by Nick Case
SPIEL had finished in late 2018 after I’d run a stand there for the launch of Tales of the Northlands. It had gone well, but after demonstrations to 96 people, I really needed a break from Noggin the Nog (and talking). In an attempt to unwind, I started to play the other games that I’d bought at the show, but that period of calm and relaxation didn’t go as planned. By January 2019, after much scowling and coarse language, I had sold on about 50% of my SPIEL purchases. I kept a few good titles, but the general consensus was that there were too many copycat games that had simply re-veneered and plagiarized old mechanisms but added nothing new. The results were resoundingly meh!
So many of these super glossy titles just seemed to be shamelessly lazy designs missing the special essence of those great, earlier games. Why weren’t there any new ideas anymore? I got to thinking: Could I create something that was fresh and wasn’t just a shallow reskin of an old classic?
I set to, listing the elements that would be in my perfect game. Unfortunately, despite the best of intentions, my early priorities were pretty abstract and not all that new:
1. I wanted a highly variable action-selection system from the set-up. A modular action tile arrangement with mancala worker movement seemed the best way to achieve that.
2. Players should be able to improve their efficiencies by developing their player boards.
3. Workers would be promoted and cycled from the general supply to the player board and finally onto the action tiles and main board.
4. I wanted a “build” element so there needed to be a means to generate resources.
5. I liked the idea of players competing to build routes across a board, whilst blocking and obstructing opponents on the way. Paths would be formed from the center of a hex map using upgradeable tiles that needed to reach perimeter spaces for endgame points.
6. Turn order needed to be controllable.
7. Little or no in-game randomness/luck — but a fundamentally random set-up that would make each game different from all that preceded it.
But how could this “not so original” brief be developed to create something not seen before?
If a game is going to use resources, then they might as well be wood, stone, food, and money, so this seemed a good starting point, especially as I had plenty of these wooden spares left over from Tales of the Northlands.
These resources needed to be created somewhere, so the player board was as good a place as any — but thematically what location would generate these resources? It seemed lame and too obvious to opt for a farm or a village, and even if the easy option were selected, I felt the player board needed to offer more. A prison or penal colony was soon dismissed owing to the extreme negativity of this subject, but what about an abbey? The monks and nuns who lived in abbeys literally just prayed and worked (Ora et Labora – sound familiar?), so the “workers” had a focus as to why they were existing on the player board. That added another resource, “piety”.
Mmmmm. We might be onto something. The player board could be an abbey where the acolytes live, and they can be sent to work in areas on the outskirts. Additional buildings can be constructed to enhance the yield; serfs from a general supply need to be ordained to supplement allocated workers, then sent into the world on missions to complete actions. Pilgrims could travel from the center of the board to distant holy sites. At this point I had a flashback to growing up in the county of Kent in South East England. Roughly in the middle is the small historic city of Canterbury with its famous cathedral.
Canterbury Cathedral…
Subject to many school trips, here is the place where Thomas Becket (then Arch Bishop of Canterbury) was murdered and martyred by henchmen of Henry II.
…where Thomas Becket was murdered
As a result, Canterbury became a popular destination for pilgrimages from London, especially in the 14th century when Geoffrey Chaucer made this the focus for his collection of 24 stories, The Canterbury Tales. (I studied one for my A levels, “The Miller’s Tale”; it’s a tough read.) It was as if I’d been given the box lid of a jigsaw and could now see the whole picture to allow me to start to fit pieces together. Ideas seemed to suddenly cascade from this one theme.
The first prototype player board: the abbey
The purpose of the map board was to allow a player’s pilgrim to travel to various pilgrimage sites at random locations around the board via player-built roads that could be upgraded and punctuated with shrines for improved endgame points. A piety and turn-order track were added, and a prototype bolted together from various online royalty-free images. Below is a photo of prototype #1 set up prior to playtest #1 on March 19, 2019. Looking at this three years later, I am amazed at how close this is to the final design.
This first playtest immediately identified problems:
1. The middle hex of the board was too small and too congested.
2. The action tile to decide turn order achieved too little to sacrifice a turn for. Players just ignored it.
3. Whilst the excommunication action that demoted acolytes back to serfs and off the board was “fun”, it was far too negative and resulted in reprisals that effectively eliminated all who took part in this action from contention.
4. The creation of pilgrim trails had merit, but the mechanism to control and move the pilgrims was not just awkward and clunky, but also a bit scruffy around the edges.
The rest of the game showed promise, especially the mancala arrangement in which a player got to take two actions if they held the majority on a tile. Moving “actioned” acolytes back to the middle of the board meant that players didn’t permanently stockpile and dominate key areas. All the playtesters made useful comments and suggestions and give it a thumbs up, which was nice.
