placement.

The end result is a Stonehenge that game designers and historians could love, assuming the latter group could get beyond the whole 56-pits-becomes-60-stones issue.

Next time, I'll talk about what it is we put on top of that board. Come back for that.

Mike Selinker is the Titanic Games brand manager. He has worked on Axis & Allies, Pirates of the Spanish Main, the Marvel Super Heroes Adventure Game, Risk: Godstorm, and Dungeons & Dragons. He also directs the design studio Lone Shark Games, Inc.

by Mike Selinker

Boo! It must be Samhain, which maybe you know as the night of Halloween and All Saints Day. I've just returned from the Essen Game Fair, which is the largest hobby-game convention in the world. If you've been to Origins or Gen Con, you might have thought they were big. And they are. But Essen is 180,000 people, nearly all of them there to play board games. It is a sight to behold.

At Essen, I showed the Stonehenge prototype to a lot of my European game designer counterparts. Most of them thought it was quite cool, and were quite intrigued by the design team I introduced to you in my last Stonehenge diary. I picked those particular people because they're good game designers, they're my friends, and they play well with others. And also because they all were smart enough to help me figure out which anthology board game to do.

It might surprise you that we didn't start with the idea to do Stonehenge. We actually had a different idea, which Bruno tells me I can't spoil in case we pick it up for some other anthology board game in the future. It was a great idea, but we all suspected that the subject wasn't well known enough for the launch of this line. Here's what the Mystery Idea did have going for it, though:

1. It was historical. You put enough time between something and now, people are gonna come up with all sorts of reasons to like it. That contrasts with, say, a science-fiction or fantasy game, where you have to tell people why they should like it.
2. It was mysterious. (All good Mystery Ideas are.) You didn't know quite what it was used for, or how it got where it was, or what people thought of it at the time. That suggested lots of different things you could justify doing with it, because no one had a fixed idea in their head.
3. It had lots of objects associated with it. If there's lots of stuff in the environment, there's lots of things you can make into game pieces.

So if we weren't going to do the Mystery Idea, what subject could we do? We kicked around a lot of ideas, but it took a friendly little gathering at Alan Moon's to nail it down. I gathered up Richard Borg, Alan, and Überplay Entertainment publisher Jeremy Young and floated them a number of ideas for the project formerly known as "Shared Designer Box." Alan, however, made an eloquent defense of Stonehenge as an ideal first anthology board game. Here's how it stood up against the criteria I just mentioned:

1. It's about as historical as you can get. In fact, it's prehistorical, as nobody with a written language was anywhere near it while it was being built. There are postholes at the site that date from 8000 BC. (Eight thousand. To put that in perspective, that's about the first time that blond hair showed up.) The real work at the site began around 3100 BC, though, with the first ditch and a circle of wooden posts in holes. Some standing stones were added around 2600 BC, and the giant sarsen stones in the familiar three-stone trilithon arrangment arrived between 2400 and 2100 BC. (Just to put that in perspective, Stonehenge was complete before anyone on Earth had drank a cup of tea.)
2. It's super-mysterious. About the only things we know for certain about Stonehenge is that it's about 8 miles north of Salisbury, and it has a lot of rocks. Who built it? Hard to say. Why'd they build it? Ditto. If you had to list the top 10 mysterious structures in the world, you'd be spending all your time ranking the bottom nine. Even in the cases of the pyramids and the Sphinx, you know exactly what those colossi were used for. With Stonehenge, you've got any of the following possibilities:
   • It's a channeling device.
   • It's a giant clock.
   • It's a druidic sacrifice site.
   • It's a marketplace.
   • It's an astronomical observatory.
   • It's a chariot racetrack.
   • It's a UFO landing platform.
   • It's Merlin's personal magical lab.
   Actually, that's just the tip of the iceberg. Stonehenge has more origin stories than rocks.
3. But it does have a whole lot of rocks. According to the so-called "Restored Plan" (which I think is right, but not everyone does), Stonehenge has about a hundred small stones, 60 large stones, and 15 really large stones. Some are round, some are tall, and some are stacked on top of each other. This makes for a wonderful piece pack for a game.

And in the next column, I'll tell you about what's in that piece pack. Have a happy Samhain.

