Megagame Designer Thoughts: By Other Means
By Other Means players. Credit: Ed Silverstone
In these interviews we have a chat with designers after their megagames have run, and talk a bit about their experiences, thoughts, and any general tips they may have on making megagames. For the first of these interviews, Rob Grayston caught up with Ed Silverstone on Zoom in the wake of the latest playthrough of By Other Means – a sci-fi megagame of diplomacy and warfare that draws inspiration from history with ongoing peace negotiations whilst wars still rage.
Hello Ed! Now I’ve got my mug of tea, tell us a bit about yourself – how did you get into megagames?
I’m a big ol’ nerd; I played AD&D at high school and have been a serious boardgamer since university. In real life I work for the National Grid building IT stuff for control room engineers to use, to hopefully keep the lights on.
As with most people I saw the Shut Up and Sit Down video and went to look what megagames were running. I saw a very exciting-looking one called Spanish Road* by Ben Moores and it was a truly mind-boggling experience. I struggled with the format and came away with a million regrets around “what if I’d done this instead?” but I loved it!
I was lucky enough to get into megagaming just as it snowballed from five or six games a year to 20-30, so there was plenty to choose from. As part of my origin story I was also bitten by a radioactive megagamer, but that’s a story for another time maybe.
You recently ran By Other Means near to Bristol with John Mizon’s South West Megagames – how do you think the game went overall?
Really, really well! Everyone was engaged and it exceeded my expectations. It was exciting to see lots of creative play coming up that was still within the framework of the game if you see what I mean?
I think there’s two kinds of creative play, there’s the “I’m bored and this isn’t going anywhere…I’m going to start a menagerie!” and then there’s the “I’m really engaged with the problems the game is giving me and I want to find a solution that fits my vision of what the future should be like in this game universe!” and there was a lot of the second kind going on at By Other Means which is a designer’s dream, frankly.
It is a very negotiation-heavy game, and the first run was 80% experienced players, so there was a little worry going into this one that most of the players were new-ish and there was a question over how they would find it, but it went really well so props to all the players!
Megagames need drive and enthusiasm from a designer – what excited you about creating By Other Means?
My previous megagame was By the Grace of God, about the English Civil War, and as part of my background reading for that I also read up on the Thirty Years’ War which was just rumbling to a close on the European continent. The more I read about the end of the Thirty Years’ War, the more fascinating and megagame-y it seemed.
There was a set of tensions there I never really appreciated – until I read about it, it seemed like a messy civil war in the Holy Roman Empire. However, I came to understand it stretched across Europe, and that for the last six or seven years of the war there were active peace negotiations in parallel to active fighting happening, which appealed to me.
I was at Brian Cameron’s Dancing Congress, which was cracking, but you went into the game with a certain hand of cards, and it didn’t change. I liked the idea of being able to go away and tweak the situation without changing everything so that it becomes an operational wargame – you could say By Other Means is referencing the Clausewitz quote that “war is a continuation of policy by other means,” as you should always be using all tools available to achieve a goal (whether fighting or talking).
I wanted to bring negotiation and military tensions together in a way I’d like to think I somewhat did in By the Grace of God, and Bernie Ganley and Gareth Evans did in The Lace Wars, which felt like it was a proper mesh of the military and political the whole way through.
The map at By Other Means. Credit: Ed Silverstone
Players have a habit of doing unexpected things – from your last run of the game, did anyone do something you hadn’t considered, and how did that go?
The most unexpected moment was when one faction (a piratical coalition of clans who raid other bits of the galaxy, bit unpopular with other factions) had a bounty placed on them by others who put aside their differences for a turn and decided to try and stop the pirate coalition, although this didn’t just extend to the pirates’ ships but their whole faction and worlds.
The outcome was that the piratical coalition moved their fleets to a neutral planet where a peace negotiation was being held – with intention to break down the doors and abduct the diplomats!
This needed some thought from control as to what the impact would be; the diplomats would be replaced so players wouldn’t lose their roles, but it would clearly still have an impact. The following turn, 70% of the player diplomats went to the neutral planet and refused to hear the piratical coalition’s demands so they were all kidnapped, thankfully to everyone’s delight. A few people thought their prior character would join the pirates, some were ransomed, but it worked really well narratively and people responded to it very well.
There was then an extended negotiation to get some hostages back (even though the players were no longer playing those diplomats). The players engaged really creatively, and it made the story richer for what happened and how they reacted with this emergent story.
