A great article made by W. Eric Martin from the Boardgamenews.com

Designers: Bruno Cathala & Ludovic Maublanc

Players: 2-5
Ages: 13+
Playing time: 60-90 minutes

Ludo:

Cyclades, announced for release at Spiel 09, will be published by Editions du Matagot, for which Bruno and I had already produced the magnificent Dice Town earlier this year.

The genesis of Cyclades begin a long time ago – okay, not the time of the ancient Greeks but maybe 2004/2005. To be exact, at this time the game was not really Cyclades, but two separate entities that eventually merged. Initially, there was a telephone conversation in which Bruno exposed me to his theory of frustration. Basically, a good game must be frustrating – but without being so much so that it disgusts the players. The whole thing is finding the right amount of frustration.

After the call, I imagined part of a game mechanism for frustrating players: They would have action points, but to access the actions allowed by the game, they must spend those points during a bidding phase. Suppose that one action of the game is to advance his pawn on a track. (I had no theme at the time.) Then only one player at the table will have the right to advance his pawn – the one who has sacrificed more! So he can advance his pawn, sure, but only up to the points that he kept. The dilemma then: How many points do I sacrifice for an action to ensure that other players will let me take this bloody action, while still making it valuable to me?

The concept of “the more I have to give something, the less I have to play” made us think about gifts given to the gods. While having thought about the Greek gods, we finally set upon the Viking gods to lead us to a prototype of the colonization of Vinland, a prototype that was finished on the button as many others before it.

In parallel to this design, I wanted to make a management game like Goa. Each player develops his thing on his little shelf individually. My initial idea was something cyclic: With my gold I can buy boats; my mariners can turn into soldiers; if I prefer to turn to peace, I change my soldiers to priests; to grow intellectually the priests become philosophers; if I change my philosophers, I win gold. As there were sailors and philosophers, I thought of Greece; since there was a cycle, the Cyclades Islands were a readymade choice.

Upon reflection, I told myself that if each element of the game – the gold, sailors, soldiers, etc. – were granted by Gods, we would find our previous game. I merged the two ideas and offered to let Bruno away from our game, as at the time, he was very busy with various projects. I started alone. We also work very well by this way, and whether it was on Mr. Jack or later on Dice Town, we’ve used this method each time.

To start, I outlined the game: the five gods and the five basic elements; the auction; Apollo, who lets a player skip his turn to come back stronger later; the special buildings; the university that serves no purpose – we can say that the game is practically built around that phrase – mythological creatures who sow discord; and of course the goal of the game, building two Metropolis buildings to win the game. All of these elements were assembled more or less skillfully, giving something quite wobbly, but it helped us get a good idea of the potential that it might conceal.

Then Bruno came to put some order into all this…

Bruno:

Ludovic lives in Dijon and I live on the side of Annecy, which means that a two-and-a-half hour drive separates us ... and Ludo has no car. I have tried to convince him to make the trip on his B’twin, but under the pretext that he has not had testicular cancer, he absolutely refuses to attempt any feat connected with cycling. So we spend a lot of time calling one another, exchanging general ideas which, by successive rebounds, sometimes end up driving us to create a game. Communication and personal development coaches sell this methodology as a very expensive package under the name “brainstorming meeting” – along with lots of other stuff ending in “ing” to make it sound serious – but we call it “messing around with two” (because it’s still better than messing around alone).

On Cyclades, the fact is that I had completely forgotten the conversation we had had earlier about the mechanisms of frustration. (I have a goldfish memory sometimes.) So to my surprise, during a stint with Ludo, I discovered that first prototype with the code name “Cyclades,” in which he summarized the ideas exchanged on the phone during the previous months. My general sentiment swung between a resounding “WOAOUH!” and the more reserved “Hmmmm, yes, but...” There was a lot that was truly exciting:

• The gods with their specializations: armed land, sea control, priests, philosophers…
• Mythological creatures with powerful and varied powers, guaranteeing fresh approaches by the players.
• A clever bidding system similar to Evo.

But there were also a lot of concerns to be addressed:

• The topology of the gameboard was not satisfactory, particularly the maritime areas.
• The order of the gods was immutable – Poseidon, Ares, Zeus, Athena, Apollo – which could lead to strategies of variety being missing from one game to the next.
• Creatures were fixed to a God at the beginning of each round, and did that lead to interesting situations?
• The economic system that was clever on theory – gold becoming boats becoming troops becoming priests becoming philosophers – was not convincing in practice, leading to blocking situations and a game that lasted too long.

Ludo, agreeing with these findings, then asked me whether I would continue developing the game with him. You bet I would! I was only too happy to engage in a project this exciting because despite the concerns mentioned above, the first partial test still gave me quite a taste for going back again! It was best to return immediately, so I suggested one small change of placing the gods in random order at the beginning of each round. The second test immediately showed that we were on a good path, with more pressure, more fun, and more winning strategies than previously established.

