by James Buckley

As the geopolitical environment becomes more tumultuous, the use of digital and analogue games by professionals to understand, model, and prepare for the future is coming to prominence. Professional wargaming is having its moment in the sun.

I moved into the world of professional game design having been the head of development at a hobby board game publisher. My first professional role was helping with the development and production of Battlegroup Wargame System (BGWS). The game was commissioned by the British Army to encourage the development of a wargaming mentality in the organisation.

While there are plenty of commercial wargames that cover tactical level combat, few are interested in capturing elements that precede a real life engagement: planning based on mission objectives, force capacity, tasking against specific time lines and geographic boundaries, and map work. That’s why they are not used for training by the army.

BGWS is interested in that. I believed that a commercial audience would be too. So I began work on transforming BGWS - an umpire led-game specifically designed for military professionals - into what was to become Battlegroup Clash: Baltics. A professional wargame, designed for a commercial audience. A game you can read about on BGG.

Step 1 - What To Keep
The two essential elements from BGWS I wanted to port to Battlegroup Clash: Baltics were the use of grid-based, real world maps, and the requirement to plan your operations before the game begins.

To my knowledge, no land-based tactical commercial wargame uses real world maps. Very few give much focus on operational planning, at least not how modern armed forces actually do it.

Step 2 - What To Drop
BGWS requires both an umpire and an understanding of military concepts and approaches that is beyond most civilians. It uses off-the-shelf 1:10,000 mapping, and off board cards to track lots of information on the units in play.

User playtest by British Army junior officers of Battlegroup Wargame System, the game that inspired Battlegroup Clash: Baltics.

To make it playable beyond the classroom, these features needed amending, and the game overall needed streamlining.

A first major decision was to move away from maps that require judgement to understand and parse. I commissioned the creation of bespoke maps, created by computer-aided design. These are real world, based on satellite imagery of Estonia, but with overlaid borders to identify key terrain types.

Map B from Battlegroup Clash: Baltics. The game uses 1:10,000 maps developed from satellite imagery from Estonia, with grid lines overlaid.

A second major decision was to move the stats for each unit onto its counter, rather than having them on a separate sheet. This significantly eases game play at a lower play count; everything is in front of the player on the map.

Battlegroup Clash: Baltics moves all the necessary information about the unit onto the counter (right). BGWS uses separate force cards for this instead of its counters (left).

A third major decision related to narrative. I wanted to move away from a generic ‘blue’ versus ‘red’ approach to the real world. The presence of a British Army Battlegroup in Estonia made that an obvious choice, and the game became NATO versus Russia in a hypothetical invasion by the latter of Estonia.

Step 3 - What To Add
Emphasising the present day narrative, and in keeping with my desire to create something that stood out from other tactical wargames, I decided to concentrate a lot of the design for Battlegroup Clash: Baltics on drones and electronic warfare.

The war in Ukraine has shown the degree to which drone warfare has changed the battlefield. Electronic warfare has been around for longer, but its intersection with drones and cyber attacks makes it now almost as important as kinetic effects on the battlefield.

In the game, every action that would generate some kind of radio or electronic transmission has the potential to be intercepted by the enemy. Intercepted transmissions can be used to target units for direct or indirect fires. Each side also gains access to Electronic Warfare Chits, that can be used on the battlefield for a variety of effects such as jamming your opponent’s recon drones.

This is important as reconnaissance drones, called UAS, completely transform the battlefield in the game, providing virtually unlimited line of sight for indirect fire. Another type of kamikaze drone, known as a first person video drone (FPV), can be used to directly attack enemy units, providing a more accurate, if less powerful, alternative to mortars and artillery.

UAS effect. In the game a UAS gives unlimited line of sight to the four adjacent grid squares.

Testing the Game
I wanted my playtesting team to combine folks with experience in both professional as well as commercial wargaming, and through a combination of persistence and good luck I was able to get both.

Prototype counters used in a play test.

While Tabletop Simulator played a crucial role in the development and testing process, I learnt from my time as a hobby game developer that digital is not a substitute for a physical prototype, so I had physical copies made and tested them both at home, at my local club and at conventions.

Testing the two-mapper scenario at PunchedCON in Coventry, UK.

Making the Game
Independent of the tariffs saga, I made a decision very early on that I wouldn’t get the game printed in China. China is funding Russia’s war in Ukraine, so it didn’t make sense to me to pay a Chinese company to make the game. Instead I chose EFKO in the Czech Republic. The price is higher than the Chinese alternative, but I can sleep easier with my choice.

The box cover
Selling the Game
Battlegroup Clash: Baltics is self-published, in the sense that I am releasing via my own company. I have sufficient experience of the board game industry to be able to do this, rather than having to use another publisher to release the game. This approach also allowed me to get the game to market very quickly.

I considered using crowdfunding as the vehicle for selling the game, but I was concerned that the concept might not fly with customers from a professional background. Furthermore, I didn’t need funding to develop the game, just to print it, and decided that a simple pre-order system via the Sapper Studio website, which I use for my game development consultancy business, would suffice.

