Preparing for a convention like SPIEL Essen, I always enjoy browsing all the pre-con reporting, anticipation lists, and pre-order threads. While I did my research for SPIEL Essen 2024, I came upon something I hadn’t expected at all and to be honest hadn’t thought I would need until I found it: a scenario book for Roads & Boats.
Little bit of a backstory: Roads & Boats for a long time was a grail game for me. I remember twenty years ago a friend of mine had a copy and it always was this mystical thing that was super intriguing but I never got around to play. Fast forward, Horseless Carriage (also by Dutch publisher / design duo Splotter Spellen) led me down a huge rabbit hole. I came to love Antiquity and Indonesia, enjoyed playing Bus, tried out The Great Zimbabwe … but I always struggled to find a copy of Roads & Boats until I – by chance – found one in a place you would least expect it in: a board game flee market. Behind giant stacks of more recent games, it just lay there without anyone paying any attention to this odd looking oversized box with a Donkey on it. To make things even stranger, someone sold it for just 40€ including the Et Cetera expansion and sorting boxes. I couldn’t believe my luck. When I later by chance met the previous owner, I thanked him profusely.
Playing it though, I wasn’t sure if it is a game for me or not. On the one hand, I loved the system / sandbox feel of it. This game doesn’t need many rules to produce tons of new and ever evolving situations. It’s a sandbox for years of fun and exploration. On the other hand, its meanness is something I’m still struggling with and the official solo scenarios I tried felt like playing only half the game. In comes Joshua who originally created this book as a giveaway for SplotterCon and was now offering to sell the last few remaining copies he still had. Not only is it a love letter to the game and shows sides of it I didn’t know existed but also comes with solo scenarios that utilise parts of the Et Cetera expansion, and that should give me a lot more reasons to get this brilliant game to the table.
While I picked up my copy, I quickly leafed through the book and was so impressed, nay, shocked by the amount of passion and work Joshua had put into this that I spontaneously asked him for an interview.
Thanks for being so spontaneous. [I am just for the first time holding the book] in my hand and as I leaf through it, my heart blossoms. [Joshua laughs] There’s so much stuff in here! Why did you do this and where did the idea come from?
I really love Roads & Boats! It’s definitely one of my top favourite games, but the problem I found is twofold: The first is that when you look on BoardGameGeek – and whenever I see people play in person or posting photos on Twitter – maybe 90% of the photos that people take are of the one three player scenario, the triangle. [Alex laughs and nods] It’s because in the base game you have that scenario book (and it just has a few scenarios) and you have the Et Cetera scenarios as well. But then there’s other scenarios you can find online that people have posted over the years, or the solo scenarios, or even those on the old Splotter website. If you go to splotter.nl, they have those old ones. But if you want to find the right scenario, you have to search so many different places, right? And they’re all in a different format. Some look like just regular images, some people just take a picture, for some it’s just old style graphics or whatever.
I really wanted a place where people could just open up a single source and just choose anything they want. Because I feel like the few scenarios that come with the base game kind of direct you to a specific scenario based on your experience level. But I found that whenever people have access to any scenario, they are much more free-form in choosing. And so that was really the inspiration to collect them all and have them presented in a graphically consistent format so that there is no roadblock or mental barrier to choose any scenario, instead of just choosing the same one every single time.
Why did you decide on the book form? It is a lot of work putting everything together, finding a printer, … Why not create another blog that collects everything?
The inspiration was as a promotional item for SplotterCon. So I run a convention out in the United States called Winsome, Choose Some and it’s all about playing Winsome games. A friend of mine came to the Windsome, Choose Some events and said “you know, I have always wanted to have a Splotter convention”. And so I consulted for him and gave him a lot of inspiration and ideas for how to run the convention. I wanted to support him financially and promotionally. Now that I have this small little publication firm Neon Comet Games, it’s like, well, maybe I can make something for him. And the best way to do it was to make something physical that everyone who attended the convention could receive. So I gave this to everyone. Like 70-some participants at the first event received this for free.
Also the book has the most utility in its physical form, right? As an online publication or something, you still have to open up your phone or open up a computer and scroll and whatever. I found that if you have a book like this, you can just leaf through it like you mentioned and randomly choose something. Or if you can bookmark in your book – put a sticky note or dog ear the pages or something –, then you can come back to it later “oh, this is one I really want to try”. So it’s much better to have it physically, that you can just put it in front of you.
What was the editing process like? You searched the whole internet for everything you could find. Did you play through everything? [Joshua laughs] Did you create some scenarios yourself? It’s a daunting task, right?
Yeah. I started this project a couple years ago actually, just compiling all of the data, and I searched EVERYWHERE. I searched the old Splotter website, the books [that come] with the game, the forums, the pictures, reaching out to people on BoardGameGeek that have Roads & Boats listed as their number one game: “Hey, have you created any scenarios?”. I looked like everywhere. There was even one paper scenario that was given away to people at Gen Con 2018. [Alex laughs] It’s not on BoardGameGeek! I found it somehow.
Then actually this one guy who lives in Spain reached out to me: “Hey, I saw you posted this scenario several years ago, I like it, sounds very nice. I also created some scenarios. Too bad we are not living in the same location because you also like Leaving Earth which is one of my favorite games as well.” I said “wow, we should be neighbours”. “Well, you know, I’m coming to visit New York soon. We should hang out.” A few months ago, we met up in New York to play Roads and Boats. He and his friend Adelaida in Spain contributed so many scenarios for this book and then we collaborated on another scenario.
