Designer's notes — Proteus

(This article was originally published in Steve Jackson Games' own Pyramid Magazine back in 2001, a faraway era when print publications still thrived. I thought I'd revive it here—in a slightly edited format—to celebrate the 2nd edition of Proteus, arriving this summer.)

“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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

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.

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:

Yes, it now comes with a board!

# # #

A Legacy Apology

Destroying boardgame components is a stunning new trend adopted by thousands of enthusiasts who, not that long ago, frowned over a dog-eared card and scowled at a Pepsi-stained board.

How the hell did this happen?

Boardgames have a come a long way since the turn of the millennium. Where they mainly used to exist as unsophisticated wargames (like Risk or Axis & Allies) or variations on the roll-and-move model (such as Candyland, Chutes & Ladders or Monopoly), they are now so varied in concept and execution that it’s getting difficult to keep track of it all.

Nowadays, boardgames cover a myriad of themes and employ a dazzling array of mechanisms to create fun and excitement at the gaming table. Some of the best-selling titles of the past decade involve establishing railroad networks in various parts of the world (the Ticket to Ride series), running a 17^th-century farm and trying not to starve (Agricola), working together to stop deadly viruses from spreading all over the globe (Pandemic), and producing and shipping goods during colonial times in the Caribbean (Puerto Rico).

(For the uninitiated, it’s worth mentioning that none of the above games use dice in any way, shape or form. New boardgames definitely don’t play the way they did 20 years ago—but that’s a topic for a different blog post…)

However, for all their newfangled twists and original backdrops, today’s games share one crucial characteristic with their ancestors: they reset at the end of each and every session. You set up the game, play it to its conclusion, and then break it down and put it back in the box, where it’ll wait in that inert state until someone begins the cycle anew. Sessions will unfold differently depending on random set up elements and decisions taken by the players, but the game always starts with an empty board, in a sort of virginal state. Unsoiled.

But all that is slowly changing, thanks to an unassuming game released in 2011.

Ironically, the game that shook up the established order came from Hasbro, a toy maker not known for innovative gameplay (thanks to tired games—Clue, Risk, Operation, etc.—endlessly refitted with the hot intellectual property of the moment). But that is where designer Rob Daviau conceived of a game that would NOT reset at the end of every session. A world that would evolve with each run-through and offer players an ever-changing landscape.

Of course, the idea of “campaigns” wasn’t a new one in the boardgame world. You would play one session and the results of said session would influence the next one, and so on (usually through changes in set up to reflect, for instance, lost combat units or gained resources). But what Daviau was proposing went way beyond some inter-session bookkeeping: he wanted to physically alter the components of the game. Forever.

And so was born Risk Legacy, another entry in an ocean of Risk variations. But that one was different; that one was crazy. Sure, the game used the basic Risk mechanisms and offered yet another setting (sci-fi warlords vie for Earth domination) but it came in a box with sealed packages and envelopes, together with strict instructions as to when to open them. Players were invited to select a faction that they would play throughout the entire 15-session campaign, and then write their names on the faction cards. Using a permanent marker.

That first act of desecration was already too much for many gamers, who simply refused to take part in such atrocities. But the madness was only getting started. The game, among other things, allowed for cities to be conquered, burned to the ground or fortified. And so the conquering, burning or fortifying player was required to use one of the many stickers provided with the game, and apply it to the board to denote the city’s new status. We’re not talking Post-It notes, here: those are stickers that never, ever come off. That city got destroyed? Well it’s destroyed. For all eternity.

… in your copy of the game, that is. Because the group next door, who’s also playing its own campaign of Risk Legacy, will most probably not go through the same motions your group did. So different cities will get different treatments. Different factions will acquire different technologies (note it on your faction card!). Sealed events will happen at different moments and affect different elements of the game, and so on. In the end, each group winds up with a completely personalized copy of the game, an extreme level of customization achieved through 15 sessions of pure exploration. Not only do you not have access to the full roster of game components when you first start out, but even the rules evolve over time, with holes in the rulebook being filled with stickers that modify the way the game is played.

