Finally done!

Alright, after almost a decade we are happy to declare that Dystopolis is, at last, completed. A few weeks ago we received a box from Game Crafter with ten copies of our board game and we had some kind of ceremonial inauguration playing the game with our friends. Since we had been working almost exclusively on the artwork during the last couple of years we had almost forgotten the rules but were very glad to discover that the game was as fun and nerve-tingling as we had remembered.

Our journey as ‘recreational game developers’ started 9 years ago in a student dorm in Gothenburg. We played a lot of board games together there back then, mostly the biggest ones like Carcasonne, Settlers of Catan, Ticket to Ride, Stone Age, Dominion etcetera. Me and my cousin both lived in the same area and one evening we got stuck looking through boxes in his room searching for a game we had made together as kids, some kind of Monopoly rip-off as I remember. Anyhow, we never found it and in order to fill the void rising from this we decided to start creating something new instead, a better version of that old, handwritten, cardboard and small pieces of paper game.

We wanted to incorporate a popular idea from our favourite games at the time: a variable board that is constructed during the game, and being poker-enthusiasts we also wished to add some of that thrill and meta-gaming that makes poker so exciting. The theme of the game was decided upon almost instantaneously, as it combined our love for cyberpunk and sci-fi with political satire and cynicism.

So, with some pieces of cardboard, the tokens from Ticket to Ride and a plastic bag full of coins, it all began…

We ran a few tests that night and the coming months but quite early on we started designing artwork. This has been a mistake that we have repeated an awful amount of times during this process: starting the design before the testing is done and the rules are final. For example, I think we have made seven or eight versions of the event cards before they reached their final form. The image below shows how the event cards have evolved, with the first version at top left and the most recent version at bottom right.

The first public appearance of the game took place after around 4 years. We had been testing the game a lot with one group of friends who had had really fun playing it, and I had forced my siblings to try it with only the written rulebook as instructions to check if the rules were clear enough. We had put a lot of effort into the design of some parts, especially ‘the companies’ – the thicker pieces that constitute the game board. For them we had developed a technique where we drew an image with black lines on white paper, then scanned it and made elaborate shadows, textures and coloring in photoshop while keeping the black contour lines. With all this we considered the game to be ready for publishing. Little did we know of how much work that remained before that could be done…

There is a big board game convention in Gothenburg, called Gothcon, that we decided to participate in the year 2012. We wanted to hold some sort of testing session where we could also sell a few games in case anyone was interested.

Our plan was to make many copies of the game ourselves and we ordered colored wooden tokens for 20 games. Later we learned that the actual crafting was much more time consuming than expected and we ended up with only 5 copies, the last one finished a few hours before the start of the convention. There were many challenges in cardboard crafting and I remember spending several hours figuring out how to cut and glue cardboard to make a nice game box.

Again we had to force my siblings to help; when they were visiting just the days before the convention we had a big sorting and cutting session of all the cards, tokens and fake money.

The game testing at the convention went pretty smoothly, most people seemed to like it (although it’s always hard to know how honest they dare to be when facing the creators). It became obvious though that a lot of development was still necessary. The rules felt very complicated and some of the events during the game felt too random. We got many good comments and suggestions and decided to go back to testing some new rules. Since we only had 5 copies we abandoned the plan to sell games, although some people were actually asking for it. Instead we held a lottery where the winner got one game.

We had some ideas for improvements of the rules that we wanted to test after the convention, but most of all we wanted to design more images. The game felt a bit abstract and we wanted to create some images with ‘scenes’ from our imaginary city where the game takes place. A very unequal and violent place, with high-tech buildings and neon-ads side by side with shantytowns, drug-addicted children and underground weapon-stores. We introduced a new type of card, the intrigue card, with individual images on every card so that we would get to make a lot of drawings and photoshop-work. The intrigue cards were distributed randomly to each player at the start of the game and they could be played at any time, giving the player some situational advantage or a permanent bonus.

Next year, 2013, we appeared at Gothcon again and people could test the game with our new cards and new rules. Many liked it but there were also a lot of people who thought we had made the game too random. We realised we had some work left to do before we could say the game was complete.

After that we had an intense year of game testing and managed to make the game a lot smoother and less complicated without removing the essential parts; the hair-rising high stake/high risk moments with bribes and concealed biddings and the feeling of being a ruthless capitalistic overlord in a completely decadent corporate-controlled society. We changed the rules of the intrigue cards so that there would only be one intrigue card every year and an open auction would determine which player controls it. This made the game a lot more balanced.

When the final rules had been formed we started another, final round of designing artwork. When you have spent six years on something perfectionism is really hard to avoid. That and also some life events; graduating, moving to another city and such, delayed the process another three years. However, now we have ten boxes with a complete game, ready to meet the public.