“And Proteus began at once with his old tricks, first changing himself into a lion with a great mane. Then suddenly he became a dragon, a leopard, a wild boar; the next moment he turned into running water, and then, finally, he was a tree.”
Homer, The Odyssey, Book IV
I designed the basic mechanics of Proteus while waiting in line for the Back to the Future ride at Universal Studios, in California.
Seriously.
Seriously.
For some time I had been toying with the idea of playing a game with dice for pieces and the rules of chess for movement, but I had never sat down to figure out how such a game might work. I don’t really like chess: I find the frame of the game too restrictive (and I don’t mean the edges of the chessboard), but I’m fascinated by the movement possibilities of chess pieces. As a result, I oftentimes contemplate chess but rarely play it. I had tried my share of chess variants, but somehow I felt that my “dice chess” idea would create something interestingly different. If I could only figure it out.
Things stayed pretty much status quo for about two years. My brain might have been polishing up some concepts on its own, but I didn’t consciously work on the game until I found myself stuck in line at Universal Studios.
Things stayed pretty much status quo for about two years. My brain might have been polishing up some concepts on its own, but I didn’t consciously work on the game until I found myself stuck in line at Universal Studios.
You see, I was alone in Los Angeles for work and, with a free afternoon ahead of me, the temptation of the Universal Studios demon proved too great to resist. So I went. At some point I ended up trapped in line at the Back to the Future ride, and since I had no one to talk to and hadn’t brought a book or a smart phone (we're talking 1999 here...), I thought it might be worth my while to start laying down the foundations of my dice-chess game. In my head. In any case, it would be a lot more productive than staring at the Hawaiian shirt in front of me for an hour. By the time I got on the ride, I already had a good idea of the inner workings of the game. And when I stepped out of my rigged Delorean (great ride, by the way), I couldn’t wait to get back to my hotel room and write everything down. But the day wasn't done yet, so I used the rest of my in-line waiting sessions to run a few mental tests and do some basic math.
At the end of the day, I drove back to the hotel with my head full of sketches and design notes. I knew that my game would be a two-player affair and that player turns would alternate. I also knew that each player would start with eight dice, that those dice would show a different chess piece on each face, and that the goal of the game would involve capturing several pieces (as opposed to neutralizing one particular target). Furthermore, a player would perform two actions on their turn: move a die and rotate a die (to change the identity of that piece) one step at a time. Most importantly (hey, we all have our fixations), I also had a name for the game: Proteus, the Greek god of ever-changing form.
I had trouble falling asleep that night, as Morpheus was always bumped by Proteus who thought some of his needs still had to be addressed.
And he was right.
First of all, I didn’t know how you were supposed to win the game. I entertained a vague notion related to taking out as many of the opposing pieces as possible, but somehow that felt wrong. Moreover, I still hadn’t found a balancing mechanism that would prevent powermongers from rotating all of their dice up to queens. There was also a delicate matter: I didn’t know what to do with the king. Since I was hellbent on eliminating the concept of checkmate from Proteus, did it make sense to keep the king in there?
I eventually managed to switch off, despite having resolved none of the above problems. I did try to refine and complement my notes the next morning on the flight back, but somehow I didn’t make much progress. Then, in one evening, I answers practically all of my questions.
For the sequence in which the chess pieces would "evolve," I chose to adhere to the traditional chess value sequence, with one exception: I placed the bishop in front of the knight, because I felt it would open up the game faster. That gave me pawn -> bishop -> knight -> rook -> queen. Still no idea about the king, though. But it became obvious that a player would have to move a die and then rotate a different die; infiltrating the enemy camp as a bishop and immediately transforming into a knight smelled of overpowered tactics.
Interestingly enough, the problems of game balance and victory conditions were vanquished at the same time, using the same solution. Back then I was playing the game with standard six-sided dice, remembering that the 6 was the queen, 5 the rook, 4 the knight, 3 the bishop and 2 the pawn (1 could have been the king, but meh). I thought it might be fun to win a game of Proteus by scoring the most points, with each piece being worth a certain number of them. In assigning point values to the pieces—I simply chose the number of dots on each corresponding die face—I discovered that such a scheme would also balance the game, because the stronger pieces would be worth more points upon capture.
Still, what about the king? Well, since you achieved victory through points, there was little incentive to keep it in the game. Without its essential function—keeping you alive—the king just becomes a limping queen, and that’s just boring given the morphing nature of game pieces in Proteus. I could just have thrown the king away, but this was an opportunity to inject another new concept into the game. So instead of eliminating the king, I replaced it: the new piece would not move at all, but would also be impossible to take. I named that piece the fortress.
