This issue of Origin stories is special for a number of reasons. I’m talking to Stephen Hurn, a designer who’s name you might not recognise but who’s contributions to the hobby you will have experienced when playing Martin Wallace’s Anno 1800: The Board Game and it’s recently released expansion. He has been deeply involved in helping Martin playtest and tweak the game. In fact, Stephen was hired by Martin to do the initial research on the titular video game. He later designed the separately published official solo campaign for Anno 1800 (which I included in my favourite solo experiences of 2023 list), provided lots of input for the new expansion, and again designed the solo campaign for it, this time featured directly in the box itself.
What made this conversation particularly fascinating for me was that Stephen wears so many different hats in this story: That of a passionate player that wrote THE strategy guide on Anno 1800: The Board Game, that of a playtester trying to help a master of his craft perfect his design, that of a designer in his own right trying to create a fun solo mode, and that of someone that just tries to absorb it all and learn as much as he can from a legend in the industry. So while Stephen didn’t design Anno 1800 – that was all Martin Wallace –, he not only had a front row seat to the whole process but was able to influence it with his feedback and watch how it would translate into actual mechanisms. And with his solo campaigns, he was able to get his own creation published with one of Germany’s biggest publishers: Kosmos.
We talked about topics such as his involvement in the series, his approach to designing solo modes, writing for a campaign, the change of the game’s economy with the expansion, the randomness of the invention cards, and why he’s putting in the massive amounts of time it takes to design something in this hobby despite there being only very little financial reward in it.
Where it all started
How did you actually get to Anno? Did you already know the PC game or did you start with the board game?
In 2017, I was already involved in a local board game playtesting community here in Brisbane. We were meeting over at that guy’s place once every week. We’d all bring our board games along and we’d test them. There were a couple of publishers that existed in Brisbane at the time that no longer exist, but a couple of those guys got published through them and so things were going along fairly nicely. Then we heard that Martin Wallace is moving to town, so naturally the guy who was running the group invited him along and said “hey, we’ve got a playtesting group here. Would you like to come along?”.
The first game that he brought was a different license that eventually fell through and has gone through a number of iterations since then. It is currently sitting as a game that is yet unpublished but is phenomenally good to play. [Back then,] it was the first time that he playtested it and [Stephen smiles] I really didn’t like that first version. I wrote him like a two page summary of everything I hated about it and sent it to him. I was like: he’s either going to take this feedback in his stride or he’s going to hate me and … well, whatever. [Stephen laughs] He took it in good grace and brought along a prototype the next week and it was sooo much better and it’s subsequently been one of my favourite prototypes that unfortunately hasn’t yet hit the market.
So we met there and we got playtesting, playtested a number of games. I was personally really just trying to absorb as much as I could, learning about his processes and designs, and how he thought about board gaming. One of the things that our modern society doesn’t do well and doesn’t really value is the concept of apprenticeship. For most of history, an apprenticeship was how you learned any trade. I kind of have viewed the last few years as, yeah, I might not be focusing as much on my own designs, but I’m kind of going through an apprenticeship. Whenever I have a design and put it in front of him, he’ll critique it and I’ll learn from that and incorporate that into the next design.
We were doing this and he’d managed to get approached by Kosmos. Kosmos had the Anno 1800 license and they said: “design is a game”. He designed what eventually became the Anno 1800 board game very, very quickly. But before he could do that, he needed to know what the video game was about. Kosmos provided him with a license to the video game and he doesn’t play video games. So he gave me the license and said, [Stephen says jokingly] hey, have some money to write me a report on how the video game plays and what can be taken out of that and board-gamified.
Oh my god, you’re the person! [Stephen & Alex laugh] This was one of the big questions I wanted to ask you. There was always this person that Martin famously hired because he doesn’t like playing computer games. So that was you!
That was me, yes. [Stephen chuckles] So he hired me to play it. I put about 40 to 80 hours in the game and I made a note of all of the things that I thought could be board-gamified out of it. If you’ve played the video game, you’ll know that there’s just so much in it, so many buildings, so many industries, you’ve got things chaining. Before you can even get timber, you need to build your plantation and then you need a sawmill and you need roads that connect them and that’s just to get the most basic of all resources By the time you’re actually up to your engineers and investor levels of population you’ve got chains that are across the map, you’re on multiple islands.
