Loodo

The Rooftops of Ludovia is a game with simple rules willing to make players fell like they are old-school thieves, jumping over rooftops, running away from the policemen and gathering “Fame and Fortune”. Our goal was to be a simple game, with clear mechanics and no great complexity: It’s a casual (filler) game, but with some elements to add more replayability to it.

The game have a high impredictability feel, as it has lots of dice rolls and many events are defined by other random elements, but we tried to keep some tactic/estrategic mechanincs, as the action-point-based turn, or by letting players interact with each other, using equipaments or moving the policemen to block paths.

Assembling the game

Everything you need to play the game is over there: The manual and game pieces are there to be printed and assembled. To make it easier to do the “front-and-back” printing (the back of the cards are very important to the game), we made both side-by-side, so you only need to cut, fold and glue to have a perfect card: And it will have two times the normal weigth of the paper.

The paws were based on Souza Campos’ Tubeland site: You only need to cut, make a simple tube, and glue the gray area on each piece to make the thief-pawn.

Theme

The game was born after the theme: We wanted to make a game about adventuring thieves, running through the urban space, jumping walls and robbering houses, running from guards and dogs. We first thought about a low-magic medieval fantasy RPG, but we then agreed that it would fit very well on a board game: And we wanted to make a print-and-play game for our blog.

The first draft of rules came out very quickly, and we also quickly descarded the “medieval thieves” concept: Robbering houses in an urban space would work better in antoher ambient: The Industrial Revolution, bringing out some “Oliver Twist” feel. But as soon we started the first playtests, we saw a strong comic sensation in the game actions (falling down from rooftops, beign caught by police) - We already wanted to make a non-violent game (The game was about being an adventurer thief, but not about being a bad, cruel criminal), so we start thinking about the thieves from old black-and-white classic movies and animated cartoons.

After that, we started polishing it out: We researched old animated cartoons from the 30’s to 50’s, and we added some visual language from comic books, that would work better with static images.

Developing the Game

The basic mechanics for the game came out very quickly.The day after the inicial brainstorming, all the core mechanics were presented. We wanted to build a modular board to help us on level designing, and to avoid people having trouble to print a huge board.

We waste some time trying to define the tiles on the board, and most of the work was about throwing out the excess of information: The first sketches of the board were very different, and had parts that would make the policemen moviment (something we almost did not change from the very beggining) very complicated. We started then to think in blocks with an equal number of tiles on each. After some playtesting, we chose the block with 9 tiles on each (3×3) over a second choice with 12-tiled blocks (3×4): This choice helped the moviment and game dinamics and also made the board game more random as a whole.

After that, we start balancing the event cards (there were six at the start), and value/functions of the equipaments. We also start polishing the victory conditions. We had most trouble on making the equipaments attractive to the players: We didn’t had the Black Market spots, and buying them only at the Lair wasn’t a good idea, as there you could earn the victory ponts and win the game. This made us rebuild all economy of the game, changing the value of the tresaures (initially they were from 0-5), and that helped us with making the game duration smaller and more uniform. We also made the equipaments cheaper, and added the Black Market, so the players started buying them.

Another thing we found in the playtesting was that the system was making players life too hard: We wanted that players compete with each other for becoming the best thief, but they were primarily fightning against the game, for then, if possible, challenge other players. The system had too many punitive elements, and too few incentives for risk taking. We wanted the players to try, and we wanted people to achieve what they were trying.

We hope the biggest problems are gone by now!

Final Words

We really hope that you can give us anything you think the game could be: Adding stuff, removing, making it better. Or make yourselves a new version and show to us at ludovia@loodo.com.br