Looking back at 2024, Rise & Fall was one of the few stand-out games for me that a) did something radically different I hadn’t seen in another game before and b) I could see myself actually still playing in five years time. What initially looked like just another over-produced crowd funding game turned out to be a really interesting, civ-like design that can be played in under two hours and whose brutal gameplay gave me serious Splotter Spellen vibes … only to then be plagued by fulfilment issues and publisher Ludically basically going MIA.
I sat down with designer Christophe Boelinger (Rise & Fall, Dungeon Twister, Archipalego) to chat about how he created this unusual game and his path from being one of the original co-founders of Ludically to an independent designer that hopes a publisher will do good on his game. And I also learned how the deep love for his wife inspires him to develop new ideas on how to represent conflict in games.
Inception
Where did the idea to create Rise & Fall come from? Was it your intent to create something that’s different?
If you try some of the games I did, you will see that they all are radically and totally different. That’s one of my golden rules: no matter what I design, I try to do things that I’ve never ever seen before and that would be kind of almost shocking to people. Like they have to adapt because it’s so new that you cannot apply anything you know from previous games. To give you an example, Earth Reborn had the highest score in that regard of new things inside it.
I remember at some point before the game came out, we were talking with players on BGG and some of them were asking me “well yeah, okay, but what’s new in there?”. I did a count of how many new things were in this game at that time that I’ve never seen in other games. There was like 10 or 15, it was a crazy amount! It was too much. Most other designers would have done 15 different games. Kind of taking only one new thing and making a game with that. For me, I’ve put all the new stuff that was fitting in it. Earth Reborn is a lot more complex game, it’s almost like a role-playing game with miniatures. It’s a dungeon crawler, post-apocalyptic thing, but with only new mechanics in there that were not known at that time. So that was not my primary goal for Rise & Fall.
I always start from a theme that I want to explore and then if there’s not at least three or four novel things that I’ve never seen before, then I don’t even continue. It seems it’s like that almost every time. If it’s an easy abstract game, of course I cannot have 10 or 15 novelties in there. In an abstract game two is already a lot. But if it’s in a rich game, like Rise & Fall, like Earth Reborn, like Dungeon Twister, then you can have more than that.
The starting point was in 2018. It had been five years that I had been with my wife. I met her in 2013 and she’s a Brazilian from the Favelas in Rio. On her Facebook page, she had written that she hated games. Wow, that was tough for me, because it’s not only a hobby, it’s my job! She hated games. But she was thinking about video games and games that you play in a bar, to bet on or things like that probably. She didn’t even know that the board gaming industry was so vast with so many games. The only game she knew was Uno and maybe one or two easy other ones like that, the really mainstream games.
So when I met her, she started to see that gaming was more than what she had thought. I started slowly to introduce her to gaming and in 2018, she was starting to play games that were more expert type of games. She had never played a Civilization game, a big one with all the things. So I designed Rise & Fall for her and me – very, very selfishly I would say. I wanted to have full control because I love full control. Dungeon Twister has no randomness. One of my favourite games is Full Metal Planet, no randomness, zero, perfect information. So I wanted a perfect information game. I wanted something that I would really enjoy myself, a not too complex nor whole-night Civilization game, but with quite some options. And I wanted it to be so easy that she would get into it and she would love it just because it’s easy, instinctive, and almost everything is summarised on what you have in your hand. I wanted all the rules to be on our set of cards that we would play every turn. I wanted her to never have to go back to a player aid. Everything had to make sense.
That’s how the idea initially started. Then you had different pieces and everything came from that. With me, generally it goes quite fast. I don’t even write anything down anymore. I drop ideas as audio on WhatsApp or whatever recording thing I have on the phone. Only when I have the whole game already in my head – it’s working, I can see people playing it and I already thought about all the bad things you could do that would be too much – only then I start writing it down or directly do the prototype. And that’s what happened with this one. I told her “I have a great idea” and I explained to her the whole game – even though it didn’t exist yet – the whole thing, all the rules. Even if it’s a complex one like Rise & Fall, I do this just to make sure that the game is complete in my head, and it’s away of “saving” my ideas at least once, like she has a copy of the game in her head. [Chris laughs]
A few days later, I went to Photoshop, I searched for the meeples and all that. There was not so much to do except the map and the cards. And like a week after I had the first idea, we were both playing it.
