Prototype map, tokens, and player sheets

Grimoires

March 12, 2019

Grimoires is a competitive, area control, legacy game for 2-5 players. Here in The Grand Library of Enlightenment, our players are master wizards commanding an army to extract the knowledge of the land by force. Area control games have always been my favorite tabletop games but they often have limited interaction between all players and king-making. Grimoires combat this by adding methods of transporting units of a player’s army across the map to combat all different enemies. When creating this game, I wanted to evoke the emotions of the quote: “You may have lost the battle but not the war.” This inspired the legacy mechanics of the game, the remnants of each battle scarring the battlefield to be utilized in the next battle.

The game has changed over the course of development fundamentally. Originally, the game revolved around eliminating other players to be the last wizard standing. To do this, every player creates a secret name for themselves and the other players need to figure out which name that is by capturing their opponent’s units and learning pieces of the name from them. Elimination games have their benefits but when looking at the viability of the genre in today’s market, I decided to move to a style where every player is in the game until the end.

Now the goal for players is to gather victory points which is can be done through owning territory or learning names or defeating the wizard of another player. Killing a wizard ends the game immediately so players can try to force a swift victory or ally with the losing player until they earn more points for themselves.