Our brains work in funny ways. I cannot even count the times I have seen the name "Ed Beach" in Firaxis-related articles and media and never once did it cross my mind that this could be the same Ed Beach who designed one of the more famous grand strategy wargames, Here I Stand and a well-known series of American Civil War wargames (yawn). Yet it is. Beach led the design of both Civ V expansions and previously worked on Civ III: Conquests, there have been no announcements of any projects he is involved in recently, and he skipped participation in Beyond Earth and Rising Tide, which makes it as good a bet as any that he is busy plowing away at Civ VI. With that in my mind, I thought it could be interesting to look at the two grand strategy board games he designed, just as a fun speculative exercise in guessing what we might see in the next installment of the Civilization series.
![[Image: pic1939503_lg.jpg]](https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic1939503_lg.jpg)
First of all, Beach as game designer is no Zynga hack. His two grand strategy games: Here I Stand and Virgin Queen, hereon in referred to my their acronyms, are heavy in theme, mechanics and time required to actually play them out. HIS and VQ deal with state-building, war and religion in early modern Europe — a time when the three concepts were inseparable from one another. HIS covers the period from 1517, the year when Martin Luther nailed his theses to the Wittenberg Schloßkirche, to 1555, the year of the Peace of Augsburg, in which the Protestant princes of the Holy Roman Empire secured the right to both practice Lutheranism privately and make it the official faith of their land. Cuius regio, eius religio was the principle, albeit the choice in religio was rather limited — the peace also confirmed Calvinism and Anabaptism as heresies, banned in the Empire. Of course, now that I know that it was this Ed Beach that designed Gods and Kings, Wittenberg's presence on the list of city states makes that much more sense.
1555 takes us to the start of the next game, the Virgin Queen, named after the most famous ruler of that period. VQ proceeds until 1598, the year of the Edict of Nantes, passed by the king Henry IV of France. This enacted toleration of the Huguenot, French Calvinist, faith, in his kingdom — even as Henry of Navarre himself abandoned the Reformed faith for the purposes of coronation, famously proclaiming that Paris is worth a Mass.
None of the above is incidental to Beach's game design; even though the players are, loosely, the leaders of their respective kingdoms and empires, the religious conflicts are at the very heart of both games, making a contest for the congregation's hearts as crucial as the military conflict between kingly armies. However, different players face completely different situations — as could be expected of the leaders of England, France, Holy Roman Empire and the Ottoman sultans, all of whom are playable in both games. The situations are incredibly, almost impossibly assymetric. The Ottomans have no stake in the religious conflict, apart from the fact that it weakens their immediate enemies. For the Protestants, on the other hand, almost nothing but the religious conflict matters — in both games this faction starts with no forces on the map and no territories, all of them have to be converted, before Protestants get to participate in the "traditional" 4X activities at all. In HIS, the conversion battles take place in HRE, in VQ they move westwards to Low Countries and France.
![[Image: pic114536_lg.jpg]](https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic114536_lg.jpg)
How is such thematically deep topic and the assymetric positions managed? Well, thankfully, Beach didn't have to create a system of scratch, but could rely on fairly tried and tested approach for thematic strategies — the card-driven system. A set of example cards for HIS are given above, as you can see they cover actual historical events and convert them into the language of mechanics. But they are more than thematic events, they form the very fuel of the game. Each card has an action point value on it, and when taking his round, rather than use the card for the event, the player can use it for its action point value to conduct standard actions — build troops, hire mercenaries, move troop formations, fortify areas, engage in religious struggles, colonize the New World and, in VQ, patron artists and scientists. As far as I know, VQ is the only game which lets you take a part in the development of world literature by sponsoring the work of Shakespeare.
A lot of substance in VQ and HIS is greatly abstracted and streamlined. There are only two types of land troops — mercenaries and regulars, and you buy them at a fixed rate of one strength point for one action point (mercenaries), or one strength point for two action points (regulars). There is only one type of resource in the game, the action points on your cards, which you draw to your current hand size and the start of the turn — the more cities you have under your control, the bigger your hand size, reflecting access to a bigger resource base. On top of this high-level of abstraction, the games provide an incredible level of historical theme and detail, limited only by the amount of text that can be printed on one card. Separate bits of cardboard are used to track multiple stories, related to characters, places or events.