I decided to make use of professional channels as well as traditional board game media to promote the game. This involved posting on LinkedIn and via the Fight Club Discord server, as well as hobby channels and events such as SD Histcon and Armchair Dragoons.

The success of the game in terms of generating pre-orders very much exceeded my expectations. I had several hundred pre-orders within the first few months, meaning I could opt for a larger print run than I had anticipated. Now the game is out for general release, and it’s time to see if my customers agree that I have been able to create a professional wargame for a commercial audience.

You can purchase a copy of Battlegroup Clash directly from Sapper Studio via this link https://www.sapperstudio.com/battlegr. Alternatively check your with FLGS in your country that you know stock a good wargame selection.

by Steph Hodge

Hey Everyone! Thank you so much for the warm welcome on my first post last week. :meeple:

Today I wanted to bring attention to Board Game Arena. Many of us enjoy playing games online, and BGA is one of the key websites for doing that. I am still amazed at the number of games they are implementing each year. There are over 1200 games ready to be played at your fingertips.

Currently, there is 1 week left to vote for the 2025 BGA Awards. The BGA Awards were first introduced in January 2024 for games from 2023, and they have continued each year since.

[ImageID=9395798 medium rep]

You can view the whole article here, but below is a snip-it of how they select which games are nominated.




To participate, you will first have to play each of the nominated games in the category you want to vote for. Once you play each game from a category, you can cast your vote here.

Here are the nominations:

Best Casual Game:
Coffee Rush
Flip 7
Qwinto
Skull King

Best Regular Game
Castles of Mad King Ludwig
Dead Cells: The Rogue-Lite Board Game
Forest Shuffle: Dartmoor
The Guild of Merchant Explorers

Best Expert Game
Apiary
Concordia
Galactic Cruise
The White Castle

Best 2-Player Game
Azul Duel
King of Tokyo: Duel
Schotten Totten
Toy Battle

Best Brain Teaser
Digit Code
Logic
Orapa Mine
Ubongo

Happy Voting!

They will post the results on 2/16/2026 at 5:00 AM

by Robby Boey

The Museum Spark
The whole story of Abbates traces back to a single weekend outing: a perfectly ordinary visit to museum M in Leuven, Belgium. Museums usually inspire me to admiration, contemplation, and maybe jealousy when confronted with artists who clearly have a greater talent than I do. Yet, halfway through the galleries, it was the museum gift shop that lodged the fateful splinter in my brain. Among books and postcards sat a board game derived from one of the museum’s artworks. That’s when my wife, who works at Bornem Abbey, turned to me and said, almost mischievously, “Wouldn’t it be great if we used Bornem Abbey as our own board game?”

At first, it was just a thought experiment. But museums have a way of making ideas feel serious, as though monks, curators, and old medieval books are silently nodding in approval. By the time we were back home, the little notion had become a not-so-little itch; this could actually work. The abbey is practically begging to become cardboard: artifacts, stained glass, libraries, abbots, architecture, history, the works. And there’s something magical about transforming physical cultural heritage into a playful, interactive medium… a kind of preservation-through-play.

Tiles, Heraldry, Cards, Grids, and the First Meeple
The first draft was tile-based because of course it was: tile-layers are the early evolutionary stage of most Euro designs. I imagined players building a stylized abbey using square tiles, connecting rooms via coats of arms of abbots printed along the edges. It wasn’t terrible. It was even charming in that “this should probably be sold next to puzzles and tea towels” kind of way.

But testing quickly revealed its limits: calm, pleasant, and almost entirely devoid of tension. It was the board game equivalent of a monk humming a lullaby in Gregorian chant.

I felt the abbey deserved more verve, not chaos, but interaction. I wanted something where players would look up, watch each other, second-guess each other, and occasionally mutter mild insults under their breath.

Shifting from tiles to cards unlocked new design space. The game transformed into a 4×4 grid of cards on the table, with a solitary meeple marching around like a tiny abbot conducting inspections, moved by the roll of a die. Activating a row or column allowed players to claim a card from it. A neat mechanism with just enough positional tension to matter, especially as every row and column also had their own effect that would benefit the winner of that round. But who got to claim first? Enter the first appearance of bidding cards numbered 1–13. Simple, but competitive. A touch of interaction, without turning into a knife fight.

Already players were comparing intentions: “You want that stained-glass? Or are you bluffing?” The game was learning to talk socially.

Shrinking the Abbey and Growing the Puzzle
The next breakthrough came by shrinking the central 4×4 grid into a tighter 3×3. That small reduction made everything more deliberate as fewer spaces meant fewer choices and more pressure. Adding in a personal player tableau on which you would place the cards you won was another needed layer of gameplay. Now players didn’t just acquire cards, they needed to store them in their personal tableau. Rows and columns formed gentle patterns and scoring lines.