And so I played it and I made notes and basically Martin got virtually every single note that I made incorporated into the board game and I was shocked. The first time he brought it in, I was actually shocked at how much he’d managed to incorporate into it. That first version was not exactly the same as the final version but the changes that were made were small tweaks here and there.
[…] Honestly, the play testing for the base game of Anno 1800 didn’t take that many playtests for Martin to take it from initial concept to final finished product. Most of the things that he did change were he just trimmed a few industries, he lowered the resource requirements on a number of the cards and whatnot. But then Kosmos really wanted a solo mode. So Martin said, “hey, I don’t like doing solo. Do you want to do the solo mode?” and I was like “sure, that sounds great!”.
The Solo Mode
I thought about it and I’m like: I really don’t like it when I get a board game, it’s got a solo mode, and all it is is an automa and it’s really boring to play against. Well, what is the kind of solo game that I like to play? I thought back and some of my fondest memories on video games were playing through the Warcraft 2 / the Warcraft 3 / the Starcraft single player modes and the way that they introduce concepts. Most games are very hard to grok when you first get the game and I really liked the way that video games often will use the single player to teach you the game. So I brought that principle into the design for a solo mode for the base game of Anno.
I designed the 10 missions and then [did some playtesting]. I then did the sandbox mode, taking the feedback that I got from all of the missions and kind of figured out: Well, you don’t just want to play one of those missions, you want to play something that more closely resembles a real game against a real opponent. And so I made a few changes to the trading in particular just to make it a little bit less about getting as many ships as you can to get everything through trade, to put a little bit more of a barrier there mostly.
What surprised me is actually just how many people only play the sandbox mode. I played the sandbox mode a number of times but I played the solo campaign way more than I played the sandbox. But all the learnings of the solo campaign went into the sandbox mode.
I actually would have thought it’s the other way around: you designed the full sandbox mode and then sliced it into tutorial missions for it.
I could have gone down that route. Because I wanted to introduce that kind of almost tutorial solo mode, I kind of just was like, “okay, what’s the smallest unit of Anno that I can do?”. And the smallest unit is “How about you only play with the blue cards?” and you don’t worry about their effects and all you’re trying to do is smash out the blue cards in your hand. That’s gonna teach you the very, very basics of Anno. Okay, well, that can be mission one. Well, what’s mission two? Let’s add one thing to it, all the way up until the last few missions where you’re doing the whole game and maybe the focus is a bit different.
One of the missions – which is probably the craziest mission out there – is the one where you’re attacked by the Pyrphorians and they’re blowing up your buildings if you’re not careful with your ships. I kind of wanted to give people who were playing the sandbox mode that as well. So I changed the effect of the card for the sandbox mode to basically allow you to play that solo mode mission in the sandbox mode because just having the minus points was kind of a bit dull and uninteresting.
What was the original brief from Kosmos? Just “do some solo mode” or did they already have the idea of writing a story?
Honestly, I never received any written brief from Kosmos. I was basically just told from Martin “we need a solo mode for this, can you do it for me?” And [jokingly] “I’ll pay you a very tiny amount of money that won’t cover your labour costs” [Stephen chuckles] but I was like, well hey, it’s a little bit of money and it’s the first time that I’ll have been paid for board games, so that’s fine.
And it’s working with Martin Wallace, a design legend, right?
Exactly! I was honoured that he would actually entrust me with that because Martin is quite protective of his own name when it comes to games.
Why did he know he should approach you? Were you known in the circle as “the solo guy”?
He’d seen my other designs that I’d done and I’d kind of probably talked a bit about designing solo in the past. I also was the guy that knew the most about the Anno video game as well as I’d already been working with him on Anno 1800. So I was probably the logical choice.
Over the years, the board game design group has kind of stopped meeting [due to the interruption with COVID and real life and everything] but Martin is constantly over at my place playtesting. So anytime he’s in Brisbane, he’s got his groups of playtesters that he will meet and I’m one of those people on his path.
So that was like the first real design work that I’d done for Martin. After that he got me to do the Bloodstones solo mode.
Story Telling
There are few solo mode designers that combine trying to prepare the player for the multiplayer and a story that both pulls you through and also back into the game. Maracaibo and some other Alexander Pfister games have a story, but those don’t have the progression element and don’t necessarily give you the same challenge as the main game. What inspired you to combine these two elements?
