Hello fellow gamers!
The Ancient Mediterranean Seas! An epoch full of myths. Endless coasts to be discovered and conquered. But the ancient empires were also Empires of trade and commerce in search of rare goods and grain to feed their people at home. Here it is: The game series that covers this fascinating era. Move your armies and ships over a vast map and lead your empire to the Golden Age.
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Why no dice?
I’ve played board games since I was a kid. At the age of 12, Risk was my game, many of you will relate. Having an intense interest in history I soon switched to more “serious” games and discovered hex and counter war-games.
After playing strategy board games for more than 40 years I often felt unsatisfied with almost most games because no matter how good my plan was, victory often depended on the last decisive die roll.
I know that in a game where many dice are rolled, in the end normally dice results even out. That is a question of statistics. So, normally you can’t blame dice for not winning a game. In many of today’s designs you have a mechanism with dice and or cards. Playing “Card Driven Games” (CDG) or Settlers, I feel played by these cards or the dice and my actions depend on what cards I have available, or in case of Settlers how I roll the dice.
Take any strategy game you played and you will most likely remember the moment when you did everything right over the last hours of play and then to win you only need a die roll of XY. But you fail on that vital roll. Frustrating, isn’t it?
In HISTORY OF THE ANCIENT SEAS (HOTAS) and our following game designs we skip dice and cards for the good reason that we want gamers to focus on their decisions and the only uncertainty is that you don’t know the plans, strategies and decisions taken by your opponents.
In my view this creates enough uncertainty. In HOTAS, you can’t blame the game if you don’t win, because your opponent had better die rolls or better event cards. This eventuality cannot occur precisely as a result of not having a reliance on dice or better event cards. You can only blame yourself because you didn’t choose the right actions and you have not been playing as efficiently.
In HOTAS you need to plan your actions carefully, and it is not always the most evident action that is best. A game of HOTAS is not easy to win. It is not always the player who expanded most on the map who will win. You have to time the flow of your end game very carefully. If you don’t do this, you will be often short of 1 or 2 Victory Points and your opponents will coordinate their actions to stop you from winning.
You need to find the right moment to offer “Armistice” to threatening opponents; or build monuments to achieve a swift victory. Often the end game of a winning player will look like a backhand blow. It comes quick and unexpected.
We created a challenging system with no more than 12 pages of rules. You will spend most of the time in the game making decisions.
But I hear you! There are many gamers out there who love playing board games having these die rolls or the event cards. They love the thrill of not knowing what cards their opponents have in their hand and they love the thrill of chucking the dice in their hand praying for the result between x and z to gain the last necessary victory point. I am not blind to this. That is why we will offer two additional things: A dice-based combat resolution system as free download from our website and “Event/Hero cards” for the early bird pledgers. Both come for free. The “Hero” and “Event Cards” will add a lot of flavor and randomness to the game. If you remember and liked the “instants” in “Magic: The Gathering” you will love these cards. We will introduce you to these play cards in a later blog post!
And for those who even want more uncertainty we will offer the expansion NEW MARKETS. This expansion contains merchandise tokens that are placed face down on the map. This will mean that players don’t know what merchandise they will get once they create a trade post. You invest what is asked for, the token is revealed and only then does the player know what kind of merchandise he gets. Read more about our expansions for HOTAS in one of the upcoming blogs. They all offer a lot of variety to the games in this series.
Let us know what you think about games that are not driven by dice and cards.
And please don’t forget to subscribe our Kickstarter Campaign to be informed when we launch it!
Take care and thanks for your interest in our games! See you in the next blog post,
your Uwe Walentin.
The “History of the Ancient Seas” Kickstarter campaign was successfully funded!