Then I mirrored the central meeple onto each personal tableau. Your own meeple determined where newly drafted cards could be placed. No longer could players lazily optimize. The game began to tease, challenge, restrict. And when games tease, players lean in.

With three cards per side around the 3×3 grid, there were three opportunities per round to bid. Initially, all bids were submitted blind and simultaneously. The idea worked logically; emotionally it felt bone-dry. Everyone revealed, shrugged, assigned cards, and moved on.

What finally clicked after several test sessions with the amazing team of Bornem Abbey was sequential - open bidding. Each bidding moment became a micro-auction: clockwise, highest card wins, ties forbidden. Suddenly players had agency in tempo. Adding an advantage to the lowest bid, made underbidding a tactic by itself. Seize the initiative next round and additionally force oneself into taking the blind from the draw pile; a form of gamble that often paid off in surprising ways.
The scoring system also matured around this time: three of a kind in a line scored 10, two scored 6, mismatches 3. It meshed beautifully with the abbey’s thematic triad: artifacts, stained glass, library books, and gave visitors a taste of actual abbey content without forcing it down their throats.

Beans, Beans, the Monastic Currency and Rules
And then… beans. Yes, beans.
With rows of cards on your personal tableau now providing points, I added a central tableau, the abbey chapter room, on which you had a score track for… negative points. Tying this in with the cards proved to be a fresh new mechanic, another layer in the game. Low bidding cards gained white beans (up to four), indicating how far the central meeple marched on this track. High values bore fewer or none.

Efficient for winning auctions, disastrous for bean logistics.

Meanwhile collected cards bestowed black beans, advancing the personal meeple. And at game’s end, the distance between central and personal meeples produced negative points, resulting in a monastic bean-based tug-of-war.

Mechanically it added tempo management, shared-race pressure, and a new layer of tension. Thematically it became a playful abstraction of the actual voting system in abbeys. More importantly, playtesters kept talking about beans afterward. When players talk about a mechanism after the table is packed up, design is doing its job.

The cards proved to be even more of a treasure vault for new mechanics. Every abbey needs rules, so ours gained one: St. Benedict’s. It rewarded players for sequencing bids cleverly: 1–7 first, 8–13 second, then even, then odd. Do it right and you earned a glorious 14-value card, worth a victory point at the end. It nudged players toward intentionality without being prescriptive. It also supplied flavor as monks love order, after all. Now everything clicks and the different mechanics just click.

Feedback
Thus armed, we marched to the Spel convention in Antwerp in November 2024 with five professionally printed prototypes. The booth was lively, feedback plentiful, and best of all, genuine strangers smiled while playing. This cannot be overstated: strangers are the ultimate calibrators of fun. Friends lie. Family lies. Colleagues lie because they must see you at lunch. Only random convention-goers express truth.
People praised the tension and pace, but they also nudged the weak spots: scoring was a little too predetermined, patterns a bit too solvable, and the Rule of St. Benedict too predictable after repeat plays. All fair. All fixable.

Back in our “war room,” scoring underwent surgery. Fixed 10/6/3 lines melted away and three starting revealed cards determined scoring values: 3/2/1 points per card for the three types. Instantly every game became a different economic ecosystem.

Mission cards entered next with spatial objectives promising five points for pattern completion and halving negative bean-distance if fully satisfied. They gave structure, identity, and long-term ambition to players’ tableaus.

The Rule of St. Benedict became modular via two double-sided guides per player, offering unique sequences and higher replay value. Suddenly players had strategic identities instead of purely tactical reactions.
The prototype now felt alive and, importantly, replayable.

A Deadline, a Printer, and Several Sleepless Months
Then came the twist worthy of a thriller; the city of Bornem joined forces with the abbey to help fund a first run on the condition that the game launch by April 2025. When this condition was agreed, it was January. We still needed to finalize rules, translate gameplay into precise language, prep InDesign files, negotiate printing, and manufacture on time without resorting to cargo ships that behave like slow, unpredictable sea turtles.

We selected Fabryka Kart: European, reliable, communicative, and they delivered with clock-like precision. Rulebooks printed, components boxed, meeples lacquered, games shrink-wrapped. In April, copies stood proudly for sale at the abbey. All this done at the end with many sleepless nights, working and editing, typing and designing.
Nineteen months all-in-all from spark to shelf.

Pontifex Games Begins & Closing Reflections
The funniest part of the whole odyssey is that the game was meant to be a one-off cultural project. Instead, it became the cornerstone of a publishing house: Pontifex Games. As of writing, we already have our second game, Sacra Maioritas out, an expansion for Abbates and our third release, Via Peregrina, slated for February 2026. Apparently once you’ve printed one game, it’s difficult to stop. Monastic vices take many forms…

In retrospect, designing for a real institution, with its own history, identity, and a tourism footprint, shaped countless design decisions. It demanded theme without theatrics, elegance without sterility, accessibility without boredom. And it revealed how physical sites and cultural spaces can find new life in cardboard.