That’s a good question. There are probably multiple factors that have all played into it. One is that I actually wanted to be a novelist at one point and I started doing writing work myself. So I kind of understand enough about how to structure a story. My writing technique is not as good as some people’s out there, but I do understand the very basics of how to write engaging prose, how to do interesting stories, at least a little bit. [Stephen chuckles]
So that was in my background already. But then one of the things that I picked up from talking to Martin is that the way that he designed games is that he thinks of the story that he wants to tell. And then he takes all of his knowledge of board game mechanics and the physical properties of board games and tells the story that he wants to tell with those things. He’s currently got a game coming out soon called Casus Belli and that is going to be a political-ish kind of game, but it’s kind of like every single science fiction mashed into one. So you have Babylon 5, Battlestar Galactica, Star Trek, Star Wars and he’s taken all of these elements from every single Sci-Fi and thrown them into the one game. But what he’s done there is he’s added things so that every time you play it, it will tell a different story from the last time that you’ve played it, but it will always tell a story. It will always be an epic space opera type of story but the particularities of every time you play it are going to be wildly different.
So he brings that ethos of every single game should be telling a story into his designs. But his designs are quite mechanical in the sense that he tells his stories through the mechanics and because of that, he gives you a lot to work with as someone who wants to tell an actual plotted narrative story.
That’s kind of why I was able to do that with Anno. The more complex you’re game, the easier it is to do something like that as well. Anno has all of these mechanics that tie in with each other, but they’re not 100% dependent on all of the other mechanics. They do build upon each other. I could quite easily create that long narrative arc where you get more and more things that you can do until you can do everything in the game.
So were you the person that actually wrote the story for the campaign or was it Kosmos?
For the base game, that entire campaign was effectively ripped out of the video game. I didn’t use any copyrighted material. I just took, okay, this is what happens in the video game, I’m going to turn that into a paragraph story and put that at the start and that’s going to be what you’re doing for this one. If you play the video game, you might recognise the story. But it’s not word for-word and I only wanted to give it a tiny bit of flavour at the start and end of each mission and then have the mission very much tie into what that flavour is.
There are not that many words in each chapter. It’s like a paragraph or so, not even half a page. Was it like someone said, “okay, do ten chapters” and the novelist in you cracked his knuckles and started typing fifty pages?
I always wanted it to be just a really short amount because what I wanted was for the game itself to tell most of the story. For Anno, it was just, okay, I’m doing a paragraph at the start and if necessary a paragraph at the end. But for most of the time, it’s just a really small amount to give you enough information so that your imagination can take over.
Let’s take a Song of Ice and Fire. I enjoyed the books that were written in that series when I read them a decade ago. But what I didn’t like about them is that sometimes they were going to three and four pages of description about heraldry and the like, and I get that the LoR people love that kind of stuff but to me, it’s not the important thing. It is not the details about what they’re wearing. The important thing is about the decisions that they’re making, why they’re making them, motivations. And so to me you can tell a story much more succinctly than by describing every single minute detail in the world. in some ways, it’s better when you do that. So for Anno I just wanted to put a tiny little bit there. Just wanted to give you enough of a flavour of the world. If you want to get more of that, you can go and play the video game and run through the whole storyline.
Not that it’s the greatest storyline in history. I think other games have had much more interesting and complex storylines, but it’s a little storyline that takes you through, teaches you the world, how to play, gives you a flavour of what they want you to feel in Anno.
The Mechanisms
To pick your brain on the mechanical part of the design process a bit: how did you for example tweak the difficulty of the solo campaign? You introduced the normal and the hard deck. Was it you just playing it over and over again and seeing what was your minimum and maximum of turns needed per chapter?
What happened here was that I initially designed the solo mode to be quite easy. I was like: most people who are going to sit down with the solo mode are going to play three missions and then put it aside and never play it again. So I was thinking what I want to do is I want to give people as much of a taste of the game as I can. I’ll make it relatively easy.
