Invicta is a tabletop map strategy game for 3-6 players. In it, you play as the sovereign of an emerging European power with ambitions of continental domination. Through industry, diplomacy, doctrine, and warfare, make your bid for the position of European superpower.
In this post I intend to lay out the development path that led to the current state of this game.
A game played with my brother (left) and my nephew (middle). They end up ganging up on me.
Project History
Invicta was the first project that I took through the entire development cycle and convinced me to pursue game design as a career. The game started as a middle school art assignment to draw a map on a piece of wood covered in primer. To make this task easier, I laid out a grid on the board so I would have to focus only on getting the proportions right for tiny little squares rather than free handing the whole map.
After finishing the drawing, I realized it would make a decent board for a strategy game. I bought some centimeter cubes, drew up some initial rules for army movement, and the development process began.
Once I felt comfortable with the arrangement of borders for the map, I decided to get it printed from a custom game board company online. Paid a pretty penny for it but felt worthwhile.
Sources of Inspiration
I drew upon two primary sources for the game’s design: Risk, and Sid Meier’s Civilization series; games I played frequently in middle school. From risk, I took the D6 combat system and map style, and from civilization, I took the ideas of policy cards and city development. I also implemented events and crises inspired by Dead of Winter's system.
The three primary resources of the game were Gold, Influence, Manpower, which purchased buildings that produced more resources, or armies and navies. Navies (a passive number as opposed to unit on the board) and armies, produced naval movement and land movement respectively that powered the maneuvering and combat of armies across Europe.
This resulted in a game that had both tactical and strategic gameplay, that I found compelling if a bit rough around the edges.
The First Playtest
The first few playtests of the game were painful. The movement system was not quite right as players could simply juke around other armies as they retreated. The territories had different and unfair levels of strength compared to one another (a problem I continued to struggle with balancing). One of my dear friends, who has since 8th grade come around to the game, accused me of designing the game just so I could beat other people at it. The other people at the table also didn’t have good things to say. Some policy cards provided absurd combat bonuses or combat acceleration, or provided completely irrelevant bonuses. Players also complained about a lack of choice.
A game with several of my friends, played in my basement.
Modifications & Improvements
Since then, I’ve gone through about 5 different iterations of map design, developed numerous different policy cards and tightened up game balanced. Inspired by some design trends in Magic the Gathering, I’ve added a lot of what could be considered “Group Hug” cards to the game, which has fulfilled its role of increasing political dealings dramatically. I also tested hidden objectives mechanics and decreased the number of rounds the game takes by 3. I still find it a little tasteless that the game has a fixed number of rounds, but that's currently a low priority to fix.
Some avenues of change I explored included making the game a campaign played over multiple sessions, starting with the ancient world through the Victorian, but I found it difficult to get people to commit to that and most just preferred a new game from scratch anyway.
Future Development
For now, I am setting Invicta aside as I concentrate on schoolwork and smaller projects. In the future, however, I see two different development pathways.
I could continue to develop the game along its current path, focusing on balancing, streamlining existing mechanics, and adding more events and policies. The advantage of this is that it follows the principle of "If it ain't broke, don't fix it", as most of the mechanics in the game feel proven to work. But I feel that Invicta doesn't offer much that's new to the genre of strategy games.
Alternatively, I could retrofit the game with some systems I have developed since then for other projects. Levoid's Government Generator gave me a compelling foundation for simple but dynamic governments in board games, and I have a few other systems lying around for world creation, and a fantasy version of the game board I developed for a DND setting of mine a wgile ago. I feel like there's something grander than the current version of Invicta that I ought to put together.
Overall, Invicta has taught me a lot about the game development process.
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