

Design diary: Daitoshi
By Dani García
About 2 years ago, I had a meeting with David Esbrí, who is responsible for Devir's original releases. He wanted me to work on a new game for the Kemushi Saga. I was given a lot of liberty to decide how the game should work, but there were a few key elements that the game should have:
1- It should be set in a steampunk world, and players would have to build a city.
2- The future on the saga after this game was Sand, which means, players had to destroy the environment so that the previously green world would become the wasteland portrayed in Sand.
3- As part of the Kemushi Saga, the Yokai should be present, although in a secondary way, as the game should focus on the humans.
4- David asked me to add a zeppelin, if possible.
With that in mind, I started to work on it.

The City
For some reason, I immediately envisioned the city as a circle. I imagined a rondel, where you would move and send your workers to do actions on the several spots of each sector. This first idea focused on the workers, and depended on players expanding the city to increase the number of worker placement spots. The starting sectors had weak versions of each action, and only when you started to improve the city, those actions would become more powerful. As usual, the first idea had many problems, but after several tests, it was obvious that the basic structure was not working.
Players were not expanding the city, and when they did, the new combinations of actions on a sector were not working well together. The game felt slow, it was taking way too long for the actions to improve, so players were constantly doing weak and unsatisfying actions. Plus, the worker placement aspect was confusing, as each color of worker had a special power that would interact with the action they performed, so the number of possible combinations and specific rules to make it work was a problem.
It took me several iterations to find the correct structure for the game, and also to simplify it as much as possible, as there were already too many icons and special rules players had to keep in mind. But most importantly, I had to scratch the original idea of workers carrying all the weight of the game.
I came up with a simple structure, a series of steps that players would follow every turn, that would work the same no matter which district they would visit, but at the same time, would push players in different directions, creating interesting decisions. I came up with these steps:

1- When visiting a district, players could place workers of the color of that district. The more you had of that color, the more rewards you could get, so this encouraged players to visit the districts based on the colors of the workers they had. It simplified the version with each worker having a special power, but in a way, they still had a special power, which was the ability to work on that specific district.
2- Then, they had to exploit the land shown on the district, and that could cause them problems if they accumulated too many of the same type of land hex, but it also rewarded players with more workers of different colors, which could condition their next moves. This also solved a problem I had with the original version, when players refused to take those tiles as much as possible. Now it was mandatory, which helped me control the length of the game, as those tiles act as the timer.
3- Finally, players could do the action on the district, which depended on having enough of its related resource. With enough of them, you could do the powerful versions of the actions from the beginning of the game, rather than having to wait for the powerful versions of those actions to be built.
Always the same structure, with 4 different colors of workers, 4 different types of lands to exploit and 4 different actions that require 4 different resources, and to get the most of it, you needed to have the right color of workers, to be able to deal with the land you got and to have enough of the resource needed to perform the action, all at the same time. Only 1 decision, which is, which district to move your magnate to, but many consequences for that single decision, some positive and some negative, which would also affect your future turns.
This structure required players to plan ahead, but I usually like some tactical elements in my games, usually coming in the form of positive interaction between players. The idea of having a new opportunity because of something another player did. This could happen on the main board, when players build or electrify districts on the city, adding or improving the existing worker placement spots that you then may use, or when they move the mega-machine to a new district that may now look more beneficial to you, but the main source of this kind of interaction happened on the player boards.

The Environment and the Factories
The main reason to exploit the land on this steampunk world, that will eventually lead to Sand, is to gain steam. Steam is easily gained on this game, but it's also easily spent, and one of the main ways to do it is in your factories. This part of the game was pretty much like in the final version since the beginning: you have 3 factories in your player board that you can fill with inventions, so that when you produce and spend Steam, you can get all kind of resources, rewards and victory points.
I wanted a very powerful engine building aspect on this game, and this system was mostly working well since the beginning. Whenever somebody needed resources, they could run their engines instead of playing a normal turn, giving them resources and improving their engine for future activations. I was quite happy with the system, but one small and simple change suggested during a playtest greatly improved this mechanic: whenever you decide to produce, everybody produces.
Turns that where only happening in your player board and had no effect on other players, now were a huge moment for everybody in the table, becoming a source of positive interaction, allowing you to generate resources you were not expecting when somebody else decided to produce. To balance it and avoid the producing player feeling like they were wasting their turn, I increased the rewards for the producing player, not only to make it more worth it, but also to allow different strategies, making it viable both to produce a lot during the game and to wait for others to do it.
The basic structure was working. This could have been enough for a steampunk game about building a city, but this one is set in the Kemushi Saga, and there was another aspect missing, which was also the one that took me the most to get right.