Do you remember her first reaction? Rise & Fall is a game that can be frustrating, especially for people who try it the first time. Did she love it? Did she hate it?
The first game we played, between turns five and ten, she was smiling like crazy and giving both thumbs up like the Brazilians do a lot. I was like [Chris acting incredulously and smiling] “really, you like it?” because I could see within the first turns that I really liked it as well, it was my type of game. I had another type of “Dungeon Twister” that I would enjoy.
Right from the start I hit the jackpot because the objective was that she as a new gamer would love to play a full control, no randomness, perfect information Civilization game that is not so long with me. And maybe the first 15 or 20 games we played were just her and me. But the punishing part came quickly. [Chris chuckles] Around the eighth or the tenth game, I’m beating her so bad every time that she didn’t want to play alone with me anymore. She likes to introduce new players to the game, play with three or four, so she can at least be second or something like that and beat the crap out of the other people. Every time after that, whenever I wanted to play alone with her because I changed something or was working on the stretch goals, she’ll say “No! No, no, no, no, no. You have too much skill in this game, I don’t want to.”
And then we did the Festival des Jeux in Cannes. That was the time I did the first video with BGG where I explained the prototype. She was taking care of the booth and explaining Rise & Fall to the people passing by. Every time when there were only two or three players and there was a free spot, she would play with the guys. So she would train and she loved the game so much that she could play it non-stop for the whole fair, she didn’t mind. At the end of the fair, she had played it a lot more than me! And so she was willing again to play one vs one because she’d beaten the crap out of the people that were passing by during the Cannes festival. [Chris laughs hard]
A Design In A Week
Rise & Fall feels to me akin to the Splotter Spellen games: there are no guardrails, you can lose on the first turn. But Rise & Fall is even more extreme than that: you can actually lose during setup! Were you thinking about creating standardised setups to avoid the setup problem for new players?
The people from Ludically asked me to do that! The only way you can do that is to have a pre-made map. If you do a pre-made map, you remove the most fun part of the game, which is creating the world, and people might only stick to that. They might play only the scenario.
One of my friends who discovered the game very late was telling me “no, it’s like Go”. Go has been in my top 5 for my whole life. I didn’t get the chance to play it a lot but I love Go because it’s so simple. There’s nothing into it. It takes not even two minutes to explain the rules and yet there are people playing their whole life and they’re not even ranked in the top 100 of the world. Their whole life, with 30 seconds or one minute of rules. It’s brilliant!
I’ve always admired Go, even though I played probably only 20 or 30 games in my whole life. I’m a very bad gamer of Go, but I love to play until the end to see what will be the design, the final zones. I don’t like to stop the game before and give it to the other player even if I’m losing. I want to see the the shape it’s going to produce.
So yeah, we could have done that, but I guess I said no because I’d rather give the strategy tips in the rules … which it seems to me people most of the time don’t read. Like the fact that you need to spread, try to have access to the two main resources, the highway … using your nomads and the cities to spread quickly, that’s what I call the highway.
I’ve heard a lot of people praise the way you designed the creation of the map. Was it like this from the beginning or were there multiple iterations?
Most of my games, they either are functioning in my head and I’m like 90-95% sure that they’re going to work or I don’t do them. They stay in here [Chris points to his head] until they’re finished in my head. For Rise and Fall, the first game I played with my wife was already very good. So the only things that have changed are the balancing on the cards. For example, for the merchants, we were almost not using them and putting them out at all in the first games. They were coming but very late. So I had to boost them and boost them, give them more movement, make them more and more attractive, so we would do them sooner and sooner in the game. That’s the only thing. The construction of the map, everything was done right from the start.
