by David Bernal

Introduction

(written by designer David Bernal)

Oddly enough, for a long time Níjar wasn't Níjar. This is the diary of how, thanks to the work done together by its designer (me) and the development team at Perro Loko Games, that first prototype ended up becoming the game it is today.

The Inspiration That Got the Design Going

Designing a board game is not an easy job. I always need some inspiration, a spark that makes all the ideas I've been storing up fall into place.

The case of Níjar was a curious one. I remember sitting on the sofa at home when I thought of a theme based on the Barcelona '92 Olympics, something completely different from what the game has ended up being.

The idea was that each player would be an Olympic bid, competing in the race to become the host city of the Games. To do that you would have to develop your own city and meet the IOC's demands: the best stadiums, transport, hotel capacity, waste management... all the things you need in place to host an event on that scale.

When something excites me, what usually happens is that the rest of the ideas and mechanisms start turning up like a whirlwind. That's when the time comes to put some order into everything you're generating.

Fitting Into a Design Pattern

There is a publisher in Spain with a line this theme fit perfectly, so I got in touch with them to see whether the project might interest them. With no commitment, but with their blessing, I started working on the idea while sticking to production parameters that are very characteristic of their games.

I had the theme, I had ideas about how to develop the game and I had the publisher's encouragement to start building something, so I got my hands dirty with the proto.

The part I was most convinced about was the player area. It had to show the evolution of the city you represented and how it grew. That would be one of the cores of the game. To fit the idea into the publisher's parameters, the best approach was to build that area out of cards and, to get real development out of very few components, I made the cards interact with each other through horizontal and vertical connections.

I soon realized I was walking straight into designing a tableau building game with synergies.


At the bottom of the picture you can see the player area with the connections between cards. At the top, the main board with a matrix of discs as the action selection space and the first card selection method
The Action Engine

One of the problems I had was action selection. I didn't know exactly what mechanism to use to get interesting interaction between players. An action selection system with discs in limited spaces could make sense, but it needed an interesting twist.

Anyone who knows me will know that majorities are one of my favorite mechanisms, and the new idea in action selection was that a player could return another player's disc or discs as long as, when placing their own, they went over the number of discs in that action space. Once returned, those discs were available to their owner again.

The icing on the cake for the action system was arranging those spaces in a matrix, so that by taking a particular space you could choose one of the main actions matching the X coordinate of that space and a secondary action matching its Y coordinate.

All of this sounded great, to be honest. The problems arrived when we played it.


The picture shows an action selection matrix already using the Níjar theme and much further along
Card Selection

Another part of the process was designing the card selection, which was the main engine of the game. The first proposal focused on creating different types of cards and putting them all in the same deck. To add a decision point, the cards would be laid out on one side of the deck or the other, forcing players to choose one of the two available groups.

I knew this would cause problems too, but I needed to play the game before designing a more complex card selection mechanism.

The game was ready to be tested and, as always, when the playtests start, the real problems start.

The First Problems

The action selection grid with the stacked discs was interesting, but it didn't work the way I intended. Some players could be left with nothing to do for a long stretch because they had used up all their discs on the matrix and no other player returned them.

To fix it, we opened up the possibility of taking secondary actions on the turn of players who no longer had discs available. That gave the players who still had discs a reason to close the round as soon as possible, so as not to hand out extra actions. The action system became richer, and it started to work.

Another problem we spotted was that card selection could end up very unbalanced depending on the type of cards showing up in each part of the matrix. The dilemma dissolved and the choice ended up being fairly obvious.

The first changes came from the card deck. We had to organize the cards by year and balance them so that they gradually increased in cost and value, making them come out in a more orderly way.

We also expanded the matrix so that cards from earlier years were still available during later rounds and didn't just fade away.

And so, little by little, over months of playtesting, the game took shape until it became the prototype I ended up showing to Chus.


This picture was taken during Protos y Tipos, an event for designers in Spain. You can see the card selection matrix a little further along
Meeting Perro Loko

I remember the session where I showed the game to Chus. It was pretty casual. We're good friends and my intention wasn't to pitch him a game, but to ask his opinion on how he saw the prototype. After all, they had already worked on a city building game, a mechanism that shares certain aspects with the tableau building I was working on.

To my surprise, he asked for a bit of time to think about the game. It looked like he had enjoyed it and was after a game with those characteristics. That's where the metamorphosis started...

