❖ Version History ❖

The tale of Calendra begins in Pre-Pandemic:
❖ March: 2020 ❖

The 1st of March, 2020 (part: 1 – 12:00pm)
I invite Benjamin Seagrave over to my house because I have a game in mind that I want to discuss the origins of as a fun design test. The goal of this day is to create a super basic prototype game and test it at least once to see what happens, thus giving us a goal to strive toward. To this point in time, we have hammered out great work on our only other table top game at the time (a game called Gratuity, which we will come back to discuss one day), and I yearn to do a new project in a similar way. We meet around noon and begin talking game immediately.

For the first few hours we set the parameters a bit:
1. This is a game that features Runes.

2. We want it to be a deck building game… with a catch. Though it is a deck building concept, everyone only has access to the same original set of cards, thus avaoiding the necessity for randomized packs and simultaneously limiting the purchase of this game to one product.

3. The game should be able to do at least two players, and definitely up to four.

4. There are five sets of runes, and there should always be at least one more suit than there are in the maximum player count.

5. Each player has a suit designation: a particular suit that they need to do the best tricks, and win the game.

6. Randomization of the runes in your deck is a burden. This is the trigger for why you want to collect / sort the remaining runes in the game in your favor. By attaining runes of your suit from other players, you attain your chance at winning the game.

7. There are going to be 10 types of runes… but they could all have different strengths / abilities applied to them.

8. Runes will be one of three categories: Strength, Tricks, or Royalty.

9. When you ‘play a rune’ you only have a certain number of designated locations where they can be laid on a table. For example: there may be five slots in a front row, five in a back row, and perhaps some shared spaces between rows and neighboring players, where runes can be placed to alter larger areas of tiles.

10. The runes should have a Celtic vibe to them, and the suits should be the seasons.

As we discuss these topics for a while, I begin drawing and writing down some of what we are talking about, and these are the initial notes from that morning:

This page of notes is coming along rather well, and we can hardly wait to see how these ideas with continue to form as we go on, but we have hit a point where we are famished. It has been several hours now of us discussing these ideas & how they might work together, but we cannot go on with out some nourishment, and so we make our way to the local pizza shop for a sandwich and a break.

We walk to the restaurant and eat dinner while discussing the possible organization of the rune layouts…. How many runes should there be? How could we possibly balance the stats? What kind of lore can we add to the narrative of these runes to tell a story? It is likely an hour or two before we return home… but in that time we come up with an idea for the layout of the suits, the ways in which a player can win, & decide that there will be 25 runes in a suit, with only 10 unique rune types therein. We note that there should be several duplicates of certain runes so that the rounds may move more quickly. Returning to the house, I begin notating some of what we discussed once again:

It takes us a good couple rounds of arguing to determine which things we wanted to keep in this list and which we thought were getting out of hand, but we do come to an agreement pretty quickly. We also take great pleasure trying to figure out all of the interesting challenging combinations of rune types a player might need in order to achieve a win. Some of them seem like they might be too easy, or possibly too hard to achieve, but there is no way of knowing this without building a prototype and seeing how all the moving parts start to interact when thrust into motion.

Looking at the clock, it’s still only about 8pm by this point in time. It seems like it might be a stretch that I could get a functional prototype done in this same hangout session, but I decide to give it a go. So I find some scissors, a stack of index cards, five markers, and I get myself to work.