Cat Land Designer Diary #1
This is the first in a series of essays about the creation and design of Cat Land, a medium-weight euro-style tabletop boardgame.
You can read the next entry in this Designer Diary here!
I’d like to give the game an ancient Egyptian name but Cat Land is a useful working title.
Inspiration for Cat Land
The impetus to create Cat Land came from my first experience of living full time with a housecat. My daughter acquired Sullivan as a rescue several years ago and when she came to live with us she brought Sullivan with her. Sullivan was fairly traumatized and at first he would only come out of my daughter’s room to use his litter box. My daughter has since left home but her cat has stayed.
As we moved from house to house, Sullivan came out of his shell and became an indoor-outdoor cat. I was very interested in his behavior, and the extent that it is shaped by his instincts and his lived experiences. To learn more about housecats I did a little reading on the subject and learned a lot about how they live and how they interact with humans.
Housecats were domesticated from wild desert cats which still live in parts of the Near East and Africa. Cats were probably domesticated about 10,000 years ago. A tomb in Cyprus contains the bones of a recognizably domesticated cat and is dated to approximately 7,000 BCE. Because housecats and their wild ancestors are still genetically very similar (they can interbreed) the domestication process is harder to determine than it was for dogs (which are now genetically distinct from their grey wolf ancestors). Domestication of cats may have occurred multiple times in multiple places across the Near East at the end of the neolithic and beginning of the bronze age.
Domesticated cats are known to have flourished in ancient Egypt. It isn’t hard to imagine that as the area became more arid which forced the desert tribes into the Nile river zone and the development of agriculture began (and thus an increased population of rodents), wild and partially domesticated cats would have been increasingly valued and would eventually become the fully domesticated housecats we know today.
I decided that it would be interesting to make a game about the domestication of cats in ancient Egypt; a game concept that combined my newfound interest in housecats with a long term interest in bronze age cultures and the development of civilization.
Game Mechanics
In my position as Chief Operating Officer at Alderac Entertainment Group one of my jobs is to take pitch meetings from designers who want to sell a game design to the company. As a result I have reviewed several hundred prototype games in the past several years and have developed some strong feelings about the kinds of games I think have a chance to be commercially successful.
I wanted Cat Land to reflect those insights, so the design envelope I set for myself was bounded by the level of complexity I feel appropriate, the kinds of mechanics I think are popular, the number of players who might encounter the game, and the length of time the game should require to play.
The Servants of Bastet
The players are servants of the cat goddess Bastet. She has commanded them to help the Egyptian civilization to become mighty, so that cats will flourish throughout the land.
Bastet has decreed that after nine lives (turns) she will determine which of her servants has pleased her most in this endeavor. She has also decided that if the Egyptians succeed in discovering the mysteries of the cosmos and if one of their Pharaohs ascends to the afterlife as a god she will immediately decide which servant has won her favor.
The Nine Lives
The game is played in a series of turns, called “Lives”. By default there are nine Lives in the game although as noted above if the Egyptians succeed in elevating a Pharaoh to godhood the game will end regardless of how many Lives have passed.
Each turn consists of a series of discrete phases. These phases set up the turn, allow the players to act sequentially until no further actions are possible, resolve effects from the turn, and then clean up prior to the start of the next turn.
Worker Placement
The core of Cat Land is worker placement. In this mechanic, players have a limited number of cats (aka “workers”) that they can deploy onto the board each turn. The places that the cats can be deployed may be restricted in number and by various prerequisites. Typically, placing a cat at a location generates some kind of effect on the game state. It is common that placement of cats is exclusive — that is, once a player sends a cat to a location, that location is blocked for the remainder of the turn. Placing a cat on a location that is advantageous to a player’s strategy is normal, but sometimes the best play is to impact another player’s strategy by blocking the place the opponent would like to use.
Typically in euro-style games players accumulate victory points until an end-game condition is triggered, after which end of game effects are resolved and final scores totaled to determine the winner. The intersection of how a player assigns cats, what the results of those assignments are, and how they convert to victory points forms the core strategic choices of the game.
The Trait Deck
To capture the sense that the cats in the game are undergoing genetic selection by their human companions I wanted to introduce a mechanic which would allow the players to differentiate their cats from the other players. I did not want to build an elaborate breeding simulation into the game. My final design solution was the Trait Deck.
The Trait Deck represents the various attributes that have accumulated in a line of cats. All cats begin with an identical Trait Deck and as the game is played choices made by the players alter the contents of the Trait Deck until at the end of the game a player’s cats have a selection of Traits generated by player choice and some element of chance.
Each turn the players deal out a selection of cards from their Trait Decks which determine the Traits their cats will have for that turn. By altering the contents of the Trait Deck the players can influence the odds that Traits they wish to use are more likely to express themselves over time.
Development of Civilization
The center of the game is a symbolic representation of the city of Memphis. Memphis was founded in the 1st Dynasty around 3,100 BCE, at about the time Upper and Lower Egypt were unified for the first time into one political body. As the center of Egyptian society for over a thousand years, Memphis became the largest city in the world for its time.
As the game begins, Memphis is a relatively simple place that consists of a small number of locations where cats can be sent by the servants of Bastet. As the game progresses these areas upgrade and become more complex based on player actions, with several different potential paths of development which means the game gains replay value.
This mechanic is designed to limit the complexity of the rules required to begin play. A new player only needs to understand the minimum mechanics of the turn order, how to assign cats, and how to interpret the instructions on the starting cards which comprise the beginning state of Memphis. As the game progresses, the components themselves will reveal the instructions for new rules and new systems allowing inexperienced players to “learn as they play”.
Next Steps
Cat Land has progressed to the point where I am ready to create the first playable prototype. That process will be the feature of the next entry in this Design Diary.
