tabletopgaming.co.uk 312
008 was the year of Matt Leacock.
Although his in uential Pandemic
has reaped the lion’s share
of attention and acclaim for
kickstarting a new wave of co-op
experiences, the designer’s other release that
year, Roll rough the Ages, would turn out to
be similarly prescient – eventually.
Roll rough the Ages: e Bronze Age
condensed the grand empire-building of
games such as Civilization and rough the
Ages – the card game from which it took its
name – into a quick loop of rolling wooden
dice, gathering resources on a peg board and
developing a culture. With ticked boxes on
paper sheets tracking players’ improvements
and the construction of monuments, it was a
roll-and-write in the tradition of Ya h t z e e but
a decade before the recent urry fuelled by
the success of last year’s Welcome To..., Ganz
Schön Clever and Railroad Ink, among others.
“It’s funny looking back seeing all those
games and then remembering how much
fun it was to do the original ten years ago.
It was just kind of enjoyable for me to see
them have their time,” Leacock says.
“I’m not sure what really led to their
popularity in the last year. I don’t know
if people were kind of looking for some
kind of lighter fun or ller but, yeah, I
don’t know, it got people’s attention. I
don’t know if I was just early. It felt like
the game got plenty of good attention
back when it came out, but then people
moved on to other things.”
After an o cial print-and-play expansion
in 2009, e Late Bronze Age, and despite
a nomination for the Spiel des Jahres the
following year, Leacock also moved on to
other things. In 2014, it was Race for the
Galaxy designer Tom Lehmann who took
up the mantle of continuing the series with
standalone sequel e Iron Age, which
similarly expanded with a Mediterranean map.
Roll rough the Ages lay dormant for a few
years. Eventually, Leacock began to consider
rebooting the series.
“I started kind of working on games in that
system and hit upon this medieval variation
of it that I really loved; I thought it was even
stronger than the original,” he says.
e roll-and-write follow-up to the series
he worked on came close to being published,
but something was missing.
“We all kind of looked at the game sitting on
the table and, y’know, it didn’t have a whole
lot of table presence,” Leacock says. “It’s just
kinda a score pad and some dice.“I talked with the publisher about dierent
ways we could bring some life to it, to take
advantage of the fact that it’s a board game,
that it’s a physical thing, it can broadcast fun to
people. Sophie Gravel, the head of [publisher]
Plan B, challenged me: what if it was a three-
dimensional game? What if you actually could
manipulate the pieces?”
Inspired by his recent purchase of a laser-
cutter, Leacock set to work on lifting his
spiritual successor to Roll rough the Ages up
from the table.
“It wasn’t very long before I saw how we
could really take advantage of the fact that a
three-dimensional version of the game would
really be so much more exciting.”A NEW DIE-MENSION
e result was Era: Medieval Age, the rst in
a genre its creators have dubbed ‘roll-and-
build’. Where Roll rough the Ages was aboutbuilding up an entire civilisation on a sheet of
paper, Era focuses on a single city constructed
piece by piece by players on their individual
board. e walls and buildings are represented
by plastic structures that slot into the grid,
replacing the ink boxes of old.
“You get a lot of the joy that you get with
playing with Lego, kind of snapping things into
place, and also the classic game of Cathedral,
its really great table presence,” compares
Leacock. “I love playing with Cathedral sets,
but I was always kind of disappointed that the
game wasn’t super deep. So this gives you the
joy of positioning buildings relative to each
other within a medieval city, and the positions
actually have some meaning.”
Era’s impressive visuals aren’t just for
looks, either.
“One of the great things about going 3D is
that you can really see what the other players
are doing,” Leacock says. “So you can look
across the table and see – I can see how your
city is developing and know that other peoplecan see mine. So there’s a better sense of that.
ere’s more of a toy-like quality, because
you’re dealing with physical components
you can pick up and they’re really beautiful.
We’re able to kind of leverage the fact that
we’ve got components now and we can play
with scarcity, so now players are competing
for buildings, which is something that would
be hard to do when you can draw whatever
you want – there’s an unlimited supply! So
we played with that quite a bit, and that really
brought a lot of life to the game.”
As he began ne-tuning its follow-up,
Leacock went back and replayed Roll rough
the Ages. A turn-based format where players
rolled their dice individually, the designer
found his older game to feel considerably
more sluggish by today’s standards.
“I don’t know if we had more patience for
it ten years ago, but in a four-player game
there’s a lot more downtime,” he says. “I re-
engineered the system for Medieval
Age so that players roll their dice
at the same time, then there’s a big
reveal and you work out how the dice
interact with each other. at cuts
downtime considerably and keeps
the game moving at a really fun and
rapid pace.”
Era hides its players’ simultaneous
rolls behind screens, allowing them
to reroll dice without the pressure of
checking what their opponents are
doing. Once everybody’s ready, the
results are revealed together, with
players collecting resources and in icting
disasters on each other.
“We actually found that the interaction
happens in more interesting ways later in the
turn and that downtime that was introduced
by waiting for you to roll just interfered and
felt kind of clumsy – people just wanted to
roll,” Leacock says. “So I went with what
players really wanted and what they really
enjoyed, which was to just get on with the
turn and interact in the more interesting
parts of the turn.”
e increased interaction between players
in Era is a signi cant step up from Roll
rough the Ages, which allowed players to
roll skulls to cause pestilence among their
rivals and squabble over monuments. In the
new game, players are competing over the
buildings available to add to their city, but
can also extort resources, scorch earth and
unleash diseases – centuries before Leacock
would rid the world of them in Pandemic – to
ensure their own medieval metropolis thrives.It wasn’t very long
before I saw how a
3D version of the game
would really be so
much more exciting.