Borikén: The Taíno Resistance ended up being quite a big project to work on, especially in the early days of doing research. While I went through many references on the topic, the information was scarce, but many referenced one historical book that I ended up using as the backbone of the historical narrative of my design, and that was Agüeybaná: El Bravo by Jalil Sued Badillo. What was interesting about this book is that the author used the original historical texts as his sources in his analysis of the historical period, instead of referencing the historical narrative of Spanish historians of the 16th Century and afterwards.
I wanted to focus on understanding the history before designing a single part of the game. To do this, I started to organize myself by preparing a spreadsheet where I would note every important element referenced, including locations, titles, battles, the year when different events happened, historical characters on both sides of the conflict and terms that were important from a cultural perspective and a historical one. I was glad that I decided to be organized, because as I was reading and making my notes, the design ideas started coming in.
After going through that book and my other references, I knew that the story to be told could not be contained in one game, or at least one playthrough of the game. I decided that I wanted to tell the story mainly through the emotions the player felt when playing the games and to do that the game had to systematically shift. The Taíno settled the island hundreds of years before the arrival of the Spanish and that was not an easy process, especially since the original settlers were in conflict with themselves. This is a different feeling than the one of having new people disrupting their lives through an introduction of a new religion, way of thinking, speaking and doing things and being so impressed in that first point of contact that you might think of them as gods. It was such a big shift that I knew that it was going to be a big challenge to do an accurate representation of that in the game and for that reason I came up with a system of multiple chapters in which mechanisms and elements would be introduced, changed or even taken away to instill the emotions that the Taíno people must have felt during that time.
One of the main elements that I wanted to highlight in the game was an accurate map of the island at the time, especially when it came to the political divisions of the Taíno people. Thankfully, there were multiple sources of information that helped me bring an accurate representation and based on those, I drew a prepared version of the map that worked as a good base for the design. One interesting detail was the fact that it was divided into 5 main sections with subdivisions on all except one and with this seed, the idea of an area control mechanism was born.
Based on the map and all the different things that I knew the Taíno had done through my research, I developed different actions that could represent these elements in a contained way. Actions range from movement on land and on water, to collecting resources like cassava and gold and building villages and attacking different enemies. Each of these actions incorporated mechanical rules that contributed to the historical representation of what the Taíno did. Two examples being the Cassava and Mining Actions, while the Cassava Action can be used to collect Cassava Tokens that are already on the map, you can also use it to plant cassava tokens on the map that other players or yourself can collect later. The gold action on the other hand incorporated an element of luck, in which you draw from a bag that has both gold and rock tokens, sometimes you draw gold, but there is always a risk that you may only draw rocks. My objective was to have a thematic link that introduced players into the world as they played.
As my research continued, I started to link game mechanisms with what I was learning. The Cacique, who were the Taino village chiefs, were not only the political leaders, but the military and religious leaders as well. This was the basis of the Cacique action track, in which at the start of your turn, you choose one of the political, military and religious tracks to perform a set of basic actions related to those tracks. What is important to note is that whatever track you choose on your current turn, you cannot use again on your next turn. Also, on each track you can assign a Taíno card that will serve as a lieutenant and will increase the amount of actions that you can perform when that track is chosen.
Of course, having the Taíno people as the main focus and most important resource as their leader was intentional. Having them be used to complete objectives, build villages, add actions on your turn both temporarily and permanently are a couple of ways in which they are important to the gameplay, but the main one and connects the the history as a whole is that if your Taíno deck runs out, you lose the game, since it is representative of you losing your people. They are represented by two types, one that is connected to one of the five regions of the island and one that is connected to the three track on the Cacique Board and each Taíno card has two additional actions that you may or may not need and ultimately a face of a person that is representative of the Taíno Race and you will look at before making a decision with that card.
As the gameplay for the Taíno Perspective came together, I wanted to have an accurate representation of how the Conquistador would be represented from the Taíno perspective. One element that was always clear through my research is that the Spanish were not limited in the number of people that they had, they just needed a set course and time once it was apparent that the risk was more than worth the reward. For that reason, I developed the enemy system to be one that would scale up as different milestones were achieved, whether those milestones were player progress, historical objectives, or something as simple as “the more gold they find, the more they will look”. This in conjunction with a map of geographical adjacencies of locations with different colors and sizes brought forward the organic and proven system of a spawning enemy deck that is just 18 cards. This deck has multi-use cards that show the spawning location on one side and on the other, historical negative and positive effects of the Taíno-Spanish relationship are introduced that impact how you will play each round and which action you select.
Once these parts came together in my design brain, it was time to test them together in the wild land of prototype playtesting. In my next blog, I will speak more in-depth about the changes that were made in the process before signing with GMT and after, and how we made the decision to develop three games from one solid base. Stay Tuned!
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Author: Julio E. Nazario
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