Since most of you will be new to Cuzco, I will go over the history of designing the game. I will divide it in different parts to make it easier to read. Most of the things are from the memory, so I hope they are at least somewhat accurate.

The beginning

The whole idea of designing a boardgame began in first quarter of 2004. I had loved games all my life, but started playing more in 1996-97 when I first was introduced to the Settlers of Catan. I played it a lot with my family and friends, including Antti. But it wasn’t until Puerto Rico in late 2003 that I started buying more boardgames and not just games related to the Catan. It was the same Puerto Rico that got Antti excited over the boardgames and he started to build his own game collection.

The idea

So in 2004 we had had a relatively nice taste of different games out there. One day while talking, Antti mentioned the possibility to make our own game. My first thought was: “Sure, that would be nice, but I bet we won’t ever finish it.” After pondering it more, we began the process of designing by finding out what we could come up with. The main goal in our minds were: What would be the ideal game for us?

It proved to be a good decision. Almost right away I came up with the theme of conquering the new world and Antti had good ideas to add to that. We also thought of different games we had played and thought about different mechanics we had liked the most. We started figuring out how we could use those ideas in our theme. Looking back now, we had no control over our ideas. We put in all our wildest ideas ranging from attack formations to altitude modifiers!

Overall, our designing has followed a pattern: Sometimes it has been the only thing in our mind and we have constantly been improving it, and the other times there has been months of nothing going on with it. This happened in the beginning as well. I think it was in August 2004 that we had our first prototype put together.

The first playtest

We had high hopes for our first playtest. And it sure was a memorable experience. After five and half hours of playing it, the one of us in lead had 3-4 points in our 60+ track of victory points! Everything was just way too expensive to do, took so much time to develop your economy, way too many provinces.. the list could go on and on. At that point, we decided to end the game (originally the game ending was triggered at someone reaching 20 points!). Funny thing was that in the end, the winner had over 40 points, since there were hidden points that players could find by exploring.

Even though the first playtest wasn’t successful as a game, it showed us that there is potential in the concept of the game and it gave us the starting point for making the needed adjustments.. which would turn out to be many! Stay tuned..