Writing Hoplomachus
Exploring the creative process for Chip Theory Games' two new gladiator titles
In the half-decade-plus I’ve been working with Chip Theory Games, I’ve gotten to work on a lot of fun projects. I’ve written a few pieces of long-form fiction in the process and have even begun working on game design. While I’m proud of all the work I’ve done for the company, my most fulfilling creative experience in that time just might be for the game whose creation I was least involved with – at least from a writing and design standpoint.
I’ve been excited for this one: It’s time to talk about Hoplomachus.
Origins
Hoplomachus is the franchise that got Chip Theory Games started, back when it was just co-owners and cousins Josh and Adam Carlson working a two-man operation on Kickstarter. The Hoplo series – originally made up of three games, the first of which was funded on Kickstarter in 2012 – pitted gladiators of various real and fictional historical cities against each other in a simple but strategically robust combat mechanic, centered on moving unit chips around a hexagonal grid and rolling combat dice with various hit probabilities.
The games were small in reach but very popular among their buyers, who largely consisted of lovers of premium board game components and solo game players – both (at the time) underserved niches in an already somewhat niche industry. Along with the three core titles, the games also spawned several mini-expansions that could be played among any of the base games, eventually ballooning the series to seven unique factions and a wide variety of play modes, enemies, and customization.
In 2016, however, a year after the third Hoplo game’s campaign funded on Kickstarter, CTG launched its first campaign for Too Many Bones – the company’s first bona fide hit and still our best-selling series by a wide margin. That success helped Chip Theory go from a few guys doing their own thing to an ongoing business concern, including several employees with their own areas of expertise (for context, I started freelancing with Chip Theory at the end of 2017, when they were wrapping up their Too Many Bones reprint and working on the first standalone expansion to the franchise).
As the company grew, the games saw a marked improvement in production quality. There was more money to spend on their creation, for one thing; for another, there were artists and graphic designers and editors and rulebook writers working there. Josh and Adam no longer had to be jacks-of-all-trades; they could design games and give creative direction and manage the company, and specialized employees could execute their vision.
The upshot of all of that is that in the wake of the improved production quality of titles like Too Many Bones, Cloudspire, and burncycle, the Hoplo games started looking a little low-rent in comparison. The bones of gameplay were still very solid, but the presentation wasn’t up to the standards the company now sets for itself. Our rulebooks are better written and edited now. Our art is original, not repurposed public domain material. Our lore is richer and more central to the gameplay experience. The games started to lapse out of print, but we didn’t want to give up on the franchise.
The idea
One of the first tasks I was assigned when I was hired full-time in 2020 was a complete lore overhaul for a “remastered” version of Hoplomachus. At that stage, we weren’t sure what form that remaster would take, or even fully sure it would retain its name or gladiatorial combat theme. We just knew we wanted to continue to use those mechanics and reintroduce them to our much broader audience.
I came up with a variety of pitches, some more outlandish than others (I can’t find the pitch doc anymore, but I remember one of them involved retheming the game as a Honey, I Shrunk The Kids-sized epic war between different factions of insects). Ultimately, it was decided to retain the gladiator theme, and to split the product into two different games. The first, titled “Hoplomachus: Remastered,” would be a much more straightforward streamlined and improved version of the content in the first two Hoplo games (The Lost Cities and Rise of Rome), and the second, “Hoplomachus: Victorum,” would be the showcase – a solo-only campaign game where you traveled the world and engaged in smaller combats on a variety of battlefields inspired by the third Hoplo game (Origins, which is ironically one of the only travel-sized games we’ve ever made. Victorum is very much not that). With the direction set, I set about “remastering” the lore – and I quickly realized this was a bigger task than I’d anticipated.
