These days I’m busy testing Gotlandia, my boardgame about medieval Gotland.
At this stage of development, I like testing with physical cards. Gotlandia is a deck builder and there is nothing like shuffling and dealing a hand from a new deck of cards. The downside of testing with physical cards is of course that revision cycles are longer. I ordered new set of cards over Christmas and they had arrived when we came back from our New Year vacation.
For this revision, I added icons to the cards. Gotlandia is ready for external play testing and a great visual design is essential to communicate how the game works. There isn’t room for a lot of text on a standard playing card and with a good choice of icons and colours, you can communicate more on smaller space.
More juicy cards to grab
An area of the design I’m working on now are the unique craft and trading cards. The basic action cards, the Tar pit and Stud craft cards, and the Linköping and Lübeck trading cards all work solid now. Yet the unique craft and trading cards help make each game feel different and open for new strategies. This is a great way to improve replayability, together with the 16 different reputations.
I added four new trading cards and five new craft cards. Some are inspired by an effect that I first tested out as a reputation effect but which didn’t work out, that you can take over a neutral farmstead. Others help open up the map by allowing players to settle harbour regions without needing an adjacent settlement.
Also I didn’t want the decks to run out of cards. In the end game, coming up with a way to visit Roma or Wisby and grab another card worth 2 or 3 points can be the play that wins the game for you. A good victory point racing game never let players run out of options to grab an extra point.
A small change with big impact
I also discovered that by adding two more cards to the start deck of each player, a second copy of Gotland and of Baltic Sea, I opened up for more deck building fun. The Gotland card is very useful in the first few generations when you want to settle regions to produce more resources and draw more cards. It is flexible but doesn’t scale. Later in the game you will want to take it out of your deck and draw better cards instead. Having an extra Baltic Sea card means that you can draw a hand with two Baltic Sea cards now and do a powerful build-ship-then-raid. Together with trading cards that boost the raid action, this gives a lot more power to ships in the game. While you still need to build churches to win, completely ignoring ships will now lose you out on a lot of points.
I particular like that there is an incentive to raid-then-decorate-church. Let’s pillage foreign shores so we can create some magnificent pieces of art for our churches. It’s nice with a little theme-derived tension between doing what is proper and what will win you the game.
It’s surprising how small changes can have a big impact on the feel of the game. The difference between a good game and a great game can lie hidden in that little detail that you didn’t have the curiosity to explore changing.
Gotlandia at SAGA Protospiel
This month I played lots of games of Gotlandia where I play all sides. I was surprised to see several games where the final scores were very close. For some games I needed the tiebreaker rule to decide the winner. The tie breaker rule is that the player with the most expensive church decoration wins. This was surprising as I played each side with different strategies and as the end scores for each game varied between 50 and 80. In the end I decided this was actually quite good. It indicates that the game is sufficiently balanced. The starting positions, the reputations, the new and old craft and trading cards, the generation cards — all together seem to offer a balanced set of games to enjoy.
But this is when I play the game. So next up is for more people to play the game. Can people new to Gotlandia learn how to play quickly? Will they enjoy their first game? Will they want to play again to explore new strategies?
Sunday 26th January, I will take part in the SAGA Protospiel playtest session with Gotlandia. This happens at Pipersgatan 26 in Stockholm from 10. The event is open for everyone.
Next opportunity to join a Gotlandia session will be at LinCon 2025. Or you can get in touch and we can set something up. You can find the latest version of the rules and the files needed to create a print-and-play version of Gotlandia here.
