Tabletop_Gaming__Issue_27__February_2019

tabletopgaming.co.uk 9

PHIL WALKER-HARDING

e Australian designer behind Sushi Go!, Bärenpark and Gizmos

digs deep into his gaming past to excavate 2007’s Archaeology

FIRST TURN

HOW TO PLAY

“You’re trying to collect dierent sets of treasures. So

you have these treasures in your hand and when you’d

like to play a set down to the table, that’s selling it to the

museum and essentially cashing it in for points. But

every now and again a sandstorm happens which means

you have to discard some of your cards to the centre of

the table. So there’s a push-your-luck element, but also

you can trade cards from your hand for cards in the

marketplace. en most points at the end wins, and the

rarer the card is in the deck, the more points it’s going to

get you, but the riskier it is to wait on building up a set.”

END OF THE GAME

“Archaeology: e Card Game got picked up by Z-Man

Games in 2009, which was super exciting, and it was

in print for four, ve years. en a couple of years ago,

Z-Man wanted to re-release it as a whole new edition

[Archaeology: e New Expedition]. at really excited

me, because I’ve often thought back to the game and how

I would improve it, so I had an opportunity to go back and

implement those changes and add some new content.”

STRATEGY TIPS

“e biggest thing Archaeology taught me is to get my

designs in front of people and to take criticism seriously.

Which is a general life skill: to be open enough to say,

‘Okay, here’s my new thing. I think it’s really good, but

I need to take on criticism.’ I think putting Archaeology

out the way I did forced me to learn that quickly. I still

don’t nd it easy to take criticism, and I still get nervous

putting new games out and playtesting and all that stu,

but it was a good lesson to learn early.”

BACKGROUND

“I’ve always p layed games and, in a way,

I’ve always made them too. I can remember

being very little and making my own copies

of games with markers and paper and stu.

It’s something that’s always been in my DNA,

but it was only at university, where I studied

lm, that I got into modern game design, with

Settlers of Catan, Carcassonne and so on. Pretty

soon after that the game-design bug was back.”

COMPONENTS

“One of the games I got into really early was

Lost Cities, a very simple two-player card

game by Reiner Knizia. e thing I loved

about it was that, because of the way the

scoring works, at one point in the game a

certain card might be the most valuable card to you in

the world, but then at another point it could become this

horrible card clogging up your hand. So that was oating

around in my head with Archaeology. People have also

compared it to Bohnanza, but I hadn’t even played or

heard of Bohnanza at that point. I guess some ideas are

just kind of out there in the ether, aren’t they?”

OBJECT

“I think for most designers with their rst design, your

objective is to just design a game, really – you just want

to get something completed. Having said that, I was

obviously aiming more for casual players than deep-

strategy gamers. I always wanted it to be a game

that was kid-friendly, a good family game.”

SETUP

“e rst proper, full-on design I nished and

tested with friends – this was in 2006 – had a

pirate theme. You went around an island trying

to nd treasures. You could walk, you could

sail, there was weather... it had this completely

convoluted system and it didn’t work very well.

But the thing everyone liked was the little system

I had for collecting dierent sets of treasures

and, depending on what you already have, certain

treasures are worth more and some are worth less.

So I stripped that out and the theme of archaeology

presented itself pretty quickly. I made about a

hundred copies of the original Archaeology using Adobe

Illustrator and self-published it, then based on the

feedback I got from that I redesigned it a bit as

Archaeology: e Card Game, which

was more rened and polished.”

Interview by Dan Jolin

February 2019

The

biggest

thing

Archaeology

taught me

is to get

my designs

in front of

people and to

take criticism

seriously.

and so on. Pretty

certain card might be the most valuable card to you in