With these problems handled, I could sit down and play a few “real” games against myself. Everything was going rather smoothly: the game was simple, played fast, yet retained its potential for deep strategy. And then I hit a brick wall wearing an evening dress and a crown.
The queen.
Because of the mathematical progression of piece values, and because of the similar progression of their respective powers, the game was pretty balanced—except for the damn queen. The problem resided in the power of the queen being much greater than its point value. Between a rook and a queen, the difference in power is immense; yet the difference in point value was only one. That couldn’t work. One solution was to raise the point value of the queen, which meant assigning it some ridiculous value—say, 12 points. But then a player capturing a queen would probably win, which would sort of take me back to the issue I had with the king in the first place. So instead I gave the queen a weakness: you could capture it by moving to the square right behind it—stepping on the queen's gown, as it were.
Because of the mathematical progression of piece values, and because of the similar progression of their respective powers, the game was pretty balanced—except for the damn queen. The problem resided in the power of the queen being much greater than its point value. Between a rook and a queen, the difference in power is immense; yet the difference in point value was only one. That couldn’t work. One solution was to raise the point value of the queen, which meant assigning it some ridiculous value—say, 12 points. But then a player capturing a queen would probably win, which would sort of take me back to the issue I had with the king in the first place. So instead I gave the queen a weakness: you could capture it by moving to the square right behind it—stepping on the queen's gown, as it were.
But would that work? I played some more test games and, sure enough, it did.
It was time to take Proteus out for a spin.
I brought my prototype to the Santa Rosa game store I frequented back then, and a couple of friends expressed interest in the game. We played it over and over again, and while I kept fearing that some obvious flaw would blow up in my face, no such thing happened. Then more people played it and the game still held up. We did toy around with a few things. For instance, we increased the number of pieces each player starts with (up to 12), but we only succeeded in creating quite a mess of a traffic jam, with games that would take more than an hour to completion, which was way too long for me. We also experimented with fewer pieces for each player, but the game became boring and predictable. Eight—my original number—seemed to be just right.
I brought my prototype to the Santa Rosa game store I frequented back then, and a couple of friends expressed interest in the game. We played it over and over again, and while I kept fearing that some obvious flaw would blow up in my face, no such thing happened. Then more people played it and the game still held up. We did toy around with a few things. For instance, we increased the number of pieces each player starts with (up to 12), but we only succeeded in creating quite a mess of a traffic jam, with games that would take more than an hour to completion, which was way too long for me. We also experimented with fewer pieces for each player, but the game became boring and predictable. Eight—my original number—seemed to be just right.
At that time I had just finished translating both Illuminati and Tile Chess into French for Steve Jackson Games, so it was an easy matter for me to tell Steve about Proteus. I briefly described the game and asked him if I should just publish the rules in a gaming magazine, or try to find a publisher. He asked to see the rules, and wrote back the next day with a question: "Would you let me me publish it?" In-house testing would take place, naturally, but he asked for only one change up front: that the fortress become the well known "eye in the pyramid" Illuminati symbol that also doubles as the Steve Jackson Games logo. And before I knew it, my game was on the list of upcoming Steve Jackson Games titles.
So I got to work.
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| You want dice? We got dice. |
The thing was, I hadn’t really planned on selling Proteus to anyone; I was just playing around with the game for my own enjoyment. But now that it was going to be out there in the wild, I thought the door was wide open for a series of intriguing variations on the basic rules. So I designed and tested a handful of variants, four of which ended up in the finished game: Trade-Off, Russian Roulette, Wall Street and Polarity. That’s actually five if you count the two different setups for Wall Street. Steve also suggested an additional way to play, which we ended up calling Warhorses, for a total of six variants.
Where did the discards go? Right this way.
RANDOM SETUP
This was the shortest-lived of the variants I came up with. Rolling your dice to see what pieces you'd start with was the dumbest idea this side of the sun, and it only survived for about half a setup phase—I realized pretty fast there was no way I could make this work. Still, the concept of rolling pieces (because they are dice, after all) appealed to me, and that eventually became the Russian Roulette variant.
PYRAMID
The idea here was that pieces could only capture opposing pieces that were of equal or higher value. So a pawn could capture everything (except the pyramid, but that’s a given), and a queen could only capture other queens. This didn’t work because no player wanted to upgrade to stronger pieces.
“So what if you have a knight? I’ll just stay with bishops and the only thing you’ll catch is a cold.”
