"The Hungarian Tricolours without the Communist emblem, now flying on many public and other buildings throughout the city, while orderly crowds carrying their flags and singing patriotic songs are moving about at will. Without controlling the Government they appear to have come as close to controlling Budapest as is ever likely."
Leslie Fry, Confidential Telegram, Budapest to Foreign Office, 25 October 1956
We continue the conversation with Dávid Turczi, focusing now on the development of Days of Ire and the challenges of designing games that might echo individual stories and memories.
Are you fond of History subjects, at large, and History-based games?
I always enjoyed historical topics, especially ones I knew some stuff about, so I can feel smart and "put it all in context". Twilight Struggle and some good cold war thrillers particularly instilled a love of post-WWII history in me.
I don't play "simulation" wargames, I don't do hex-and-counters, and I prefer my excitement to come down to more than a lot of die rolling. That said, a good, well developed historical theme that might teach me some stuff, has a good chance of drawing me in, and then making me read Wikipedia afterwards.
What was the motivation to design a game based on the October Hungarian Revolution, and the will to honour those who stood up, back in 1956?
It was the 60th anniversary in 2016. Zsombor Zeöld, a friend of a friend, worked at the Hungarian Foreign Ministry, and suggested we design a game (with him consulting on the historical tidbits) and get some government grants to publish it.
The grants fell through (bureaucracy 😜) but at that point we were too invested in the process to give up, so ended up publishing it with my Maltese friends at Mighty Boards (initially known as Cloud Island).
When approaching such a subject, do you find time distance matters?
I was probably the least historically inclined of the team. My job was to make the game tight and the strategies matter. Yet, we were not far enough to look at things objectively, I still heard stories of people who said the game invoked tragic memories from their childhood, but they thanked us for the approach, so I'm happy we did it right.
Did you already had a thorough knowledge of the events or was a lot learned during game development? How was the research carried out?
I learnt some basic stuff in high school, read a book or two, had some discussions with my dad over the years, but I'm definitely not an expert on the subject. It was Zsombor's job to create "historical tidbits" we can use in the game, and Mihaly's to integrate it.
I find the games about recreating history to be conceptually more demanding, as they need to strike a compromise between history and a balanced playable board game. Can you give us some insights into the process of defining what elements would be in the game (such as places, events, actions, mechanisms, characters)?
Initially it was filling in the "interesting stories" Zsombor had for us, and the momentous events. Towards the end, it turned around, I posed gameplay requirements that Zsombor tried to "find a story for". We just kept asking each other "is there anything else we should mention?"
In many conflict games units and individual characters are “anonymous”, in others they have fictional identities, and still in others, such as Pavlov’s House, they represent real people and bear real names. Why the option to name the revolutionary fighters in Days of Ire?
That said we didn't want anyone's grandma to be in the game, so we went with "inspired by". Most characters were representing some noted rebel, or someone who did one notable act before disappearing from the stage of history, but we changed all the names out of respect for the dead and injured.
The mechanisms and the rule set are much more streamlined than, say, the “classical” wargames I grew up with, with their hundreds of counters, lengthy rulebooks, and a concern about time and space scales. One could say it is more event-driven than a typical combat simulation. What was the feel you were aiming for?
The card play of the Soviet side was inspired by Twilight Struggle, while the Revolutionary side was meant to be a "heavy Pandemic" alternative. Definitely not what you'd expect in a wargame, our different background shows here.
The game incorporates solo and co-op modes, playing as revolutionary, and competitive, where one player controls the soviet and state side. Was this intended from the very start, or have the different modes emerged along the way?
We started with the competitive. The solo/coop was designed specifically to mimic the feel of playing the Hungarian side against a live opponent.
That was Zsombor's good influence on all of us 😊
How long was the game in the making?
We started in the summer of 2014, the game got to Kickstarter in 2016 if I remember correctly. It was almost a self-publish, since Cloud Island was just one person and some extra help at the time (David Chircop, with whom I later worked together on Petrichor), so we briefed the graphic designer, the artist, proofing, everything. I learnt a lot about publishing process from this, from our own mistakes and ways we fixed them...
Why the follow-up with Nights of Fire?
Brian Train, the designer of A Distant Plain was a backer, and he mentioned that he designed a small tactical urban wargame about "the next week" of the soviet retribution. So, I asked him to co-design the sequel with me, and I married his tactical approach with my euro-inspired card play and low luck/high choice decision making.
Any project, in the design pipeline or just lurking, along this line of work?
I have a non-historical conflict game upcoming, Defence of Procyon III (shipping in a few months), which is a 2v2 wargame with minimal randomness, and 4 completely unique factions.
Thank you so much for your availability and kindness, Dávid!
Now we know a little more about Dávid Turczi, the person behind this and other games, and we just scratched the surface of game design, teamwork and the complementarity of roles, the hardships of publishing, the influence of previous games and the links to games yet to be, and the connections that are established.
Time to move on. Time to go inside the box!
List of episodes
Ep. 1 - Serious stuff
Ep. 2 - Meet Dávid Turczi
Ep. 3 - Designer insights
Ep. 4 - At the table
Ep. 5 - I joined the revolution!
Ep. 6 - The fate of the revolution
Ep. 7 - Budapest 1956, and beyond
No comments:
Post a Comment