Bruno Faidutti: Jeux sans Strategie

This is page 4 of an interview with game author Bruno Faidutti.
Page 1, 2, 3, 4

A Tale of Two Cities
by Bruno Faidutti

This article originally appeared on the now-defunct site The Games Cafe. It is reprinted here, with additional comments from Bruno Faidutti, by permission of the author.

It was wintertime and I was still living in Paris. One evening I was chatting on the phone with Serge Laget, the friend from Lyon with whom I'd invented Murder in the Abbey. For that game we'd each worked on our own, playtesting with different groups of people and making extensive use of the mail and the phones, in order to integrate his thoughts about tactics with my passionate ravings. Why not revive a formula that had been so successful?

Several hours and a few phone calls later, a new project -- soon christened Citadelle (without the s) -- was born.The premise seemed clear: there would be a medieval world made up of "place" cards (castle, tower, inn...) and "character" cards (king, magician, princess...); the latter would allow players to accomplish various actions (the king could impose and collect taxes, the magician could switch cards, the princess could seduce...). Thus it was the theme that was dominant and not, as in Murder in the Abbey, the mechanics of the game-play; and that may explain the semi-failure -- or double success -- that was about to follow.

Bruno Faidutti's Citadels was a finalist for the 2000 Spiel des Jahres.

We each came up with some cards and had a few preliminary game-testing parties with friends. But over the phone it quickly became clear that Serge no longer had a clear idea of what I was doing and I no longer had a clear idea of what he was doing. No problem, we thought; we could easily get ourselves back on the same track since in April we'd be together at my Ludopathic Gathering (my very own little private game convention). In the meantime, my game took form more quickly than anticipated. After conclusive game-testing, a nearly final version was completed. Cyrille Daujean, with much enthusiasm, came up with a superb prototype that remained almost unchanged right up to the final version, and he managed to convince his friends at MultiSim to come out with the game.

Frank Branham translated Citadelles into English and brought his version to Alan Moon's Gathering of Friends, where it was given a warm reception that brought me a great deal of mail.When I got together with Serge in Etourvy in April '99, we had to admit what we'd already suspected: our two games had nothing to do with each other. It was as if, both of us having decided to work on auto-racing games, I had created Mille Bornes and he Formula De. I had eight character cards and 60 locations, he had five locations and 60 characters. Why bother attempting an impossible synthesis, given the fact that my Citadelles -- a bluffing game -- was working quite well and Serge's -- more tactical -- seemed full of promise. Too busy pecking cheeks, serving hors d'oeuvres, and cleaning up empty beer bottles, I never found time to try his game during the weekend. So Sunday evening I left him a sample of my game and headed home with his, to study it up close.

The initial tests showed that, although the trip around his game board was as interesting as mine, his game still had some snags that caused it to bog down too often and end up in gridlock. The Lyonnais Citadelles, with its 60 cards all with different abilities, would need considerably more tweaking than the Parisian Citadelles. The game was very promising, and extremely original, but it needed a new look; while keeping the same basic strategy, I did the necessary fine-tuning. The dungeon disappeared, many characters acquired new powers, and new restrictions on placement appeared, allowing cards to be combined. I soon noticed that I was hardly playing my Citadelles anymore; I had adopted Serge's, and I'd modified it so much it had sort of become mine.

This time, though, we managed to work together to come up with the final product. The game attracted Henri Baczesak, of Jeux Descartes, and the contract was soon signed, although the game -- which we couldn't call Citadelles -- didn't yet have a name. Camelot was already taken, Tintagel (King Arthur's birthplace) sounded like a brand of laundry detergent; and Fortress seemed a little heavy. Finally, it became Castel, a somewhat old-fashioned French word for castle.

And that's how I find myself publishing -- almost simultaneously -- two games on the same theme, with similar graphics, but which are nevertheless entirely different. Citadelles is, fundamentally, a game of bluffing. Castel [aka Castle] is a game of strategy and combinations of cards, somewhat reminiscent of certain collectible card games. Citadelles has been published in German by Hans Im Gluck under the name Ohne Furcht und Adel and will be published one day in French, I hope, by Multisim.

(Translated from the French by Sandy Fein.)

A few further remarks from Bruno Faidutti:

I must add that Citadels was one of these games that work almost from the first test -- a very unusual thing, that I've met again recently with another prototype, Macao. After the Gathering, I got lots of email from people who played Frank's copy and wanted to make their own. I sent them Quark files and they made their games, and so this game was intensively tested for about three months by a dozen of American, English and French teams. This intensive testing didn't change much in the game, but helped with the "fine tuning," which is always something difficult with only one testing team.

Discuss Bruno Faidutti's board games on the Board Games Forum.

There were long discussions as to which characters were the most powerful ones, and the fact that various test teams had different opinions on this matter probably means that they are well balanced. The only important change in the game during this time was the card draw system. The first versions had "take two golds or draw a card," which was replaced with "take two golds or draw two cards, choose one, and discard the other," which makes the game much more balanced. The fact that the German publisher, Hans im Glueck, changed almost nothing to the original game -- they presented the rules another way, but the rules are basically the same -- probably means that it was already correctly "developed."

I think that what makes the charm of this game is that, though it's absolutely not a simulation, it has a strong theme. The power of the characters, the effect of the few special cards, were chosen not only because of their playability, but also because they fitted well the character names and the fantasy setting. We made the same with Serge with Castel (which is also, I think, a very good game, despite some rare endgame problems), and I'm trying to do the same with the game I'm now working on, Dragonslayers [aka Draco].

In the recurrent trend about "abstract vs. theme," theme is usually linked with simulation, and I think it's an error. Magic: the Gathering is a very strongly themed game -- and that's why it has great charm -- but is by no way a simulation. That's what I'm trying to do with my games. I don't always succeed: Democrazy, for example, lacks a strong theme, but the few we tried (earlier versions were called The Parliament of Fairies, Elfenlaw -- just to see Alan Moon's reaction -- and Judgement Day)...

NAVIGATE THIS BOARDGAMES ARTICLE
Page 1	Introduction to Faidutti and why he enjoys board games, with a complete ludography.
Page 2	Faidutti discusses the process of designing his games, including Murder at the Abbey.
Page 3	The success of Citadels, plus comments on Corruption, Democrazy and more.
Page 4	Faidutti's firt-hand account of how the related games Citadels and Castle came to be.

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