So how I developed the actual difficulty for Anno was I tried to be as efficient as I could and I played it say two or three times [per chapter]. I’d get an average and then I’d add a certain number of turns so that depending on the mission it might be I’d add three turns in an early mission and five turns in a later mission. And I’d go alright, that’s the difficulty level. And then I submitted it to Kosmos and they came back and said this way too easy. [Alex & Stephen laugh]
So I went back and I was like, okay, I’ll make this very hard. What I did was I played it a number of times – say two or three more times – and I was like, okay, what was my best two runs and well, my best two runs were 25 turns. Alright, let’s add one, 26 turns, that’s hard mode. Add another three, 29 turns or 30 turns, that’s the normal mode. And then I went out and got feedback on that. I probably didn’t get enough feedback on some of the missions because I think one or two of them were actually too hard for a lot of people.
Yes. [Alex laughs knowingly]
Where as the designer who was like, okay, this is how to optimize for this particular scenario … but it shut Kosmos up and they were like, okay, we’re happy with this now. [Stephen laughs]
I would have thought the role of the solo mode in Anno is to be the challenge for the hardcore gamer and less about the casual gamer who wants to play a solo mode from time to time.
I wanted the early missions to be easy but the later missions to be hard. The idea would be that I would make it tighter and tighter the further you got into the game. But Kosmos really kind of were like “we think this is way too easy” when they started playing it. So I was like, okay, well, what I’ll do is I don’t want to alienate the more casual player. I’ll create a normal mode and I’ll call it normal because no one wants to play easy and think that they’re like an idiot for not being able to beat it on easy. So let’s call it normal. And then the challenge mode will be hard. We’ll call that the hard mode. As it was, I probably could have loosened up on the normal mode for the base game because I think there were one or two gatekeeping missions that killed a number of players. I think about mission four or five. A lot of players found them too challenging and it dispirited them. They just didn’t get it and stopped playing after that. So I was mindful of that going into designing the expansions solo missions.
The advantage of the 10 missions in the original game is that the early missions were not full games. You could smash the first mission out in 20 minutes. It was only by the last mission that you were playing the complete and full version of the game. For the expansion, I was like: well, every game, you’re gonna basically be playing with the whole lot. So I wanna layer each of the new mechanics one by one on top of that. Because you’re playing a much longer game, it’s not like you can go back and restart after 20 minutes. If you get to the end of the game and miss by one turn in an hour long session, you don’t really want to go back to the start and play that machine again. So I actually made it a bit looser at first. And then I got feedback from Cosmos that it was too easy. [Alex laughs]
So I tightened it up. And I got more feedback that it was too easy, so I tightened it up a little bit more but kept the normal mode relatively loose. And they still weren’t happy with how difficult it was. They said it was still too easy but I was reluctant to change it again after that because I followed the feedback from the [base] game and so the gap between the normal and the hard in the expansion is probably a little bit wider than it was in the base game. But I still think it’s challenging enough for most people. Because when you’re playing solo, you’ve got the added mechanics of the solo mode layering on top of the base game mechanics anyway. So you automatically have to be thinking of more stuff all the time when you’re playing solo. You kind of don’t want to be trying to make it too difficult for players to optimize their turns efficiently enough to be able to beat it. At least on the normal mode.
On the hard mode, I was like: if you can prove to me that you can beat this every single time, I can tighten it up. But as it is, the hard mode in the expansion is fairly hard even for me. So I’m quite happy that it’s hard enough. The normal mode – for me – is fairly easy but I went through it. We probably playtested the expansion more than we playtested the base game and it went through more iterations than the base game. So when I found out that Kosmos were not releasing an English version of the expansion, I was very disappointed given the amount of work that we’d put into it. So, yeah, but … c ‘est la vie, you know.
I can imagine! Do you have any idea what their reasoning is? Is it just like they expect Germany to be THE main target market?
I think it’s a combination of the numbers probably did better in Germany, Kosmos being a German brand, probably their sales for the base game were better in German because there was that fairly big time delay between the German version and the English version. I think they also had issues with finding an English partner at the publisher level. So there’s probably a number of things that fed into it. We were obviously fairly disappointed. Maybe one day Martin will come back and get the rights back and release it under a different brand or make it into a different game or something like that, who knows? But it is what it is. This is something you have to live with. I mean, the fact is it got published. And that’s way better than 99% of designs.
And it’s not too many games that actually can do an expansion. Why do an expansion if you could do like a full game in the same time, right?
Exactly, and especially four years after the release of the original game.
Maybe I can console you a little bit. I checked Amazon.de today and right now, they’re out of expansions, [jokingly] I think because BGG has figured out shipping from Germany is not too bad due to the small box size.
