Hey there, I’m Stan Kordonskiy, and I wanted to share my story of how I came to design Minos: Dawn of Bronze Age.
My original prototype of this game was called “Bronze Dynasties”, but to make it less confusing, I will refer to this game as Minos from here on out.
The idea for this game came from my two previously published titles: Rurik: Dawn of Kiev and Endless Winter: Paleoamericans. After designing Endless Winter, I wanted to make another game in a historical setting but advance it forward from the Ice Age to the Bronze Age. At the same time, I wanted to re-implement my main mechanism from Rurik. If you are not familiar with Rurik, I’ll give you a quick rundown.
This interesting mechanism that I called “auction programming” combines action programming (selecting your actions for the round) and auction (bidding for something). In Rurik, it was implemented by using numbered meeples, which players took turns placing on a strategy board, selecting and simultaneously bidding on their future actions.
In Minos, I decided to create a different version of this mechanism that would use dice drafting instead of pre-set meeples. Finding new ways to use dice in board games is a bit of a passion for me. My first design was Dice Hospital, where I used dice to represent hospital patients, with the dice pips corresponding to how healthy or ill they were. Later, I designed Shadow Kingdoms of Valeria, where dice represented player’s armies, and Guild Academies of Valeria, where the dice are students studying in a fantasy academy.
This brings us to how I use the dice in Minos. At the beginning of each round, the dice are rolled, then are drafted and assigned to a variety of actions that players will take later in the round. Different colors of the dice correspond to different tracks (military, economic, cultural) on which players can focus, and the dice value signifies the order of actions that a player will be able to take. The lower-value dice will outbid the higher-value dice for better versions of any given action, but the higher-value dice are superior for advancing on the tracks, which can gain significant advantages during the game.
This is one of my favorite things to design: the way of balancing player choices so that they are presented with several equally enticing propositions. All of the dice colors are useful in their own right, and both the high and the low values have their own advantages. Furthermore, the different actions available to the players are all useful, but it is not possible to do all of them equally well, so player must prioritize based on their own strategy, as well as the opponent’s choices.
Let’s talk about these actions. Because the drafting of the dice can be a tricky choice, I wanted to counterbalance that complexity with an easy and clear list of actions to which these dice would be applied. Otherwise, the game was at risk of becoming very complicated and overly long. Early on, I decided to have only a few core actions that were easily understood and distinct from one another: drafting cards, playing cards, building structures, and deploying and moving population tokens.
The cards in this game are another highlight for me. Earlier I mentioned Endless Winter. In that game — a deck-builder — I used cards that had different uses depending on whether players played them during the round or saved them for the “end of the round” phase. I quite like multi-use cards, and for Minos I wanted to find another way to use that mechanism.
Image: Wouter Debisschop
In Minos, players do not use deck building. Instead, the cards can be drafted, then played to gain a wide variety of immediate benefits that can reinforce a player’s strategy or allow them to pivot during the game. After these cards are played, some of them can be transferred to the player’s palace area, where they will provide ongoing bonuses that can again contribute to the player’s overall strategy. Since all cards have a different combination of instant and ongoing abilities, as well as different costs, choosing the right cards to play is a big part of this game. Players who can do this well will be rewarded with an engine that makes their future turns much more powerful.
Now that I’ve talked about the highlights of the game design, I want to mention how the game came to be published by Board&Dice. For those who are interested in being a game designer, I have to say that designing a game and finding a publisher for your game are equally important tasks.
After I designed and playtested Minos for about six months, both in person and on Tabletop Simulator, I felt that it was in good shape to start looking for a publisher. I showed this game to both the publisher of Rurik and the publisher of Endless Winter since it had some ties to both and since I already had a working relationship with them. However, both publishers passed on this project for different reasons.
Don’t be surprised — this happens in the boardgame business all the time. Making games is a time-consuming and expensive endeavor, and any past success is no guarantee of easy future access to publishers. I showed this design to several other companies, and as a part of the evaluation process by the publisher of CloudAge, I even got to play it online with the much more accomplished game designer Alexander Pfister, which honestly was a bit of a high point for me. Although the publisher passed on this game, the fact that Alexander seemed to like my design encouraged me tremendously.
In 2022, I traveled to the SPIEL convention in Essen. It was a big year for me because Endless Winter was released to a positive reception, and it was going to be featured at SPIEL as well — but aside from enjoying my newest release, I planned to meet with several publishers to pitch my new designs, including Minos.
I approached Board&Dice via email because I felt that the game‘s weight, mechanisms, and theme would fit the type of games they were publishing. I quite enjoy their titles and felt that they would be a great company to take on Minos. My pitch meeting with B&D was actually rather brief. They didn’t have a meeting room available, so I ended up showing them my prototype on a small counter space in their booth. As a result, I could not set up and show the entire game; instead I think I got about twenty minutes or so to talk about the main mechanisms and show separate components of the game to try to explain how the dice drafting and placement would work and how the multi-use cards were used in the game. I did not think such an impromptu pitch was going to make much of an impression, but B&D seemed interested in my game and requested that I leave the prototype with them so that they could play it and evaluate it in detail.
To my surprise, several weeks later B&D came back with an offer to publish Minos. This was already great news for me, but I was also told that it would be made for a SPIEL Essen release in 2024 — which is rather fast by modern industry standards.
Naturally, between the time this game was signed to Board&Dice and the time it was released the publisher did a mountain of work, including development, playtesting, and art and graphics production, just to name a few items. Covering every aspect of the design and development process would make this a much longer read, so I will just end it here.
I’m proud of Minos and thankful to Board&Dice for their excellent job as a publisher.
Best wishes,
Stanislav Kordonskiy
Image: Wouter Debisschop
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