by Charles Amir Perret

Super Meeple is posting this diary on behalf of the designers of Mythologies, Maxime Babad and Mickaël “Froh” Garcin, and we invite you to read the illustrator’s diary for the game HERE.

Genesis
The origins of a unique game, according to the two designers who made it…

Mythologies — or Mythic Mashup, as we called it in the beginning — did not exactly spring fully formed from the heavens. It went through a long and sometimes winding development process before becoming the game you know today. What began as a journey for two people was sometimes complicated, often exciting, and always enriching. A collaboration that could be restrictive at times — and, on more than one occasion, a genuine lifesaver.

In these notes, we invite you behind the scenes of Mythologies: a game born from the unlikely combination of strategy, ancient myths (obviously!) and an almost unreasonable amount of replayability. Discover how two distinct visions gradually came together to create a gaming experience unlike any other.

The Primordial Spark
The meeting, the first spark, the initial chaos.

Fun fact: After two and a half years of development, Mythologies came to life. Yet its two designers had only ever crossed paths once… briefly, at Cannes.

It all started with a fan-made project based on Blood Bowl Team Manager, for which Mickaël designed around twenty additional teams. Maxime, already the designer of Saint Seiya Deckbuilding, joined the dream team, also being a passionate fan of BBTM. Then Mickaël joined Maxime’s playtesting team for his second game to be published, Death Note.

Little by little — or rather, through tackles to the carotid and more than a few unfounded suspicions — our duo of passionate gamers came together, united around a shared vision: a game built on replayability, interaction, originality, and a strong theme.

The Mythic Mashup project was born.

Woven Destiny
Key dates and the first divine choices.

October 18, 2018 First contact. Maxime offers to help with the Blood Bowl fan-made project. Mickaël tries to score a free game (spoiler: he fails).

[Mickael waves hello! Click to wave hello too]
“Hello, I thought you’d be all over this ;)”
“Hola. Welcome. Feel free to ask any questions if needed, but also feel free to send me a free copy of Saint Seiya*.”
*the deckbuilding game designed by Maxime
2020 – Max takes advantage of lockdown to recruit playtesters for Death Note.

– Hey Mickaël, how’s it going? (Well, within a reasonable radius of your home, with the required paperwork.)
– Could be going better, but I’m surviving.
– Would you be interested in testing my next game, Death Note, sometime?
– Absolutely.
Max is still owning his questionable jokes five years later. Mickaël, meanwhile, prefers to forget them.

Late 2021
Max suggests to Mickaël they move on to a “real” project, in order to finance Mickaël’s solid-gold swimming pool (filled with normal water, since liquid gold is rather impractical). They decide to create a game together. Max wants a drafting game. Mickaël wants a swimming pool. The project is launched.

The Founding Myth
Civilizations, creatures, and the sacred foundations of the game.

When Mickaël came up with a historical Civilizations theme, Maxime suggested reusing the universe of a prototype modestly named Gods Pantheonic Battle, in order to use its templates.

It was not far removed from the concept of Civilizations, but it gave the game a more epic dimension, while allowing us to reuse the card files already prepared for the prototype and adapt them.

At that point, we had a foundation of six mythologies, each containing four Deities and three Creatures. More than enough to test the first mechanics of Mythic Mashup and its famous carousel…

The six mythologies were already quite diverse, including the Hindu and Inca mythologies alongside much better-known cultures such as Ancient Egypt and Greece, the Norse, and Japan.

With a few exceptions, these 36 Deities and Creatures are still present in the final version of Mythologies. Among the Egyptians, the Criosphinx and Hieracosphinx were replaced by the Mummy and the Scarab. And the Norse Berserker became the Draugr it always should have been.

The Carousel of Souls
From a curse to the resurrection of a concept.

The foundation of the game was meant to recreate the experience of a carousel found in autobattler video games (Dota Chess, Teamfight Tactics, etc.). In other words, each round would begin with a Selection phase during which everyone would try to grab units from a rotating board, with units passing by as it turned. Depending on their position, players would try to quickly claim the ones they were interested in before they slipped past them and were taken by the next player.

We quickly developed a prototype of a mechanically rotating board, on which players could select a card from a mythology whenever the arrow on their section of the board pointed toward that mythology.

Unfortunately, this choice created several problems:

• Card readability on a moving platform: this required the cards to be extremely simple.

• Stress and lack of time to rethink your strategy when a coveted card was taken by an opponent: making it difficult to strategize.

• Mechanical boards that were too complex and expensive to produce for a publisher: possibly the number-one issue. It was simply impossible within a limited budget, and represented a major publishing risk.

We had to find an alternative solution. But we wanted to preserve two key ideas:

• Open drafting, allowing players to anticipate their choices and their opponents’ strategies.

• Simultaneous selection, making for fast games and sudden reversals.

