by Box of Delights

Deckers began as a somewhat different game, way back in 2010. Such is the way with board game design and development.

It was a time when the hobby of board games was really starting to hot up. I had recently discovered modern board gaming — and solo gaming in particular through games like Pandemic (Matt Leacock, 2008) and Flash Point (Kevin Lanzing, 2010) — and was being exposed to wonderful new game mechanisms that were being developed within this acceleration of modern board game design.

Deck-building in particular, which we first experienced via Dominion (Donald X. Vaccarino, 2008), was magical to me. It created these cascading card combinations that exploded into seemingly boundless strategies that blew my mind. It reminded me of the feeling I got when I played a sandbox video game for the first time, which would have been Elite (Acornsoft, 1984) on the BBC micro back in the 1980s.

Needless to say, board games like Dominion, Pandemic, and Flash Point, as well as video games like Elite were highly influential in my desire to create a board game that created that feeling of empowering the player to find emergent tactics and to give them that “sandbox” sense of creativity, finding combination card play that rewards them by saying, “That was one smart play!”

I started collecting and playing all sorts of new games; my hunger was insatiable. I was enjoying this new kaleidoscope of mechanisms, but I couldn’t find a game that combined them in a way where I got to experience them all together, so I decided to redirect my energies.

My new mission was to create the kind of board game that I wanted to play. Of course those early games remained influential to my initial designs. For example, the game has threats spawning across its board, and as in Pandemic, my early designs used cards to spawn those new threats.

But I soon switched to using dice, after the inspiration of Flash Point. I preferred this idea because not only did it give me a wider distribution of threats, but it also meant both the players and I as designer — and thus orchestrator — could interact with those dice, either through the game rules themselves or via card effects.

And what about deck-building? How do I incorporate deck-building and make it feel different? Well, let’s make sure that when we get new cards, they don’t go to a discard pile; let’s make them available straight away in your hand. Nice. Tick to the one thing I wanted from a deck-builder.

Next, I don’t want all that shuffling. Let’s not start with a small deck and make it bigger, then have to work to cut away the chaff from it. Let’s stick with a fixed deck of twenty cards (which was soon to become ffteen as the streamlining knife got to work) that you can swap cards in and out of, so it’s always twenty cards. A fixed deck meant I knew, as the designer, how many rounds it would take to get through the day, and I could better control game length and flow. Okay, now we’re getting somewhere!

Now we have a deck…but what the heck does that deck do for you? It gives you the power to influence the board! I had found a winning combination.

Many other designers developed the same idea around this time. Trains (Hisashi Hayashi, 2012) was one of the first. One I subsequently and particularly enjoyed was Asgard’s Chosen (Morgan Dontanville, 2013). There have been many more since. One thing to get used to as a designer: Whatever you think of, there’s a good chance someone else is thinking of it, too! But this key idea became central to Deckers: the deck we build becomes our toolbox to act out change on the board.

So to the board. The game board is the world our players inhabit. It started life as a map of anglo-saxon England, with the seven kingdoms that made up its heptarchy. It was in this place where my game created a new layer of depth; not only can we build our deck, and thus enhance the toolbox we have in our hands, but we can also develop our pieces on the board. These pieces each have unique abilities that can combine and evolve like our deck, and together this duality created a rich palette with which we could play in our sandbox world.

With a new game designed, one that I would want to play, it was around 2012 that I started showing the game to publishers. Ultimately I took the game to a publisher I had been cooperating with as a YouTube content creator, and a publisher I knew loved the kind of things I encapsulated in this game.

For any budding new designers, this is a wonderful piece of advice: Take your design to a publisher who publishes the kind of games you have made. For me, this was Alan Emrich’s Victory Point Games. Alan was a trailblazer not only for independent designers and publishers and for historical games, but also for solo and co-operative games. I had played and loved titles from them like Nemo’s War (Chris Taylor, 2009) and the whole States of Siege series, which included games like Zulus on the Ramparts (Joseph Miranda, 2009), Empires in America (Joseph Miranda, 2009) and Cruel Necessity (John Welch, 2013).

Alan was immediately enthusiastic about the game and its ideas, but wanted to go in a completely different direction with the setting. Alan offered up a variety of alternative settings for the game in order to broaden VPG’s portfolio of titles, and he set me up with his team, including developer Tylar Allinder who was fresh from working with Bandai-Namco with a CCG and TCG background. This new team was keen to develop a cyberpunk game, and thus my project took a sharp left turn and I was thrown into the world of netrunners and deckjockeys.