Right, yes. [Stephen laughs] But, yeah, it is what it is and hopefully the sales will be strong in German, we’ll see. Like I said, these things happen. I’m just happy that it got published. I wrote the solo mode for it, I was heavily involved in the development of the game, and in fact I probably pointed Martin in the direction of a lot of the feedback that was coming in about the base game.
The Shift to Red in the Expansion
I took all the feedback and a lot of it was actually my own. Having designed all that stuff with the solo mode, I knew the parts of the game that people would skip over, the main part being the red industries. You built the red industries that you had to build and nothing more. Because there was always stuff that you could kind of skip over: champagne, pocket watches, and sunglasses. You’d often find that people would avoid building them. But even the New World ones, people would try and skip them as much as possible. And I was like, well, okay, let’s try and incentivise them. So with the expansion, the way of incentivising them was to make it so that you had to have the factory to be able to purchase one of the new cards with that good and all of the new cards had red goods or purple goods on them.
The red goods were the most important because they’re the ones that are going to kickstart your engine. The expansion basically gives you an extra turn every turn if you play it right. With the solo mode, I actually designed it with the idea of once you get to your red engine – so it’s how I call it – where you would be able to put a red cube on one of your red buildings to take one of the cog cards and use that cog to build a building and then you’ve still got your full turn ahead of you. Once you got to that middle game, that’s when you really could crank out what you can do on each turn quite a bit.
So that was with a lot of my thinking around the design of the solo mode, okay, how can we be as turn efficient as possible and get to these red goods as soon as possible? And that’s kind of how the multiplayer game plays out. Multiplayer game is a little bit more random because people are competing for the same red cards. So someone will get to that particular red industry faster than you, but if you’re building those red industries, one of them you’re likely to hit anyway. I think the key to doing well in the expansion is to look to get the red industries down as early as possible and use them as much as possible to get more cogs. Particularly in the late game once you’ve got enough buildings, you want to be using two cogs to clear out your three victory point cards or even three cogs to clear out your fives.
In multiplayer I like to play a point heavy kind of game. This actually developed because I was looking for strong counters to rush strategies. So the strong counter in the base game to rush strategies is to go to the New World and get New World cards and smash out your 5vp cards. If you can get a couple of 5vp cards down, you’re going to beat the rushing player who’s just getting to the 6 cannon points to get that one card where they can clear out their other card or two that’s their 8vp card and just play out their 3 point cards. Which is something that I don’t think a lot of players who were complaining about the rush strategy tweak to.
If you go straight to the New World, grab those three 5vp cards and you can play two of them out relatively early in the game, that’s 10 VP, that’s more than their big 8 VP one. To get the same amount, they’re gonna have to play four little cards and you can generally – if you go to the New World a couple of times – end up getting four or five of those cards down, and you’re gonna just have a blowout victory against someone who’s just trying to clear their hand as fast as possible.
I like to go down more heavy VP-oriented strategies and I think the expansion allows you to do that a bit more and it kind of incentivices going after those mid-tier buildings a bit more as well so you’re not just rushing to get to the ones that are going to clear out your big 8vp cards. And I think you’re going to be more successful if you try and engage with the new material than if you are just rushing to try and clear them. Because the other thing that the expansion does is it gives you an extra 8vp card in your hand at the start and for people who are rushing that does change the math a little bit. It just makes it that little bit harder to do and you’ve got more workers and there’s more going on so I think it makes it feel more like a sandbox game than the base game even felt.
You said something about the randomness of the innovation cards I find very interesting. The randomness makes a lot more sense to me for the solo mode than for the multiplayer game, exactly because in the solo mode, you can’t have situations like I had with my friend who immediately rushed for coffee, produced coffee, flips up a new card, hey, another coffee innovation card, flips up new card, hey, another coffee! As a result, he had a huge boost.
I think in the way that they manufacture it, you end up with clusters of certain types of cards. So you might need to make sure that first shuffle is a good muck shuffle and really gets those cards mixed up. But I have heard that some players raise that as a complaint about the game. In all of the playtesting that I did, I think that that’s less important than having a big picture view of what’s out there and the ways that you can maximise what you’re doing and what you have. And there is other paths as well.
