Today, we’re joining Karl Lange, designer of „Unter the Mango Tree“, in a deep dive about developing this quick and easy, family-friendly drafting game about the Australian wildlife. He explores all the different aspects that went into creating a game, so there’s a lot to learn. Let’s Go!
2020
2020 was, so far, my most successful year for game creation. Like it or loathe it, Melbourne, Australia (my home town) was in lockdown / work from home for over ⅔ of the year. For me, this meant I was saving hours on my day job commute, and had copious time to work on my designs, with 4 of the 6 games I designed that year being signed (Under the Mango tree being the second being released).
The Idea
With most of my designs, I tend to find my starting point is often a mechanic that I haven’t explored before, or a component that I find exciting. In this case, it was both.
I had an idea for a family weight game using domino style cards, where you are only using half of each card, tucking the other half away. Mechanically, I have always liked pick and pass drafting but until now had never explored it. It is clean, simple to grasp, and has low downtime which felt it would fit well with this weight of game of the game, so the idea was born.
One of my design goals with all my games is to have “baked in” complexity where the game rules themselves are very simple, but the systems and layers within the game add multiple layers of complexity to be discovered by players (emergent strategy). Basically, make the game do the heavy lifting, not the players.
From here, I looked to some of my favourite pick and pass drafting games and find what I liked and didn’t like about them. The two that I took the most inspiration from being 7 Wonders by Antoine Bauza and Sushi Go by Phil Walker-Harding.
One thing I love about both games is they have a great range of ways you can score points, allowing a wide range of strategies. You are always engaged in not only what you are collecting but also what your neighbours are collecting.There were two things I felt could be improved in both games, the first being the initial setup time – sorting cards by player count / selecting which sets to use.
Around this time, I’d been playing more games with new gamers, and had seen the friction additional setup could cause in getting games to the table. For that reason, I wanted this game to be an ‘open and play’ experience. The other element I felt could be improved was scoring between rounds. Having to write down scores mid game or calculate who gets tokens felt like it could be streamlined keeping people engaged without breaking them away from the flow of the game.
Magic Numbers
As an engineer by trade, I love math and numbers. There are a few ‘magic numbers’ and ‘magic sequences’ in my designs, numbers that I see coming up regularly, so I often use them as a starting point when working on a new game. 12 is great for example as a number of rounds in a game, as is it divisible by 2, 3, and 4 players. Similarly, 60 is special as it is divisible by 2, 3, 4, and 5. For this reason, I decided 60 cards was my starting point for the game as I could have an even number of cards across all player counts to each player.
The Deck
Using a deck of 60 domino style cards (each card having 2 items) meant that I had 120 spaces to fill. I decided 5 scoring elements would add enough decision space to the game, while keeping the game in the family weight range that I wanted.
120 spaces ÷ 5 scoring elements = 24 of each item
5 elements choose 2 per card (5C2) = 10 unique combinations of cards
60 cards ÷ 10 unique combinations = 6 cards of each combination
But what would these items be and how would they score?
The Player Board
I decided to give each player a board for a few reasons. By having a player board for each player, all their scoring summaries could be listed directly in front of each player. This would remove any memory element to the game as everything is clearly displayed to everyone.
Having a player board worked well for tucking the cards also, allowing only one half to remain visible.
This also allowed me to get creative with the positioning of the items around the board. In musing on the concept with my wife, she suggested having the player board as a scenescape that players could build to add table presence, and create a story as players add more cards throughout the game, which led to the first element, the tree growing from the centre of the player board.
Thematically, with the tree as the centrepiece the game started as a farming theme, then called Movin’ to the Country (a reference to the song “Peaches” by the Presidents of the United States of America) with a peach tree as the central element of the game.
Bringing it all together
From here I’ll talk about each of the 5 scoring elements in the game, and how they evolved over the course of the design. There were 12 unique versions of the player board, each with at least 1 major change to how an element scored, and countless minor versions tweaking numbers to get the balance right.
Mango Tree (multiplication)
The Tree itself had had the least change to it of all the elements of the game. I wanted a multiplication scoring, and all the other elements of the game were balanced around the tree.
The very first version had 8 cards with peaches (lorikeets in the final version), and 16 cards with branches (mangos in the final version). This remained the same until version 8 onwards when there were a number of passes to the cards, adding in the double mango and lorikeet / mango cards. These gave some spicy choices, and gave the ability for players catch up if they hadn’t started their tree.
The last change was to balance the different player counts. As the same deck is used for all player counts, it means that with more players, you draft less cards throughout the game. To counteract the reduced number of lorikeets going around, I added one to the 4 player side of the board.
