Back in 2011 Behdad and I started talking about games and game Ideas; the idea behind Elements was one of the first ones that he shared with me. It was born out of contemplating on social games like Mafia, and card games like Yu-Gi-Oh!. It was a board game but like Mafia it needed an omniscent entity to make it work and it had some complicated calculations so it couldn’t be a traditional board game but a video game instead.

In its first iteration the game was designed for 2-4 players. The board was a diamond-shaped grid and each player had a number of warriors on this grid. There were four resources, namely air, earth, fire and water. Warriors were composed of a combination of these elements and the dominant element would have specified the warrior’s type, and each type had a certain attribute, e.g., a warrior of type fire had more attack power and an earth warrior was good at defence. In each turn the player could move a warrior by one grid or attack a neibouring enemy or split the warrior into two warriors. The attack and defense logic was based on a graph indicated which element can attack which other elements.

The game idea seemed interesting to us, at least on paper, but we didn’t work on it, I was busy with my startup and Behdad was finishing his BS project and after that went to Canada. That was the case until two months ago that we started working on Elements again.

As soon as we began to work on Elements we saw design flaws in our initial game design. One of the pillars of Elements’ design was information hiding. Like Mafia, we wanted the players to try and guess the composition of opponent’s warriors based on small clues that they get here and there, specifically in the battle. With that in mind we redesigned the attack graph so that we someone attacks, you cannot figure out the attacker’s composition exactly. Unfortunately, that made the attack calculations way more complicated than we wanted.

After some tinkering and taking different approaches we went with a much simpler game design. We used each resource as a currency to do a specific task: for moving more than one tile you need to spend air, you need to sacrifice fire to attack, you need water to split or merge two warriors and earth is needed for adding all the elements that you gathered from your backpack to your warrior. Warriors don’t have a type anymore and the damage is simply calculated by the difference between sum of resources of each warrior. The game still has partial information hiding and you need a good strategy against your opponent based on her moves to win the game.

I knew from the start that we need something less complicated than Unity (the game engine we used for our previous games), something that would enable us to just work on the logic and let us ignore the scaffoldings and boilerplates. For those reasons we picked Meteor, a JavaScript framework for building webapps, and it helped us immensely.

Elements was one of our first ideas. It was an attempt to make a strategy board game with a bunch of radical yet simple rules. It was also one of our oldest ideas and to watch its transformation from an abstract idea, a sketch, a vague shape and a wish to a concrete game which was playable and enjoyable, was a immensely satisfying process.

You can play Elements at here.