So why did you do these unusual shapes? You have the normal water tiles and you have the unusual shape per player. Why did you think of that?
The H-shape you mean? Should I really say? … [Chris smiles] I have to be honest: it’s the leftover of the hexagonal shapes [both laugh hard]. I wanted to break the normal hexagon grid. For this game, it’s not like I had 100% of the theme and I did the game. Both were advancing simultaneously and everything went super fast. I don’t remember, it was less than a day of thinking, something like that. Maybe it was a morning and most of it was here. [Alex has to laugh] Yeah, the game was less than a week. From the first game I played with her, the whole thing was one week.
After that, there’s been – I think – nine versions of the cards, and that’s a lot for me, really a lot. That means from the first set of cards I did until the one that was published, there’s been nine different versions of tweaking the values of this and that, or the victory point values that were given at the end, all those elements. But the game mechanic mostly didn’t change. The six pieces were there right from the start.
The H-shape comes from that I did some hexagons and I had those H that were remaining or were the rest of something that was sea. The theme that I imagined was a world where the glaciers and the fjords they have in Norway would meet the landscape we have in the Caribbean. The jungle forest would be at the bottom of those big glaciers and the map would create fjords and things like that. So to create that, I didn’t want to have a normal, perfect grid. With those H combined with the rule saying that you have to touch two tiles at the beginning, it is impossible to do a nice grid. It directs you towards those fjords kind of thing. Even though it’s empty, you can imagine it has mountains or areas where we cannot go explore or whatever. So initially, it was a desire I had and there was this rest of pieces that I tried and it just functioned well. [Chris continues jokingly] Maybe something else would have functioned better, but when I have something that functions well right from the start, well, why change it?
You already mentioned that the six units were there from the beginning. When I played Rise & Fall, I immediately was reminded of Sid Meier’s Civilization and so the nomads and cities felt very natural to me. But what was your thinking behind the merchants, the mountaineers, and the other units. Why was it six and not five or seven?
I wanted this 3D landscape and the creation of the world to form cliffs. So I needed to have guys that could climb the mountains and all that. That’s why I wanted the mountaineer. I knew the map would be blocking you in some ways here and there. And I knew that I wanted to have a different map every time. So I needed to have guys who could pass that. The merchants most certainly didn’t have the cliff passing capability at the start. But to go to other cities and to make commerce I needed to give this to them. So this is one of the changes that came after.
The merchants to make the money and the ships to go in the sea were obvious. I wanted to have a game that was economic. And yeah, I didn’t want the fighting. The reason was: my wife. She doesn’t like the fighting so I had to have a Civilization game, easy enough to understand and grasp with all the rules iconographically on the cards, but no fighting. [Chris plays being grumpy] But yeah, I want some fighting! I play Warhammer and all those miniature games also. So I said to her the temple, they “convert”. It’s not so bad … It’s even worse! They don’t kill, you get the unit from the other player. But there’s no combat, that’s why there’s temples.
And that’s it. You get the six, the cities popping guys and they are where you have the university to study and all that. Yeah, you have the six pieces and then right after probably like the same morning, I went through all that … [Chris shows a shelf full of boxes and boxes of various components.]
… and looked if I had the pieces I needed. Now you’re going to ask me “why the numbers?”. [Chris continuous mischievous] Well, there’s maybe only three mountaineers because MAYBE I only had three meeples [Alex laughs hard]. They looked like whatever, they’re not the main pieces. They needed to be there to control the mountains because the mountains were giving lots of points and all.
That’s all for the story. When I imagined this world, I thought about Peru. In Peru – in Lima I think – the higher you live, the richer you are, the more you’re in the good spheres because oxygen is better up there, there’s less pollution or things like that. I had heard about that. Close to the Andes, so I think it’s Peru, think it’s Lima, where the poor people live down there at 1,500 meters, for example, and the rich people, they live up there in the 3,000 or 2,000 something.