The rest of 2019 saw steady developments on this foundation of the game. Points were awarded for the piety table, and this now governed the turn order. The central space on the board was enlarged and evolved into a city. Players could give alms to the poor in a race for points at the end of each season but were also rewarded with ordained acolytes to cushion the blow if not first. Three levels of new buildings were added around the perimeter of the board, and they became live as the round marker moved from season to season.
Prototype #2-ish
Each playtest cemented old mechanisms that proved to be working well and finessed others that needed a polish. The theme seemed to enhance the way the varied cogs of the game meshed together. Tithes were added and (combined with a traveling merchant), trade routes were born to offer an alternative to production. Wood was dropped as a resource to streamline production actions and simplify building. The point-scoring traveling pilgrims were removed in favor of points being awarded for constructing pilgrim trails. Piety became a resource to be spent on visiting pilgrimage sites and building shrines. Actions were renamed “duties” and each duty expanded to offer two options for the active player. Although the core rules were relatively simple and intuitive, players normally had a wide range of options for each turn.
The player board went through several iterations, eventually giving a home to the serfs before they were ordained. A store was added for resources.
Player board #2
With the variable set-up for the duty tiles, the tithe counters, and the selection of twelve different buildings and four pilgrimage site tiles on four of 24 different locations around the board, there was now massive variability to each new game. It has been calculated that there are 160 sextillion different combinations!
Everything was flying until early 2020, when the world seemed to stop. The Covid pandemic closed down the games club and face-to-face contact with my playtesters. It looked like Pilgrim would be mothballed for the foreseeable future. However, what first appeared to be a curse turned out to be a blessing in disguise.
I had heard about Tabletopia sometime before, but the idea of uploading an entire game onto a website with a 3D engine sounded like a serious challenge, and experience suggested that these websites needed considerable time and concentration to understand. However, with little to do beyond walking the dog, I had all the time in the world, so I set to it. Three days later, no one was more surprised than me to see a fully operational Tabletopia version of Pilgrim on the other side of my monitor screen.
Suddenly playtests that had been occurring every fortnight pre-pandemic, were now booked up two or three times a week. Friends stuck at home welcomed the chance for a game and a chat over Zoom at the same time. With the help of OBS studio, which effectively films what is occurring on your monitor, I was able to record each game and replay them to tabulate the frequency of moves and the number of resources collected, etc. With the data on Excel spreadsheets from tens of sessions, proper science could be applied to the ratio of points awarded for each aspect of the game. Likewise, the cost and value of an acolyte working on the duty tiles or locked in a point-scoring position on the board became precisely measurable.
I was now rarely playing but normally occupying the fifth seat and taking copious notes as well as doing the housekeeping by moving the merchant and round marker, adjusting piety, and handing out resources. My actions kept up momentum and compensated for the extra thirty minutes Tabletopia added to the playing time. By the end of 2020, there were no longer any suggested tweaks or suggestions to fine tune the rules at the end of a game. Things seemed to have reached a fully working balance point.
The principal playtesters were comfortable that the game had found its natural level, and with that they seemed to move up a gear. Previously players would seed the board and start play promptly. Now after the random set-up of the game, players would say very little for the next 10-15 minutes. Each would intently examine the positions of each duty tile combined with the distribution of buildings to assess which would offer useful synergies. The time interval between seasons was also a consideration to throw into the mix to see whether “give alms” bonuses could be grabbed quickly, and when turn order would be crucial to grab that oh-so-useful building. This pre-game deliberation became so crucial that we would actually set up a few days before the game was due to be played to allow players uninterrupted thinking and planning time and to get the game started promptly at the allotted time.
During these latter games, the experienced players seemed to go off piste from the previously well-trodden moves, and I witnessed radical new ploys and tactics as well as shocking levels of hitherto unseen subterfuge. I would love to be able to say that this sort of play had been an integral part of my design, but I had never anticipated the sheer genius and skulduggery displayed in some of those games.
It’s clear that although my name is on the box, I did not design Pilgrim on my own. The list of contributors is extensive, ranging from playtesters to proofreaders, statistical analysts and graphic designers. I hope they will forgive me for not mentioning their names here, but I have received an astonishing level of support in the game’s development, and I am enormously grateful.
When I think back to my aspirational brief for a “new game” in 2019, do I now think that I achieved what I set out to do? Has a game been created that is in all respects unique and new? It would be disingenuous to say an absolute “Yes”, but I would say that I’m proud to have taken a very long established mancala mechanism and enhanced it with what I believe to be some very new and unique twists, along with a theme that seems to shine through each facet of the game. I hope that new players experiencing Pilgrim will agree.
