32 April 2019
Era: Medieval Age
With the right rolls, players can
extort resources and unleash
disasters such as disease“ e competition is me against all the other
players, so there’s no ‘take that’ in the game,
you’re not directly attacking a speci c player,”
Leacock says. “A lot of it is more long-term
competition; it’s not direct necessarily but you
are forming a strategy and seeing how that
strategy interacts with your opponents.”
Being able to mess with your opponents
also stands apart from the ‘multiplayer
solitaire’ format of many roll-and-write games,
where players compete with each other for the
highest score but could otherwise be playing
alone. Leacock says having the option to
interact with your opponents in Era was “there
from the beginning”.
“I was looking for ways to augment it and
thread it through there without it feeling
clumsy,” he remarks. “I just wanted it to feel
like it was a natural part of the turn. Y’know:
I’m exploring a certain strategy but if my
opponents are exploring a di erent strategy
which con icts with mine, I have to adjust.
“You may have this very well-laid plan but
then one turn maybe three of your opponents
are extorting from you, you have to decide is it
worth handing over the resources or do I take
a knock in victory points? So you’re always
kind of adjusting your plans based on what
your opponents are doing.”HISTORY LESSON
e game that would become Era wasn’t
the rst stab Leacock had taken at making
a historical roll-and-write game since Roll
rough the Ages.
“I had another game that I probably worked
on maybe eight years ago set in the medieval
age, and I put it together and it was...” He
laughs. “I’ll just say it. It was just bad! It was just
a bad game. It checked all the boxes – it was a
roll-and-write game, it was set in that age – but
it was kind of clumsy.”
When he came back to the idea, the designer
sunk himself fully into researching the period:
“what things were like and how society was
structured”. Although his background reading
isn’t necessary explicit in the nished game,
it’s present; for example, Era’s dice represent
four di erent societal classes, from peasants to
nobles and clergy.
“It’s something I’ve done more and more
in the last, say, ve or six years,” Leacock
comments on his level of study. “When I did
Pandemic I didn’t do much original research
or anything, I was just kind of chasing the
excitement of the game. I bounced it o people
to make sure I wasn’t making any big mistakes,
but I wasn’t setting out to simulate something.
But I have found when I go out and do somereading that it does spark new ideas and it just
feels like it grounds me a lot more than just,
say, making derivative games o pop culture
references would.
“It’s funny, when you actually do that
research you put yourself in the mindset; you’re
playing less o of clichés. I was able to take a
more authentic approach to it. At the end of the
day, you’ve got this game [where] I think players
will nd many familiar tropes in it and it will
be comfortable to play and so on, but it made
a di erence actually going and doing some
reading and starting fresh several years later.”
When we speak, Leacock reveals that he’s
close to wrapping up a second Era game set in
the Bronze Age and is beginning to research a
nal instalment in the planned trilogy.
“ e ideas come pretty fast for all the
di erent ages you could do,” he acknowledges.
e designer admits that he considered the
ease of taking Era’s dice-rolling gameplay to
di erent time periods.
“My original conceit was we do the Bronze
Age, then we do another age, call it medieval
or iron – [my] thinking was, ‘Oh, I’ll just have
a di erent tech tree for each of them, and you
have di erent developments and set them in
di erent time periods and so on, and then the
game writes itself,’” Leacock recalls.
Uninspired by the idea of producing the
“same game over and over again with di erent
labels for the di erent developments”, Leacock
says he began to look at Era from a di erent
angle, striving to give each game a unique
and fun treatment rooted in their setting that
avoided the feeling of repetition.
“You have some things that you take for
granted, like there’s going to be dice and there’s
going to be building, but I really do want the
games in the series to stand apart from each
other, so you feel like you really need to have
each one or you can explore di erent aspects
in each of the games without them being, like,
‘Oh, this is just another tech tree game.’”
Tying the di erent ages together would be
the series’ new name: Era. While Leacock says
he wanted to preserve Roll rough the Ages’
“heart and core” from the o , what it would be
called “was kind of always up in the air”.
“Roll rough the Ages was a fun name, but it
was really long,” he says. “So we were looking for
something kind of snappy as an umbrella name.
Something short, something easy to localise and
that was descriptive – all those good things –
that we could then tag an age onto.”
He laughs.
“I think the name actually in German was
even worse. I think it might’ve broken one