Beehive (majority)
I wanted an element that players were directly completing with their opponents on, majorities seemed the obvious way to do this.
The bees initially started as flowers in a garden, with points for most, 2nd most, 3rd most, etc. The cards themselves there were 10x 1 flower, 8x 2 flowers, and 6x 3 flowers.
there were a lot of changes to this element from the start, as players could get a lot of points for very few cards if others ignored them, but would often turn into a sunk cost fallacy with players overcommitting, and not earning many points elsewhere.
the next version had points for most, and negative points for least flowers, which worked well in that all players were encouraged to interact with that element, but the payoff per card was still a little off.
To fix this problem, I changed to your flowers minus the player with the least flowers (so if you had 8 and the player with the least had 3, you would score 5 points).
This again worked quite well, but the reward per card was still not balanced. To balance this more, I increased the number of flowers on the cards from 1,2 or 3, to 2, 3, or 4 (as it remained in the final version). This gave a smaller jump per card but could still be very low points if everyone was competing for them, from version 11 onwards, I switched to points if you have majority to the player on your left, and points if you have majority to the player on your right. This felt much cleaner, as you were only looking at players nearest to you and it allowed the points to be much more evenly spread around the table, as multiple people could gain majority.
Animal reserve (pairs and triples)
Animals was another area that didn’t have a huge change throughout the design of the game, other than balancing values. I decided on 6 animals, 4 of each, so multiple players could possibly get a pair. For more than half of the versions, there were only points for pairs. Players had mused that they would often want to take a third of an animal so stop others being able to get a pair, but it wasn’t worth anything to them, so taking this feedback onboard, I added high value points for triples which both made people pay attention to what others were taking to stop them getting a third, but also meant more people would keep animals more often as there were good points available if they could get them. Thematically this worked well, also as I saw it as repopulation.
As with the tree, at 4 players, it was harder to get a pair and triple as the animals were spread more thinly through more players, so I increased the points to ensure they were still sought after.
Coast (sets of unique fish)
The coast started as train stops, where you were trying to collect unique stops. There were 8 items, with 3 of each, which remained throughout. This has very few mechanical changes, with lots of micro adjustments to the scores for sets to balance against the rest of the elements.
Garbage removal (minimum required)
This section has had the most changes of all the elements. There are 24 identical cards for this element. With the original theme you were growing wheat fields and in the first version, you were scoring points for your largest completed rectangle. This had problems as players would want to rearrange the position at the end to maximise their points. To simplify this, I changed it to 3 points per completed column of 2. This was too close to the pairs scoring so was completely overhauled.
The next version (v5) I changed to points per round. This worked well but went against my initial goal of keeping all scoring to the end of the game to maintain engagement throughout the gameplay. Version 8 onwards saw a change to earning points for filling slots from left to right, with a swinging curve where the first card would earn you lots of points (relatively) but the next would earn you very few.
It was at this point (version 10) that I started pitching the design around to publishers, when one publisher after some testing, suggested making the fields negative unless you collect a specified number, and earning you positive if you reach the threshold. This has a similar effect to the previous scoring but was much more understandable. You could still overinvest, costing you points, or ignore it completely in an attempt to make up those points in other sections.
Retheme
After some great feedback but ultimately no contract from the publisher above, I decided to retheme the game slightly as the generic farming theme seemed to be doing the game a disservice.
It was here that I decided to lean into give it an environmental theme and lean into the Australian animals to really make it stand out to an international audience.
The tree became fruit × lorikeets, the flowers became bees, the animals all became Australian natives, the train stations became fish, and the wheat fields, with their now negative points for not collecting them became rubbish in the sea. This had an immediate effect with multiple publishers becoming interested and really showed me how important theme can be for a game.
Signing
After a few months testing by the Deep Print Games team, I was offered a contract. Jump forward 12 months and they began development of the game, keeping the Australian theme, leaning into it further with the addition of the koala rubbish bins and the quokka family which I adore. Dennis did a fantastic job bringing life and colour to the game with great representations of all the animals. The addition of the duel-layer board and the storage tiles for when you pick a card identifying which item you selected were also welcome changes that you can see in the finished game.
I would also like to extend a thank you to my wife Laura, fellow designers Tom Cox, Joel Kennedy, and Matt Gleeson for countless playtests of this and many many other games, and the Incubator [ONLINE] playtest group. Lastly thanks to the Deep Print Games team for making this game beautiful and available to so many – I hope everyone can enjoy growing their little slice of Australia.
Thank you Karl for these amazing insights into the development!
