Olympus

Os criadores de Kingsburg – Andreas Chiarvesio e Luca Iennaco – têm jogo novo para levar a Essen, as promessas de um jogos sem sorte envolvida e bastante ensaio, são os condimentos para mais uma receita lúdica de sucesso, desta dupla italiana que começa a ter de ser considerada como um caso sério no design de jogos.

O simpático Andreas Chiarvesio falou ao JE para nos dar algumas informações sobre o seu novo jogo. O que se segue é essa pequena conversa em jeito de entrevista.

Para já a entrevista está só em inglês, mas em breve tentaremos publicá-la em português.

BRANCO

JE – When do you start the concept of Olympus?

Andreas Chiarvesio (AC) – I started working at Olympus right after Kingsburg was released, in 2007. If you want to know the full story, in a similar way to how the basic Kingsburg mechanic was born in my mind (as an “improvement” of the basic mechanic of a game I really appreciate like Settlers of Catan), the very first inspirational source for Olympus was another game I love, Puerto Rico. I really like Puerto Rico, but sometimes when playing I feel that the player seated to the right of the weakest player at the table has an unfair advantage. And the same could be said for Agricola, another great game. So, I started thinking to a basic game mechanic that had role selection, and the opportunity for the other players to perform the same action choosed by the active player, but that shoudl come with a cost and not automatically like in Puerto Rico. From there, the basic mechanism with three “workers” for each player was born. It was now time to find a theme, and I always liked ancient Greek mythology and history, so it looked to me a good match: the workers become priests going to ask favors to the deities on behalf of their cities. From here, development started. Something the theme was calling for (and is almost unheard of in worker placement and role selection games) was direct interaction between players. Instead of facing a common enemy like in Kingsburg, here players can, may and maybe must wage war to each other. Conflict is solved very basically (if my army is stronger than your army I win, point) and it’s not the core of the game, but it may play an important role.

BRANCO

JE – Do Olympus share some basic structure from the Kingsburg?

AC – To reply, I have to go back to the parallelism Kingsburg = Settlers of Catan and Olympus = Puerto Rico. I would say Olympus is at least as different from Kingsburg as Puerto Rico is different from Settlers of Catan. In all four games, actually, you build things by giving back resources to the general supply. This is what all of those games have in common (and in all of those games you generate those resources somehow). Because of this, in both Olympus and Kingsburg you can build “buildings” (in Olympus, however, there is no fixed order to do this, but instead your ability to make a certain building is linked to your cultural level, it’s like a very basic technology tree, typical of civilization games). Still some buildings in Olympus are linked to each other (like having a Library without a School won’t be that useful, since if very few of your citizens can read books a Library won’t do much for your city; likewise a Fleet will be a serious improvement to your Army, if you have a decent land army, otherwise will stay on the sea and watch your city being pillaged, etc…) What instead I would call the most important difference between the two games is the role of random factors. Although Kingsburg still involves much more skill than luck, it has random elements. Olympus on the other hand is a totally deterministic game. The only “randomic” factor is the starting player.

BRANCO

JE – With one more game which is expected to be a successful, the double Chiarvesio / Iennaco is becoming a serious case in the panorama of game developers. How do you explain such success?

AC – Olympus still has to become a success (hope it will be but we can’t be sure), so how can I reply to this question? I will take the opportunity to say that myself and Luca (Luke) complete each other very well. I am the one that comes up with the main mechanics, the settings and the general purpose of the game, he is the mathematic mind behind balancing and most of the development. We share a great love for boardgames, and we both want to deliver the best possible game to the right target audience, so this makes it possible for us to work together with what I would call at least decent results 🙂

BRANCO

JE – How much will cost the game?

AC – This is indeed a question for our publisher, I don’t have the answer to that. The first release will be multilanguage, English and Italian, and will have a very limited print run. So you can expect this first edition to be, maybe, slightly more expensive than future reprints.

BRANCO

JE – Do you will be at Essen to promote the game? All days?

AC – Yes, I will be there to help promote the game, most of the days if not for the whole Essen, so that first-edition signed copies will become more unique and valuable 😀 And I look forward to try many new promising games during Essen, as always 🙂

BRANCO

JE – How would you define this game in few words?

AC – A no-luck worker placement with direct interaction, set in ancient Greece, with the feeling of a light-civ game. Have fun.