by Germán P. Millán

Hello, everyone, I'm Germán, creator of games such as Bitoku and Men-Nefer. My newest game, Covenant, will be presented at SPIEL Essen 25, so I'd like to share with you some thoughts on the creation of this game. I hope you find them interesting.

The Call of the Mountain

When I finished creating Bitoku, David Esbrí from Devir suggested the idea of starting another game. I remember that conversation well because David proposed the possibility of obtaining the Lord of the Rings license, something that left me both impressed and intimidated. Tolkien's world is so vast and full of stories that the possibilities for creating a game are almost endless.

With the possibility of obtaining this license in mind, I began writing an adventure game: Players would travel through Middle-earth in parallel with the events of the War of the Ring, fighting against Sauron's forces while completing missions and meeting influential characters from the saga.

It didn't take long before I had a prototype ready, and we started testing it. The game worked and improved with each play, but I never truly liked it. It felt too similar to many other adventure games...and that's when I realized what wasn't working: the theme.


An early prototype of Covenant, when it was focused on Lord of the Rings
The idea of "making a Lord of the Rings game" was far too broad. A more specific focus was needed, not just another game of heroes fighting enemies and completing quests.

After much thought and diving deep into the stories of Middle-earth, I decided to focus on the dwarves and the fall of Khazad-dûm. The moment when the Fellowship enters the Mines of Moria has always impressed me. That labyrinth of galleries, halls, pillars, and constructions once built by the dwarven lords is incredibly evocative. Moreover, dwarves have always been my favorite race.

In just a few days, I had written the structure of a Euro-style game, keeping some ideas from the earlier prototype, but defining much more clearly the players' goals and the game's actions.

Without a doubt, Covenant taught me how important it is to have a clear theme. It helps me narrow down what I want to happen and define the central axis around which everything revolves.

The Ringing of the Anvil

Board game design is curious in many ways, one of which is how easy or difficult it can be to make a prototype work. In the case of Covenant, it didn't take long for the design to work, and most of the initial ideas remain in the final game.

From the first prototype of the board, you could already see the three tracks that players could develop, the mountain to be discovered and built upon, the enemies besieging it, the three ages of the game, and (most importantly) the forging of tools and inlays.


All of this evolved and improved over many plays, but I'd like to pause on one idea that didn't make it into the final version: trading with the elves.

In Tolkien's books, the relationship between elves and dwarves is fascinating, and I find the friendship between Gimli and Legolas one of the most moving aspects of the trilogy, so I tried to integrate something similar into Covenant.

The idea was simple: the minerals and gems excavated by the dwarves could be traded with nearby elven cities. That way, the materials players dug up could be used not only to forge tools, but also to trade in elven cities. At that point, the board had a network of paths connecting the mountain with many elven settlements.


On paper this sounded fantastic, and it was hard for me to let go of the idea. Proof of that is how long this mechanism stayed in the prototype. I refused to remove it for far too long, yet once again game design has taught me that it's not about what the author wants, but about what the game needs. As strange as it sounds, there are moments when it feels like the prototype is speaking to you, and what it says is often the opposite of what you think.

Looking back, it made sense to discard that element of the design because it shifted the players' focus elsewhere. Trading with elves created a sort of tug-of-war with almost everything else. Roughly 80% of the game was about conquering the mountain, but 20% was about something else entirely. Players felt the trading was forced — fun and functional, yes, but it didn't truly fit.

This is an example of the kinds of decisions designers must make during development. Looking at the final version of the board, I feel everything is in harmony with the central goal of reconquering the mountain.



The Dwarven Pact

I don't remember exactly when it happened, but David Esbrí told me that publishing the game under the Lord of the Rings license was no longer possible — something we had always known might happen. At first, I was a little disappointed, but I think this was ultimately good for the project, especially considering the number of games being published with that license today.

It isn't hard to reframe a fantasy-medieval game thematically, and David found an incredible illustrator, Enrique Fernández, who gave the game his own unique personality. The dwarves had signed the pact to recover their ancestral home, and that's how the game's title was born: Covenant.

With that set and defined, the development of the game came together, and once everything was in place, all that remained was to finish...

Inlays and Tools

Earlier, I mentioned how smooth the development of Covenant was, but I had avoided talking about the inlays — those troublesome inlays.

In Covenant, players take actions using tools. If you equip your dwarf with a pickaxe, it performs a mining action, but each tool also has a slot where you can place a gem, that is, the "inlay". That gem grants an additional action, so if you equip a dwarf with an inlaid pickaxe, it will mine and also perform the gem's action.

On paper, this sounds fantastic; mechanically, it was a nightmare. Not all combinations of actions worked well. Combining tool actions with inlay actions created redundancies and imbalances.

Playtests went smoothly until a player added an inlay to a tool and created a dangerous combination. And believe me, there were many more possible action combinations than those that made it into the final game.
The inlays became a wild horse, hard to tame — one isolated combination could break the game's balance. We ran the game through many sessions to figure out which actions could be inlays and which could not. It was painful to cut some really fun effects from the inlays because they unbalanced the game. In the end, we had to separate inlays into two types to ensure both balance and diversity in the tool-inlay system.

The lesson here is the importance of knowing where to place an action or effect — and where not to! Without a doubt, this can be the difference between a good design and a mediocre one.


Speak, Friend, and Enter

This brings us to the end of this short diary on the creation of Covenant. I'm sorry I don't have more to share. I hope that one day you'll enjoy reconquering the mountain in Covenant, but you'll have only twelve turns in which to do it!

I'd like to thank the Devir team for the opportunity to publish another game with them, especially David Esbrí for being a magnanimous clan leader, Enrique Fernández for his skill with the brush, and the duo Samu and Diego, whose set squares and compasses have ordered every corner of the mountain.

And if you've made it this far, thank you, dear reader and gamer. Without you, we wouldn't be making these games.