Your game has run twice now, and I know some game designers enjoy a good tweak of their creations – did you find there were any changes you took into this play through from the first one, and will you make any changes based on how things went recently, for the next one?
A couple of changes – one obvious one was the setting has a load of neutral worlds that major powers can interfere with. In the first run of the game, each world had a list of world leader candidates in a document, with no mechanical repercussions for getting your candidate in power and it was a bit hard to keep track of. For the second run I created a bunch of cards with candidate details and some mechanical perks, which people engaged with far more. This gave players some incentive to engage with this aspect of the game, both for the mechanical bonuses but also the physical card component gave a sense of ownership.
Also in the last game, there was a game element around the Imperial faction setting taxes which had less mechanical impact last game – this should have been a source of tension between the Empire and its vassals, but the team sensibly decided not to really engage with it. This time around, the taxes had more tangible effects which was more impactful for the players.
You’re responsible for one of my personal Top 3 favourite megagames, By The Grace of God – was this influential in your design process for By Other Means?
I don’t know it massively was – some elements came from By the Grace of God like how negotiation is structured, and how to represent prolonged periods in real life in a short time frame in a game. Honestly not much though! If anything, it really was more Dancing Congress that influenced me, with how it was formatted which had people chipping away at the edges of big key elements/objectives. The debate about who gets what (and who gets to negotiate) is powerful and influential, but there’s still enough for people to be getting on with who aren’t central to the “main table.”
What do you think is the advantage of “disguising” an historical scenario with a fantasy or sci-fi layer over the top?
In general, I’d say there’s no blanket rule, but in this instance the megagame was based on the Peace of Westphalia which had hundreds of nations in attendance, which settled all sorts of border disputes and issues. I thought it would be easier to take the main elements of the historical setting and convert them; it was not a difficult decision to say “actually I can make this a better game if I remove the minutiae and give myself freedom to rewrite.”
As an example, I gave the “Dutch” faction some micro-states inside the Empire structure, which wasn’t historically accurate but made it a more interesting and tense game for their team. I also gave the “Bavarian” team some other stuff to worry about, but also some liberty for them to play with it and make choices. I was able to balance things, although not to the extent I made everything a level playing field for all factions.
Looking at the history, I got rid of bits that weren’t productive, and tried to make it more accessible as a scenario. I also feel there’s less for players to have to learn using non-historical settings, as the sheer amount of historical background can be intimidating – compared to the By Other Means which has a 15-page game handbook.
Rebellion breaks out in the Grand Duchy as enemy forces begin to descend. Credit: John Mizon
We all have lists of games we’d like to make, and some of these end up actually bearing sweet megagame-flavoured fruit – what are you working on for your next game design?
The first wild idea I have is heavily inspired by Jim Wallman’s Dungeons of Yendor. What didn’t click for me in that game was that there were no neutral denizens, but all the factions were played when some could have been NPCs, and there was just lots of fighting and not much negotiation. I wouldn’t try to reproduce that, but I would like some over-arching conflict with some elements to research, metrics on how safe some bits of the dungeon are, and try to have things a bit more interconnected. That has been running around my head for a bit.
If resources and time were no object, what would be your dream megagame to design?
That’s tricky! For me, it would be something a lot like Spanish Road. The main problem is time, as I have to get to a level of knowledge where I feel I understood Early Modern Europe. I tend to get quite worried about how correct things are for historical games, so I’d want to get it right. Maybe slightly earlier than Spanish Road in the early days of the Reformation? Genuinely that’s what excites me!
For anyone looking at designing a megagame, what is your one top tip for them?
Firstly, make sure you’re not the only tea drinker when providing drinks – there were only two of us at By Other Means!
Possibly not a top tip, but there is something I’ve thought about a lot recently that I’ve noticed sometimes gets missed in megagames. When writing briefings, make sure you know how a team or character might complete their goals and objectives inside the game’s framework.
Sketch out briefings and think about how they can be achieved in the game. Moral of the story – make sure player objectives can be achieved within the framework of the game.
Thanks Ed for an interesting chat! If you’d like to get hold of him, you can contact Reading Megagames or Megagame Makers where Ed is admin. We’ll be bringing you more designer interviews from upcoming games, so keep your eyes peeled to see what runs through their minds and makes them tick.
*Spanish Road was a 16th century historical megagame focused on diplomacy, dynasty, and faith set mostly in Europe.