If I learned anything, it’s that creativity also thrives on constraints: theme, deadlines, and funding all played their part. And through all of it, the game stayed fun. Which, in the end, is the only reason to make one.

by Steph Hodge

▪️ Capstone Games plans to release Rising Cultures this March 2026. This extends their 2-player lineup of games which includes Pagan: Fate of Roanoke, Watergate, Suna Valo, and many more!

Rising Cultures is brought to you from designers Aske Christiansen (Living Forest) & Francesco Testini (Tang Garden)

Here is an excerpt from a recent newsletter:

▪️ Aquaria is another new release available in the Capstone catalog after partnering with the small Czech publisher Delicious Games.

From Tomáš Holek the designer who brought you SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence and Galileo Galilei you can now control the aquarium.




▪️ Speaking of Tomáš Holek, he has yet another new game just released from Capstone titled Pondscape.




▪️ Scott Almes is quite the prolific designer who brought us Series: Tiny Epic (Gamelyn Games/Tycoon Games) games, Beer & Bread as well as a brand new game called Angel's Share. Capstone partnered with Spielworxx to release Angel's Share in February 2026.

▪️ Finally, the hunt is on in Pirates of Maracaibo because a second expansion has hit the market! Be on the lookout for Pirates of Maracaibo: Bermuda Triangle.

This new expansion introduces a new module that has players going on a treasure hunt, where players need to collect the most treasure. Of course, that is just one small portion of the expansion; there is added content with epic monsters you have to deal with, new improvement cards, and a new solo experience.

Are you ready to set sail?

by S G

In the early 2000s, I had the privilege of connecting with a NASA scientist who would change the course of my career. She posed a simple but powerful challenge: How do we share all the amazing work happening on the International Space Station in a way that actually excites the general public?

My answer was immediate — games.

With her support, I started down a path that would eventually lead to the successful Kickstarter of 4 Years to Mars. But like any real space program, the road wasn’t paved with yellow bricks. It was littered with asteroids, craters, and — oh yes — funding and budget issues.

History and Design
(Feel free to skip ahead to Gameplay if you'd like)

4 Years to Mars began life as a humble paper prototype for a NASA outreach mobile game called To the Moon and Beyond. My lab had already launched two successful mobile games, and this would be our third—and, in my opinion, the most challenging.

NASA periodically publishes a document called Benefits for Humanity. In its most common form, it’s a dense, 25+ page technical report filled with fascinating information about how NASA research benefits life on Earth and advances exploration. Unfortunately, it’s not exactly light reading and many people find it intimidating.

The mission I accepted was clear: translate that information into something people could understand—and enjoy.

After many hours of brainstorming, we landed on the idea of a card game. Players would:
- Conduct research based on the real research in the document
- Fund technology projects that used that research based on the projects in the documents and in NASA Spinoffs
- Use the funded technology to build mission components.

From this, a paper prototype was born.

The first cards were printed on sticker paper and slapped onto old playing cards. The “board” consisted of images printed on cardstock. We cannibalized games from home to scavenge money, tokens, and components.

Once funding was approved, playtesting began with people from across the agency, and development of the mobile game followed. If you’re curious, To the Moon and Beyond is still playable—just search for it along with “NASA” on Google Play, Xbox, or the Apple App Store (Yes, there’s actually an Xbox version).

From Mobile to Tabletop

In 2021, after 37 years in government and extensive experience using gamification across projects, I decided it was time to venture out on my own. One lingering dream was to turn To the Moon and Beyond into a family-friendly board game—one that taught players about NASA while being genuinely fun.

I secured permission to create the game and use NASA imagery (with restrictions), recruited my son—fresh out of college with a game design degree—and launched my company, Game2Learn.

The design challenges were significant. The biggest? Transforming a single-player mobile game into a 1–6 player tabletop experience that worked both competitively and cooperatively.

Our first attempts failed spectacularly. Copying the mobile formula directly just didn’t work. We scrapped the “one research topic discounted one project” system and replaced it with broad research categories that discounted multiple projects. To increase player interaction, we added Sabotage cards. We also rebalanced the mission objectives to create a consistent mission track.

To the Moon and Back—the board game—was born.

Iteration, Evolution, and Failure (the Fun Kind)

Testing continued in 2022 with a rough prototype at Origins Game Fair. Feedback was honest and invaluable:
- The board was too big
- The artwork felt unfinished
- This is fun!
- And, frankly, Mars is sexier than the Moon

I hired an artist, regrouped, and rebranded the game as 5 Years to Mars.

Artwork required many iterations. I had a clear picture in my mind, but conveying that across the continent via zoom was harder than I thought. Thankfully, my amazing artist grew adept at reading my mind and we settled on a design that not only fit the genre, but allowed players to stack the project cards for easier point computation.

While the card design stabilized, the board continued to be a challenge. A large board with designated spaces worked great—but was far too expensive to manufacture. We explored multiple layouts, tracks, and even tried to recreate some of the parts building fun from the mobile game.