Risk Legacy quickly found its audience, and it was only a matter of time before other legacy-style games saw the light of day. Daviau himself designed a sequel of sorts, once again picking up an existing design—the aforementioned Pandemic—and giving it the legacy treatment. In Pandemic Legacy, Season 1 (which strongly hints at a possible continuation of the storyline), two to four players get together to fight the spread of deadly viruses. And it feels pretty much like your good old Pandemic—well, perhaps apart from naming the characters you decide to play and logging the date of each session on their cards—until the shit hits the fan. Things spiral out of control, characters die (yes, rip that card to shreds and throw it away), heroes emerge from the wreckage (new characters to choose from!), a new, deadly virus makes a dramatic entrance (time to alter that rulebook), special missions become priorities (it almost feels like we’re playing a different game!) and so on, for a campaign experience that spans 12 to 24 sessions, depending on your level of success at the end of each run.

Was it fun? You bet. The experience ranks among the highlights of my long and distinguished career as a boardgaming geek, and it showed me that boardgames can tell gripping, edge-of-your-seat interactive stories to rival movies, videogames and those page-turners that keep you awake all night.

(Come on: I remember my group finishing a session of Pandemic Legacy past midnight and immediately launching into the next one, even though we all had to get up and go to work just a few hours down the line.)

Will we play with our Season 1 box again? No. While the game does permit further sessions—you just keep playing with your customized game, even though your actions no longer contribute to an ongoing storyline—it has essentially run its course. We keep it archived and look at the resulting board from time to time, like a worn out diary that speaks to turbulent times and obstacles now overcome.

Will we buy Season 2 if it ever comes out? Only death would prevent us from doing so. Maybe.

Many of my gamer friends have shied away from the legacy experience. They can’t begin to imagine altering and even destroying game components, nor can they accept the fact that after the campaign is over, you don’t really want to play the game again, and you can’t sell it or trade it. It’s done.

But it’s all worth it. Not a single doubt about that.

Your typical, serious boardgamer will have a collection numbering in the hundreds, and will play each game in that collection, on average, a dozen times over their lifetime. (And I’m being generous here. A handful of titles will get played to death—I have racked up more than 300 sessions of Combat Commander—while others will sit on the shelf, unplayed for years.)

That’s fine: say you paid $50 for a new boardgame and play it 10 times with two of your friends before you move on to other, shinier titles. Assuming that each session lasts about an hour, the cost of the game breaks down to $5 an hour. For each person, that becomes $1.67 per hour, which is about as cheap as you can possibly get when it comes to entertainment.

So what if you play Pandemic Legacy only 12 times? (That’s the bare minimum of sessions required to finish the story, if you and your friends are the best players in the universe.) The game will still compare favorably to the rest of your collection. (My trio—composed or hardened boardgamers already very familiar with Pandemic—had to struggle through 17 sessions to get to the end, loving every second of it.)

I understand the initial aversion to physically altering game components. But trust me, it’s part of the fun. Knowing you can’t go back and use that character again no matter what the rules say (because he’s in the trash now!) really ratchets up the tension and makes the experience all the more tasty.

And memorable.

Of course, more legacy games are coming out now, but not as quickly as one might imagine. They are massively complex to design, especially if they’re not adapted from an existing game: you first have to design a fun and solid game, and then throw in a story arc that offers exciting twists and turns without derailing the gameplay you spent so much time fine-tuning.

And once again, Rob Daviau is leading the way, with his completely original Seafall releasing this month. No need to ask the question: yes, I’ll be tearing cards and putting stickers in my rulebook and writing stuff on my board like a maniac as soon as I can get my hands on a copy.

I wouldn’t want all of my games to be legacy contraptions. But going through one of those babies each year?

I could live with that.

# # #