Since last year’s conversation for Origin Stories: Brass was so much fun, I once again caught up with Martin at SPIEL Essen 2024. I was interested to learn why there were suddenly so many releases of his at the fair. Also that very morning, I had played my very first session of Steam Power, a game we had only talked about in the abstract during our last conversation. So a good opportunity to ask about his plans for that one as well.
New Releases & Many Things To Come
You seem to have been very busy because you have multiple big games coming out this fair AND you have your own booth. Like what happened with you? Is it us seeing Wallace Design blossoming?
Well, it’s a number of things. Yeah, there are some other games I’m aware of at other booths like Chaos Cove, Æterna (which isn’t for sale but is being presented here), but these are games I did a long time ago, way before COVID. And for one reason or another, they had long development times. So sometimes, yes, it looks like you have been doing a lot but with these games … like with Æterna, I’ve completely forgotten how to play it. [Alex laughs]
[Martin jokingly] I have no idea. I’ve got a vague memory and I saw “oh, I think it’s got a roman theme” but I might be wrong. Same with the games we got here. Steam Power did come together fairly quickly, Zero to Hero we didn’t start work on until May this year.
Oh wow!
I already had the design done. But when I showed it to my artist Leith who does Steam Power, I said “hey, do you want to do the artwork for this?” and like next day “yeah, here’s your cover, got the graphic design” – because there is not a lot of artwork in it.
So that came about very quickly and it’s a bit of an afterthought. I had shown it to some other companies and I think they were worried about the pricing of the physical components. I suppose I’ve reached a point now where it’s much easier to do the game myself and then when other companies see it they go “oh, now I understand what this is. Yes, we are interested in licensing it.” or interested in being a partner. So rather than me going with a prototype, I say “here is the finished article, are you interested in it?”.
… and we already sold copies, people like it.
Yes and you can already see the response.
In the future there is other stuff: I’ve got a game here Animal Rules Football where all the artwork is done, but it’s not going to go to crowd funding because it’s just a card game. So we are finding partners, people we can do this with and that will be out some time next year. Animal Rules is a simple two player sports game based on Australian rules football. But you are playing with teams of animals. It’s like a team of kangaroos, koalas, kookaburra, wombat, and so on. So each team has its different strength and weaknesses.
We got the Fighting Fantasy game which is still ongoing where we are hoping to have all the artwork finished by end of this year and then we’ll be going into production early next year, so we are reaching the end of the line on that.
Casus Belli
I’ve got a new game I’m working on that I started on in March this year called Casus Belli which is a big space 4x game I’m really excited about! This game is I think one of the best games I’ve ever designed. What it does is it kind of mixes lots of well known intellectual properties like there is maybe a well-known film like Star [REDACTED] maybe or a TV show like Star [REDACTED] and it might, it might take things like that and mix them together with maybe a little bit of Doctor [REDACTED] and possibly [REDACTED] 5.
[jokingly] Obviously I have to be careful what I say because I’ll get sued. But it does it in the same way that Awaken Realms [does it] with their Nemesis, you can see the inspiration. So the game is inspired by TV shows and films and it takes all those inspirations and mixes them all up to make this big space 4x game that can still be played in two to two and a half hours. So yeah, a lot of stuff coming out in the future.
I saw Casus Belli on the table yesterday. What state is it in? Will it be retail, crowd funding? Can I buy it here at the booth?
What you saw yesterday, that’s sort of placeholder artwork, not the final artwork. That’s just stuff that’s been dragged off the internet just to make it look pretty. We just produced that so we have review copies to send out to influencers so that they hopefully can comment on the mechanics, not the artwork. We already started on the artwork but the bulk of it will have to wait until my art director is finished on the Fighting Fantasy Adventure game. We only have a certain amount of bandwidth. At the moment, I don’t want to stop Rupert working on the Fighting Fantasy game even though he is really super excited doing Casus Belli [Alex laughs] I’m like “no, finish that job first!”
Focus, focus!
Yeah! We will look at Casus Belli and yes make it look as good as it can possibly be.
What’s your target date?
I like it to be on Gamefound by March / April next year. If we can get ahead on the artwork … I’m aiming to have the retail version ready for Essen next year. That would be the plan, but there’s a lot of artwork in the game. So it depends on how long it will take to get the artwork done. But we already started on the 3D sculpts for the models. I think about 3 or 4 … [Martin stops, counts for a moment in his head, then continues surprised] I think we got most of them done actually! So we really made a start on the base artwork.