Eventually, we settled on a smaller fold-up board for 5 Years to Mars. In 2023, after Origins, we launched the Kickstarter.

And then… we canceled it.

We had reached over 50% of our goal, but something was still missing.

The Final Countdown: 4 Years to Mars

Determined to fix what was missing, I sought out mentors and publishers and connected with Sean Brown of Mr. B Games. With his guidance, and additional feedback from convention players, I made several crucial changes. The game was split into a Base game, an Events deck, and a Cutthroat deck which broadened the game's appeal. The game was rebalanced to remove a game year, which shortened the play time and aligned with what seemed to be the industry standard length.

In addition to broadening the game’s appeal, the modular approach reduced the funding goal since the Events deck and Cutthroat deck could be made into stretch goals for the campaign.

In 2024, the game successfully funded on Kickstarter, and I was able to include the Events deck and the Cutthroat deck with my funding.

After manufacturing hiccups and tariff nightmares, 4 Years to Mars became a reality.

Game Play Synopsis

4 Years to Mars is a card-based game for one to six players that can be played competitively or cooperatively. The game is played over four rounds, called Program Years. These represent the four years you have to complete your program. To succeed, you must complete eight Mission Objectives by accumulating 6 points in each objective.

During the first Program Year, you will fund Research cards. Research cards represent topics you are researching in one of your four bays on the International Space Station. Your Research cards reduce the cost of Projects that you will fund in order to advance your Mission Objectives.

In the second through fourth Program Years, players can purchase Project cards as well as Research and Action cards. Project cards provide advances in your Mission Objectives as well as income for the next year of your program. Projects are categorized based on what benefits they provide in Scientific discoveries, helping life on Earth, advancing space Exploration, or inspiring youth through STEM programs. When combined into sets, these benefit categories also advance your Mission Objectives.

At the end of a Program Year, players advance their Mission Objective tokens once per mission icon on their funded Projects. Mission Objective tokens are also advanced based on what sets are made with card categories. The first and second players to complete a Mission Objective receive an Award from the government. This reward can be used to augment the next year's budget or can be saved for end of game calculations in case of a tie.

After Mission Objectives have been advanced and Awards earned, players receive 20 Spucks (space bucks) from the government and any income their products have generated. The first player token then passes to the player with the smallest budget for the next year. The first person to complete all 8 mission objectives wins the game.

The game difficulty can be varied with the inclusion of Event cards or played more competitively with the inclusion of the Cutthroat cards. Rules are provided for solo play as well as cooperative play.

Conclusion

Even with its ups and downs, this has been a wonderful experience. I encourage everyone: If you have an idea, don't dream it, do it!
I typically run the game at Origins, so if you're around, stop by and say hi. I may even have a NASA sticker left to hand out.

by Fat Francis

AUTHORS AND DESIGNERS:
Michael Rieneck
Franz Vohwinkel

Franz:
“Three Illustrations with fantasy motifs for a new series of 1000-piece jigsaw puzzles.” That was the assignment that led to the creation of the Skybridge in autumn 2010.

Beyond this, there were no instructions from the publisher, so I had to come up with something. Dragons! Fantasy - there must be dragons. But what else? I wanted it to be something else than the usual fantasy cliché with sword-swinging heroes and princesses to be saved in front of a Neuschwanstein-castle backdrop. Also, instead of developing three unrelated motifs, I wanted to come up with a small, short story to connect the three puzzles.

So, what’s cool? A hollow world. Ever since Journey to the Center of the Earth, I always found hollow worlds fascinating. What else? A huge tower, like the tower of Babel. Together with dragons, this could be exciting. Why is the tower being built? Well, as always with large monumental buildings, it is built to get closer to God.

Somehow this doesn’t really work for a hollow world, because there’s just the other side of the world to be seen in the sky. The sky over Thraen is finite, not infinite like ours. There was something missing to make it worthwhile for such a tower to be built.

Then I had an idea: In the middle of the hollow world floats a small planet, a moon! And what if the roles were reversed? If not the moon was an unlivable, dry world but the hollow world that surrounds it?

People must constantly fight for their survival on the outside, while they have to watch a lush, green and fertile world above their heads? A visible, real paradise, right in front of the eyes of all humanity? Wouldn’t that be enough motivation to build a huge tower into the sky that forms a bridge between the worlds? A world-bridge? A Skybridge?

Suddenly I had found my little story for the puzzles:
Part 1 - The construction of the bridge begins;
Part 2 - The bridge is half built, gravity flips to the other side;
Part 3 - The bridge is finished, people of both worlds meet.

The completed illustrations for the three jigsaw puzzles
The puzzles were produced and published, but were, as far as I know, not a great success: The puzzle series was not continued anyway. Normally, this would have been the end of the Skybridge and its worlds - if it hadn’t been for those prints.