So [it was] so many different locations. But the editing process was just making sure that everything was super consistent, that there was no barriers to understanding everything. For example, I created a schema for knowing what tile I’m specifically talking about. If you look in the very back of the book, there’s a tile manifest where I’m like “It’s not a desert tile, it’s not a desert with a river tile. It’s specifically desert-with-gentle-curve tile”, right? So that way in the rules I can refer to that specific tile or you know the orientation is east versus west versus north. All of the solo scenarios show only red as the player color so that way you’re not confused if there are extra home tokens on there for artwork scenarios. Just trying to make it so consistent that it would be as usable as possible.
I saw you have actually added content of your own. You have this lovely introduction by Joris, I just saw the picture of this very very first Roads & Boats version made out of wood, … I had only heard legends of it. Before we started recording, you told me you actually went [to the Netherlands] to take the photo?
Yeah! [Joshua laughs] So I like to do things in person. I try not to do too many things electronically because it’s so impersonal for me. I knew Jeroen previously. He attended my convention for the first year and so I could very easily do this, say “hey, can I make this scenario work?” I could easily do that online. But I really wanted to visit because I had this plan in mind for many years to make this book. I finally decided to do it for SplotterCon. I wanted to meet them in person – both of them – to just talk about, “hey, I want to produce a scenario book that’s official, that I can give to people at SplatterCon.”
So I flew there with two ideas in mind: The first was to talk about the book, the second was I REALLY wanted to see this original hand-made wooden copy of the game. And so I actually went out there with some very specific equipment to 3D scan his clay components that he made by hand.
You’re kidding!
I did that. [Joshua laughs] So I’m in the process of making a resin replica of his original copy of the game.
Oh my god, you’re crazy! I love it!
It sounds like Roads & Boats is your passion game. You put so much effort into this. Why Roads & Boats?
For me it’s a system thing. Two of my top favourite games are Age of Steam and Roads & Boats. For me these are systems which are very amenable to scenarios that you can kind of push the boundaries with. I mean most people play Roads & Boats, they just change up the tiles and play the same game no matter what. But I found that you can actually do many scenarios that kind of push the mechanisms a little further.
When you open up the book, you’ll find that there’s a two-player scenario that is called “Middle Earth for two”. One player is the hobbit and the other player is the orc and the orcs are trying to bring a bomb to the Shire and the hobbits are trying to bring a ring to Mordor and you can really just kind of push this. Roads & Boats at its core is just a beautiful game in its logistical complexity and just how the rules are so robust. It feels so fragile, like the rules could be very easily broken: what if the goose is over here and there’s another donkey and, you know, very situational, very edge case things could happen. But still the rules are just solid in every situation and I really like that and wanted to try and expand it as much as possible.
So that’s why even this book is volume one. Hopefully someday, I can figure out enough more scenarios to have a volume 2 and with this release then maybe more people will start contributing more. So I want to make it as expansive as possible.
For everyone who missed the opportunity [to get the book], give them a bit of a pitch: what’s in this book? I saw there’s this lovely introduction, there are the scenarios, we also talked about there’s extra tiles in there, … Give people an idea what they’ll get and will they have a chance to get it after the convention?
I’m in talks with Splotter about doing a second printing and hopefully that will come soon. I know it will happen, we just have to come to the right agreement because this will no longer be specifically for SplotterCon. It will be a promotional thing for SplotterCon so that I can help to contribute financially but as much more of a [standalone] thing for the second printing.
You’re basically getting a license to do your own product sort of, right?
Exactly. So it will come. Hopefully in the next couple of months I’ll have more available. What you get is 161-ish scenarios that are categorised by player accounts. Solo player and two, three, four, five, six in that order. Many of the scenarios require extra tiles that are not included with the game or Et Cetera. So there are five sticker sheets with extra tiles. I created an expansion, like a secondary producer, that is specific for polder tiles and it’s called the Splotter Autter. It’s kind of a play on words like A-U, Autter, like for gold. So the Splotter Autter helps you produce more gold.
There’s a jump start variant in there. There is a treatise on “In Defense of Artwork” basically because nobody ever plays artwork, so trying to get people introduced to that idea. There’s maybe a five or six page “how to use this book” section just so that you are very familiar with all of the nuances for how the book is laid out, how best to use it. An introduction, just my own section that I wrote about why the book was written, which includes many exclusive pictures of Joris’ handmade wooden copy of the game. There’s a foreword written by Joris talking about how nice it is to have this book produced for SplotterCon. There’s a tile manifest that shows you how many tiles are included with the base game and with Et Cetera. There’s Sterling Babcock’s player aid in there as well. It’s just chock full of stuff.
Thanks for all the work you put in it, really excited to try it out.
Thank you so much.
This was a short, impromptu conversation I had with Joshua at SPIEL Essen 2024. As always, I applied some editing to make it more readable and clean up the phrasing. Any mistakes are likely mine as an editor and not Joshua’s.
Check out Joshua’s website Neon Comet Games to find out more about the Roads & Boats Scenario book and Age of Steam maps. Check out Splotter Spellen for Roads & Boats itself and all their other fine games.