By Matthias Cramer
April 30, 2010
Not clockwise.
In 2006, I started to experiment with turn order systems that don’t go clockwise. Most games with a custom turn order have the problem that you always have to look at a special turn order track to determine who goes next. For me, that was too far away from being intuitive and disrupted the flow of the game. At that time, someone told me about Tobias Stapelfeldt’s Neuland, which utilizes a dynamic turn order system with all players having almost the same number of actions during the complete game. Peter Prinz transported this system into the dimension of time with his Thebes, although it follows nearly the same mechanism.
During that time, I was working on a game called Oldtimer (which stands for vintage cars in the German language). Oldtimer called for a dynamic turn mechanism without necessarily distributing the same number of actions for all players, so I created a mechanism that presents players with the dilemma of choosing between getting the next action soon and getting the actions they would prefer most at the moment. Oldtimer had a chain consisting of player pieces and action tiles. As in Neuland, the last player in that chain takes the current turn, and he does so by choosing one of the action tiles and placing that tile at the front of the chain. The closest action is not the best one in most cases, so you have to decide whether to take the best action or get your next turn soon.
In 2009, I started to think about replacing actions with landscape tiles. I had tons of graphics from a different game set in Switzerland, so I wanted to reuse most of the prototype design and therefore decided to transport the theme to another rural and lovely countryside in Europe. Scotland came to mind with its rough countryside. The game’s original name was Highlands, which I kept during the whole design period. (We had to change it later on because otherwise the game could have been confused with Ralf Burkert’s Highland Clans.)
In my first approach, I wanted to have something Brass-like together with my turn mechanism. Most of the tiles contained roads, and players had to build a network of connections between the different tiles in order to transport goods over the land. All goods were agricultural: corn, sheep, cattle, leather, wool, bread, meat and whiskey. A player needed to have a link between the grazing land that produced the cattle and the tannery via streets or the river. Players only scored for tiles where all resources were used. I also modified the market from Brass, but changed the handling and decided to go for a fixed amount of money in the game. The market is the only element that didn’t change during the whole design process. The game at this stage was playable but far from being fun.
After a few games it was quite obvious that I was at the beginning of some major changes. I wanted to replace the transport system with something easier. Players should be able to transport their goods wherever they are. Since the limitation of having one river and one street was not enough for me, I introduced the clansmen, which needed to have a second meaning later for the scoring. I also replaced nearly everything that originally came from Brass. Resource management got much easier, and production was removed entirely – except for whisky, which moved from a normal resource over to the comparison scoring after each round. In the first games, activations were color dependent, so placing a yellow tile meant that a player activated all yellow tiles. Scoring the surrounding tiles emerged as the better solution because doing so takes into account where a tile is being placed.
Another important rule came up after some games with Geza and Ralph Bruhn from Hall Games in which we discussed the impact of the landscape size on the game. From that point on, I started to work with the punishment rule for large areas. In the beginning, all players lost two victory points for each tile they had more than the player with the fewest tiles. I originally thought there was a psychological barrier between two and three VPs per tile, but this turned out not to be the case. The three VP punishment made it to the final game. (For very experienced players, I would recommend trying the game with a four VP penalty and facing off against a strong strategy with few tiles: one woods, one stone pit, and as many castles as possible.)
At the Essen fair, I gave the game to Stefan Brück from alea. He played it a few times with his testing group and liked it very much. From then on, some aspects of the game were rewritten with the personal handwriting of alea. Stefan doesn’t like open victory points, for example – this is a red thread through most of the alea games. I spent a whole week at the gaming convention in Willingen going through a huge number of testing sessions, so I had the opportunity to test both versions and the game shifted towards Stefan’s direction. We also had a lot of discussions about single tiles and their powers. We had to increase the victory points of some tiles because the round scorings were too strong in the beginning. So the Willingen experience – and later on a full day of playing Glen More at alea’s editorial office in southern Bavaria – was very important for game balancing. We also had a closer look at Loch Ness, which could be quite strong if it came early in the second pile, but it proved not to be broken in the end.
After that period, the mechanisms of the game were finalized. The last thing we changed was the game play for two and three players by adding a neutral die. It’s possible to play without the die or to use a neutral piece that always picks the next tile, but the die is much closer to a human player – and the real humans can’t always predict whether a tile will survive the dummy’s turn.
During the whole winter, the main goal of testing was to balance the different tiles and the different strategies that come along with them. It is important that it is very hard to win the game by having the fewest tiles; market-based and castle-based landscapes should have the same potential. Also, the tiles of the third phase are very important because there will be only one or two turns left in which to use these tiles, in addition to their role in the suspense curve of Glen More.
Right now, everything is finished and we are just waiting for some trees to be cut into sheep and cattle. I hope everybody will enjoy Glen More once it starts arriving in the shops at the beginning of May.
Editor’s note: Stefan Brück at alea says that Glen More will likely be available in Germany in mid-May 2010. No other editions, English or otherwise, have been announced at the time of publication.
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