Category Archives: Designer Blogs

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The Other Infernal Machine: The Tale of the Union Navy’s “Submarine Propeller” Part 1 – The Development

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I propose to you a new arm of war, as formidable as it is economical.

Submarine navigation, which has been sometimes attempted, but as all know without results, owing to want of suitable opportunities, is now a problematical thing no more.”

(French nautical designer Brutus de Villeroi, in a letter to U.S. President Abraham Lincoln.)

Though the “H.L. Hunley” is widely known as the first submarine to sink an enemy warship in combat, it was by no means the only submarine to come out of the American Civil War. The construction team headed by James McClintock and Baxter Watson who built the “Hunley” had already completed and tested two other designs for underwater vessels. Though there were other designs created and built south of the Mason-Line, they were by no means the only submersibles being built in North America in the 1860’s.

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Conquest: Britannia – Claudius and the Establishment of Roman Britain

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Rebellion: Britannia is a game about rebellions in Roman Britain, and concentrates largely on the Claudian period, which ran from 43CE to 69CE. Over the course of a quarter of a century, there were at least 5 major rebellions that the invading Roman forces had to deal with, including Boudicca’s revolt, which is certainly the most widely known.

After Julius Caesar’s initial expedition to Britain in 55BCE, almost an entire century would pass before Rome eventually chose to stage an invasion of the British Isles. Emperor Augustus considered an invasion, but failed Roman efforts to subdue the German tribes, and the disastrous defeat at Teutoburg in 9CE, led to him cautioning Rome to restrict its lands to those “within its present frontiers” (Tacitus, Annals, I.11),  advice which his successor, Tiberius, chose to follow. 

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Who Was Zheng He?

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Zheng He was born in 1371 in Yunnan Province. His given name was “Ma He,” indicative of his family’s Hui Muslim origins since “Ma” is the Chinese version of “Mohammad.” His father was a hajji, a Muslim who had made the hajj (pilgrimage) to Mecca. Zheng He’s great-great-great-grandfather, Sayyid Ajjal Shams al-Din Omar, was a Persian governor of the province under the Mongolian Emperor Kublai Khan, founder of the Yuan Dynasty that ruled China from 1279 to 1368.

In 1381, when he was about 10 years old, Yunnan, the last Mongol hold in China, was conquered by Chinese forces led by generals of the Ming dynasty, which had overthrown the Yuan dynasty in 1368. The young Ma He was among the boys who were captured, and he was castrated and made a eunuch. Ma He was sent to Beiping (now Beijing) to serve in the household of 21-year-old Zhu Di, the Prince of Yan who later became the Yongle Emperor. Ma He distinguished himself as a junior officer, skilled in war and diplomacy, and soon became one of the prince’s closest confidants. In the 1390s, he served as a soldier, fighting on the northern frontier and participating in the Prince of Yan’s military campaigns against the Mongols.

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Building Track in 18 India

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In 18 India, plenty of track gets built, creating routes all over the map. One of the most fun aspects of 18XX gaming is engineering your routes for maximum revenue and efficiency, and 18 India seeks to enhance that experience to its fullest!

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“Rocks & Shoals”: Navigating Infernal Machine’s New Orleans Action Board — Part 2

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Part Two: Down River from Port Hudson to Baton Rouge

The USS “Hartford” exchanges gunfire with the Confederate ironclad CSS “Manassas” (right) and the unfinished ironclad “Louisiana” during the Passage of the Forts, April 23rd, 1862. At extreme left, Fort St. Philip can be glimpsed through the smoke and flame. {Courtesy Library of Congress}

Beginning April 16, 1862, the US Navy’s West Gulf Blockading Squadron under Flag Officer David Glasgow Farragut began a thunderous bombardment of the Confederate forts Jackson and St. Philip, guardians of the lower Mississippi River and the approaches to New Orleans, Louisiana. Seven nights later, on April 23, 1862, after a pitched river battle, Farragut‘s West Gulf Squadron steamed past the two forts.

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Borikén: Why Did I Make This Game?

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I have been designing games for 5 years. In that time, I have learned so much about the board game industry. One element of game design that instantly stood out to me and is thankfully being addressed by many publishers and designers is cultural appropriation in games. I remember how disappointed I was after my first play of Puerto Rico. While the game had so many interesting mechanics, the theme was not representative of what I knew my culture to be and greatly distracted me from the fun. While I didn’t know it at the time, my experience with Puerto Rico planted the desire in me to make a new game that shared a more holistic picture of my people.