Before playing with my wife, I tried to build the map acting as two or three players to see how it was working, just doing that. And most certainly right from the start for me in this world, the people were praising the mountains and the more they would control or live up there in those mountains, the happier they were. So that’s why they’re giving more victory points but give less resources. I also wanted this balance. They give more victory points because they’re up there but they give less resources, like the snow. You can only go there with a mountaineer to get resources, and that was one of the last modifications. Initially you would go in the snow and you could get no resources in the snow. Just occupy it to get all the victory points at the end.
We mentioned Civilization games. For a lot of designers, it is like the holy grail to design a Civilization game that plays in less than two hours. There are two main things missing in Rise & Fall: it doesn’t have direct combat and it has no tech tree. Were you tempted to put some form of tech tree in into it at some point?
It seems like lately I’m designing five or six different Civilization games at the same time. I have many different ideas – mechanics and all that – and each of them could become a different game. It seems like to get the best out of all those ideas, I cannot do multiple Civilization games but rather take all the best ideas from these 6 Civilization games and put them into one excellent Civilization game.
I’ve been thinking about the tech tree a lot. What I don’t like in a tech tree is that it’s fixed. The more you play the game, the more you’re gonna know it. The more you’re gonna know which are the good branches and things like that. It also goes against modularity, which is one of my key words to eternal replay.
For example, for the next game I’m preparing, there are technologies, buildings, advantages that you’re going to be able to buy, gain, invent. But I don’t want to use a tech tree again because I’d rather have the players decide what they discover. What do they invent? I don’t want to be using oil, then creating gasoline, and all that. So maybe you’re going to skip that and instead you want to develop commerce or trading or whatever. So I’m going more towards the players making inventions accessible to everybody. Meaning that if I invent the oil pump, everybody can copy it and can build oil pumps. But since I’m the inventor of that, every time somebody’s gonna make one, I’m gonna gain something out of it. That’s the idea of the next game.
Doing a tech tree would be good, but then I’d do something really historical, something that follows history. I’d follow the normal tech tree that the world has created naturally and change it maybe through the eras, I don’t know … but I think I would follow the historical tech tree.
Players new to Rise & Fall seem to go through a similar progression: For first-time players, it’s often that Rise & Fall takes a long time to finish because they like to build stuff, do a little bit of money here, a little bit of something else there. Two or three plays later, they get to a point where they figure it’s much easier to win by earning lots of money than fighting for majorities. Then they realise earning money takes time and one can gain trophies and end the game early. Have you also seen this, that people need like three, four plays to really play Rise & Fall as fast as you intended it?
Yeah, so it depends. I couldn’t really experience that because for most of the games I played during the playtesting, my wife or I were part of it. And so we were giving examples to the other players. Even if we didn’t explain it, they were seeing what we were doing and we were ending the game faster. We were speeding up.
I think it was between game 10 and 15 with my wife that I wanted to see how long it takes. I had no notion of time. We always had so much pleasure playing and playing that we never tracked time. When we were at our 10th or 15th play together, we played and used a timer. Can you guess how long the two of us took to play the game, including building the map and counting the score?
I would guess 35-45 minutes?
14 minutes! [Alex laughs hard] When we finished the scoring, I said stop and I looked at her shocked. We were playing the 1-2-3 rule, you know when you play down your card? The rule where you push the opponent to randomly draw a card if he goes into AP? My wife invented it during the first game. It was my first time playing it as well and there’s total control. So I went into analysis paralysis and it was bothering her because she understood all the icons, she wanted to continue. I was thinking about what I’m going to play next and she did “one, two, three”, I replied “okay, you want to play it this way!”. [Chris mimes pulling a card at random out of someone’s hand] So we installed this rule right from the start. When you have three or four players, if everybody put down their card except for you, you can do that. But when you are two players, if you just know already what you’re going to play, you put it down and then you do “one, two, three”. And my wife, doesn’t do “oooone …, twooooo …” which is the real rule. She goes “one-two-three” and she draws. So you have like half a second to think.