Wallace Designs
I remember us last time talking about how you found enjoyment in working with your own network of people. That you find people that you can trust and say do [what you do best]. It sounds a bit like it’s coming to fruition. You now have your [group of] people and if you have a new idea, you can say “you are great with sculpts, you are great with solo work, you’re …”
Yeah that’s definitely the case where I can just show the team and say yeah, this is what we are doing and they just get on and do stuff.
Hypothetically, if I come to you and say I have this brilliant marketing idea, there is this – I don’t know – soccer event coming up or something. What do you think, how quickly could you design the game, produce everything and have it ready for the shops now?
Let’s say with Zero to Hero, we went from standing start to having a product between May and October.
That’s impressive!
We can work quickly. Casus Belli, that took me two weeks to design.
[Alex laughs] You shouldn’t say this!
The thing is, it was based on a game I’d already done, A Handful of Stars. So I wasn’t designing from scratch. Also it didn’t need much research because it’s just based on all these things I already knew. Everybody knows Star [REDACTED], everybody knows these things. Whereas there’s another game I’m working on – a future projects – on War of the Roses. Now that’s taking longer because I’m still at the research. I’m just at the point of starting to do the base design. But there’s been a lot of research, a lot of reading I’ve had to do leading up to that.
If a game has got a historical base, that’s what slows things down, because I need to do the reading. If it’s got a simple theme, then I can turn it around really quickly.
I think people need to have the context that two weeks of “Martin Wallace time” is a lot of time. I know Anno 1800 also was a pretty quick design for you, and people loved that one.
I think when things click, things happen very quickly.
Almost like writing a song or an album, right? Sometimes you go in the studio for 15 minutes and there you have it.
Yeah, and it just all falls into place.
Steam Power
So let’s jump to Steam Power. I played it today and good news, everyone at the table liked it. In Germany we have a word that’s called “süffig”. It’s basically describes a drink you can’t stop drinking. I had the feeling Steam Power might be just like that. You’re playing it and you’re thinking, okay, it’s just another train game, it’s got cubes, I’ve seen that before. And somehow we came to the end of the shortened demo game and all of us were like “I was about to do this and this and this … shouldn’t we go on?”.
When you designed Steam Power, who were you aiming for? What do you think is the target audience?
It is aimed at a wider market. It’s trying to produce something for those people who don’t like complicated train games. I wanted to do a game where you could choose where you built the track, a track laying game. But those games that have that element, like Age of Steam or 18xx, are also long, complex games. They’re also not physically very attractive. So what I was trying to do with Steam Power was do something that gives you the track building, but without all of the complexity. That everything else is stripped down as much as possible.
I also wanted a game where it’s all about allowing you to do things. It seems to me there’s quite a few games on the market where the game makes it hard to do things. Like, you can’t do this until you have a plan and then you have to have your worker in this position here and then you have to have someone to … You can spend half a game setting up something to allow you to do something.
Seven rounds later, you can build one thing.
Yeah, and with [Steam Power], it’s like the fun bit is just doing it. You want to build a track, boom, put the track down. You don’t pay for it, you just put it down. You want to build a factory, you put the factory down and you put some resources with it, that is the action. So it’s all about allowing players to do what they want to do. Because you’re still in competition with other players, but you’re not butting heads with the game. You’re not in competition with the game, you’re in competition with other players.
That’s what I was saying while we were playing. It’s like the rules get out of the way so quickly, it almost feels very old school. You’re more thinking about what the other players are doing, how you can block them or benefit from them, rather than you’re thinking about rules, which is very refreshing I have to say.
Yeah, I take old school as a compliment. I feel that. It’s not trying to do anything incredibly ambitious or unique, but it’s just trying to be a solid straightforward train game that a wide range of people can enjoy.
Are you a bit afraid that people may pass it by because it doesn’t have this unique thing that attracts people when they’re walking by the booth?
I think that – as you know – every year now there are thousands upon thousands of games and most of them they’re around for a couple of minutes and then they disappear. What I want to try and do with Steam Power is be patient, play the long game. It’s like, yeah, it might not become an immediate success, but sometimes things require … you know, there’s a slow burn. Like Pandemic. Pandemic was not an instantaneous success. It’s a risk, but my strategy for Steam Power is just to keep it in the marketplace and hopefully just word spreads.
