At Essen, Bezier Games, purveyors of such fine games as Suburbia and One Night Ultimate Werewolf, were exhibiting their newest game, science fiction dice drafting engine builder Colony, adapted from a Japanese game called Age of Craft.

Busy as it was, Bezier did have a tiny square room for people to sit down and have a quick chat. I managed to talk to Colony designer Ted Alspach about the game and how it came to be.

Hi Ted!

Hello!

So I see you've got a lot of Colony at your booth.

Yes! We've got nine out of ten tables demoing Colony.

How's it been selling?

Well! Lots of people play it then come up to buy it, so that's been good for us.

Yay high conversion rate!

So tell me about the game.

Well, it started off as a Japanese game called Age of Craft that we updated. The print run on that was very small, maybe 300 copies? And you know Japanese games, they like to cram everything into a tiny box. The core system was very good, but the game came with a ton of different cards which were monochromatic, and the symbols were hard to read, and it was difficult to get into thematically – like this card costs X and Y and gives me A but this other cards costs X and W and gives me B – but A and B are COMPLETELY different, so how does that work thematically? We also tried to work down the downtime.

Age of Craft felt like a small game with a lot of components, whereas I think Colony feels like a big game.

So mainly you improved the usability and graphic design?

Yes. We had to find little things like the dice symbols on the cards being rotated 45 degrees means that it's much, much easier to see across the table.

The game is out at Essen?

Yes, and it's selling really well.

As a jumping off point for gamers who've played some of your other games such as Suburbia or Castles of Mad King Ludwig – I understand that Colony is a very different game, but could you perhaps describe it as a reference point?

Colony is more obviously an engine building game than Suburbia. In Suburbia there's more of a spatial element – you have adjacencies to think about, and then when the tile is locked off it's not going to interact with anything else – unless it's like an airport or a restaurant. In Colony you always have all your cards to work with – oh this card is going to give me a five every turn, so I can work towards a strategy that makes that work.

But it's pretty fast right, because it's just a race to 16 points?

Depends on the player count. 2 players is 20, 3 is 17.

How long does it take to play?

About 30 minutes.

What would you say is one of the joys of playing Colony?

As you discover and reveal the combos and engines that you can create with the cards, that's always fun. If I can combine these two and get some kind of runaway effect that's going to give me the game – and then other people are obviously going to try and do that. But finding the runaway effect with the dice you have available, that's the interesting part.

I imagine that led to some design issues.

Oh yeah. We tried to tune the knobs and adjust costs where we could. My teenage son was great for this because teenagers, you know, are always trying to find the loopholes and break the game.

Are you concerned there's one you might have missed?

Well, gamers are gonna glom onto broken combos just because that's what gamers do, but some cards feel better than they actually are – Gambler's Den and Power Supplement are the ones I'm thinking of. Gambler's Den is a card that lets you put dice on it and gives you extra dice next round if you roll well – I think it has a 40% chance of doing this? But some gamers will get lucky twice in a row then they're in love and even if it fails the next six times, they just feel like they rolled well. But when you upgrade Gambler's Den you use three dice instead of two – then the odds go up REALLY high and it's something like... 65% or 70%. It caters to different strategies and lets you play the game with some more variety.

My experience with XCOM has taught me that anything with less than a 100% chance is never to be trusted. NEVER. But Colony looks pretty low luck from what I can see because you can keep dice from round to round and over the whole 30 minutes you'll eventually roll what you need.

Well there was luck in Suburbia too, like if you spent your whole game setting up for this one tile that never actually shows up. It's low luck for a dice game, I'll say that.

What were some other design kinks that happened as you were working on the game?

One of the things we kept getting feedback on (we're still getting comments in this vein) is 'why don't you have custom dice? Why is it just regular six sided dice?' I love custom dice. I like the way they look visually, I love what they did to the theme, so for about a week during the design of the game I made up some resource faces, gave them little symbols, then put them on the dice and cards.

The game became almost unplayable. People were getting confused as to which symbol did what, they were looking across the table at the market and not understanding what they had vs what they needed vs what their opponents had. With six sided dice we didn't have that issue. A five is a five and you can see that all the way from across the table.

We also lost the ability to have cards like the Prize Safe or the Tweaker, which let you manipulate the numbers on the dice. The Prize Safe for example lets you turn a die into two dice with values that sum to the original, or the Tweaker lets you add or subtract one pip from any of your dice. You can't do that with resource symbols.

What else have you guys got going on at the moment?

Well we just announced New York Slice, that's a game coming out in January.

Tell me about that.

So in the game you've got all these different types of pizza, and you want to collect sets of them – Margherita, for example – and each pizza has a different amount of slices. Each round one player is the slicer – they take the pizza and divide it into different amounts – slicing it – and the other players then choose which segments they want and the slicer chooses last. So this I cut you choose mechanic is really interesting because you're trying to make it so that I give you enough slices that make this pizza really appealing to you but I'm also trying to keep the slices that I want for my own purposes but maybe you don't want enough. And of course, you can only slice pieces (Ted makes hand motions as though slicing an actual pizza) contiguously, you can't make it so that the slices separate.

And these are cardboard pieces?

Yeah, really thick chunky cardboard slices. And then we have other mechanics, like pepperoni counts for points even if you don't have a set, and there's something called the Daily Special which gives you points for that type of pizza, and some other fun mechanics we've got going on.

I saw this box outside – America, a trivia game. How's that selling?

Not so well at Essen, because, you know, Europe. The previous game, Terra, which had a global focus, did quite well last year. It's by Friedeman Friesse.

So it's a series. Terra into America into...?

Nothing yet. America is pretty easy to latch onto anyway, because our pop culture spreads all over the world.

Soft power, etc.

Yes.

Ted, thank you for your time. One final question: Would you take a picture of Colin with us?

Of course!

Look out for Ding & Dent’s review of Colony, out later this week.

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