So I had to play her way, meaning that on the turn when finishing my moves and all that, I have to already know what I’m going to play next. And we played super fast this way. Building the world, your whole thing, 14 minutes for four trophies. A few days after, I talked to a guy, a very smart guy that was living in the area. He came to my house and we played three players, my wife, him and me. He’s a smart guy, so he got most of it quite easily. So I proposed him: we never played the epic game in six trophies. I wanted to see how long an epic game would be. We thought it would take us the whole afternoon. [Chris chuckles] So we booked the whole afternoon to play it. In one hour and 15 minutes, the epic game was finished at three players and six trophies! We were looking at all of that: “That’s not epic! That’s good, it’s fast, we’re not going to complain. But it’s not epic. I cannot call that an epic game.”
So, I didn’t experience this. I know if I want to “beat the crap” out of the other player, if we’re in a two player game and I’m totally in control, I could make it last. So I make more money and all that and make more points. That’s also why one of the latest adjustment was to reduce the bank size depending on the number of players.
You wouldn’t have a very, very long game if you’re playing four unless people are really disinterested in the trophies. If I could still change something with the feedback of the world playing and all, maybe the trophies should bring a little bit more victory points to push you to go for them. If you wanted to accelerate the end of the game, you would just have to raise the victory points of the trophies. Like give 10 extra victory points to each of the trophies, maybe, and you would accelerate the game.
Most new players I’ve seen underestimate how easy it is to get trophies. Getting three Mountaineers, one can do that in one round and suddenly there’s one less trophy. But for some reason people don’t think like that during their first plays. Are they trying to expand instead of trying to win?
Yeah, that’s very easy. But it’s also not so many points. The reason why the cities and the nomads give so little victory points is because I quickly realised that this “highway”, that popping and going somewhere else, building another city and popping – and I would say the Sid Meier Civilization way, the historical way of that – I didn’t want to remove just because that’s human nature, that’s history. That’s what any civilisation would do. They would grow, grow and go explore further and build again and grow and grow and do it again. That’s natural and I didn’t want to break it. That’s why when they say “it’s abstract” I’m still like… [Chris contorts his face as if he would have bitten into a lemon] Man, then Civilization the computer game is abstract!
Do you remember why you gave players an initial boat? Everybody I have played with usually tries to convert the boat into a city or a nomad within their first one or two turns. So why have it?
Because I wanted you to have three cards – half of the deck – at the beginning and to be able to at least have three decisions at the start. And for me, once again, thematically, the city and the nomads, they’re the base thing. They move, they pop up new guys and all that. And to have control of the sea, to be able to move on the sea, move really far and all that, opening new doors – new horizons – was a major thing. I started with that and it never changed. And yeah, soon we started to abandon the ship to be faster with the cities. But again, even if it’s an opening move, people had to find out by themselves.
For me it felt like it’s a backup. You can place it somewhere and even if other players block you during the setup, with the boat you still have a little bit of flexibility and can find a way out.
Yeah, because sometimes two players will put their boats next to each other, but the first one to play gets out on the plains and blocks your exit point. And then you lose one action to move away and find another place from this sea to exit. That’s when we initially had the problem with the nomad abandoning the ship and not being able to go anywhere else than plains.
Do you remember when you got the idea for the decline?
The decline rules and phase came thematically. From my point of view, when a civilisation has reached the peak in a given domain, it generally means that in order to reach that peak it had to either abandon or disregard another aspect of its civilisation. When you built your 5th boat, you’ve reached a milestone, you’ve reached the peak of Navigation. Since you’ve reached the peak of navigation it means that you’ve abandoned something else and the fact that you must “decline” a card (meaning a part of your civilisation) simulates that. Afterwards buying it back represents the energy and economy that you have to spend to get back into this domain of expertise, but you can always decide to come back to trading if ever in the past you abandoned trading.
From Prototype to Kickstarter
I was really surprised when I prepared for this conversation and I found the BGG video you mentioned from the Festival des Jeux 2019. At that time, you were saying it was basically done and might come out like in half a year or something. When did the prototype you did – which looked like a more conventional game, cardboard, simple meeples – turn into this big Kickstarter thing?
