Behind-the-scenes stories – by Matthias Nagy
Deckers is a success story for us. A bigger success than we anticipated. When we signed the game, it was primarily our love for puzzle games that can be played solo and cooperatively that drew us in. The designer is also no stranger to the industry, because Ricky Royal (Box of Delights) is one of the major YouTube channels for solo gamers. He was the first to make Mage Knight explainable.
After the success, I sat down my mind racing with ideas for how to meaningfully expand the game. The idea came up of having an SMC that could chameleon-like transform into all sorts of things. In a conversation with our editor Sebastian (Wenzlaff), we quickly realized that would be way too much. Perhaps there should only be two versions: an attack mode and a defense mode. I tinkered with the idea a bit more and then presented it to Ricky in November. I couldn't resist quoting Mission Impossible when I contacted him.
Ricky looked at everything, and the next thing he did were some solid ideas. He'd taken the bait. Ricky will certainly write a lot more about the development, but the result of the next three months was a new SMC that perfectly matched my vision.
The story of Janus, the two-headed god, is told very differently depending on whom you ask. Historically, there is the Temple of Janus and the Arch of Janus. And there was the Gate of Janus, which was closed when there was peace and open when there was war. The deeper one delves into the historical context, the more one realizes that there is much to draw inspiration from.
Technically, we have a kind of wall on the board. This wall is either open and permeable or closed and sharply dividing, depending on which side is open in the game. We put a lot of thought into how we wanted to handle the SMC flip. And since parsing a lot of text is somewhat time-consuming, we decided to put the wall rules on a separate card. This way, the rules for the tokens' behavior and the SMC's behavior are always quickly recognizable.
We didn't want to set the SMC to the highest difficulty level, but rather offer an exciting new experience, especially for fans of the game who have already seen everything. Based on my tests, I'd say Ricky succeeded. I can't wait until you can get your hands on the expansion at Essen.
In the next post, Matthias will show you the new deckers.