The publisher gave me prints of the puzzles from the manufacturer. Full-sized, stable prints on really thick cardboard, not yet cut into individual puzzle pieces. I displayed and sold them in the following time at conventions, tournaments and game events. My little story about the Skybridge made visitors curious.

“Where can I read something about it?” was a question I was often asked. I always answered with “Sorry, I’m an artist, man. I can’t write.”

LEFT: Prints for sale at Emerald City Comic Con, Seattle, 2014 / RIGHT: Gen Con, Indianapolis, 2015
But over time, it started to bother me. Was it true that I couldn’t write? After all, I hadn’t tried it since my school days. So at some point, I decided to give it a shot sometime in 2011. I couldn’t say afterwards whether the result was good or bad, but one thing became clear to me: I really enjoy writing.

In the following years, the history and worlds of Skybridge grew dramatically. It became obvious that a short story wouldn’t do the emerging, complex relationships justice. The more I explored Thraen, Beeledhans Eye and the Skybridge, the more questions had to be answered. A three-part structure again offered itself.
Part I: How did the bridge come to be built after no one had dared to do it for thousands and thousands of days?
Part II: What happens when such a bridge is built under conditions of constantly decreasing gravity that finally flips to the other side?
And, last but not least,
Part III: What happens when the Skybridge is completed and paradise suddenly becomes accessible to all of humanity?

I would be a strange game illustrator if I hadn’t asked myself whether there isn’t a game somewhere in this story. Unfortunately, there is a good reason why I became an illustrator: math and I have always been at war with each other. But game design needs mathematics for their mechanics like players need the rules to play a game. It was clear to me that I was completely unsuited to developing a game on my own.

Then at a party during SPIEL in Essen - it must have been 2013 - I met someone who knows how to make games based on given stories: Michael Rieneck. I had already illustrated games he designed, but didn’t know him well. When we started talking, I gathered all my courage and finally told him about the Skybridge. Then I asked him if he could imagine designing a game for an unreleased book...

Michael:
... These are days still remembered many years later. And by that I don’t mean anything specific, like the weather or the corresponding date. I mean the feeling that this day triggered in you. Some kind of feeling that this day would change something. And that those experiences will have an effect for a long time. How long, I couldn’t guess, then back in the fall of 2013 ...

Franz Vohwinkel just asked me if I could imagine developing a game based on a story that has been on his mind for a long time and that he intends to write a book about it. I had to sort that out for a moment and let it sink in. I have worked with book templates before and appreciate doing it very much. On one hand, books usually provide great stories and ensure that you don’t have to look for a - usually superimposed - theme for the game anymore. In addition, books offer a common thread for the development of a game right from the start.

But a book that doesn’t even exist yet? That seemed quite bizarre. But there were no doubts. When an experienced game illustrator like Franz Vohwinkel comes up with a story, then it must be something very imaginative that should give enough starting points for a game idea. I didn’t know what the book is about, but I already knew my answer: “Sure, I can imagine that.”

And so begins a long journey into a strange and epic world that has been taking an increasingly concrete form in my mind’s eye ever since that day, drawing me further and further into its spell.

I can’t remember exactly when over the years Franz told me various details of the story. But because I couldn’t read anything about it, I asked him countless questions about it while we were working together, and he patiently gave me just as many answers - a process that continues to this day. In fact, there is still a lot for me to discover in Thraen. In the beginning, it was the big topics that we discussed and that were supposed to play a role in the game. The hollow world of Thraen, Beeledhans Eye, the peoples of Thraen, the cruel queen, the Drakhes and all the Gods. And most importantly, the desire to build a Skybridge. “Great,” I thought, I had already found the game goal. I immediately felt reminded of the building of the cathedral in The Pillars of the Earth. With this, the thematic framework established quite quickly. Another one thing was clear to me from the beginning. Franz certainly would want to illustrate his story with opulent pictures. Hence, large playing cards are undoubtedly the best medium to let off steam artistically. Also, we’d need a big game board, of course.

When you accept such a big assignment, you quickly want certainty. Can I even come up with something suitable? Am I really capable of developing a good game for Skybridge that can convince the players and especially Franz? The project has taken over my mind and it keeps occupying it until I have success or I failed. After our first conversation that night, I got to work very soon and created a card-based board game in which the Skybridge is built. At that time, I knew only a few main characters from the story. Franz had already told me about some of the cities and landscapes of Thraen. I still remember vividly how strange many names seemed to me back then. Today they are familiar and it feels like I have known them forever. But I wanted to ignore all this at first and develop a good game mechanic that fits the topic and can be filled with life later. The first prototype was actually ready before Christmas. It crashed with a loud bang, not just for my test players but also for myself. The decisions were bland and the atmosphere of an epic story did not even begin to come up at the game table. Franz didn’t see this prototype or the second one, which also was a disaster.