I tried playing the Inverted Pyramid (capture downwards) but it only succeeded in destroying the effectiveness of the weaker pieces and handing a flak jacket to the stronger ones.
BLACK & WHITE
Whenever you capture a piece, its point value is the standard one if it was captured on a black square, but is whatever’s on the bottom face (or 7 minus top face) if it was captured on a white square.
Pretty inventive, right? This one I did send to Steve, but in the end it was not included with the rest because it didn’t add all that much to the strategy. Plus, the configuration of the Proteus dice would be different from that of regular six-siders in order to facilitate the upgrade/downgrade procedure, and that would throw the point balance out of whack.
There were other variant possibilities, but most of them involved complicated rules, and I didn’t want to burden Proteus with unnecessary weight.
There was only one thing left to do, and that was asking Steve for a favor: I wanted to dedicate the game to one of my oldest friends, whom I’d known since we were both nine years old, and with whom I’d shared a universe of close games, hot matches, and gaming disputes. I gave Steve two versions of the dedication, with the short one ending up in the game. Here’s how the long one read:
“This game is dedicated to my dear friend Alexandre "Le Brown" Boivin, who started bugging me about designing my own game over a decade ago and hasn't stopped since. I'm as happy to see my first game published as I am to finally shut him up.”
There is a final variant, which Steve came up with right after he played his first game of Proteus. It didn’t make it in the game because of space considerations, but since there’s no limit on electrons (yet), here it is:
RANDOM SETUP
This was the shortest-lived of the variants I came up with. Rolling your dice to see what pieces you'd start with was the dumbest idea this side of the sun, and it only survived for about half a setup phase—I realized pretty fast there was no way I could make this work. Still, the concept of rolling pieces (because they are dice, after all) appealed to me, and that eventually became the Russian Roulette variant.
PYRAMID
The idea here was that pieces could only capture opposing pieces that were of equal or higher value. So a pawn could capture everything (except the pyramid, but that’s a given), and a queen could only capture other queens. This didn’t work because no player wanted to upgrade to stronger pieces.
“So what if you have a knight? I’ll just stay with bishops and the only thing you’ll catch is a cold.”
I tried playing the Inverted Pyramid (capture downwards) but it only succeeded in destroying the effectiveness of the weaker pieces and handing a flak jacket to the stronger ones.
BLACK & WHITE
Whenever you capture a piece, its point value is the standard one if it was captured on a black square, but is whatever’s on the bottom face (or 7 minus top face) if it was captured on a white square.
Pretty inventive, right? This one I did send to Steve, but in the end it was not included with the rest because it didn’t add all that much to the strategy. Plus, the configuration of the Proteus dice would be different from that of regular six-siders in order to facilitate the upgrade/downgrade procedure, and that would throw the point balance out of whack.
There were other variant possibilities, but most of them involved complicated rules, and I didn’t want to burden Proteus with unnecessary weight.
There was only one thing left to do, and that was asking Steve for a favor: I wanted to dedicate the game to one of my oldest friends, whom I’d known since we were both nine years old, and with whom I’d shared a universe of close games, hot matches, and gaming disputes. I gave Steve two versions of the dedication, with the short one ending up in the game. Here’s how the long one read:
“This game is dedicated to my dear friend Alexandre "Le Brown" Boivin, who started bugging me about designing my own game over a decade ago and hasn't stopped since. I'm as happy to see my first game published as I am to finally shut him up.”
There is a final variant, which Steve came up with right after he played his first game of Proteus. It didn’t make it in the game because of space considerations, but since there’s no limit on electrons (yet), here it is:
DICTATORSHIP
This is played with regular chess pieces and two Proteus dice. Each turn, roll the two dice. You must move one of the two pieces showing on your dice (pyramid=king). If you can’t make a legal move with one of the indicated pieces, you don’t move.
If this is too hard, roll three dice to give yourself more options. Or play with a handicap: the stronger player gets only two dice, and the weaker player gets three.
This is played with regular chess pieces and two Proteus dice. Each turn, roll the two dice. You must move one of the two pieces showing on your dice (pyramid=king). If you can’t make a legal move with one of the indicated pieces, you don’t move.
If this is too hard, roll three dice to give yourself more options. Or play with a handicap: the stronger player gets only two dice, and the weaker player gets three.
Now, what about my next game? I do have a few ideas floating around in my head; I’m trying to arrange a trip to Disneyland to sort them out.
P.S.: Just as I was about to push this article live, a delivery guy handed me my advanced copies of the new edition! So here is the new Proteus, in all its glory:
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| Yes, it now comes with a board! |
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