Goodbye carousel, hello Destiny cards. These are drawn at random during each Selection phase and determine the random order in which players can select one of their two cards — or choose not to — from each area of the board, one after another.

We kept our key ideas, but introduced a new source of tension through uncertainty: Which mythology will I have access to next? Should I pass up an available choice in the hope that the next one will still be there? The stressful tension imposed by the rotating-board mechanism was therefore replaced by the tension of dilemmas and “bets” on our own choices and those of our opponents. “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush,” as they say… You’ll be the judge.

Offerings and Gems
Personal Pantheons and sacrificial strategies.

Alongside the selection system, we needed these mythological entities to serve a purpose. Rather than having gods beat the living daylights out of each other with superpowers, something other games already do very well, wouldn’t it be more interesting to combine them in order to create a unique culture?

How could we measure the relevance of our choices without direct confrontation and without repeatedly comparing values, while still keeping the game moving at a good pace?

From the outset, building an original and unique Pantheon seemed to us to be the more interesting approach, and a great promise of depth and replayability for players. What if the positioning of these Creatures in our Pantheon could give us more than simply collecting them?

That is the whole point of the tableau-building system we wanted to create.
To do this, we needed to identify ways for players to move toward victory. Different paths to renown? Resources with different values? Offering tokens to collect or spend? We knew we were starting with a game rich in combos and depth, where every choice would have an impact, while absolutely wanting to maintain the goal of short games.

The Tablets of Ancient Knowledge
Design choices: text or symbols, tradition or modernity.

Defining a game’s mechanics starts with clearly identifying the experience we want to offer, then trying to stick to it — to keep it as a guiding principle throughout the game’s development. There are multiple dials to adjust and just as many points of balance to find: the length of the game versus the feeling of growing in power, depth versus accessibility, richness versus complexity, and so on. Finding effective and enjoyable gameplay is the foundation of game design, and the more criteria you set, the harder it becomes to find something that meets all of them.

Board game design has evolved considerably over the past two decades, favoring short games, clear rules, and another particular feature: cards with as little text as possible (or even no text at all). This is the case for many modern games aiming for the same playing time as ours.

We stuck to the first two constraints (short games and clear rules), but chose to embrace text on the cards. This gives us greater versatility in terms of effects, and therefore more thematic depth. Likewise, we chose to move away from the constraint of dynamic drafting, which only introduces new cards each round. It may seem like an insignificant choice, but it is often one of the points players come back to after their first game.

Our game offers a feeling of growing in power, not because the cards in Round 2 are stronger than those in Round 3, but rather because they combine with one another, while the Deities come in to add those spikes of power.

A completely sourced and impeccably formatted graph depicting a typical game of Mythologies.
Here, the tension can be felt from the very first round, thanks to a drafting mechanism that is both simple and tactical. During this phase, players can take risks, anticipate what their opponents will do, but also react to their choices and adjust their own strategy accordingly. The game is driven by opportunities and highly varied card combinations, with effects that can be extremely versatile depending on the situation.

This choice also brings several benefits:

• Beginners have fewer cards to read in later turns, since some cards have remained available.

• More experienced players can rely on those remaining cards to guide their combinations.

All of this takes place in a game where every card has several uses (effects, immediate gains, and value toward objectives). In other words, a card that may initially appear bad often really isn’t — and may not remain so from one game to the next. This is the discovery aspect that means no two games will ever be alike.

The Epic of the Pantheons
Romans, Chinese, Celts, Zulus: the chosen ones of the expanded Pantheon.

After various iterations and major changes to the gameplay, we reached the point where we felt that our mechanism was the right one. At the very least, it was solid enough to serve as a foundation for developing more content.

We started by expanding the bestiary with a fourth creature for each mythology (and later a fifth, then a sixth). But above all, we realized that we had a concept that was perfectly suited to modularity and replayability. With six mythologies, we had 15 possible combinations of four mythologies, and 180 different setups, with these setups defining the objectives of the game.

Since the heart of the game was mixing mythologies together to constantly discover new synergies, we quickly wanted to expand the number of mythologies, with each new mythology increasing the number of possible combinations exponentially.

Mickaël always developed projects with 30 factions or more, while Maxime wanted to make games that could be played hundreds of times and have each game feel different. So we immediately launched into the design of four additional mythologies at once. That brought us to 210 mythology combinations and 2,520 setups!

For our additional mythologies, we chose the Romans and Chinese on the one hand, as they seemed like obvious choices.

The Romans: A culture that is both rich and well known, with plenty of material for introducing new Deities while avoiding duplicates with the Greeks. The Creatures were a little more difficult, as we had to find ones that were more characteristic of Roman legends than Greek ones.