So the thing was I designed this game when my ex-partner in Ludically was going into retirement and sold his shares. We were two in the company, Jean-Charles Mourey and me. We had started the company in 2008. And so in 2017-18, he told me that he wanted to retire. No fighting, nothing bad between us, just that he found a new hobby in opera singing and he got so good that within a few months, he was replacing a tenor in the Philharmonic of Monaco, Monte Carlo. He was a very smart engineer from Apple, for 13 years he worked in it. He was the lead engineer on the first internet browser, Netscape. Ludically was for him a serious hobby – I would say a very serious hobby – but not a need. So when he quit, Hicham bought his shares in the company and Hicham was one of the two bosses of Matagot for 10-15 years.
When we went to Essen for the first time with Hicham – the new owner of 50% of Ludically – I had this game Rise & Fall. But we already had the new Earth Reborn, Dungeon Twister, War of Time. We already had six games that were finished with miniatures, big games, prototypes. They were finished on my game design side. My objective was to propose Rise & Fall to other publishers and to sign it as an independent game designer because we had so many games already with Ludically that for me, there was no way we could do it as well. I showed it to Hicham – just to see it – and he loved the game. He wanted to have it for Ludically. And I was saying that we already have six big games to do and there’s so much work and all that. And he would say, no, this game with the components and everything you have, inside six months, I’ll put it out.
And that’s when like a “race” started between him and me saying, okay, I can design more games that you can produce. And he was like I can produce more games that you can design. He promised me that the game would come out six months after I showed it to him, that would have been like in March 2019. When I showed it in Cannes, it should have been there kind of. Well, the game came out six years after that! Guess who won the race and decided to sell his shares in the Ludically because everything was going too slow. I’m a rabbit that designed the game in the weekend, can playtest in the week after and say “wow, there’s everything there”. So that’s why afterwards I decided to sell my shares and that’s when everything became a wall.
Since legal matters are always tricky to write about and parts of the conversation were said in confidence, let me give you a brief summary here instead of quoting verbatim: After selling his shares, Christophe entered a contract with Ludically as an independent game designer because most of Ludically’s games were his designs. Since Ludically hasn’t used some of the licensed IP in a while, part of the contract has lapsed and he therefore has regained control of some of his games such as Earth Reborn (which he re-signed with another publisher) and Archipelago. That’s why he is active on BGG and answers questions, but he is not privilege to any business decisions and activities of Ludically other than those they have shared publicly.
The Future
What do you see in the future for Rise & Fall? Will you try to get the license back or take elements of it and design a similar game?
Taking elements of game design from a game I did and putting it into another game, it’s something that I almost never do, that is not me.
I realised this because I’m trying to go down my pile of shame a little bit more lately and I realised that one of my favourite game designers in Euro-games is Alexander Pfister. I tried most of his big games by now except one or two. I really like all of his games because I can feel the theme more than in all the other German style / Euro-games. I realised that in every new game, he has only one new game mechanic and he does a new game with it. But all the rest, he takes it from the other games, all the rest. I’m like “wow, that’s good”, because at least when you play one of his game, you know most of the mechanics. You don’t have to re-read and re-learn everything. But then I was like “if I would function like that, I would have so many games ready”. [Chris laughs]
As I was telling you in Earth Reborn there’s too many, there’s 12 or 15 new game mechanics. That’s when I realised that I’m not efficient or optimising on this part because I’m putting everything new that I have that fits the theme in a game. It’s not that if I have a new idea, I’m going to put it into it. No, it’s the contrary. For the revolt in the Archipelago, I had to find a rule, a game mechanic, to simulate how the insurrection would come up. But to do that, I could try to find maybe this game mechanic in some other games that have an insurrection or something like that. But no, what I’m trying to do is to find an original idea, something I’ve never seen nowhere, to simulate the thing. So it’s not only I try to find the game mechanic that fits the theme, but this game mechanic on top of that has to be original and never seen before.