One path that I don’t know if players have explored too much is going down the airship building path. Because those airships are now giving you potentially three or five VP for each airship. You can realistically get to the late game and have two or three hangars down and be getting eight VP per turn just from building airships, not to mention using those airships for other purposes like exploring or fulfilling cards or trading for resources and that.
So I think that the late game has really opened up quite a bit and it’s not so dependent like it was on you just having the right combination of 8vp cards in your hand that you could finish the game as fast as you can. I think that there are more paths that you can go down now than what they were.
It definitely feels less of a race than base Anno 1800 did. Now, you can actually build up something, there are multiple paths that make sense – even independent of the goal cards.
The other mechanics that I think mix up the game are those new mission cards as well. I talked to Martin quite a bit about the different things that we could introduce in the expansion to change things up. I think having the introduction of that corruption – I don’t know what the German word is – but I’ve always called it the corruption mechanic. If you have workers that you didn’t use, you get one corruption per worker. That totally changes the way that you think about the game particularly if you’re heavily reliant on your ships. All of a sudden, you’re like actually no, I need to think more about my population than my ships and so having more factories down and a better balanced population means that you’re gonna cop less corruption and so it just it gives you more to think about there so but
But I must stress that it was Martin that actually did the design work on the multiplayer. He did all the design, although I was by far the most involved with the feedback and play testing process. And we would often spent quite some time talking about different things that could be done to make things better one way or the other.
One thing that Kosmos did: we went down the path of many of the new cards have red industries on them, but some of them have purple industries on them. Initially, I was basically “let’s overload those purple industries with cars”. The steam cars are the hardest tech in the game to get because you need a purple technology and an investor just to be able to build it. So let’s put more awards for those cars, and by putting more awards for those cars in that new deck, you’re also making the 8VP cards that have cars on them more useful because you’re more likely to have that industry. Initially, most of those were actually cars. Kosmos went and rebalanced it in their own playtesting and mixed a few more things in there and I actually think that they did a really good job of that development. I think the balance now is actually really quite good between those different purple industries on the 2vp cards.
I find it really interesting talking to you because you wear all these different hats: you’re the person who wrote the long strategy guide on BGG for the base game, you have really thought about everything in the game as a player. As a designer, you have these criteria you need for the solo mode or like to emphasize in it. And you’re like the Anno whisperer on Martin’s side who says, hey, I’ve seen the community needs this, Martin, you should think of something.
To be fair, I had a lot more time at that point in my life because I took a small break from my career to be a full-time stay at home parent. And so that’s when I did a lot of that design work. I would spend all day looking after the kids and then in the evening, I would go and do the design work by myself as a way of engaging my brain. It’s not like when you’re working with your children that your brain is over-engaged the whole day.
Imagine Kosmos says, “hey, the expansion went crazy well, let’s do it again. We want a second one” and Martin would not be interested in it. Do you still see potential in Anno? Would you personally – as a player – push it in certain directions?
So … [Stephen considers this for a moment] When Kosmos greenlit the expansion, I was almost hoping that – because Martin would rather design a new game – I was kind of hoping that he would just throw it to me and say, “hey, you create the expansion”. [Alex laughs, Stephen continues with a smile] I had ideas. Because I’d been playing the video game, I kind of wanted to go down the path of taking it in different directions with having an arctic area. There’s all these different areas that you can go to in the Anno video game and I kind of wanted to go down the path of having different areas and they do different things and having cards that correspond to population that you get from those areas. I think you could easily go down that path.
As far as Martin’s involvement in something like that: he did not want to go anywhere near that path. He very much was of the belief – and rightly so because he’s a much better designer than I am – he wanted to go down the path that we went down which is “let’s not lengthen the game, let’s thicken the game”. Let’s give players more paths through the game rather than making the game longer or adding more cards because we’ve already got plenty of cards in there and his view is that if you try and mix cards that are coming from a different print run, oftentimes the backs are different colours and so that physical difference can make it obvious whether you’ve got a new one or an old one.
Where I was initially thinking that we could take the game would be to introduce say an arctic area. You would go there like you’re exploring a new world island. You would explore an arctic island and it would have slightly different requirements and it would have a resource like say furs and oil and one or two other resources. My initial idea was that oil from there would power power plants that you would place on your board and that would give you bonuses when you used the factories that were around the power plants. So it would play a little bit more into the spatial puzzle of it and then the other resources that you got from there would be on new 8 VP cards that would be shuffled into the deck. You could only complete those if you went to that new world. And then again, I wanted to go down that similar path with Enbesa, and there would be things that you could do with the knowledge tomes and whatnot that you could get from there in a similar way.