![[Image: pic2234841_lg.jpg]](https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic2234841_lg.jpg)
England player's sheet for VQ.
What can be said about these games, without diving much deeper into them? First of all, these are unflinchingly heavy and multiplayer experiences. They take little account of the "mass market" and are clearly aimed at enthusiasts. Of course, the publisher of these games is not Firaxis and Beach is unlikely to be choosing the company's marketing policy — but still, choosing Beach as the designer does potentially hint at the direction chosen for the product. If Firaxis wanted to release a more developed Civ Online Play by Facebook game, they would have turned to someone else.
On the slightly less positive side, these games are a mess of what wargamers call "chrome", little bits of rules that apply to a highly specific section of the game, rather than following from the general design. HIS and VQ are almost all about chrome, the Ottoman Sultan skipping a round of governance for the pleasures of the Harem, or the English having to worry about Mary, Queen of Scots stirring up trouble. No reasonable system could integrate events so diverse and specific into something abstract, so Beach, quite rightly, doesn't even try. Only English have the "Mary" problem, it has specific rules applying only to it, and nothing remotely similar can happen to other players, all of which have to worry instead about their own specific problems and their associated rulesets.
Coming back to the positives, despite all that has just been said, Beach manages to produce games which are balanced. The tricks he uses for this are numerous and include varying the demands for achieving victory — imagine Louis XIV in Civ having a higher "Legendary" cap for his cities to make up for a great number of culture-positive events he has unique access to. This has problems of its own, of course. In one VQ game I played, Catholic France was only a few points of winning the game at the very end, even though it controlled not a single key city in its own territory, everything has fallen either to the Protestants or Spain. This they managed by successfully marrying their royals all over the place (successful* marriage yields victory points for everyone, but more so for the French side) and by being avid sponsors of the arts and sciences. Both activities yield victory points which cannot be taken away ever, and potentially allow winning in circumstances which resemble nothing like victory. Of course, this is perhaps not so different from the Space and Culture victories in Civ in any case.
I have to say I am excited. If Ed Beach is the lead on Civ VI, I am pretty sure that, whatever happens, we will see something very different from the series. Where Soren is a master of tight mechanical design, something he confirmed with Offworld Trading Company, Ed is the lord of historical storytelling through the gaming medium. I would expect Beach's Civilization to be messy and overwrought, yet engrossing and enjoyable. He just has the chops to throw up a salad of mechanics and fuse them into something that plays well, even competitively. I just hope that he would have kept the multiplayer aspect of it all in mind.
*You guessed it right, there is a bunch of separate mechanics governing whether a marriage agreement between players results in a successful marriages. Some couples are unhappy, some wives die in childbirth, it's all there in the rules.
First of all, Beach as game designer is no Zynga hack. His two grand strategy games: Here I Stand and Virgin Queen, hereon in referred to my their acronyms, are heavy in theme, mechanics and time required to actually play them out. HIS and VQ deal with state-building, war and religion in early modern Europe — a time when the three concepts were inseparable from one another. HIS covers the period from 1517, the year when Martin Luther nailed his theses to the Wittenberg Schloßkirche, to 1555, the year of the Peace of Augsburg, in which the Protestant princes of the Holy Roman Empire secured the right to both practice Lutheranism privately and make it the official faith of their land. Cuius regio, eius religio was the principle, albeit the choice in religio was rather limited — the peace also confirmed Calvinism and Anabaptism as heresies, banned in the Empire. Of course, now that I know that it was this Ed Beach that designed Gods and Kings, Wittenberg's presence on the list of city states makes that much more sense.
1555 takes us to the start of the next game, the Virgin Queen, named after the most famous ruler of that period. VQ proceeds until 1598, the year of the Edict of Nantes, passed by the king Henry IV of France. This enacted toleration of the Huguenot, French Calvinist, faith, in his kingdom — even as Henry of Navarre himself abandoned the Reformed faith for the purposes of coronation, famously proclaiming that Paris is worth a Mass.