The Yokai are not Happy
Daitoshi is not a game about building a city, it's a game about the consequences of the city being built. And those consequences had to be felt at the end of the game, but especially, during the game, which was a huge challenge. I don't like to punish players in my games, I'm much more comfortable rewarding them while playing, but this was a key part of the story this game is telling, with Sand following it chronologically. The Yokai, the protectors of the land had to fight back once you started destroying the environment, and it had to be something players would really notice and would try to avoid as much as possible, but at the same time, something they could recover from. Players had to succeed in this fight against the Yokai, so the game would follow the story of the Kemushi saga.
After discarding a few ideas, I came up with the core elements of the current version. Each one of them would affect you negatively in one area of the game, like the number of workers you could hold, or the amount of steam you had to spend in order to activate your factories. They would be linked to the environment tiles you were destroying in order to produce steam, and their effects would start affecting you once you had 2 hexes of the same type, and would disappear once you reduced that number to 1 or less. But getting them balanced was a nightmare.
I was constantly going from one extreme to the other, either making them barely noticeable or making them destroy any chances players had to win, and any tiny change on them was making them swing from one side to the other. This was, for sure, the part that took me the most to get right, and it involved a lot of playtesting and balancing, changing their effects, the options for players to get rid of them, and creating systems to give players under their effects options to succeed. They had to be an important part of the game, but not a mandatory strategy to always get rid of all of them.
This was the hardest part of the game to balance, but also, one of the key elements to make this game feel special. The tension they create, as players know every turn they take on the city they must take at least one of those, combined with the relief of keeping them under control, and even, the feeling of success when you manage to score a lot of endgame points based on your ability to get rid of them, make all the frustrating moments I had when I was trying to get them right, worth it.

The Mega-Machine
I was requested a zeppelin. Frequently in steampunk worlds, huge machines are built, and I didn't want to lose the opportunity to do it in this game, but the way to do it should feel special. The game has 4 main actions, and they all work the same: you have to go to a specific district to perform them, you have to spend one specific resource (and the more you have, the more powerful the action), and you can perform any of those actions from the beginning of the game.
The mega-machine action is the opposite: it's not on a specific district, as it moves during the game, it's the only action that needs different resources, and you can't perform it till mid game, as you also need a sufficiently developed invention. It's also the only piece in the game that moves in counter-clockwise direction, and there are several versions of it, so it's different every time you play. I wanted everything about it to make it feel special, as I wanted it to be seen as one of the goals of the game, not only giving players great rewards, but also causing unique effects, such as changing the inventions on your factories (and the strategies they may enable) through the game, or creating a mobile worker placement spot that becomes more powerful as the game progresses.
This idea was there since the beginning, and while I did some balancing changes through the development process, it's one of those very rare cases in which the starting idea stayed pretty much the same, which is a refreshing change, as more often than not, these kind of strange ideas end up being discarded once it becomes obvious they will never work.
Conclusion
My goal with every game I do is to try new things, make them different from my previous games, and hopefully, from any other game. This one was tough to design due to its thematic restrictions, but also very rewarding, as I think I was able to incorporate some original ideas, while keeping it true to its theme and to the story that's being told.
It's a game in which you will probably need 1 or 2 plays in order to discover how everything interacts and the many strategies you can follow, but that will hopefully make that journey really enjoyable.
In any case, I hope you like it, and that you found this diary interesting!
- Daitoshi$69.99