Designer Diary: The Birth of Trickerion | BoardGameGeek News

by Viktor Péter

The Beginning

Great games are often born as a result of meticulous planning and years of industry experience. That said, passion, curiosity, and experimentation can sometimes make up for the lack of these, and starting with a blank slate and nothing to lose can help one think outside the box and tread paths that established companies might not risk.

This was exactly the case with Trickerion: Legends of Illusion.

On a ski trip in 2012, Richard Ámann and I had no intention of creating a product that would compete on the market. We simply came up with a snappy little card game (with players in the role of cardsharps and swindlers) to keep ourselves entertained when we ran out of games to play.

The idea stuck with us after returning home, and so did the desire to keep working on a game of our own. At the time, both of us had been getting into the heavier, classic worker-placement Euros like Agricola and Lords of Waterdeep, and as a result, our fledgling design gradually outgrew the limits of a simple card game — but the true spark of inspiration came when we pivoted from the loose “theme” of cardsharps to something much more interesting: magicians and stage illusion.

Theme First

There hadn’t been any board games with this theme at the time, and looking back now, it still feels like a sound choice with a lot of potential — but that wasn’t a consideration back then. The theme mostly came from both of us absolutely loving Christopher Nolan’s movie The Prestige, which made it clear to the world that Victorian magicians are awesome. The movie had become an infinite font of inspiration, and while it led to us adding a lot of things that ended up on the chopping block (more on that later), it did teach us to design by putting the theme first. That is something I stick with to this day, and I consider it to be one of the main reasons for the success of Mindclash Games.

With the new theme came some of the foundational elements that are still in the game today: the components, the tricks, the black market (the dark alley’s predecessor), and the two main measures of your success — money and fame. At this point, our lack of experience and little knowledge of design patterns became both a blessing and a curse. We had interesting out-of-the-box ideas, but had to go through a painstakingly long process of trial and error to weed out bad ones that would likely be obvious cuts today.

Once we had a (somewhat) functional game, our first milestone was to prepare it for a local university’s board game design competition that was called something like “1359 cm³ — the volume of the human brain”, with the size of the games designed by the applicants being as close to that as possible. We spent several all-nighters designing appropriately-sized packaging with the shape of a top hat — which, in retrospect, would have been time better spent polishing the actual gameplay…

Unsurprisingly we didn’t win, but we weren’t discouraged — quite the opposite. By then, we were too invested in the theme and the idea of creating our own game, so we went back to the drawing board. We kept the core idea of tricks with different categories and component requirements, scrapped most of the rest, and started building up what Trickerion is today.

The biggest step in the right direction was the addition of a main board with a Victorian city and locations that could be visited — and with it, our core mechanism: worker placement.

Initially, we had a system in which players’ apprentices — the only other worker type at first, beside the magician — would queue in front of the stores and other locations waiting for their turn, but it was a little silly thematically, so this evolved into the action-point system and the hidden, card-driven, simultaneous worker-placement system that we have today. This brought on the addition of specialists, starting with the assistant, and followed by the engineer and the manager for additional variety.

Scrapped Ideas

During this time, The Prestige‘s inspiration was so strong that we even tried to implement some of its more obscure elements into Trickerion. One example of these mechanisms was “Journey Abroad”: a train station action space where you could send only your magician, giving them up for an entire round. This action rewarded you with a special trick, chosen from an assortment that’s not available anywhere else. These tricks needed to be pretty insane to be worth it — just like in the movie, I guess… — and as a result, they were a nightmare to balance. We ended up axing the idea, but it still inspired the addition of the “signature tricks” later in the Dawn of Technology expansion.

Another example: Inspired by Angier and Borden’s cutthroat rivalry in The Prestige, we used to have a complex sub-system of magician relationships, ranging from friendly to hostile. These relationships were influenced by a number of things: playing hostile special assignment cards (of which we used to have a lot more), sabotaging performances (an actual game mechanism previously), co-performing together, and more.

While this was as thematic as it gets, a heavy Euro doesn’t need to be that cutthroat, so most of this ended up being cut. However, the legacy of this idea lives on in the system of co-performing and linking tricks together on performance cards; this is actually an integral part of the game, adding a slight semi-co-operative touch that rarely works in competitive Euros — but in this case, I think it holds up well.

As you can probably tell, at this point the design had about 50% more mechanisms than it does today — and it still has a lot today — so we spent most of the months ahead cutting this complexity and streamlining the game to its current form.

Thankfully, we had a lot of help from the board game community here in Hungary as we started participating in board game meetups and playtesting events, receiving valuable feedback from players who were into heavy Euros. Not only did the game get better as a result, but we also grew increasingly confident in our design, which led us to the decision to take it to the next level and try publishing it.

The Tipping Point

This decision was immediately followed by a lot of research and subsequent head-scratching because we didn’t have much knowledge about the inner workings of the board game industry, and we didn’t feel like our prototype looked good enough to start pitching it to publishers.