But – and I think rightly so – that probably would have made the game a little bit more complex than even what it is now. And it probably would have made it longer. I think Martin took it in the direction that it should have gone. [Stephen laughs] He’s one of the world’s best designers for a good reason. He knows what he’s talking about.
The Future
Let’s jump to you as a designer. The solo campaign for the base game was initially a bit of struggle for people to get. But eventually there was an English version and people liked it a lot. Everything I’ve seen so far for the Anno 1800 expansion was also very positive, the only question is how people can get their hands on it. What’s the next thing for you? Are you hoping to design more solo modes? Are you working on your own designs and hoping to be published? What’s the direction you want to go?
That’s a good question. the next thing for me – Cassie would kill me if I said it was anything other than the next solo campaign for Bloodstones. [Alex laughs hard] So our campaign manager, Cassie, she is very much on top of kicking me up the backside to design solo missions for the two new Bloodstones factions and the new faction that will go into the next Bloodstones expansion.
I actually designed a couple of Bloodstones factions for an expansion myself and I spoke to Martin about it and he is actually like, let’s put that off and maybe do something slightly differently with those. We have to formalise something like that, so I can’t give you any juicy details [Alex laughs] But hopefully that project will come about, which would be Bloodstones, but it would be Bloodstones done in a different way that would possibly be targeted to more of a retail market. So that’s a possibility, it’s an iron in the fire.
I semi-regularly design games that I put in front of Martin, [Stephen laughs] he trashes and I throw out and design the next game. I spent quite some time trying to design a game around the sugar industry in Bundaberg in the late 1800s, because it’s quite a fascinating piece of history for that town in Queensland. It’s a small town but it captures a piece of history that goes under the radar of most people because it was a unique period of time in history. […] I really would have loved it if I could have turned that into a board game, but I just didn’t have the skill at the time to do that. But I spent probably a year working on that game on and off making iterations. I also – just as an exercise – tried my hand at taking some video games and seeing if I could turn them into a board game version that could do justice to the video game.
Most of my design work had been taken up by doing [the solo campaigns for Anno 1800 and Bloodstones]. I mean designing 18 missions for Bloodstones took a long time. When I was using tabletop simulator to create those missions, actually creating the missions would take a couple of nights each and then I’d play through them once and I’d go, okay, well, these are all the problems with it. Then I’d fix that up. And so each of the missions ended up taking about three nights to get to a point where I’m like, okay, I’m happy enough with that mission. Now I’m gonna do two or three playtests on this to make sure that it’s as I had hoped it would be.
Unfortunately, I didn’t really get anyone on board for playtesting those although I think I’ve got a pretty good feel now for what works difficulty-wise and mechanics-wise for a lot of those solo missions. So I was fairly comfortable with those and I haven’t received any feedback saying that something’s hideously broken [laughs] so I’m pretty happy with that.
What’s the success criteria for you as a designer? Do you do it just because the process is fun? Or do you have a goal like you want to have your game published with a certain publisher and your name on the box?
So everything that I do, I don’t want to send out unless I am happy with it. And for me to be happy with it means that I need to be confident that it’s working first and foremost. It’s not broken in some fundamental way but that I can have fun playing with it. I want to be enjoying it myself when i’m doing the playtests. I really don’t ever want it to fell like it was a chore to do the work, I wouldn’t be doing it. Although having said that, it’s not so much a chore to do it, it’s a chore to get started because after you come home from a long day of work, you just wanna vegetate in front of the TV or something like that.
I really enjoy the work and that’s a thing. But my primary motivator for designing is that I want to give back to the board game community because I have derived so much joy from it myself over the years. I think that it is an extremely good hobby to have because it allows people to physically connect with people in a world where we are so atomised in everything that we do. Many of us don’t even work in the same office as our colleagues anymore. Many people are living alone in apartments by themselves or with a house mate they barely talk to. Having a hobby that gets you sitting around the same table as someone else, interacting with people, laughing, carrying on, trying to like destroy their armies or build a better civilization than them, something like that, it’s just good for the world. […]
There’s also that kind of sense of … like everyone needs a few Horcruxes around, right? Everyone wants that small piece of immortality and so there’s obviously some of that in me as well, you know? You always want to be able to sit back at the end of the day and go, you know, I created something that no one else did there. I did something that went out into the world and people got enjoyment from it. And you know, if that’s the legacy that I leave, then that’s a good legacy to leave, right?
