DESIGN NOTES FOR DRAKON
by Tom Jolly

Drakon started out life in the early 1990's as a game about programming. The basic framework of the game, which still exists, is that players would move onto a program instruction that affected various actions in the game, and decide whether to use it, and how to use it. The first design attempt involved program instructions laid out in a straight line. While attempting to add subroutines and loop statements, I ended up with little side-paths that went back to earlier statements. Using square tiles, this naturally evolved into the existing board, with multiple arrows on a tile loosely representing if/then statements (or decision blocks in a flow chart), and the Teleport representing the "goto" statement.

I liked the creation of looping paths, and the game's theme drifted away from programming into a sort of "Alice-in-Wonderland" look, and at that time I named it Primrose Path. Clearly there are instructions that have nothing at all to do with programming, such as Rotate, though I suppose you could consider this a program statement that reprograms the program, changing the arrow directions of a decision block. At some point I just started experimenting with all the different ways the tiles could affect the game and seeing which ones played well.

Around the same time I started to create a second game that diverged totally from Primrose Path called "Programmer's Nightmare". Though they both started from the same initial idea, they are completely different. Programmer's Nightmare suffered from the fact that it was about, well, programming, and you could get into some really complicated mind-numbing situations. I liked it, but I'm nuts.

The object of the original version of Primrose Path was to get rid of the four tiles in your hand. There was no "Get 1 Gold", it was "Discard 1 Tile". This had an interesting feature in that as you got close to winning, your tile choices were reduced, thus making you weaker.

I showed the game to Wizards of the Coast in 1993 at GenCon, the same year that Magic: the Gathering came out, and was fortunate that many of them were Wiz-War fans.

They liked the game and offered to publish it. M:TG ended up sucking up every free minute they had, however, and two years later they dropped it, along with some other planned board games they had in the queue. Richard Garfield (designer of Magic: the Gathering) suggested changing the object from "Getting rid of Tiles" to "Getting gold", on the presumption that players enjoy gathering things rather than getting rid of them. This made sense to me, and I changed the game to reflect it.

The game was renamed "Vaults" on the basis of this change, and the idea that you were raiding the evil King's vaults.

I met Christian Petersen (Fantasy Flight's CEO) in Essen, Germany while I was living in England, showing him the concept for DiskWars, and much later (after a few more luckless attempts at securing a publisher) I showed him Vaults, which became Dragon's Vault, and finally Drakon. Christian's design group decided to add the special character abilities, which worked out quite well.

The game was finally published 6 years after it was first submitted to WotC.

I was so happy!

Most of the changes from the second edition to the third have been introduced by FFG to resolve some of the issues the game had, and to eliminate some of the "kingmaker" effects that were introduced by having all your gold on display, and the ability for all the players to gang up on the winner. Now, gold denominations are random, and nobody is ever really sure just how close you are to winning the game. They also combined many of the tiles from the only expansion set into the new set, and added miniatures to the lot.

I hope everyone enjoys playing the game as much as I enjoyed designing it.

Tom Jolly