It’s been a very exciting few weeks for the development of Order & Opportunity.

Over here in Europe, the Essen Spiel Fair 2024 took place in early October. With a little bit of help from a friend, the Estonian designer and publisher Aigar Alaveer, I was able to get some table space and demo Order & Opportunity at the fair this year. It was great to see many gamers stop by ranging from those who said they had already backed the game as well as curious folks who seemed not to have played a historical game in their lives.

Aigar accommodated me at one corner of his booth space, for which I am extremely thankful. Be sure to check out Aigar’s games at https://www.2d6.ee/. Among others, I got the game Arabella published by Aigar and 2d6, billed as an “18xx roll and write” set in Estonia, which sounds absolutely fascinating.

Among those to visit the booth was Candice Harris, the boardgame personality and soon to be designer as she revealed in the recent Five Games For Doomsday podcast episode featuring Cole Wehrle and the German publisher Uli Blennemann from the Spielworxx. Candice is well known in the historical games space and has done a lot for our corner of the hobby.

Candice and I had tried to meet up to demo Order & Opportunity already last year in Essen, but it was only this year that the stars aligned. Candice shot a video of me going through some of the main aspects of game play. I apologise for the hoarse voice that I had developed over the two days of demoing and shouting over the noise of the Essen halls and crowds.

As always, it is a revelation also to the designer to demo the game; to take it into the wild, so to speak. You begin to get a sense of what aspects of the game go down well, and what might remain abstract and distant. One lesson this time for me was that I will want the game to balance more carefully between the aggressive military power based strategy and the more diplomatic political and economic strategies that the global powers in the game might want to pursue. This was always an explicit design aim. The game should be “sandboxy” enough such that players don’t feel straightjacketed to the historical trajectories, yet those trajectories should be available as potential pathways. The iterations I have since implemented show that this could be achieved with rather small changes to the existing game systems.

A second highlight of the last weeks was that, about a week before Essen, I got to play Order & Opportunity with my wife and our two kids. Now, as I’m sure many of us in this hobby know, our deep interest in historical games is not always necessarily echoed in the interests of our family members who might prefer lighter “euro games”. It was all the more astonishing to me that the family was willing to try out my game with me!

The lesson I learned from this playtest was in many ways analogous to that from Essen: the game will do well to allow for confrontational as well as more diplomatic pathways to victory. Corresponding to the differences in their gamer personalities, some family members took like fish to the water in the confrontational area control game while others seemed to wish more of a “multiplayer solitaire” dimension to the game.

On a notable mention, my daughter (11) was able to learn the game very fast. She’s an enthusiastic player of Root (Leder Games), so she’s used to heavier, confrontational games. This was notable to me, one, because she is my daughter and I am proud of her, but two, because the game must not be all that complex if a 11 year old can learn it. As the designer, I have probably lost all sense of objective judgement on the complexity, so reality checks like these can be very helpful.

On a parallel note, having just finished the latest draft of the rules, we’re looking at a rule book of 18 pages in total (two of which even are the setup details and one the glossary). This playtime is reflected in the length of the rules as well. Following the latest playtests and tweaks to the sequence of play, we are having playtimes of 2 to 2.5 hours (live online on VASSAL). Joe, one of the trusted playtesters, wrote in our internal playtest channel that the game “can be played in not much over two hours and probably, with experienced players, could come in under that. This would make O&O an excellent midweek game, remarkable for something that covers such a wide geo-political landscape.” Recently Joe also posted this short report from our game on the War Games On You Table list on BGG.

We’re starting a new round of playtesting to get to know the effects of the latest tweaks as described above. If you have a group of four friends who you think might be interested in trying out the game, do get in touch with me via a geekmail on the Boardgame Geek.

---