So the start was already an utter failure. In addition, I had gained a realization during those first two attempts that initially frustrated me, but turned out to be a stroke of luck later on. Initially the players were supposed to form their own extensive card displays, which they laid out successively on each side of the game board. The space required for this reached far beyond the normal dimensions of a conventional play table. It quickly became obvious: A maximum of one row of cards could be placed on each side of the game board, nothing more, unless we use very small cards.

Example of cards displays on all sides of the game board
This didn’t seem to be a real option for this project, which was supposed to come to life through its impressive illustrations. Then I got the idea to limit the card display to a row of six cards, to make them fit comfortably to the side of a large game board. Whoever wants to play a seventh card needs to cover up one that’s already lying out. The covered card would then no longer be usable for the player. For the available space, this worked wonderfully. From this moment on, each player had six card slots available on his side, which had to be tactically used in a smart way. We already assigned a color to the cards of each ethnic group. Each group consisted of eighteen cards, which were available in separate piles on the game board. At the beginning of a turn, one player could draw an open card from one of the piles and receive a bonus from the respective people. This mechanism hasn't changed to this day. Even back then, the top cards of the piles were only refreshed at the beginning of the new round. So the starting player always had the largest selection of cards to draw from in the current round.

With the help of the cards, the actions required for the game were controlled: procurement of technical knowledge and raw materials for the construction of the Skybridge, supply of food for the population, the expansion of military power, intrigues, oracles, praying for favors from gods, usage of Drakhes and more. There were quite a few different actions on the cards. Many were tried, many more were changed or abandoned.

The space problem was solved, but the game still didn’t work. The decisions were still trivial unfortunately. It was far too easy to construct a well-functioning display. So I wanted to limit the freedom of the construction of the card display. This was when the runes were born. With their help I wanted to tie the individual cards to certain card slots. If a player wanted to play a certain card, it had to be placed on a specific card slot and cover the card that might already be there. This quickly turned out to be a step in the right direction and I asked Franz to design six runes for me that could be depicted on the cards and slots. At first there was a total of six runes, but as it turned out, the freedoms were still too great.

The original six runes
Only after we limited the slots to five - and thus also the runes - was the slot management (as I called it) challenging enough as an essential game mechanic. (By the way, the sixth rune from that time still exists - you can see it on a belt of the rebel leader Raphis and as a tattoo on the neck of Hamises).

Franz:
In the meantime, Michael and I had started working on a serious prototype for the game. The first elements we needed were, of course, icons for the actions, layouts for the playing cards, and the game board.

Michael needed more and more background information about Thraen for his work on the game. My focus during this time was therefore mainly world building. Although much of it already existed in writing, the geography of Thraen needed to be visualized. I had to create maps to fully understand the connections between the regions and their peoples.
From these maps, prototype graphics of the game board and the playing cards were then developed.

Maps of Thraen

The first playable board

Prototypes for SPIEL in 2018[
Michael:
In the meantime, I was sure I had found the core mechanism of the game. Now I got down to work on the distribution of the cards and their functions over the five runes. For this I was in a lively back and forth with Franz about what could be included in each stack of faction cards. “Metal and Drakhes are only available for the Utreng, salt comes only from the cities of Shenna” is an example of the kind of information that I received from him. One can easily imagine that thematic correctness and game developing necessity did not always go hand in hand. We had to make compromises, but by that time I had long fallen to my own “Skybridge fever” and I no longer wanted things in the game to be completely different from the written story. It was a challenging puzzle that we had to solve together, but we managed to distribute the actions coherently and meaningfully among the now 100+ cards.

Meanwhile, Franz had made a breathtaking three-dimensional skybridge that was enthroned in the center of our game board. It looked absolutely gorgeous and I still have the picture of it close to my heart.

Cardboard prototype version of a 3D Skybridge
By that time, I had no more doubts that we’d find a publisher for Skybridge. What a painful misconception! Many days, weeks, months and even years of work were already spent on the project. Not only in terms of the development of the game design itself, but also in terms of the design of the prototypes, which, thanks to Franz, presented themselves differently than those I usually create. Should all of it have been in vain? For a brief period of time, we even played around with the idea of running a Kickstarter campaign. But in the end, the project seemed too big for us—we had no experience in this area. As difficult as this was for us, we had to admit that we would probably not be able to capture the history of the Skybridge in a board game and convince other decision-makers. At this point, the chapter “Skybridge board game” looked like it had finally reached its end.
Then the Vohwinkels decided to move from Seattle to Eckernförde at the beginning of 2020 - which happens to be about a 15 minute car drive from my home.

Franz:
After presenting the first prototypes to various publishers, it became clear to us that we still had a long way to go with the second prototype: Most important steps were moving the card slots from the game board to individual player boards and to disconnect the skybridge and the group of central draw piles into two separate game boards. With this new flexible version, Skybridge was now adaptable to a wider range of table sizes.
We also streamlined the gameplay and its essential mechanisms to make Skybridge less complex and more accessible.

Streamlined prototype versions of the game board, player board, and Skybridge
Michael:
Instead of communicating across the Atlantic, we were suddenly able to work collaboratively at the same table and try out new ideas together in smaller steps.