Mike Selinker is the Titanic Games brand manager. He has worked on Axis & Allies, Pirates of the Spanish Main, the Marvel Super Heroes Adventure Game, Risk: Godstorm, and Dungeons & Dragons. He also directs the design studio Lone Shark Games.

Happy autumnal equinox, everybody, and I hope you enjoyed our first little Stonehenge puzzle. Welcome to the new occasional design diary on Titanic Games' upcoming release, Stonehenge. It's a strange and exciting game for us in a lot of ways, and one that we've spent a lot of time developing. It's my job to give you the rundown on how this game came to be, preferably in small enough morsels so you still want to know more when we actually release it early next year. This design diary will not be just my own, but also that of many people who are associated with the game, some of whom you've actually heard of.

Stonehenge is Titanic's second big boxed game, following the stunning new color edition of Kill Doctor Lucky, which releases in just a couple weeks. (And by the way, if you haven't preordered KDL yet, now's a great time, because you can still get the exclusive Doctor Lucky miniature for free. Go ahead, I'll wait right here.)

OK, now that you're a bit poorer but richer with anticipation, I'll start talking about Stonehenge. At some point I'll twist James Ernest's arm to tell you the full story on this. For now, suffice it to say that shortly after James and I formed our game design studio, Lone Shark Games, James mentioned an idea of his in which multiple game designers would agree on a set of pieces and make different board games that worked with those pieces. For me, the idea was like a story anthology from the 1950s, where renowned sci-fi authors would all gather under a banner like 9 Tales of Space and Time and write somewhat related pieces. So I came up with the term "Anthology Board Game™," and convinced James that it was a practical idea, assuming one knew the right people.

Here's the cast of characters I rounded up for our first Anthology Board Game:

Stop number one was James himself. James Ernest is the founder and game designer of Cheapass Games, the little game company that could. Over the years he's put out dozens of modern classics like Give Me the Brain, Button Men, and Diceland. He and I started working together on the game Fightball in 2001, and later started Lone Shark to make games like Cowpoker, Dungeonville, and the really-coming-out-soon Gloria Mundi. I was pretty sure I could get more out of James than just the idea for this enterprise.

Next on my hit list was Richard Garfield, a longtime friend from our Wizards of the Coast days. When you hear his name, you may first think of his card game Magic: The Gathering, but he's also a major-league board game designer, having come up with RoboRally, Filthy Rich, Rocketville, and What Were You Thinking? Professor Garfield was the guy that a way-out-there project like this needed, as he's one of the most intellectually curious people I've ever met. Set him a bizarre proposition like an Anthology Board Game, and he'll poke around the edges till he figures out what makes the beast tick.

I then called across the pond to Paris to talk to Bruno Faidutti, designer of Mystery of the Abbey, Citadels, and many other games. Bruno is the ultimate collaborator. Check out this crazy map of game designers and you'll see why. I'm in the middle, connected to James, Larry Harris, the late Paul Randles, and Bruno (the latter two on the game Key Largo, which I hope comes stateside soon). But Bruno's the freakin' hub, with—count 'em—nine connections to other designers. Most designers get through their lives not having issued nine board games. But Bruno has been involved in at least nineteen collaborations, because everybody likes working with him. This anthology group wouldn't make sense without him, and he signed on enthusiastically.

I'd worked with all these guys before, but there was a connection I'd been meaning to make for years. You might notice that on that map, I'm near—but not linked to—Richard Borg, the designer of Battle Cry, Memoir '44, and Liar's Dice. He and I are in a very select fraternity: we've both been honored to design games for Risk, me with Godstorm and him as part of the Lord of the Rings expansion. We'd been looking for a project to work on together, so when I started the anthology project, I dragged him in.

(I also dragged in his buddy, Alan Moon. Alan is the creator of New England, Ticket to Ride, and other classics. Unfortunately, as the project got going, Alan had to drop out, but I hope to sign him up for another anthology some time down the road. You never know what these nutty game designers might do.)

OK, so now we had a crew. All we needed was a subject. Next time I'll let you in on how we decided on a bunch of rocks.

See you then!

Mike Selinker is the Titanic Games brand manager. He has worked on Axis & Allies, Pirates of the Spanish Main, the Marvel Super Heroes Adventure Game, Risk: Godstorm, and Dungeons & Dragons. He also directs the design studio Lone Shark Games.