Designer Diary: Daitoshi | BoardGameGeek News

In 2022, I had a meeting with David Esbrí, who is responsible for Devir‘s original releases. He wanted me to work on a new game for the Kemushi Saga. I was given a lot of liberty to decide how the game should work, but a few key elements were required:

1. It should be set in a steampunk world, and players would have to build a city.

2. The future of the saga after this game was Sand, which means players had to destroy the environment so that the previously green world would become the wasteland portrayed in Sand.

3. As part of the Kemushi Saga, the Yokai should be present, although in a secondary way as the game should focus on the humans.

4. David asked me to add a zeppelin, if possible.

With all of that in mind, I got to work.

The City

For some reason, I immediately envisioned the city as a circle. I imagined a rondel in which you would move and send your workers to do actions on the several spots of each sector. This first idea focused on the workers and depended on players expanding the city to increase the number of worker-placement spots. The starting sectors had weak versions of each action, and only when you started to improve the city would those actions become more powerful. As usual, the first idea had many problems, but after several tests, it was obvious that the basic structure was not working.

Players were not expanding the city, and when they did, the new combinations of actions in a sector were not working well together. The game felt slow, and it was taking way too long for the actions to improve, so players were constantly doing weak and unsatisfying actions. What’s more, the worker-placement aspect was confusing as each color of worker had a special power that would interact with the action they performed, so the number of possible combinations and specific rules to make it work was a problem.

It took me several iterations to find the correct structure for the game, and also to simplify it as much as possible as there were too many icons and special rules players had to keep in mind. But most importantly, I had to scratch the original idea of workers carrying all the weight of the game.

I came up with a simple structure, a series of steps that players would follow every turn that would work the same no matter which district they visited, while at the same time pushing players in different directions to create interesting decisions. I came up with these steps:

1. When visiting a district, players could place workers of the color of that district. The more you had of that color, the more rewards you could get, so this encouraged players to visit the districts based on the colors of the workers they had. This simplified the version with each worker having a special power…but in a way, they still had a special power, which was the ability to work on that specific district.

2. Then, players had to exploit the land shown on the district, and that could cause them problems if they accumulated too many of the same type of land hex, but it also rewarded players with more workers of different colors, which could condition their next moves. This also solved a problem I had with the original version when players refused to take those tiles as much as possible; now it was mandatory, which helped me control the length of the game as those tiles act as the timer.

3. Finally, players could do the action of the district, which depended on having enough of its related resource. With enough of them, you could do the powerful versions of the actions from the beginning of the game rather than having to wait for the powerful versions of those actions to be built.

Always the same structure — with four colors of workers, four types of lands to exploit, and four actions that require four resources — and to get the most of it, you needed to have the right color of workers, to be able to deal with the land you got, and to have enough of the resource needed to perform the action, all at the same time. You have only one decision — which district to move your magnate to — but many consequences from that single decision, some positive and some negative, which would also affect your future turns.

This structure required players to plan ahead, but I usually like some tactical elements in my games, usually coming in the form of positive interaction between players, the idea of having a new opportunity because of something another player did. This could happen on the main board when players build or electrify districts on the city, add or improve the existing worker placement spots that you then may use, or move the mega-machine to a new district that may now look more beneficial to you, but the main source of this kind of interaction happened on the player boards.

The Environment and the Factories

The main reason to exploit the land of this steampunk world that will eventually lead to Sand is to gain steam. Steam is easily gained in this game, but it’s also easily spent, and one of the main ways to do it is in your factories. This part of the game was pretty much the same from beginning to end: You have three factories on your player board that you can fill with inventions so that when you produce and spend steam, you can get all kind of resources, rewards, and victory points.

I wanted a powerful engine-building aspect in this game, and this system was mostly working well from the beginning. Whenever somebody needed resources, they could run their engines instead of playing a normal turn, giving them resources and improving their engine for future activations. I was quite happy with the system, but one small and simple change suggested during a playtest greatly improved this mechanism: Whenever you decide to produce, everybody produces.