I then left Ludo for my annual summer pilgrimage to the Bretagne coast – but I had not stopped thinking constantly about Cyclades. The process of creation, it sometimes becomes obsessive. We then exchanged phone calls almost daily. As I was at a campsite, there was no possibility of making a prototype. We kept exchanging our ideas and more importantly, we worked in a mode of operation that often goes well for us: Ludo playing the prototype with the recently discussed amendments, then telling me the proceedings of the party on the phone. This allowed me to immerse myself mentally in the game and live it virtually, imagining what I could do in a given situation, especially anticipating blocking situations – all this thought being a source of new proposals then discussed and integrated by Ludo in a new version of the prototype, etc.

All of this led us to take two important decisions:

1. Delete the original economic system for a system more classically based only on gold as it would be easier to understand and far easier to adjust very precisely. The old system, in fact, was hidden within the cost scale construction of different game elements: troops, fleets, priests, philosophers, etc.
2. Separate access to the mythological creatures from the gods. With this new solution, the player desperate to access a particular creature has to win the bid on the first God during this round, even though this God won’t be the most beneficial to his development. So we had more small choices, more powerful combos available, more power, more frustration…

Back at home, I was finally able to make my own prototype using the files Ludo updated on the basis of our work calls. It was then time for me to move to another essential step: the topology of the gameboard.





Ludo:

It’s true that initially the gameboard of Cyclades was very special. I wanted to do a board which could be both original and flexible – two errors of youth, as it turned out. Later I understood that my idea for originality was not necessarily a good idea. My gameboard was something never seen before, and that’s understandable because it did not work very well! It was not very readable, created lots of blockages, and did not allow the game to reach its full potential.

I made several versions, with multiple tests, persevering in the same error until Bruno removed me from this bad situation. After the first playtest, he said something like, “But why don’t you just have a board with hexagons?” Well, here I said something horrified like, “Erk! Hexagons are super ugly!”

Then Bruno showed me something from his bag of tricks, which led to the current board for Cyclades. If you look closely, you see that there are hexagons, but with an extreme makeover. Hexagons immediately induce a wargame atmosphere, an impression of complexity and seriousness. Bruno explained that by replacing a hexagon with a simple circle, the connections remain exactly the same – except that the circles are all nice and reassuring, and they give an impression of simplicity and obviousness. I was immediately seduced by the elegance of the board, and the circles wonderfully correspond with the name of the game.

There was still the subject of the modularity of the board. Initially, we had a blank board with circles and islands and cardboard that we placed ourselves at the beginning of each game. I wanted modularity so players could have a different board each time they played, but this turned out to be a bad idea. Really, bad? Yes, because while sometimes the game would be exciting to play, another time might be simply disastrous! After many tests, we developed lots of rules for the placement of islands – so many rules that ultimately very few configurations proved viable. We therefore decided to opt for a fixed position of the islands, with different starting points depending on the number of players. It took many tests to arrive at the set-up that you find on the final board. For the record, this is version 8.4…

From that moment, we had nothing left to do on our game other than the “little details” – details which still took over two years!

Bruno:

Damn, two years – but two years during which play has followed play, with here or there a touch of paint to erase a hitch, but no substantive work except for the combat system. Defining how to calculate the fighting was a point that we had us sweating through days of trial-and-error. For us, the resolution of the fighting had to take into account several important aspects in conjunction with the ancient period in which the game takes place:

• It must be suspenseful and epic, while providing twists to the situation,
• It must take into account the distribution of forces.
• The larger force should not always prevail.
• If a player has a bad start in battle, he must be able to escape.

And of course, we had to consider the specifics of our game. (Fighting may happen rarely as players have limited troops and it’s not easy to recruit, but it may also be decisive for victory.)

So we explored several systems. The first was remarkably simple: You put the troops in a bag and pull one at random, thereby designating the winner. The system is simple and effective – except that the frustration level of an attacker with 7-1 odds seeing the color of his opponent was such that at best we were faced with a sigh of rage, and at worst a clearing of the table with the four corners of the room being painted with our small armies. Result: Abandonment of the system.

Then for a very long time we played with a really original system. The attacker had a single roll of the dice, with one die for each of the troops attacking. A pictorial chart showed both who won the battle and the number of troops that the loser could retreat. The system was fun and original and also balanced exactly to our liking – except that the iconographic system showing all this information on the dice was difficult for lots of players to incorporate, no matter what their experience with the game. Result: Abandonment of the system. Making and making again is the author’s way…

Finally, Hicham, the boss of Matagot, suggested the idea of a fight that would take place over successive rounds. The resulting final system was less innovative, but it has the merit of being simple and efficient, while retaining exactly the right critical points: suspense, twisted situations, respect for the size of the forces in battle, and the ability to retreat.