This change of setting necessitated a lot of rule changes. The game changed perspective: from an open expanse of towns and countryside to a claustrophobic closed world; from a place where players were kings managing a story-driven land of peoples to hackers in abstract puzzle-solving confinement. Britons became “parks”, fortifications became installations, and roads became network pathways. The game’s core remained the same, but its theme changed to one in which the game’s payoff was in solving its puzzles.

The game funded on Kickstarter, and players were able to table the game I had dreamt of, with its deck-building and evolving board pieces intact, albeit in a new setting, with renegade hackers fighting an evil corporation intent on controlling the citizens of a cyberpunk Japan.

Unfortunately for Alan, Tylar, and the rest of the team, Victory Point Games was subsequently acquired, and the game fizzled out of existence.

However, in 2023 the game, now out of contract, drew the attention of Matthias Nagy of Frosted Games/Deep Print Games, and we began talks about giving the game a new lease on life as Deckers.

One way a publisher can bring your game to life is to engage with an artist who will realize the characters and the world they inhabit. As a designer, you can offer guidance and direction, but it is the artist’s flair and imagination that puts those images on screen, paper, and card, and suddenly your game bursts with life. In my game’s story that artist was Clark Miller (who has worked with Ian O’Toole on Nemo’s War, and with designer Hermann Luttmann on Dawn of the Zeds 3rd edition), and in the latest release from Deep Print Games that artist is Lukas Siegmon.

With the VPG release I was very much “director” with the artwork and was blown away by Clark’s ability to interpret my characters and story into the images he created. With Deckers and Lukas’s work with Deep Print Games, I have been a lot more hands-off. Deep Print Games is an established publisher that needs little direction from a designer, particularly when re-implementing an existing game. I was happy to leave the game in their hands and trusting — as well as excited — to see what they came up with.

Lukas is a digital artist with many game works under his belt, including Reykholt (2018), Nova Luna (2019), The Princes of Florence (2022), and Intarsia (2024), and what he has done with the game is a wonderful representation of my world. I had written a whole playable story, stringing a series of game missions together that expanded on the world and its characters. This playable story did not make the final print, but Lukas’s art delivered that story with its images, some with darkness, some with humor, and all wonderfully vibrant. I hope you will enjoy playing with these cards as you puzzle through Deckers‘ missions.

This re-imagining of the game was also a huge opportunity for me to use the experience gained from the 5+ years the game had been in players’ hands. I am quite active on forums answering rules questions and listening to player feedback, so I had an awareness of the game’s faults and shortcomings, and thus where I could improve things.

Together with the new developer at Deep Print Games, Sebastian Wenzlaff, we set to work refining the rules and bringing new and updated content to the game. Sebastian, an experienced rulebook editor and developer, brought new and keen eyes to the project. His perspective and eye for detail brought a new level of refinement, not just to the rulebook, but also to the wording of each and every card.

Sebastian has been a joy to work with. He saw the details and was able to quickly reach an understanding of what I wanted the game to do. He was able to spot inconsistencies or highlight where new players might struggle with the game. He was a wonderful filter for refining the complexities into more user-friendly rules. Together we were able to create something that we hope will bring the game to new audiences. With expansion ideas that I had been bursting to get included in the game, and the years of development that were waiting to be realized, Lukas, Sebastian, and Deep Print Games were finally able to deliver the complete package that I wanted the game to be.

So what is Deckers now? It is a complete package. There are no expansions. There are no gaps. It creates solo/co-operative puzzles in a cyberpunk world where players take on the role of hackers, developing a deck of cards that represent the commands they issue from being jacked-in to a virtual network, allowing them to upload and install their programs to spread their influence over its servers, to carry out a series of goals, and ultimately to bring down the super-massive computers that are governing society with an autocratic power.

The rulebook is fresh and user-friendly. It no longer overwhelms new players with a mountain of thematic jargon, but instead delivers it in drips so that the game can be learned and then mastered more easily. There are new bosses to take on, new victory conditions, a refinement in some of the actions the players take (for example, the Modify action has been powered down, and Shifting has been powered up), the way the network explodes its threats has been changed to make the evil powers more threatening whilst also simpler for the players to execute, and each and every card has been re-crafted to provide a more balanced and refined game.

With Deckers debuting at SPIEL Essen 25, I am writing this designer diary with a retrospection that is both a reflection on what the game was and the journey it took to where it is now, but also with trepidation as I wait for it to reach a thousand tables, remembering all those rules queries and multitude of perspectives on whether this is a well-designed game or a fun game or a worthwhile game. It is a complex game, it is a challenging game. Its puzzles are complex, and its payoffs are satisfying. It is a game for gamers, and it is a game for me, and that is what I wanted it to be.

Richard Wilkins