I’d played around with the old Hoplo games before, but because I’d never looked into the lore, I didn’t realize they were extremely anachronistic. To take place in the height of gladiatorial combat, the game needed to be set in the first century AD – specifically around or after 80 AD, when the Colosseum was completed (the Colosseum was also one of the most important arenas to the original Hoplo series, and Rome was one of the game’s seven city factions). However, most of the non-fictional cities in the series did not exist (or at least were not at their historic heights) during that time. Carthage (which came with its hero, Dido, the city’s legendary founder) was founded some 800 years before, Xanadu was founded 1,200 years later, and Machu Picchu was founded 200 years after that. Even Pompeii, while contemporaneous to Rome, was destroyed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD, one year before the Colosseum was completed.
But that gave me an idea.
I’ve always been morbidly fascinated by the Vesuvius eruption – the idea that a volcano could just erase a couple of cities from existence, instantly wiping out whole populations (if we ever make a game about the lost colony of Roanoke, you’ll know that I’m indulging another one of my historical obsessions). The event’s proximity to the construction of the Colosseum allowed me to weave the two events together. In this new, more explicitly mythological world of Hoplomachus, the catastrophic event was stopped due to the magical intercession of Pliny the Elder, a famous philosopher and scientist of questionable veracity of the time (in real life, Pliny was also killed during the Vesuvian eruption). However, this angers Pluto, the Roman god of the underworld, who demands recompense for the souls he was supposed to gain. Unless the world can best his collection of fearsome scions, he will cause Mount Vesuvius to erupt as it should have, but increased 1,000-fold, raining destruction down upon the entire world.
The process
With the idea approved, I set about populating the world. I did a lot of homework for these games; my hope is that players find the world to be well-realized and thematic without the research intruding on the gameplay experience.
First, I started theming the new factions. To increase the game’s cultural diversity and to provide a wide variety of art and thematic options for gameplay, I decided to incorporate real-life civilizations from this time from all around the world, with the conceit that they all came together to fight this supernatural conflict. To further make the game stand out from other Greco-Roman projects, Pluto’s array of servants would hail from the mythologies of each of these civilizations: Greco-Roman, Persian, Mayan, and Chinese. Because the games are still, at their heart, themed around gladiatorial combat, I decided to use the Greco-Roman mythology as a lens for how the Romans are understanding their fellow civilizations. That’s why, for example, each faction has a unit named after a real-life gladiator type: Since many real gladiator types were inspired by other cultures or myths, the idea would be that the Romans saw these multicultural warriors and decided to adopt their fighting styles in the arena.
Rome became the New Argonauts, a group of gladiators who wished to fight Pluto for glory. I left the Atlanteans the same as they were in the previous iteration of Hoplo (Atlantis is a Greco-Roman myth), and changed Machu Picchu to the Amazons, another Greco-Roman myth. Carthage, known for their mounted warriors, became the Parthians, which were modeled after the real-life Parthian Empire (also in possession of a famous cavalry). Xanadu, a Chinese city, became Kunlun, a mixture of Han Empire military of that time period and Chinese myth. El Dorado was out, as that city had a Spanish name and was rumored to exist hundreds of years after the Roman Empire, so I replaced it with the Lamosians – the name a nod to Lamos, the stronghold of the Laestrygonians as described in The Odyssey, and the people modeled after the Mayan Empire, which was in full swing in Central America at this time. Finally, there were two underworld-based factions in the game: Pluto’s Refugees, a group of escapees from the Underworld who took up residence in Antarctica after Pliny’s intercession, and the Vesuvians, a group of evil creatures led by the rebellious god Nox (who would become the game’s eighth player character).
With the factions set, I began populating the world with the game’s villains. There are some great looking monsters and creatures in all of these myths, and it was a treat to pick the best one to match with each of the mechanics created by the designers (more on them in a moment). The scions of Victorum were the centerpieces, but Remastered had its own versions of endgame monsters in its titans and immortals, and I tried to make every selection for each chip and card feel rich and textured.
Of course, the reason they feel that way in the final version is largely due to the work of CTG artists Anthony LeTourneau and Federico Pompili, who brought these characters to life in their own gorgeous styles. I would do research on each unit and enemy and submit my descriptions and art references to CTG’s creative director Melonie Lavely (or, for the first part of the project, studio head Andrew Navaro), who would work with Anthony and Federico as they put together the final pieces, which always looked better than I could have imagined. Occasionally, I would have notes about the authenticity of one aspect or another (for example, weapons or armor), and our cultural consultant Jason Perez also had some very helpful notes about a few blind spots we could potentially run into. Creating the art for a game like this is a team effort, and even though I was generating the names and ideas, it was the other people on that team who actually turned those ideas into something that was worth playing with and looking at.