I’m at that point in my life where I know that unless I end up having a fluke smash hit – the kind of games that I like to design are probably not going to be that kind of game – I’m probably never going to make a living out of board games. I probably haven’t even made enough money to pay for the board game collection that I have [both laugh] out of board games, despite doing the work that I’ve done. But I’m working with one of the world’s best designers. It’s always good to work with people at the top of their game and go see their processes and be in awe at the things that they’re producing.
What’s your favorite project you’re looking for? Like if you could say, hey, I would like the license to this, or I would love to work on that game, does someone want to commission me for it?
That’s a great question. Because I’ve only got back into the full-time work environment after four years of looking after kids, I haven’t really had my head in new design kind of space for quite some time especially with the Bloodstones work that I’ve been doing, which is obviously working more with Martin’s designs there. As far as a dream project, the project that I kind of started working on and was working on for a number of years – and I got it to a point where I quite enjoyed it but I don’t think it was marketable I think it had too many components in it – was a game that had a similar feel to Twilight Imperium but it could be played in two to three hours. I quite liked the idea behind the design, I quite liked the mechanics that it had in it, but it had too many pieces in it and if I was to go back and revisit that, would change a lot.
The holy grail for me has always been the space game that gives you the feel of something akin to Star Trek or Babylon 5 and does so in a way that doesn’t take too long to play and it doesn’t feel like any other game out there. I like Martin’s games a lot but I think there is a game that I would do that would be very different to one of Martin’s games that I think I would like the mechanics of. And I was going down the path at one point of doing a couple of interesting things with puzzle pieces, having your factories basically be little puzzles that you put your workers into which were cubes. To build your spaceship, you needed four workers and so you put the four cubes into the spaceship factory that would produce you your spaceship, and then you could go down that path. I quite liked that idea and never quite developed it fully into a game.
I am quite hoping that this independent Bloodstones game does work and does end up coming out because I quite like these factions that I’ve designed. [laughs] And I had quite a lot of fun doing that actually. I just proxied the pieces with my Bloodstones set and came up with the rules and played these new factions against the existing factions and balanced them against them. I really, really enjoyed that process. so I hope that I can make that work and we can get that one published.
I think as far as any kind of holy grail type things, I’d love to work in the Dune universe. I really, really enjoy those novels. I enjoy – though have criticisms of – the latest Dune movies, Villeneuve’s Dune movies. I quite enjoyed them, although I am critical of the Chani character in the second movie and the fact that they didn’t have any of the weirder stuff in them. So if you’ve read the books there’s like the spacing guild and what not, they kind of dodged some of that which I was little tiny bit disappointed about. I wanted to see creepy Alia as well at the end of the movie like in the 80s version, but alas we didn’t get that.
Note: This is a written extract of a much larger conversation and I had to do some heavy editing to keep it in a readable format. Any mistakes are very likely mine, not Stephen’s, and it has to be emphasised with how much appreciation and reverence Stephen speaks of the work Martin Wallace does. Stephen is a very funny guy, and I’m not sure how much I was able to capture this in written form, but I tried. I unfortunately also had to take out the part where we talked about his approach on designing the solo campaign for Bloodstones, but I might be able to release that as a separate post at some point in the future.
If you’re interested in picking up Anno 1800, there is an English version available in retail but the solo campaign for the base game as well as the expansion only exists in a German version. There are fan-made translations of the rules that can be found in the BGG files section and the components of the expansion are language independent with very few minor exceptions. The most convenient way to get the expansion outside Germany seems to be to use Amazon.de’s international shipping. If you’re interested in checking out Stephen’s work for Bloodstones, you can go to https://www.wallacedesigns.com.au.
If you enjoyed reading this interview, please leave feedback in the comments. What part did you like? What question would you have asked Stephen? Doing in-depth interviews like these takes a lot of prep & research and it’s really rewarding to see that so many of you seem to enjoy reading them. Showing your support helps getting future interview partners on board! You can find more interviews like these in the interview section.