The last few weeks I have been busy playtesting variations of Gotlandia. Gotlandia is my boardgame about sheep, pirates, and overly embellished churches. Presenting Gotlandia at LinCon gave me a lot of great feedback.
Sometimes when a problem or issue occurs during playtest, it is easy to come up with a solution. But usually it is hard to see what the underlying problem is. If it needs to be addressed at all. An obvious fix for one issue may introduce problems elsewhere. So game design is very much an iterative process. With a lot of analysing and playtesting.
I’m happy to now have reached a stage where I have a consistent set of changes. I have uploaded a new version of the rules. Gotlandia is ready for external playtest once again. Thank you all who have given feedback and helped mature the game.
Get in touch if would like to take part in a playtest. You can find everything needed for a print-and-play edition at the games homepage. If you live in the Stockholm area, we can meet up and I can share a physical copy. I will look into doing a virtual implementation, maybe on Vassal or on Tabletop Simulator, but don’t hold your breath. Games are more fun when played in person.
In the following I dive into the details of the changes, both for those who know earlier versions of the game. But also just for fun to show how I am working with the design. But first, let me pitch the core play experience of Gotlandia. What makes Gotlandia fun to play?
The Gotlandia play experience
Gotlandia is a racing game where you build and tune a deck engine to score more victory points than the other players. You compete with other players for access to shared resources. Unique for Gotlandia is that the game hits your empire with various calamities near the end of the game. To come out on top you need to prepare to take a beating. There is luck from drawing cards, not from rolling dice. You never know if and when the Black Plague sweeps, the Vitalien Brothers plunder, and King Valdemar invades. There is skill in assessing the odds.
I think Gotlandia provides a great play experience with a good balance between tactical puzzle solving, choice of strategy, and player interaction. I enjoy the little trade offs your brain needs to process as you play the hand you drew.
Do I want to play an extra card next turn or do I want to draw one more card? Oh, I can’t build another settlement before I have upgraded one of my farmsteads to a tower. So I need stone or maybe I can sell sheep now such that I have silver to give as a gift when I settle that hill… and what is that pirate doing right where I want to settle? I don’t have a ship but wait, I can call upon the Gotland Assembly to sink that pirate but I need to do it now before someone else does. But then it would be nice to have some silver to also pick up a craft card…
So you get a lot of juicy choices and a nice feeling of accomplishment when you have decided a plan for the turn.
As a bonus, you get the historical theme of Medieval Gotland. For first time play, immerse yourself in the story and trust that rules generally work as you would expect. While you may not win first time around, you will get a pretty good play from just doing the obvious. Settle into your neighbouring setting, sinking that annoying pirate, and build and decorate a church or two. You can always accuse your neighbour for not keeping seas safe from pirates when you build a tower in their backyard and score the points for their setting.
Open issues in the LinCon edition
I was satisfied with the edition of Gotlandia that I presented at LinCon. Still, I was looking to improve the game and I had my little mental list of issues that I wanted to validate. I hadn’t crystallised out everything, but in after thought, here is how it might have looked if I had written it down.
Is the game too long?
I knew that the estimated playing time of 2 hours was a bit of a stretch especially for first time play. More likely it would be longer. If the game is great, two or three ours play time for a board game can be fine, but usually you get a better game by making it shorter. So I was looking to see if players stayed engaged and if there was enough to engage with also in the final few turns.
Is there enough to do in the end game?
I wanted the main way to win the game to be the race to build and decorate churches. The basic economy is that you settle regions, produce resources from regions, sell resources for silver, and buy victory points with silver by decorating your churches. However, when you can no longer afford to build or decorate even more magnificent churches, what then do you do? Is there a way to scramble a victory point or two that may just be enough to get you ahead on the track at the final tally?
Is the game fun to play when the Black Plagues strikes?
The historical theme mandates that the calamities of the 1300s Gotland appear in the game. They help explain how Gotland changed from a sovereign island to a subject of first Denmark then Sweden. So in Gotlandia you build your empire over two centuries to then see it taking a beating in the final century. Like kids building sandcastles at the beach to see which one best services the rising tide. Most engine building games don’t do this. They stop just when your gearing kicks in, making it a game about peaking at the right time. So how do players respond to this? Do they feel they still have agency? Do they give up or are they inspired to play again?
Can I balance the starting positions better?
The six starting positions are not equal. It’s a core idea of the game that you need to play to the strengths of your position and to mitigate the weaknesses. But still, it must be possible to win with any of the starting positions with skill and not just luck. Especially the Rute player is challenged by having two pastures, no fields and bordering only two settings. Have you lost if you can’t expand into a field in the first generation?
Can ships play a more prominent role?