The Chinese: Probably the best-known mythology in the world that we had not yet included in the game. Here, choosing the Deities was the difficult part. Not only because there are so many of them — which is also true of many other mythologies — but because we struggled to determine which ones were considered the main figures.

By cross-referencing different sources of information (encyclopedic references, specialist websites, AI and native speakers), we settled on the final cast, which we felt both represented the major Deities of the Chinese Pantheon and met our game-design constraints.

For the other two mythologies, our goal was to explore cultures that are less frequently represented. We wanted to move away from Antiquity and the Mediterranean basin, which are often favored in cultural works. Since our game highlights historical and cultural knowledge, we chose to reinforce this aspect by giving players the opportunity to discover as many new cultures as possible — cultures that many of us are not very familiar with.

We chose the Zulus, with their mystical and wild bestiary, as worthy representatives of the African continent.

We had to dig through the depths of the internet to cross-reference enough reliable sources to properly identify the Deities and Creatures that could be highlighted in the game. The sources were much rarer and more scattered than for any of the other mythologies we had incorporated.

Finally, our last choice was the Celts, whose beliefs turned out to be much darker than we had imagined.

It is a mixture of different cultures, and the Deities are not as clearly established as those of the other mythologies. Their bestiary, on the other hand, is truly unique, with a strong focus on sometimes rather sinister legends (the Headless Horseman, for example).

Although the game is highly mechanical, we made sure to give each mythology a particular influence, expressed through one or two major themes for each of them.

Thus, the Incas focus on sacrifice, the Greeks on movement and interaction, the Hindus on summoning, the Norse on aggression, and so on.

And individually, wherever possible, each card has an effect related to the role that the corresponding entity appeared to play according to our current knowledge. Thus, Anubis rules over the abyss, Valkyries strike down Deities, Râkshasas are shapeshifters, and so on.

The Eternal Return
Replayability and infinite possibilities.

One of the most important aspects of Mythologies is its unparalleled replayability for a tableau-building game, and even more broadly for a game of this format.

Its high degree of modularity comes from the fact that the game was designed with this goal in mind from the very beginning (those who know us are aware of how important replayability is to both of us). We very quickly incorporated key elements into the heart of the game’s design. They became the core of the game design, and we never questioned them afterward.

The starting point is that you have to choose four mythologies for each game — or draw them randomly; that works too. What matters is that every combination works. Since each mythology has its own particularities, levels of interaction, key mechanics, and so on, each combination of four mythologies will give your game a different feeling. With eight mythologies in the box, that already gives us around 70 different experiences, along with all their synergies to explore.

And that’s without counting the fact that you will not see all the cards from each mythology in a single game. You can get your full dose of gaming pleasure by playing several games with the same configuration.

Seventy different experiences is already a significant amount. To go even further, the central board is assembled from the boards of the 4 mythologies in the game. This assembly, which we call the Sanctuary, serves in particular as the market from which players obtain cards. But the order in which it is assembled is crucial, because each board is double-sided, with the beginning of a sentence on one side and the end of that sentence on the other.

The way you assemble the four selected boards will therefore create two unique sentences, which serve as the objectives for the game. That gives us a grand total of 840 unique pairs of objectives!

Each pair of objectives creates genuine choices: emptying your Pantheon, placing Creatures in ways that may be less than optimal, filling certain columns…
This focus also provides a degree of predictability for player interaction. And it creates genuine dilemmas during your turns, even when you know the game very well.

A card may therefore not necessarily be interesting because of its effect, but may be extremely interesting because of what it provides toward an objective.

Obviously, some objectives are similar — for example, if one objective asks you to fill one row or another. Except that the cards you play will not have the same effect, provide the same gain, or have the same usefulness depending on which row you play them in.

The value of each card will therefore vary from game to game, but also over the course of a game depending on how it develops. The same very powerful synergy in one situation may be far less profitable in another configuration. In Mythologies, it is impossible to rely on your usual strategy for winning. The key word is adaptability. You will always have to adapt your choices to the objectives of the game, its development, and the opportunities available to you. And who knows? You may discover new horizons with cards you would not normally have played.

As for synergies, we worked extensively to ensure that the mythologies combine with one another rather than each operating independently.

Do the Egyptians reward crushing? You will be able to find effects in other mythologies that interact with crushing. Do you have a card that generates significant gains? It may require the presence of different mythologies in your pantheon. This allows us to avoid the pitfall of “mono-faction” games, where the optimal way to play is to dive headfirst into a single color, sometimes competing with other players doing exactly the same thing.

So we leave behind the routine of following the usual plan, because you will have to consider every card available to you — which will inevitably maintain a certain amount of tension during the drafting of those cards.

The Oracle’s Quest
Finding a publisher, or how to read the signs of the gods of the market.

Finding a publisher is easy.