And I realised that for the game I’m working on, I had it on the computer for a long time. I’ve been lazy. There’s a lot of work to do on Photoshop and I’m such a perfectionist. If I showed you the hexagons, you’re gonna see. Now I cannot play with less than that.
[Chris shows me some large hex tiles that basically look production ready]
Do you draw all the graphics yourself or how do you do it?
No, I have tons of different things that I scan and I keep. There’s 52 of those hexagons. They’re very different. There’s castle, there’s a desert with the Sphinx, the swamp, that’s all the deserts, the jungle things.
Do you already have a name for this game?
For now it’s “Conquest”. The glacier [Chris shows a tile with a glacier on it], that’s probably something coming from Rise & Fall. But all the trees here, every single tree is a different layer. I have tons of trees! There’s a whole city; that’s the village, that’s the same thing as that but I use them and encrusted into it. So this takes a lot of work. Nothing is the same. With this game, everything is on the hexagons. I have to glue all that, that’s the boring part. But for this game, I still have many buildings to do and cards that go with these ideas that I was telling you that replace the tech tree.
The story in this game is that in the future, there’s been a rift. People have been playing with time machines and all that. They created a temporal rift that is disturbing the whole world, the whole planet throughout time. You have time rifts that have appeared in the past and some people from the future who came here. And barbarians from the past that invaded the land, killed people and took control of the lands and kicked you out. You as a population who was pacifist got kicked out of your lands and went through the rift and into another portion of time.
Now, some time later, you’re coming back to your place of birth and conquer it back. So that’s why you’re okay to attack the barbarians that are here, to eliminate them and all that, to take back control. But those populations that are coming back through the rift in time are different populations from different eras of time. And that’s why they can invent things from different eras. So I don’t need a tech tree, because me, I’m coming back, and maybe I was from the medieval times. I’m gonna invent things from the medieval ages.
We pop out in those first hexagons where there was this magical symbol, this rune, which is the place where there’s the rift. We’re gonna explore and control, and on each hexagon, there’ll be some barbarians, which are the ones that kicked us out from here. We’re gonna kill them to take control of the hexagon. And there’s no direct fighting between us unless we want to and if we want to, we get these penalty things in the end.
So that was the last idea. I was playing with my wife again – I don’t know which game – and she didn’t like it because there was the fighting thing and then I was like: There could be a game where we can fight but when we fight we lose something. So we better think about it twice. And maybe you don’t care being attacked if the other player loses so many points …? I’ve never seen any game doing that. That idea also came when things were blowing up or what with Ukraine and other countries. Where when you have to fight somewhere, everybody’s pointing fingers, all the other nations saying “oh, it’s bad, it’s bad. You shouldn’t do that. You didn’t do that. What the <bleeeep> did they do? They did …”. So you lose things. You lose the image of your country throughout the world, which could be represented by victory points or appreciation.
This is a written extract of a two hour conversation of two non-native English speakers and I had to do some heavy editing to keep it in a readable format. Any mistakes are very likely mine as editor, not Christophe’s. I also intentionally edited out some things that were said in confidence or tangents that took us too far off Rise & Fall, such as Christophe’s love of Full Metal Planet and Darwin’s Journey, his absolutely giant board game collection, etc. After all, this is a live conversation between two avid gamers and it’s fun to go off track from time to time.
I’d like to thank Christophe for taking the time to talk to me and being so open in sharing details of his process and on his history with Ludically. You can check out his games on his BGG profile.
If you are interested in Rise & Fall: The best way to get a copy right now seems to be to check the usual second hand markets or pick up a German copy from online retailer Spiele Offensive which still has some retail copies left. As far as I know, there is no way to find the UV-printed meeples version of Rise & Fall or any version that includes the Guilds expansion. Multiple people (me included) have reported they still haven’t even received replacements for damaged components from the original Kickstarter campaign and there have been no mentions that might indicate another Kickstarter campaign would be coming.
If you want to know more about Rise & Fall, you can also read my full review of it here.