Evolution of Enemy Lines
Around 2007, I came up with the germ of an idea for an abstract strategy game that would become the first game I ever felt was complete, Enemy Lines.
I cannot remember why it came about, what the inspiration was. My son was a toddler. My daughter was not yet conceived. Game nights were not something I was part of anymore. The most commonly played game at the time was “Can I get a full night’s sleep?” I was sporadically working on another game design about building castles. I was, and still am, an avid player of Strat-O-Matic baseball. So, where did this abstract strategy game idea come from? I have not the answer. But I can tell the story of its journey.
Despite life changes, career course correction, and a move, I was still in touch will many of my gaming friends of my younger days. They were just farther away. But I brought the game with me to every social gathering that might include game playing. Wait. I am getting ahead of myself.
The journey begins
The very first version of Enemy Lines was written on a piece of scrap paper. I marked up some of the squares and began playing. Then, deciding upon the size and configuration of the board and using Word, I created an 8-by-8 grid of squares in the center of a page and printed it.
After a few more plays, I printed it again with “Borderlines” printed at the top of the page. And I used different colored highlighters to indicate the different squares in the grid. Each color meant something else: pawn can move sideways, pawn can move diagonally, pawn can move vertically.
After dozens of plays, the positions of the colored squares and what they meant were solidified. Pawns could only move in the direction the space on the board directed. Not each space, but the one the pawn began the turn on. So, a space that indicated diagonal meant that the pawn could only move diagonally on that turn.
After many more plays, I had solidified that the pawns could move no more than three spaces in one turn. Any more than three spaces made each move too powerful. Maximizing the move to two spaces was too granular, too slow, too easy to avoid the opponent. Three was the sweet spot. Plus, by this point, the first row of squares was the home row, where all the pawns started. So, the field of play, as it were, was really only six rows—the rows between the two home rows. Moving four spaces meant being across the middle of the board and one move from the opponent’s home row. Three spaces meant being near the center, being a threat but not imminently.
Early on, the pawns were little bits of paper, all the same size, with values written on the under, or hidden, side. The value aspect was part of the design from the beginning, or very close to it. I think, probably, the idea of individually valued pawns and board-dictated movement was the initial catalyst for the design, a sort of mashup of chess and Stratego.
I then went searching for better pieces I could use as pawns in my prototype. I wanted two sets of eight pieces in which each piece was indiscernible from the other. I wanted no way for opponents to identify the value of pieces before their time. I decided on small, solid wooded cylinders. Each set of eight pieces were colored to be uniform while the underside was color-coded for the values. I liked how everything was related to color. But I would later change from colors to numbers on the bottoms, because players did not want to refer to a key over and over.
The journey expands
I made the first non-paper version on a piece of plywood, which I still have. From about 2009 to 2018, that game “board” and its pieces traveled with me to many gatherings, and those early plays were instrumental. Borderlines would evolve ever so slightly each time I learned something new about the game. Most of that came from playing with those gaming friends whenever I could or playing with my wife, or my son or my daughter when they were old enough. For most of that time, I did not even realize this was “playtesting” and “iterating.” Living in a rural area with no local game stores or gaming groups meant that playtesting was uncommon and unscheduled.
For most of that time, I did not know there was a board game community that was international and supportive of one another. In 2018, I began researching the industry, the community, publishers, and more. It was time to push my introverted self into the community, because it was not going to miraculously come to me.
By 2019, I had changed the name from Borderlines to Enemy Lines, and it was finished in that it completely worked and played as it should. It was balanced. It was appropriately themed. It was easy to learn and difficult to master. The familiarity of it made it easy for anyone to understand. Yet, it was different and introduced new ways to think about and make decisions in that familiar setting. But, how would I ever get this game in front of other people? My answer: by going to game conventions. My first one was in March of 2020. Immediately after, the pandemic forced everything to shut down.
During the pandemic, I joined some game designers’ playtesting groups that were online, and I put Enemy Lines on Tabletop Simulator. Enemy Lines was recognized as a good game as is, but what these professional game designers and playtesters saw came from a much more experienced and nuanced lens: The game looked TOO classic, which would be troublesome to market, to sell, to pitch in this modern age of tabletop games.
From that point, my goal was to make a modernistic version of Enemy Lines, one for the new millennium, if you will. I tried multiple ideas, from adding arrows to the spaces to changing the spaces from squares to circles. With each iteration, the game was evolving while keeping the core concept in place.
During a pitch with a publisher, the game developer said that they would not be interested in the game because it looked too much like another game. I researched the mentioned game and found it was published in 1979 and was long out of print. Still, the board was eerily similar though the play was quite different. For the next iteration, I combined four circles into a tile and thus 12 tiles to be placed at random at game’s start to make each game different. This felt better and different. But I was not sold on it.
Ultimately, I want to design games that people will enjoy, but the first person who must enjoy it is me. If I do not like it and do not want to play it, how am I to expect others to? During an online playtest, someone mentioned using hexes instead of circles or squares, since hexes provide more movement choices.
The journey continues
By the end of 2020, Enemy Lines had evolved into the game it is today, aside from the occasional tweak based on the many playtests since. Now, with tri-hex tiles and its current rules, the game is abstract strategy at its core, but with a fun puzzle component built in and more interesting decisions to make. It is still easy to learn and difficult to master. It still has a sense of familiarity but with a modern sensibility.
Enemy Lines: Original Edition and Enemy Lines: Millennium Edition are two distinctly different games—they look different, feel different, play different—with very similar core mechanisms. And with difficulty variants for each one, there are many ways to play them.
While Enemy Lines is not the first game I designed, it is the first one that has felt completely finished and publishable. Getting it published is the game’s next path along our journey. Meanwhile, the pair of games will continue to travel with me whenever game playing is a possibility, because I enjoy playing it and I continue to find others who do too.
Enemy Lines: Millenium being playtested at 2023 UnPub at PAXEast
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