Pablo Clark may have a single published game to his name, but what a board game it is. The Old King’s Crown seemed to swoop in out of nowhere last year, garnering hundreds of thousands of dollars of support on Kickstarter. Wargamer editor Alex Evans calls it “the most captivating board game I’ve ever played”, and he’s far from alone.
Sudden smash hit it may seem, but The Old King’s Crown is far from a rushed job. Clark spent six years developing the title. They tested it thoroughly, with rounds of feedback from tabletop heavy-hitters like Cole Wehrle and Patrick Leder. They showed up to cons repeatedly to shout about what they were doing.
In fact, when I meet Clark and fellow Eerie Idol Games founder Andrew McKelvey at UK Games Expo, we’re interrupted. “You haven’t had enough of this place yet?”, someone asks. McKelvey tells me this is the duo’s fourth UK Games Expo. “Every year, we were like “it’s coming really soon, we promise – and it’s finally here.”
McKelvey, operations manager Eerie Idol, also tells me “there’s no shortcut” to making a successful board game. You can throw as much money as you want at marketing and advertising, but if it’s not hitting the right people, it’s not going to work”, he says. “The thing that worked for us is that we grew our community organically.”
The Old King’s Crown is far more than a cleverly marketed product, though. It’s one of the most unique strategy games out there. You play as one of four factions wrestling for the crown, and doing so means engaging in a bit of card-based combat, engine-building, bluffing, and area control.
It’s a game where your decisions spread out before you, not as a rigid path, but as the sprawling branches of a tree. These decisions are deep, and they’re difficult. Power is won and lost on many battlefields, and your journey to glory can take many routes.
Power, and the battle for it, continues to fascinate tabletop gamers. The Old King’s Crown’s nuanced exploration of such universal themes is undoubtedly part of its pull. I ask Clark and McKelvey why gameplay like this continues to captivate us.
“I think the ugly truth is that people are attracted to conflict”, Clarke says. “There’s an attraction to matching wits with someone and trying to come out on top.” “It’s a big part of why this hobby is compelling, which is odd, because it’s acknowledging this ugly desire for conflict.”
Clarke adds that The Old King’s Crown charges you with playing “a lot of unlikeable characters”. “I don’t think it’s a power fantasy in that sense.” “You’re playing nobility, but you aren’t some idealized version”, he tells me. The ugliness of the quest for power, then, is alive and well in the game’s emergent narrative.
It feels strange to talk about the ugly side of The Old King’s Crown, because this game is startlingly beautiful. It just won a Golden Geek award for artwork and presentation. As our review puts it: “Everywhere you look in this game, there’s another effortlessly absorbing piece of artistic flair, rendered in a vivid, anime-esque fantasy style that’s instantly recognizable yet refreshingly new.”
McKelvey tells me thinks the game’s art “is a big selling point”. “Part of its success is undoubtedly the artwork.”
“What I like about the artwork is it invites you to create these emergent stories throughout the game”, he adds. ” We’ve built the game so there’s no chronological order to events. We never explicitly say a character has done a specific thing or been part of a specific event.” “You can tell the story, and they become these little windows into a world that you can interpret yourself.”
Clark, the artist for the game as well as the designer, says “visuals are very important” in the world of modern board games. “Something I like seeing more and more is games bringing in influences from external sources – books and films and graphic design”, he tells me. “The more the industry does this, the healthier it becomes.”
“A horrible thing can happen when you only draw inspiration from games”, he adds. “You start thinking critically about games, but when you’re only bouncing off other games, that’s where the art starts to suffer.”
That’s just one piece of advice Clark offers budding board game designers. He shares another piece of wisdom, and it’s a bit less pragmatic than McKelvey’s marketing tips.
“You only get a few chances to make things, so make something that’s truly yours”, Clark says. “Make the thing that’s beautiful to you.” “If you make things for other people, your brain’s switched off and your heart’s switched off.”
That’s the passion that fueled The Old King’s Crown, a game that defies typical categorization. That authenticity helped Clark and McKelvey quit their day jobs to work on Eerie Idol full time. It’s why, beyond simply expanding its best-seller, Clark has been making “weird solitaire card games you can hide in a pack of cards”. “Maybe that’s the future of the company”, he quips with Scottish sarcasm.
As for the actual future, McKelvey says “we obviously want to keep making games, and this isn’t the only game we’re gonna make”. “We’ve got plans for the next big thing coming from us.”
Want to talk more about the best board games around? Mention The Old King’s Crown in the Wargamer Discord and watch editor Alex lose his mind over it, all over again.
Source: Wargamer