Turns that previously happened only on your player board and that had no effect on others were now a huge moment for everybody at the table, becoming a source of positive interaction and allowing you to generate resources you were not expecting when somebody else decided to produce. To balance this and to avoid the producing player feeling like they wasted their turn, I increased the rewards for this player — not only to make the action more worth it, but also to allow different strategies, making it viable both to produce a lot during the game and to wait for others to do it.

The basic structure was working. This could have been enough for a steampunk game about building a city, but this one is set in the Kemushi Saga, and there was another aspect missing, one that took me the most time to get right.

The Yokai Are Not Happy

Daitoshi is not a game about building a city; it’s a game about the consequences of a city being built — and those consequences had to be felt both at the end of the game and during the game, which was a huge challenge.

I don’t like to punish players in my games. I’m much more comfortable rewarding them while playing, but this was a key part of the story this game is telling, with Sand following it chronologically. The Yokai, the protectors of the land, had to fight back once you started destroying the environment, and it had to be something players would notice and try to avoid as much as possible — while also being something from which they could recover. Players had to succeed in this fight against the Yokai, so the game would follow the story of the Kemushi Saga.

After discarding a few ideas, I came up with the core elements of the current version. Each one of the Yokai would affect you negatively in one area of the game, like the number of workers you could hold or the amount of steam you had to spend to activate your factories. They would be linked to the environment tiles you were destroying in order to produce steam, and their effects would start affecting you once you had two hexes of the same type — and those effects and would disappear once you reduced that number to at most one.

The idea was solid, but getting them balanced was a nightmare.

I was constantly swinging from one extreme to the other, either making them barely noticeable or making them destroy any chances players had to win. Any tiny change on them made them swing! This was, for sure, the part that took me the most to get right, and it involved a lot of playtesting and balancing, changing their effects and the options for players to get rid of them, and creating systems to give players under their effects options to succeed. They had to be an important part of the game, but getting rid of all of them should not be a mandatory strategy.

This was the hardest part of the game to balance, but also one of the key elements that made this game feel special. The tension they create as players know every turn they take on the city they must take at least one of those, combined with the relief of keeping them under control — and even the feeling of success when you manage to score a lot of endgame points based on your ability to get rid of them — makes all the frustrating moments I had when I was trying to get them right worth it.

The Mega-Machine

I was requested a zeppelin. Frequently in steampunk worlds, huge machines are built, and I didn’t want to lose the opportunity to do so in this game, but the way to do it should feel special.

The game has four main actions, and they all work the same: You have to go to a specific district to perform them, you have to spend one specific resource (and the more you have, the more powerful the action), and you can perform any of those actions from the beginning of the game.

The mega-machine action is the opposite: it’s not on a specific district as it moves during the game, it’s the only action that needs different resources, and you can’t perform it until mid-game as you also need a sufficiently developed invention. It’s also the only piece in the game that moves in a counter-clockwise direction, and there are several versions of it, so it’s different every time you play. I wanted to make it feel special in every way as I wanted it to be seen as one of the goals of the game — not only giving players great rewards, but also causing unique effects, such as changing the inventions in your factories (and the strategies they may enable) through the game, or creating a mobile worker-placement spot that becomes more powerful as the game progresses.

This idea was there since the beginning, and while I did some balancing changes through the development process, it’s one of those rare cases in which the starting idea stayed pretty much the same, which is a refreshing change since more often than not, these kind of strange ideas end up being discarded once it becomes obvious they will never work.

Conclusion

My goal with every game I do is to try new things, to make them different from my previous games, and hopefully, from any other game. This one was tough to design due to its thematic restrictions, but also rewarding as I think I was able to incorporate original ideas, while keeping it true to its theme and to the story being told.

It’s a game in which you will probably need one or two plays in order to discover how everything interacts and the many strategies you can follow, but that will hopefully make the journey enjoyable.

In any case, I hope you like it and that you found this diary interesting!

Dani Garcia