Finding a publisher who will actually sign is more complicated. You have to understand the timing: publishers are overloaded, have projects planned for the next three years, and have absolutely no room left in their schedules. Then along comes our UFO of a project, with significant graphical demands (lots of illustrations!), and a game aimed at experienced players that nevertheless only takes 30-minutes to play. That is very rare.

Quite a few publishers saw our project, and we thank them for the time they spent on it. Some may have gone through the pitch a little too quickly, and the feedback we received from physical prototypes showed us that not everyone really engaged with the game, with feedback that was sometimes strange and sometimes very interesting. But that was fine. We persevered.

After a year of back-to-back meetings, Charles-Amir from Super Meeple, having tested different iterations of the game throughout its development, increasingly appreciated its specific qualities and understood the direction we were heading in. He probably realized that his inbox was going to receive this project every month until his death, and therefore, out of sheer desperation, accepted.

The work did not stop there. Hundreds of games and countless pieces of feedback had to be taken into account. Directions to pursue, and others to abandon. What makes a game project interesting is maintaining a direction. Because a project that tries to please everyone will ultimately please no one.

The Fleeting Apex
The Wheel of Time cannot be stopped.

One aspect that is somewhat unusual for this type of game, which focuses heavily on combos: Mythologies is NOT an engine-building game.
The more powerful combos we create, the more tempting it becomes to repeat them and improve them in order to extract the maximum benefit. We absolutely did not want players to feel as though they were repeating the same sequences over and over, with the additional risk inherent to engine-building games that the gap between players simply keeps growing as the game progresses. On the contrary, we wanted players to reassess the situation and their options every round, with no automatic moves. This is truly a mantra for us, burned into our philosophy of what makes a game engaging and captivating all the way to the final scoring.

Although the open drafting aspect contributes to this, other, less mechanical elements also help keep players engaged until the very end. We made sure that the game did not contain too many permanent effects that could be reactivated every turn. We adjusted the timing for completing objectives, imposing certain constraints on players at specific moments, even if that meant rearranging their Pantheons just before or after in order to optimize their cards in a different way.

The fact that the game ends after four rounds also contributes to this. In only four rounds, well-optimized one-off effects can be far more profitable than permanent passive bonuses.

Player interaction adds another layer to all of this. The more we allow players to throw a spanner into their opponents’ plans, the more we force them to adapt. But don’t worry about this last point! It is obvious that some players do not like having their plans disrupted, which is why the level of interaction is modular. Each mythology is more or less focused on interaction, and this level of interaction is clearly indicated. It is up to each player to choose more or less interactive mythologies for each game.

The Heroes’ Pact
Working as a pair: synergy, balance and shared faith.

There are several advantages to working as a pair, especially when you complement each other. One of the main points was to determine, from the outset, the objectives we wanted to set for the game: accessible rules, fast games, high replayability, and good depth.

These objectives guided most of our design choices. If an idea went completely against one of these four pillars, poof, it was gone. It sounds simple when presented this way, but each idea was often beneficial in one respect while detrimental in another. We therefore had to take the time to weigh the pros and cons. An unavoidable task, for which two perspectives are better than one — even if it can easily lead to lengthy debates.

Even with clearly defined objectives, even with important shared references, and even when we have a fairly similar vision of what makes a good game, disagreements are bound to arise from time to time. Most of the time, they stem from a misunderstanding. It is therefore important to take the time to listen to each other, put yourself in the other person’s shoes, and get to the root of the problem or disagreement. What is the other person trying to achieve? What exactly is bothering them? Which part of the proposed solution is bothering you? It requires genuine introspection to silence our egos and move forward.

But there you have it: disagreement is the art of compromise.

An art… that is rather verbose, since our discussions on even the smallest subject can require an enormous number of paragraphs filled with pseudo-justifications, all in the hope of being right.

Pulling the Threads of the Fates
Where we talk about destiny.

If the game finds its audience, we obviously have plenty of things planned. Even before Super Meeple took the project under its wing, we had already worked on expansion concepts and additional mythologies (yes, they already exist). And because we are (perhaps a little too?) passionate, we have also continued working on them alongside the development of the final game. But for all these great ideas to become reality, that cannot depend on us alone.

It depends on you, dear players, who will have embraced our vision and our gaming proposition — which we hope will convince you of its merits as you play more and more games.

Thank you, valiant players.

If you’re heading to SPIEL in Essen, come and find us at Hall 6, Booth F301. Come and talk to us about the struggle, the excitement, the brilliant ideas, the questionable ones, and all the compromises that somehow turned into a game. We’ll be delighted to delve deeper into the joys and tribulations of game design — and, if necessary, explain how two perfectly reasonable people managed to spend so much time arguing about ancient gods.

Mickaël & Maxime

Discover the Illustrator’s Diary as well: PART B — Making Myth a Reality