Ships are your main way to deal with pirates. They also open up for trading outside Wisby. However, it was hard to build and place ships and even if you did, they would not score you any points if there were no pirates to sink. Ships are not as central as churches but still they could have a more prominent role.
Is the game commercial feasible?
While I haven’t yet decided whether there will be a commercial release of the game, I would like to have this option. Both theme and genre target a select audience, but if done right, it could work. Hence the design needs to keep production cost reasonable. This means to limit the number of cards, components and tokens in the game. For LinCon the goal was to see if there was an audience.
Changes in the new edition
After two weeks of playtesting I ended up with pretty good solutions to the issues. I believe the game is better now, I am also humble enough to realise that it isn’t perfect (and never will be). The game consistently provides a great play experience for me and I am happy to present it to a wider audience for further test and validation.
Here is an overview of how the rules landed.
Family reputations
Families now have reputations that grant each player a special ability. You draw two reputation cards and pick one after knowing which setting you are going to play. They allow you to place an extra ship or farmstead, take extra silver or grain, or perform certain actions cheaper or better.
At LinCon one player said that the game could have leaders, i.e. every player gets a faction or leader that provides a special ability for that player. At first I wasn’t keen on the idea. There is a lot to take in for a first time play already, adding another element didn’t seem like the way to go. Yet if it could help solve other issues… So my brain kept working, and after a few days I had come up with 12 family traits or reputations that would both be fun thematic elements for the story telling, but also open for new strategies and replayability. I ended up calling them reputations and named them to be easily recognisable. Misers, troublemakers, innovators, outgoing, respectable, and so on.
So not rooted in historical families on Gotland but on general tropes and with a unique special ability that improves the starting position and open for new ways to explore the game.
More ships
Players can now have more than one ship in each direction. You can buy trading cards that allow you to place a ship in any direction and grant you victory points for each ship at the end of the game.
I needed to playtest this quite a bit, but now specialising in ships early now lets you sink more pirates, raid more silver, and award you with up to 15 victory points at the end of the game if the other players let you buy all the right cards. Ignoring when another player picks up all ship bonus cards can cost you the victory.
Victory points from trading cards and craft cards
Players now score victory points from trading cards and craft cards, depending on their board position at the end of the game. For instance, if you have the Tar pit in your desk at the end of the game, each of your forest settlements scores you one victory point.
One issue I observed with the previous edition was that some craft cards and trading cards were never purchased. In the early game they were not powerful enough and in the late game, you were busy doing other things. My first idea was to grant fixed victory points on certain cards. I came up with an even better solution. Instead of scoring victory points for most settlements, most sunk pirates, and most buried treasure, players now score victory points for pirates, treasure, and settlements depending on the craft cards they buy. Some trading cards scores you points for ships. So expanding onto the board now interplays with the cards you purchase also for scoring victory points.
I decided to allow players to buy the same card more than once. Thematically it makes less sense that you can learn how to build a tar pit twice, however, it plays better when you don’t have to check which cards you have in your deck whenever you consider buying a card. There is also a limit to how useful the third or fourth tar pit is in your deck as you run out of tar to produce at some point. So you get a chewy decision to make, do I specialise in forests or do I spread out also to field, hill and pasture? Or that Treasury sure do look nice scoring me two silver for every church on the board, now I just need to bury some silver…
Shorter game
Black Plague now ends the game. When you reveal the Black Plague in the 1300s, this will also be the last turn. The plague still clears the board ruthlessly of workers and crowded farmsteads. You get just two cards to play to recover and scramble a few final victory points. But if you feel that you were impacted harder than the other players, at least you don’t have to sit through a long painful endgame as you see your chance to win evaporate.
The Black Plagues is one out of five cards of which you draw three so likely but not certain to happen. Be careful before you get too crowded with your neighbours, you want to build those towers and churches to stay safe when they come too close.
Gotlandia now also have only three generations in the 1200s and 1300s, making for a shorter game. 8-10 turns instead of 12. Even if you get a good start and avoid the worst calamities, you will still be busy building your empire before the game ends.
Five and six players
You can play Gotlandia with five or six players.
As a bonus at LinCon, I picked up the missing components to play a five and six player game. While the historical division of Gotland into six settings made it obvious as a six player game, I wasn’t sure that it would be a better game to play with five or six players. Maybe it would just be a longer game. I didn’t have components to test before, but now I have so I tried. Both work great. It even sped up playtest as I could explore more variants in a single game, especially when testing reputations.
A game for six players needs more cards and components so it will be more expensive to produce. But the cards and components for a five or six player game could be boxed into a separate expansion, keeping a commercial release feasible.
One last thing
Ok, that was a lot of text today, congratulations if you made it to the end. Let me know in the comments if you have questions or comments. Right now I want to get in touch with playtesters and to get tips on how best to playtest online. Vassal, Tabletop Simulator or something else. What is your favourite?