DAWN OF PEACEMAKERS

We parlay with Sami Laakso to bring a little more peace to our tabletops

Introduce yourself?

I’m Sami Laakso, the owner of Snowdale Design, a Finnish board game publishing company. We design highly polished games with unique twists.

What is Dawn of Peacemakers?

The world has enough war games where players’ only objective is to defeat their opponents. I wanted to create something opposite to that – thus we call Dawn of Peacemakers a peace game. A game where you’re an adventurer with the hope of ending a conflict between two nations.

Where does it fit into the Dale of Merchants universe?

Both games take place in Daimyria, the world of animalfolks. Dale of Merchants takes place at the appropriately named Age of Trade, just before the Industrial Revolution. Dawn of Peacemakers is set hundreds of years before that, during a time we like to call the Age of Sophistication. Geographically speaking, Dawn of Peacemakers is set in South America.

What were your influences?

After deciding to create a game revolving around stopping a war, I created mechanics supporting the theme. Everything was born from the setting: what kind of game would this have to be in order to support the idea of creating peace? That resulted in armies fighting each other by AI decks while players are smaller adventurers trying to influence the tides of war in their favour.

Tell us about designing campaigns for board games?

Some games benefit from an ongoing campaign, both to strengthen their overall story but also to keep the gameplay fresh

– by adding story twists and gameplay surprises. However, implementing a polished campaign can take enormous amounts of time. You’re not only left playtesting the core game but each individual scenario multiple times.

To sum up, creating a campaign for a game is hard work but also highly rewarding when completed.

Tell us about going from Dale of Merchants to what is kind of a skirmish game?

Indeed, there was quite a leap from a small-box card game to a fully fledged bigbox game accompanied with miniatures. Managing scope becomes more and more important the larger the game is. It was exciting to work on a large scale game but I had to be really intentional about what to include as each new component, scenario, mechanic and so on takes both time to design and often adds to the final cost of the game.

How do you search for peace in this game?

There’s a third party, a chameleon named Meron, in the game. He’s working behind the scenes, searching for options of a lasting peace between the nations of ocelots and scarlet macaws.