Perro Loko is known for putting a lot of work into both game development and the product concept, and the first thing he suggested was a change of theme. The same thing happened with Orloj and, although we didn't know yet how successful it would be, it shows he usually has a good nose for these things. His proposal was a theme he had wanted to work on for a long time: pottery making.

A change of theme, with everything that comes with it, can call for very significant changes to a game. Chus took charge of the development and they started working on it. From here on the work was intense and constant alongside the development team at Perro Loko Games, so I think it's better to hand over to Chus and let him finish explaining the process.

An Andalusian Theme

Written by publisher Chus Fuentes

As an Andalusian almost from birth, I feel deeply rooted in this land. A special place, full of history, incredible landscapes and enormous cultural richness. That's why I had been turning over the idea of starting a line of games that would show the light of this land.

I love games that tell stories and invite you to travel to other cultures, like Japanese, Mexican or Indian culture, but what about the land that took me in, its streets and its long conversations? The time had come to pay tribute to it.

I live in Seville, a city with a great pottery tradition, especially in Triana. Real works of art in clay have come out of its workshops. Granada also has a very distinctive ceramic style, as do Úbeda and Bailén. A trip to the Cabo de Gata-Níjar Natural Park changed my mind, though, and Níjar was the one: a town bathed by the Mediterranean where the pottery tradition goes back to the Bronze Age.

On my first trip to Níjar I had the chance to visit Loli and Ángel's workshop, a family craft workshop. Loli is 79 and still works there. She says it's what she has always loved most; it relaxes her and keeps her entertained. When I arrived she was painting next to her granddaughter and, honestly, I think Loli could make it to 200 with the calm, the good sense and the peace she radiates.

On a second trip I wanted to go back to Níjar with the factory printing proof, to show the game to her and to her whole family. They were absolutely thrilled. Her grandson even showed me around the inside of the workshop, which is enormous.


From top to bottom and from left to right. 1 Loli and her granddaughter painting in the workshop. 2 The game in the glazing area. 3 The game in the shop area of the workshop. 4 The game in one of the prettiest corners of Níjar. 5 The game in another part of Ángel and Loli's workshop. 6 Me at the workshop, in the sweltering heat
At first nobody on the team agreed with taking on this theme, so from the very first moment I worked on the prototype with a lot of care, to try to win them over.

For this phase of development I used AI-generated illustrations purely as visual support for the prototype. The aim was to communicate the proposal better during development. The final product was always meant to be illustrated by an artist.

Meeting David

David and I are great friends. We had already published Tholos before he became known with Salton Sea and, later, Koinobori. I would have loved to publish Salton Sea, but back then Perro Loko's finances barely let us go beyond smaller formats.

We loved the game he brought us. After all, we were looking for a midweight euro with few components and, after signing Phoenix New Horizon with Devir for the United States and getting access to new markets, developing a product designed especially for that market struck us as a great idea. We took the box size of The White Castle, one of their big hits, as our reference. Changing a game's theme, though, sometimes means radical changes. Once again we were up to our elbows in mud, and never was the expression more fitting.

The Transformation

Pottery is a traditional industry. If we wanted to see it represented in the game, we had to build a production chain with all of its steps: extracting the clay, throwing, drying, firing, painting and glazing.

David's game was ideal for this transformation. It had stadium cards that were built using a crane token going around a track inside them: there were our potter's wheels. It also had a main resource, influence; that would become the clay. The hard part was fitting in the rest, so we chose to replace the right-hand side of the player area, bringing in the kilns and the painting area.

The production chain would work by moving the pieces from top to bottom, from the drying area at the top down to the glaze kiln at the bottom, passing through the different steps along the way. The pieces would be cardboard: unpainted on one side and painted on the other, so they could be flipped to show the process. On top of that, each kiln or workshop would only have room for one piece, forcing players to manage the whole chain carefully.

A piece sitting in a kiln could be sold. With that one detail, players could sell both unpainted and painted pieces.


In the picture, the player board of the first adaptation of David's game to Níjar. On the right, the production chain. In the upper kilns, fired pieces that are not painted yet; in the lower ones, fired pieces that are already painted and glazed
The production chain didn't work in the first few games. There were too many steps to make a decent number of pieces in the time a game lasts. We had to speed the process up. The key came with the Fire action: instead of firing a single piece, you could make every possible movement of pieces into your kilns. As well as speeding up the chain, we went from making two or three pieces per game to nine or 10. The best part was that the production chain had picked up a very distinctive rhythm that you had to manage in order to optimize it.

