Ben approached me with two potential jumping off points: a mechanic involving a 2v2 competition with only one winner (the winning player of the winning team), or a competition to garner favor from a pantheon of gods with a variety of unique win conditions. Both sounded interesting to me— I came into this just wanting to make something with resource-gathering, I was open to anything— so I suggested combining them. I tried framing the game as a team competition where both sides are praying to the same pantheon and trying to gain their attention, in order to gain power and become a hero or demigod. The easiest reference for this became the Trojan War; though we dropped specific references to the related epics, we kept the framing device and the Greek pantheon.
Originally, we considered simulating a more complex resource-gathering and/or siege experience with a board game. We consulted the rulebooks of Tokaido, Stardew Valley: The Board Game, Cosmic Encounter, and Root. While certainly inspiring, we soon realized that these games were far too complex for our purposes. Instead, we turned away from board games entirely and decided to simplify the aspects of these games we enjoyed into a card game format. Instead of journeying around a board collecting various goods, the main resource became simply the cards themselves. Rather than spending currency or resources, the players would discard cards to “pay” for whichever actions they wanted to perform.
Simplifying the game seemed to make it harder to track how well each individual was doing, outside of their teams. We separated out the discard piles: players could either discard cards toward team goals, or toward their own pile of “offerings”. Offerings determined an individual’s score, but they had less impact on the team’s progress. Each team needed to get as many gods on their side as they could. Each player needed to make as many offerings as they could. In sum, the winning player would be the player with the most offerings, on the team that was favored by the most gods. This meant that players had clear personal trackers, but they couldn’t be too selfish— only making offerings without contributing to team goals would still lose them the game.
Returning to our inspiration from the Greek pantheon, we devised conditions for “winning” the favor of each of the thirteen Olympians. Rather than long-term goals, each Olympian’s favor became much easier to gain, but also to lose. This was more appropriate for the theming, considering their temperament in classic mythology, and it added much more variety to the game. Both teams needed to gain as many gods’ favors as they could, but some gods had very specific or contradictory conditions. Each god also enabled different “special actions”, or prayers. The players would—hopefully— be motivated to leverage the powers of certain gods at certain times, rather than simply maintaining a few.
At this point, we finally had a fleshed-out set of rules, so we got set prototyping and playtesting.
Our first set of cards was entirely handwritten, so we could add, remove, or change cards during our playtest. It became quickly apparent that the start of our game was a slow one— we originally started out with no cards in your hand, which meant the first three or so rounds were just drawing cards. We tweaked the wording of some cards and entirely removed others. We nearly doubled the amount of Resource cards available. We made destroying buildings a bit more difficult: originally, it “cost” the same amount of discards as building something, but that made retaliation a bit too easy.
Our feedback was perhaps a bit biased, coming from friends, but still encouraging. As stated previously, they confirmed that the start of the game was a bit of a drag, but the overall mechanics were interesting and complex enough to reward many different strategies. Our playtesters appreciated complicated games, as did we, so that was high praise. For this playtest, with everyone barely learning the rules, the competitive aspect wasn’t quite able to shine. Teams shared pretty much everything with each other, since they weren’t as motivated to be the singular winner, nor did they really know what information to keep to themselves. This aspect of playtesting became even more clear during our classmates’ 15-minute playtesting experiences; it’s clear that Athena’s Gambit is for a specific audience and a decent chunk of time.
Design-wise, our next step was printing out cards, which made increasing the deck size much easier, and allowed us to make smaller, easier-to-handle cards. We added iconography, so the cards had clearer meanings from a distance. We also added physical representations of the gods, so we could more easily track who had what Favors.
Moving forward, we will be tweaking the action economy even more and further refining the physical design. We already started prototyping card mats in the middle of our classroom playtests, which seemed to make a big difference. Gods will likely get smaller figures, with their card text being kept on a “cheat sheet” and in the rulebook instead, so it’s less obvious which gods each team is paying attention to.