The breakthrough came on an evening out with an old high-school buddy of mine when he asked whether I had ever heard about Kickstarter. The platform was way smaller back then but more suitable for first-time creators, so after some research, Richard and I were set on our goal: Trickerion will be crowdfunded!

As we made this decision, it became clear that we had more work to do than we would if we worked with a publisher, and the first thing we needed to do something about was the game’s look.

My artistic talent ends at stick figures, and while Richard had some experience in UI design, we needed to find someone to create the game’s art fast and relatively cheap. Luckily, Richard knew someone from work who was looking for a change of pace, and that’s how we found Villő Farkas. Frankly, “luckily” is an understatement here; not only did Villő do an amazing job on Trickerion, she is still with Mindclash today as the illustrator/art director on most of our projects. I’m grateful to have such an awesome and talented person on our team and as a friend.

Having just become a trio, our second realization was that we could not keep working on Trickerion as an after-hours hobby project if we wanted to see it on Kickstarter anytime soon. Neither Richard nor I were particularly fond of our day jobs at the time, and with Villő already on board, we decided to take a leap of faith and quit, fully dedicating ourselves to Trickerion.

We gave ourselves six months to get the design, the art, and the UI in a good enough shape to run the crowdfunding campaign, and if it didn’t work out, we’d go back to a day job — but with full dedication and no company overhead to manage (yet), we progressed incredibly quickly!

Design Challenges

Besides the constant playtests, UI iteration, and illustration, we researched the work of past magicians and used this as further inspiration to divert from The Prestige and start building a world of our own. We knew how important the theme and setting were for a game meant for crowdfunding, so Richard began working on the story of the city of Magoria, Dahlgaard, and the Trickerion Stone. We used a lot of historic inspiration to create our characters, such as the Master of Chains, while we added a pinch of fantasy and mysticism to create others.

We also researched the actual magic tricks a lot. Tricks are the heart and soul of Trickerion, and we needed a lot of them in the game, so we were going for a good mix of:

• Tricks from The Prestige: Bullet Catch, Water Tank Escape, and of course, Transported Man

• Classic stage illusion: Zig Zag Lady, Card Manipulation, Rabbit from the Top Hat

• Tricks based on technology that matched our slightly steampunk visuals: almost the entire “mechanical” category

• Tricks that are borderline supernatural: Ghost Trap, Séance, Metamorphosis

In addition to all of that, we had yet another source of inspiration: Richard got Soma Hajnóczy, a world champion Hungarian magician, on board. Soma loved the project, and not only did he agree to have some of his own tricks included in the game — Paper Shred, Linking Rings — but he also performed them for us on camera to be used in our campaign updates. He became immortalized in the game as The Gentleman, and our friendship lasts to this day — so much so that Soma is now Richard’s brother-in-law.

Youtube Video

Youtube Video

On the flip side, all of these additional considerations added even more parameters to my own main task: the mechanical design of the tricks, where getting the component requirements right was still giving me nightmares. I needed to keep them balanced across the board, but they also had to make sense when it came to individual tricks, so there wasn’t a lot of flexibility.

On top of that, I needed to include “upgrade paths” among tricks in which the component requirements somewhat overlapped, but without the paths being blatantly obvious or strictly better than others. Even now, after ten years of game design experience, this had to be one of the hardest design challenges that I’ve faced, and while it’s not perfect, I think it stood the test of time quite well.

The First SPIEL

As Trickerion was getting close to being ready for the campaign, we had one last big step ahead of us. Having read Jamey Stegmaier‘s (incredibly useful) crowdfunding blog posts inside out, it was clear that we could not expect a successful campaign out of nowhere, no matter how good our game was, so we needed to generate exposure and buzz before launch. When it comes to board gaming events and conventions, the options in Hungary are limited, so we took a big breath and invested in a 10-square-meter booth at SPIEL ’14.

With only one prototype in our small space, we knew we needed to stand out to make an impact, so we borrowed equipment from wherever we could to turn our tiny booth into a Victorian-era stage, with us dressed up as illusionists — and it worked spectacularly! Both of our demo tables were constantly full, we gathered hundreds of sign-ups for our upcoming campaign, and, most importantly, we had an absolute blast! I’m sure that without this exposure, our campaign would not have been nearly as successful.

The Launch

That brings us to the final step of the journey leading up to Trickerion: us huddling up behind my laptop on January 29, 2015 and pressing the launch button on our first campaign. I still remember the number written on our whiteboard that Richard (quite literally) dreamed up as our final result: $60,584, a number we all would have been incredibly happy with.

The campaign absolutely blew through that, and the rest is history. That campaign not only launched Trickerion on its path, but also laid the foundations for Mindclash Games. I’m incredibly grateful to all of our original backers, as well as our supporters, playtesters, friends, and family for helping us make it happen, but most importantly to Richard and Villő for this wild ride together. Mindclash’s past ten years — which we’re celebrating with a tenth anniversary edition of Trickerion — wouldn’t have been the same without you, and I’m looking forward to the next ten!

Thanks very much for reading!

Viktor Péter

From left: Viktor, Villő, Richard