Puerto Rico Cover, Originally Designed by Andreas Seyfarth and Published by Rio Grande Games

My first experience of designing a game set in a culture that wasn’t my own was with Holi: Festival of Colors. The design that became Holi was originally pitched to Floodgate Game with a completely different theme, but Floodgate had been wanting to do a game with this theme and when they pitched the idea to me I was onboard. However, I urged them to have cultural consultants involved, so that we could be sure to do right by the theme. As it turns out, that was their plan all along and ultimately they did a great job incorporating and representing the theme in my game.Throughout that process, I learned that spending the time and resources to get that right made the game better and that there’s so much benefit that it should be a no brainer for all games that use real world cultures as a theme to make sure they bring in cultural experts.

Holi: Festival of Colors Cover, Designed by Julio E. Nazario and Published by Floodgate Games
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The First Stirrings of Rebellion: Britannia

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In October 2020 Fred Serval (designer of GMT’s Red Flag Over Paris, and A Gest of Robin Hood) organized a ConSim Game Jam sponsored by GMT.  Participants had 3 days to make a game. As participants, we had to use a pre-existing GMT COIN game at its core and make something new from it. We weren’t able to use any more wood pieces than were boxed with the original game. We  were, however, permitted to apply stickers to the board, or to any of those wood pieces, and were able to add any amount of cardboard tokens and decks of cards  we might want. Initial discussions focussed on geographical milieu, and narrowed our choices down to India (Gandhi), France (Falling Sky), and Great Britain (Pendragon), and the latter won out. So from  Morgane Gouyon-Rety’s Pendragon: The Fall of Roman Britain (2017) we  derived a game called Boudica’s Revolt.

The logo of the Boudica’s Revolt ConSIM submission
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Cross Bronx Expressway: Losing and Seeing The Bronx

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Shortly after finishing the third installment of this series about the tactility of the pieces, I took some time to capture a multihand playthrough of my physical prototype. Let me tell you a secret. I lost. In fact I lost in the first decade, three times in a row. Granted, this was the “Bronx is Burning” scenario which is hands down the hardest one in the game, but the fact of the matter is it took me four tries to get out of the first Decade, which is what you’ll see in this playthrough.

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“Rocks & Shoals”: Navigating Infernal Machine’s New Orleans Action Board — Part 1

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The New Orleans Action Board is the setting for the “brown water” naval battles, fought for control of the Mississippi River during the American Civil War.

Part One: South from the Crescent City

Though it is not shown on the Action Board, the key to this conflict is New Orleans, Louisiana. Known as the “Crescent City” for the shape of its “Vieux Carre,” New Orleans grew from the French colonial settlement that today still clings to the north bank of the Mississippi River.

By 1861, New Orleans had grown into one of the largest port cities on the North American continent.

In the 1860’s the River’s main channel at New Orleans reached down over 50 feet (9 fathoms), deep enough that overseas shipping and other commercial traffic could sail up from the Gulf of Mexico to dock almost at the local merchants’ front door.

For the Confederacy, possession of New Orleans and its control of the Mississippi River was essential to the South’s survival as a nation.

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The Eight Games of Vijayanagara: The Bots Have Risen

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The base game of Vijayanagara is a raucous three-player event set in medieval India. But we all know the feeling of not having the right player count in a given moment to pull a particular game off the shelf. Or maybe a player has to leave the game early, or you prefer to do your interactive history exploration alone over a cup of tea, savoring the decisions at precisely the right pace.

If any of these scenarios sound familiar, you may be pleased to hear that we have been very hard at work on cutting, sanding, and polishing three Non-Player Factions (bots), capable of running each of the player Factions in the game when you need them to step in. The bots are card-driven, similar to the Arjuna system for Gandhi, the Tru’ng system for Fire in the Lake, and the upcoming Calixto system for Cuba Libre, but streamlined and tailored for Vijayanagara.

Chief among the design goals for the bots was to retain the overarching narrative of the game in any configuration, while also seeking to create a streamlined interaction. After a lot of great playtesting efforts from the community and continual improvements, we are feeling pretty excited about where things stand.