We extended the same system to the Paint action to unify the whole chain. At last we started to feel the satisfaction of knowing we were on the right track.


In the picture, an example from the Níjar rulebook showing three pieces being fired at once with a single Fire action
Bringing in the production chain and the new actions meant redoing all the cards. It wasn't only a matter of swapping icons, but nobody thought it was going to be easy.

The New Action Selection Matrix

David's action matrix was a very original idea, but a bit rigid. The actions were printed on the board and, right from the start, we wanted them to be able to swap positions so that every game would feel different.

I don't want to spend too long explaining this, so as not to make this diary too long; I'll just add that it took us a long time to get all the actions to have a similar importance and to be able to swap positions.

In Níjar, the most important action in the game, by a distance, is Play a Card. To make everything work, we decided to link the First Player Action to a wild action. That way we reduced the interaction over the Play a Card action and got the matrix working, letting every action swap positions and making each game different.

Card Selection

After working on the cards, we decided to separate them by type and group them in twos to form three decks. We would reveal five cards from each deck, forming a 3×5 matrix. The mechanism was as simple as it was effective: a two-axis river market in which you could change the point of origin by moving your pawn (later on, the Donkey). In other words, if a card was one orthogonal step away from your pawn, you would pay one coin; each additional step costs one coin more.


This example from the rulebook makes the two-axis market easier to understand. After the acquire action, you move your Donkey to change the origin of the costs.
On top of that, the cards under your pawn could not be taken by other players, which added one more point of interaction to the system.

At first there was a huge variety of cards, but it was hard for players to judge which ones were good or bad without knowing the game. So we decided to unify them, changing only the combo actions. Now it was easier to choose what you wanted, and card selection generated far more interaction.

The Customers and the Market

The point of making pieces was to sell them and, through that, to score victory points.

At first we had a customer system. Each round we revealed as many customers as there were players, and each of them asked for a set of pieces. At the end of the round, starting with the first player, players chose a customer to sell their pieces to.

The interaction was fierce and turn order was hugely important with that system. It was great fun watching which pieces the other players were making over the course of the round.


Some customer cards for the end of the second round. Each piece sold gave 7 or 4 points, depending on whether it was painted or not. You could sell painted or unpainted pieces to fill the shaded requirements. Completing a customer card also gave 2 victory points.
We did get that system working, but we decided to swap it for a market where the score drops with every sale, turning selling into an action that uses up a turn instead of happening at the end of the round. It was a way of enriching a system that tended toward a rigid produce-then-sell sequence. Now pieces could stay in your kilns between rounds, waiting for the best moment to sell them.

What came out of it was a system with a lot of interaction, more strategic and less punishing. It works with a roll of three custom dice that push up the value of each type of piece, painted or not, at the start of each round. On top of that, the first player can reroll the dice and is the first to sell, which gives even more weight to the turn order action.

The Scoring Cards

The game was already finished, but we wanted to invite players to explore different strategies. That's what we designed the Endgame Scoring Cards for.

At the end of each round you could play one of these cards to score it at the end of the game, but you could also discard it during your turn to take a wild action. It's an interesting decision: lock in points for the end of the game, or have an extra action this round to make more pieces and score more points right away.

Six of these cards score for collecting as many cards of the same type as possible. We worked hard on that balance so that any strategy would be competitive. Some are more obvious than others, but we ran a huge number of tests to make sure they all offered players the same opportunities.

The Product

Since we were also working with Jorge Tabanera on ASHES: Blackout Protocol, I couldn't help telling him about this new project. My surprise came when he told me that his father had been a potter. There was no doubt left: this project had to be for Jorge as well. Nobody would convey what the world of pottery craft means with the same sensitivity as he does.

I showed him photographs of Níjar and told him about my experience there. We set the game roughly in the 1920s so that we could use the perra gorda, a coin with a strongly popular, traditional character. We decided to create a cover inspired by the traditional posters for local patron saint festivals and, as usual with Jorge, the rest of the work came about very naturally until it took the shape of the product it is today. We're very proud of the result. He has captured the light of Andalusia.

We hope you enjoy Níjar as much as we have enjoyed developing it. Designing a game this compact and, at the same time, this strategically deep has been a challenge. Don't be fooled by its size: Níjar isn't your typical family game, and we think it will be a very pleasant surprise for lovers of strategy games.


In the picture, some of the steps taken during the design of the cover