None of the above is incidental to Beach's game design; even though the players are, loosely, the leaders of their respective kingdoms and empires, the religious conflicts are at the very heart of both games, making a contest for the congregation's hearts as crucial as the military conflict between kingly armies. However, different players face completely different situations — as could be expected of the leaders of England, France, Holy Roman Empire and the Ottoman sultans, all of whom are playable in both games. The situations are incredibly, almost impossibly assymetric. The Ottomans have no stake in the religious conflict, apart from the fact that it weakens their immediate enemies. For the Protestants, on the other hand, almost nothing but the religious conflict matters — in both games this faction starts with no forces on the map and no territories, all of them have to be converted, before Protestants get to participate in the "traditional" 4X activities at all. In HIS, the conversion battles take place in HRE, in VQ they move westwards to Low Countries and France.
How is such thematically deep topic and the assymetric positions managed? Well, thankfully, Beach didn't have to create a system of scratch, but could rely on fairly tried and tested approach for thematic strategies — the card-driven system. A set of example cards for HIS are given above, as you can see they cover actual historical events and convert them into the language of mechanics. But they are more than thematic events, they form the very fuel of the game. Each card has an action point value on it, and when taking his round, rather than use the card for the event, the player can use it for its action point value to conduct standard actions — build troops, hire mercenaries, move troop formations, fortify areas, engage in religious struggles, colonize the New World and, in VQ, patron artists and scientists. As far as I know, VQ is the only game which lets you take a part in the development of world literature by sponsoring the work of Shakespeare.
A lot of substance in VQ and HIS is greatly abstracted and streamlined. There are only two types of land troops — mercenaries and regulars, and you buy them at a fixed rate of one strength point for one action point (mercenaries), or one strength point for two action points (regulars). There is only one type of resource in the game, the action points on your cards, which you draw to your current hand size and the start of the turn — the more cities you have under your control, the bigger your hand size, reflecting access to a bigger resource base. On top of this high-level of abstraction, the games provide an incredible level of historical theme and detail, limited only by the amount of text that can be printed on one card. Separate bits of cardboard are used to track multiple stories, related to characters, places or events.
England player's sheet for VQ.
What can be said about these games, without diving much deeper into them? First of all, these are unflinchingly heavy and multiplayer experiences. They take little account of the "mass market" and are clearly aimed at enthusiasts. Of course, the publisher of these games is not Firaxis and Beach is unlikely to be choosing the company's marketing policy — but still, choosing Beach as the designer does potentially hint at the direction chosen for the product. If Firaxis wanted to release a more developed Civ Online Play by Facebook game, they would have turned to someone else.
On the slightly less positive side, these games are a mess of what wargamers call "chrome", little bits of rules that apply to a highly specific section of the game, rather than following from the general design. HIS and VQ are almost all about chrome, the Ottoman Sultan skipping a round of governance for the pleasures of the Harem, or the English having to worry about Mary, Queen of Scots stirring up trouble. No reasonable system could integrate events so diverse and specific into something abstract, so Beach, quite rightly, doesn't even try. Only English have the "Mary" problem, it has specific rules applying only to it, and nothing remotely similar can happen to other players, all of which have to worry instead about their own specific problems and their associated rulesets.
Coming back to the positives, despite all that has just been said, Beach manages to produce games which are balanced. The tricks he uses for this are numerous and include varying the demands for achieving victory — imagine Louis XIV in Civ having a higher "Legendary" cap for his cities to make up for a great number of culture-positive events he has unique access to. This has problems of its own, of course. In one VQ game I played, Catholic France was only a few points of winning the game at the very end, even though it controlled not a single key city in its own territory, everything has fallen either to the Protestants or Spain. This they managed by successfully marrying their royals all over the place (successful* marriage yields victory points for everyone, but more so for the French side) and by being avid sponsors of the arts and sciences. Both activities yield victory points which cannot be taken away ever, and potentially allow winning in circumstances which resemble nothing like victory. Of course, this is perhaps not so different from the Space and Culture victories in Civ in any case.
I have to say I am excited. If Ed Beach is the lead on Civ VI, I am pretty sure that, whatever happens, we will see something very different from the series. Where Soren is a master of tight mechanical design, something he confirmed with Offworld Trading Company, Ed is the lord of historical storytelling through the gaming medium. I would expect Beach's Civilization to be messy and overwrought, yet engrossing and enjoyable. He just has the chops to throw up a salad of mechanics and fuse them into something that plays well, even competitively. I just hope that he would have kept the multiplayer aspect of it all in mind.
*You guessed it right, there is a bunch of separate mechanics governing whether a marriage agreement between players results in a successful marriages. Some couples are unhappy, some wives die in childbirth, it's all there in the rules.