The best form of marketing is when people play at somebody’s house. I mean Catan, it’s all word of mouth. Carcassonne, word of mouth. All these games have become successful. It’s not marketing, it’s word of mouth. So as long as you can get enough games out there to seed the game population, then you hope word of mouth might help. And that might take a few years.
In the short term, I’m not worried about the sales of it. I’m not expecting it to be an overnight success. But I like the idea that here is a game worth having in your collection because you know that when you pull it off the shelf you don’t have to spend an hour re-learning the rules.
And you know you will have a good time.
Yes, and you know you can play the game in an hour and you know you can play it with a wide range of people, teach this game to a non-gamer because it’s intuitive. People know what railways do. Building track, that makes sense. Moving goods along track, that makes sense. It’s not like some of these games where they might have a theme but they still feel highly abstract. You’re not exactly sure, “why am I doing this? What is the purpose of that?”, when this is all very straightforward.
Give people – like the heavy train gamers or the BGG crowd that buys tons of Kickstarter – give them a sense how much depth is in the game. If you look at it, it sounds very simple, right? You build the factories, you take this and flip that. What are the nasty moves you have seen people doing?
The real skill or strategy in the game is reading the board. Because the resource cities are set up randomly, right from the beginning you should be playing the end game. You should be looking at: right, which resources are likely to become shortages towards the end of the game? How do I make sure I’ve got access to them? You need to make sure you don’t cut yourself off from certain resources because when you’re moving resources along other people’s track you have to pay them for that. If you have to pay six or seven dollars for a resource then you’re very quickly going to have to run out of money. So that’s to my mind where the skill is, where you’re looking ahead and planning what you think your final network will look like.
And then below that, yeah, there is that tactical blocking of getting to cities before other players or getting to a choke point before somebody else. Or you can do this thing where – because you can build factories on any city that’s connected to a track – I’ve seen this done in some games where certain people focus on putting factories down because then other people are forced to pay them money all the time. You can do quite well with that strategy. So it’s not always necessarily about who’s got the biggest network. If you get a lot of factories down, you can do very well in the game.
Can you do an economical win, like basically hoarding all the money and have very few points from cities?
I’ve not seen it done yet. It might be difficult, but I’ve seen it to a degree, it varies from map to map. On some maps that would work better than others. Like on the Spain map that works quite well because Spain is very mountainous, so building track is quite expensive. Going for factories probably works better on that than on the steel belt map where it’s more open and where track is cheap to build.
It felt a bit to me like Steam Power is almost a best-of album of Martin Wallace training games. Like you’re picking certain things from different games but distilling it and the only thing that was missing was taking loans basically. But I could see the flipping from Brass, I could see this element from [another game] … was that your intent? Hey I want to distill everything down so I can reach a wide audience and they understand what’s the excitement for train games about?
I was missing … I haven’t done a train game for a long time. Having a train game like this is like having a train set because you can do maps, it’s not a one-off game. It’s like you have the fun of designing different maps and then there will be expansion maps obviously! So it’s part of missing that. You know we had that with Age of Steam where we had a series of maps and then for one reason or another I don’t do anything with that now but we don’t have enough time to discuss that. So basically I just wanted to be able to have my little train game that I could play around with.
Nice! So more to come with Steam Power in the future?
Oh yeah, yeah! There’ll be number of more maps. At some point I’ll probably do a stock market version. You can play it more like an 18xx game. I’ve already half-thought through the rules for that.
Interesting!
I’ve done it before. It’s all stuff I’ve done before. There’s nothing unfamiliar to me.
I like this image of you building your new train set to play with. Very cool, looking forward to everything that’s coming. Good luck with Essen and the booth.
Thank you.
Disclaimer: this is an edited version of a 20 min conversation we did at SPIEL Essen 2024. Any errors are likely mine as editor and not Martin’s. The redaction of titles of well-known sci-fi franchises was done by me. I just thought it was funny and matched the tongue-in-cheek undertones with which Martin expressed the fact that he of course won’t infringe on any existing IP, merely borrow inspiration from them. Thanks to Cassie, Leith, and Iain from Wallace Designs for helping me out with some of the pictures. While I was at Essen, I unfortunately forgot to shoot anything besides Steam Power itself.
Steam Power is now out in retail with its Gamefound Deluxe edition still awaiting fulfilment. I was able to check out the acrylic hex tiles of the Deluxe edition while I was at Essen and I have to say they felt quite nice and very tastefully done. Looking forward to my copy arriving.