by Sami Laakso
Welcome to the designer diary for Lands of Galzyr, a game designed by Sami Laakso (me) and Seppo Kuukasjärvi and illustrated by me and Jesús Delgado. It’s the third new game series taking place in the world of animalfolks published by my company, Snowdale Design.
Lands of Galzyr is an adventure board game for 1 to 4 players set in an open, story-rich world. Acquire prestige as a cunning and ambitious adventurer by exploring the lands and by taking on challenging quests. Your actions have long-lasting consequences in the evolving and persistent game world. Your decisions affect not only the current game, but the following games as well.
Now, without further ado, let’s begin!
A Sense of Freedom
Our ambitious goal was to create something new and fresh, something we haven’t yet seen in board games. We set out to create a game with an open, living, and persistent world where you can dive and fully immerse yourself in.
Our main inspirations for this design were games such as The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, The 7th Continent, the Fallout series, and Planescape: Torment. When played for the first time, they can create such a joyful sense of wonder where it feels like you can do whatever you want — such freedom!
You’re also often not restricted to a specific way to complete any given challenge or quest; rather you can choose between multiple different creative approaches. The quests have different endings, making it clear that your actions have persistent consequences in the game world. Whatever you do, the story supports the game mechanisms and vice versa, resulting in an uninterrupted immersion.
An early prototype of Lands of Galzyr
Boundless Stories
From our first discussions, it was clear that the game needed a storybook in order to support the amount of content needed for the feeling we wanted to evoke in players. It was originally supposed to be a physical book as we aren’t too fond of digital devices creeping into our board game space. However, as time went by, it was more and more clear that a digital storybook was the only way to realize what we were trying to do. It would have resulted in a worse gaming experience for everyone if we were more stubborn and insisted on a physical storybook.
To bring the storybook into the digital realm, I ended up creating it as a website, something that you can use on pretty much any device now and in the future. It can also be downloaded and installed on your device for offline use. That way, it is futureproofed and not bound to have a set expiration date like more traditional iOS and Android apps.
What were the main reasons for ditching the physical book in favor of a digital one? First, the game’s storybook will feature over 600,000 words — that’s six regular-sized novels. For reference, the whole Lord of the Rings trilogy has roughly 450,000 words! Second, digital adaptation brings other huge pros as well, such as being spoiler-free and having the ability for us to update the book even after the game has been released.
First prototype storybook versus the final digital one
Game with a Memory
A board game with an open world cannot be a simulation like a computer game because players keep it running — the game shouldn’t feel like work. Thus, one design goal was to decide what players should do in the game to give them the feeling of freedom.
Another tricky decision revolved around the consequences of players’ choices in the game world. How should we implement those? A traditional solution is to add a ton of components to the game, including various cards and tokens. That quickly becomes a mess. Also, tokens are not helpful in keeping the game world persistent between sessions, which is usually done with a pen and paper — or not at all!
One of the card trays, a quest card, and quest tokens
Games usually have persistence only within each session. Your actions obviously have consequences in board games. You take actions and reap benefits and face penalties because of that. The idea of those same actions having long-term consequences even between games was the thing that sparked our imaginations!
Let’s say you manage to acquire a precious gemstone for a polecat to complete their prized collection. And let’s also say that you did so by utilizing a bit of shady methods to put it mildly. The previous owner is less than happy about that and hires someone to teach you a lesson. Or maybe you helped an undisclosed party with their quest to take control of one of the cities on the map. Whatever the case, we didn’t want the game to simply forget your actions — not immediately, and not between games. Thus, your decisions carry weight, making them a wide margin more meaningful!
On the surface, our solution looks extremely simple: one save slot for each adventurer and one for the game world itself. Each save slot can hold any number of cards, regardless of their type. The orientation or order of the cards doesn’t matter, either, so it’s extremely fast and easy to save the game at the end of your session. Setting up the next game is equally speedy when you want to delve into Galzyr again.
Adventurer boards and their skill marks
Each adventurer’s gold and skill marks are saved with their adventurer board: gold with a dial and skill marks with custom plastic pegs. Basically, the saving boils down to the position of cards and skill marks in the box and card trays — well, and the orientation of your gold dial. Is the card 268 in the library? Or maybe in the vault? Or perhaps in the event deck or global save slot? Each of those would result in the game knowing something different about the status of the world and your past actions in it.
Brave and Resourceful Adventurers
Bumir the marbled polecat, and Mor the frilled lizard made their first appearances in Dale of Merchants Collection, while Aysala the river kingfisher and Keridai the northern banded newt are entirely new faces! Each adventurer represents a different class of animalfolk in Daimyria: furfolk, scalefolk, featherfolk, and palefolk, respectively.
Adventurer figures and their special abilities
Unlike in Dawn of Peacemakers, the adventurers in Lands of Galzyr are highly varied, each with their own special ability, tags, skill marks, and more! You’ll be able to feel like a resolute polecat who never surrenders without giving it his all, or a highly intelligent newt bending the rules and inventing entirely new approaches to challenges that look impossible at first glance!
We decided upon having six skills in the game: Thievery, Might, Survival, Knowledge, Communication, and Perception. They are arranged into a circle on the adventurer boards. Adjacent skills in the circle are thematically linked and have synergy with each other.
In the first game, each adventurer is prepared for different kinds of challenges, represented by four skill marks. These custom plastic pegs are attached to the adventurer board, and you can swap yours to different ones during play.
A comparison between an early prototype and final versions of adventurer related components
Our goal in designing the narrative gameplay was to create meaningful choices, carefully intertwined with the story. We paid special attention to these design principles in the “Book of Adventures”. Options, skill checks, and their outcomes have an important role in connecting game mechanisms to the narrative, making players feel they are in Daimyria and their choices have a real impact there.
Challenging story paths are accompanied by skill checks. To resolve one such check, you roll five 6-sided dice. The base skill dice have one single success for each of the six skills in the game. Skill marks grant you access to advanced skill dice that are more powerful in their own skill and help in both adjacent skills as well. There’s a lot of luck mitigation as well, in the form of items, statuses, companions, and more.
Depending on the result of the skill check, you get a different outcome with an appropriate story and consequences. Those can be positive or negative — or both! Furthermore, if you get an excessive number of successes, your outcome can be even more grandiose.
Lands Full of Opportunities
As many of you already know, all my games take place in Daimyria, the world of animalfolks. Lands of Galzyr is no different in this aspect. In Daimyria, intelligent animalfolks have risen to build civilizations, each with their own defining traits and unique cultures. There are reckless polecats, scheming magpies, enthusiastic turtles, and many other colorful folks with their own attitudes towards life.
Evolution of the game board from the first prototype to the final one
We have been steadily building Daimyria with each release, be it a new game in the Dale of Merchants series or Dawn of Peacemakers. We decided to position Lands of Galzyr about ten years before the Dale of Merchants series, in the polecats’ famous city-states. Dawn of Peacemakers takes place roughly seven hundred years before Galzyr. You will be able to see many familiar faces and animalfolks from our previous games.
The region has been built to include mystery, secrets, political intrigue, and more. Galzyr awaits!
Sami Laakso and Seppo Kuukasjärvi
This designer diary was originally posted as a four-part series. This is a condensed version, combining all of them. You can read each individual post below if you so wish:
Part 1/4: Narrative adventuring in an open world
Part 2/4: Game engine capable of remembering
Part 3/4: Brave and resourceful adventurers
Part 4/4: Lands full of opportunities
