Wildscape
Designer Diary by Sebastian Bleasdale
Part 1: The Mancala Mechanism
The design of Wildscape began many years ago, on a cold evening in Essen. I had met up for dinner with a fellow designer, Seth Jaffee, after a day at the Spiel 2014 games fair and we were talking about the action selection mechanism in Trajan. Trajan had a mancala system where each player had pieces in a number of bowls which they picked up and distributed clockwise one by one, taking an action from the final bowl. Seth and I agreed that there were different ways in which mancala systems could be used, and this area had a lot of untapped potential. Seth’s vision focused on developing customisability of actions, and became Crusaders: Thy Will Be Done which was published in 2018. My vision focused on sharing a single mancala between players. It took a lot longer to develop.
My vision was that each space gave a particular type of action, and the number of tokens in a particular location indicated how strong the action would become. When players took an action, they got an ability according to the number of tokens, then the tokens got distributed clockwise, making the action weak and gradually strengthening other actions. Unloved actions would gradually build up in strength until they were taken, creating a dynamic range of possibilities.
I’d recently started collaborating with a friend of mine, Ian Vincent, on a railway building game which had a problematic action selection mechanism. I suggested trying it out and the mancala mechanism slotted in and worked as smoothly as I had imagined. We repeatedly iterated on the design and the game developed beautifully and around 2018 was ready to be released into the world. Except … something was not right.
Exploring the mancala mechanism by rail
The mancala mechanism seemed like it was giving players lots of interesting choices – but the more experience Ian and I got with the game, the more we realised that it was nearly always correct to choose the location which gave the most builds (and optimise play so that you could use them all). We ripped out the mancala mechanic and replaced it with a superior system.
While the mancala mechanic wasn’t right for the railway building game, I was still convinced that the concept was good. It just needed a better execution. It needed a game designed around it to showcase what it could achieve. And thanks to the railway building game, I had a good idea of what it needed.
(Part 2 will follow next week…)
If you’d like to comment or ask a question, you can on the original BoardGameGeek thread!