But what was left of our game, after all? Our “old” Skybridge was too bulky and overloaded, too confusing and long-winded for most publishers. There was so much criticism, I hardly remember it all. Still, we wanted to use the luxury of simply being able to meet every week in person to make one last attempt. For a start, we subjected our prototypes to a radical cure. Game board reimagined, event cards forgone, 3D bridge removed, development tracks eliminated. All that and much more. We streamlined the game significantly. As it turned out, we were really lucky. Maybe it was the luck of the skilled, but still, I consider us lucky: The new, stripped down game still worked. In fact, we instantly liked the new version much better than the previous version. It is actually rather rare that such drastic changes immediately work well.

But, surprisingly, so it happened. The flow of the game was better, the playing time was significantly reduced, somehow everything seemed to be more precise, more to the point. Suddenly we were hopeful again and we got to work - now in Eckernförde - with renewed verve. We had the new player boards and smaller, more functional game boards. This made the handling of the components much more pleasant and feel less rigid. We played countless times to further balance the game and test the new individual abilities for the players. Expanding these asymmetric player skills was an important step for us, to give the game the greatest possible variance.

Franz:
The large card size had been planned from the beginning, but until this point we used the regular trading card size, because it was more convenient for the creation of the prototypes. Now the time had come to convert all the cards to the large format. At the same time, the old placeholder-graphics on the cards - which showed just early sketches for the maps of Thraen - were abandoned in favor of mock-up sketches that showed people, landscapes and cities.

Example of original prototype cards next to expanded illustrations
Michael:
When we presented the new version, it seemed like we were actually on the right track. But despite intensive work on the game, this version also turned out to be a fallacy in the end. And so, at the end of 2022, we again reached the point to put Skybridge with a heavy heart into the drawer of failed projects. By now, we were mentally too deeply involved in our game for another complete restart - we were still convinced that our game was the best it could ever be.

Franz:
The second version of Skybridge also did not find approval from the editors. Our Skybridge board game project was thus over for the time being. Looking back, I can’t say whether I felt more disappointment about our failure or relief that the ordeal was finally over.

In my free time, I concentrated all my energy on the novel, which had grown to a considerable size in the meantime.

Michael:
And then luck struck again. This time it did not come from ourselves, but it came to us from the outside. I can’t remember the context and on which occasion it happened, but Peter Eggert asked me about our game -it was the beginning of 2023. He wanted to know what actually became of the game I and Franz had been working on.

I always had the different versions with me for testing at a game event of Inka and Markus Brand in Lieberhausen. That’s where Peter had seen the various prototypes in the years before.

“Unfortunately nothing,” I had to tell him. “Then bring it to Lieberhausen again,” he suggested. I brought it along in consultation with Franz and I played the game several times with Peter and his team. It actually went well. Or, as Peter usually phrases it: “That’s pretty good, but it can be even better.” He could actually imagine publishing the game after editorial processing at Deep Print Games. And just like that, hope and enthusiasm for the project were back again and we got to work with Deep Prints editor Moritz Bornkast. One thing was particularly important to Peter: He thought the game needed a little more complexity. He envisioned a third strategic level in addition to building the bridge and worship the gods. The resistance against the rebels and the simultaneous expansion of one’s own military power should become significantly more important to achieve this. The implementation of this third branch of strategy was once again a lengthy process. Not least because it made profound changes in the cards necessary. The new rebel game plan was created, which led to new garrisons and a new function on the cards. Other elements had to give way. Once again, thematic and mechanical adjustments to the many cards were necessary. In the end, it was worth it.

Franz:
When Peter Eggert from Deep Print Games appeared out of nowhere and expressed interest in Skybridge to Michael, I was extremely skeptical at first. I just couldn’t imagine that a solution could be coming to us and our game so easily and unexpected.
At the moment of signing the contract, the hobby of “Skybridge” instantly became a huge pile of work. It had suddenly become clear to me, that my imagined worlds would indeed be published after such a long time. I immediately started to feverishly turn the images in my head into pictures for the game.

In order to be able to really dive deep into the project, I stopped accepting any commissioned work since then and I solely focused on Skybridge.

Michael:
While Franz devoted himself to his artistic work around the clock, for me the most wonderful time began. I worked with Moritz fine-tuning the content for the last time. A few details here and there – there wasn’t much more to do for me. I don’t know how other authors feel, but for me, these are the best moments in a project. The moments when you see your game idea take shape with your own eyes for the first time and its full creative power unfold. I got to see new images from Franz every week, one more beautiful than the other. Places and people, all of which had existed only in my imagination, suddenly became visible, as if a thick veil of fog had been lifted step by step. It felt a bit like I was meeting old friends again after a long time and I was traveling to forgotten places of longing with them ...

Whatever happens, however the game continues its journey, it has a special place in my heart and I’m utterly happy and grateful that I don’t have to get it out of my drawer when I want to play it.