There was one more very important team member to this part of the project: CTG co-owner Josh Carlson, who looked over and provided input on all of the work on the project but ultimately allowed the rest of us to take a lot of creative ownership over the process. His trust that we were doing our homework on the world-building and proper portrayals of this stuff was very freeing, and the result was a great combination of creative freedom and energy that propelled us to an exciting result.
While a lot of our games contain a voluminous amount of writing to go with them (just wait until my multi-article series on the making of the latest Too Many Bones expansion, which drops later this year), the team decided that the Hoplo games should focus on the epic scope of these stories as passed down in ancient writing, as well as the excellent art. As such, most of the games are flavor-text free, with the exception of the descriptions of the scions and brief table-setting texts at the bottom of Victorum’s event cards (for those, I took inspiration from the purple prose of Twilight Imperium’s action cards, which I love). As a stretch goal in the campaign, we added an epilogue book to Victorum that I wrote that allows you to read a short ending for every combination of character and scion in the game.
The actual games
While I put a lot of thought into the way I worked on the new Hoplo titles, much of that work is invisible – or at least, not the reason anyone thinks they’re buying a game like this (and a lot of people did, with the $900,000+ we raised in 2021 the highest crowdfunding total we’ve had for a non-Too Many Bones game). I think most people were taken in by the aforementioned art (in addition to Anthony and Federico, Yoann Boissonnet did the evocative art for the games’ various battlefields), the stellar graphic design (largely created by Shaun Boyke), and the hooky gameplay.
While Remastered is a refinement of the pick-up-and-play, multi-option convenience of The Lost Cities and Rise of Rome (featuring multiple solo and co-op modes, as well as PvP options for up to four players), Victorum is a more focused, considered experience. In it, you play as one of eight heroes who must face off against a scion of your choice. Your hero starts with a lowly coterie of neutral units and a small assortment of powers and hit dice, but as you win fights, you can recruit new characters and gain new abilities. At the end of your first three acts, you must take on a primus battle, each of which pits you against the NPC side of one of the heroes you didn’t select. The game is punishing and challenging on its hardest difficulty setting, a welcome combination for solo players – if your hero ever drops to 0 health, you lose the game.
Development on the two new Hoplo titles was spearheaded by Logan Giannini and Adam Carlson, with Josh Carlson providing important guidance and ideas to make sure the games aligned with the existing Hoplo ethos. Adam was very focused on the games’ consistency, feel and variety (particularly when it came to how the games could recreate the Hoplo experience), and Logan was a fount of ideas, introducing many of the new concepts seen in Victorum in particular (having worked with him on multiple projects since then, I am always impressed by Logan’s seemingly infinite ability to iterate on ideas).
You’ll notice that I haven’t mentioned anything I did in this section; as I said up top, my involvement with the game part of these games is virtually nil, and when we inevitably make more of this franchise, I don’t know if that will change. That’s OK with me either way. It worked well the first time, and I’m just excited to dive back into the universe we all created together.
The game was supposed to come out last year, but a few unavoidable issues (a manufacturing snafu, one of the key people working on it getting COVID, etc.) pushed it to fulfilling for initial backers at the end of last year and becoming available for general purchase very soon. For a thing that is largely what it is because of other people, I am very proud of it.
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What else is good on the internet?
Here’s a good article about how the US likely engaged in a covert act of war against Russia by blowing up the Nord Stream pipeline last year.
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From the field
I don’t have any new public-facing writing at the moment, so why not check out the Hoplomachus games?
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Follow me on Twitter @RTHowitzer, read my Letterboxd reviews @mrchumbles, listen to my Star Trek podcast at outofcontreks.podbean.com, or email me at outofcontreks@gmail.com.