I didn’t need to do this. I mean, rights for the game came back to Portal Games. The base game was out of stock for some time. It was obvious we will do a reprint. Stronghold was always one of the designs I was most proud of. I wanted it to be back in stock.

But man, did I really need to do the whole new edition?

***

In 2014 I looked at the game to see what we need to change in a reprint. Yes, of course, rulebook could use some rewriting. Yes, square boxes are better than rectangular so we will change it in new print. Yes, artwork on cards looked like artwork from 2009. There was plenty of things we could improve.

Clearly at some point there was this moment where I could stop. When I listed all production problems with the previous edition, asked my team to fix them and we would be done. I could have new edition in couple of weeks ready.

If only I was not Ignacy Trzewiczek. I don’t go for easy solutions.

***

Glory board is super thematic, but it confuses players, makes winning conditions more complicated and leads some times to very unthematic moves that help defender win the game. I decided to trash it.

Battery ram was too weak in Portal printing and too strong in Valley printing and actually I never liked it anyway. I decided to trash it.

Variant for 3 and 4 players worked well, but no one on this whole planet ever tried it. Trash.

Over and over, trashing and trashing…

***

Being serious. I read a lot of opinions about the game on BGG. I read and listened to many reviews of the game. I read comments on webstores about the game. And what is most important, I began to play the game again. And even though I was very proud of this design, I found some things that I could do better now.

So I did.

No Glory board

The Invader will win the game if he manages to break into the castle in 7 rounds. Defender wins the game if he manages to defend castle for 7 rounds.

As simple as that.

What I like about this solution is a great approach of play-testers who played as an Invader. They were planning in which round they will hit hard, in which round they will make a false attack, when they will do two dispatches… They sit to the game and they knew that there is 7 rounds. And they planned. They built precise plan and then they began the attack. It is both thematic and strategic, it works on both levels, on the level of story and on the level of mechanism and strategic challenge.

And man, this is simplest winning condition ever.

Start faster!

I wanted the game to be engaging from the very beginning, I wanted it to let players engage in combat as soon as possible. That is why in 2nd edition Invader begins the game with his forces already on the board, already marching towards the castle. It is the first round of the game when cannons will shoot, it is the first round when dead bodies of orcs and goblins will cover the ramparts.

I made the game shorter. It is only 7 rounds, you start with forces on board, you are put into the action from the very beginning. No time to waste. No time for fooling around. You have your invading forces on the foregrounds. Run towards the wall! Run!

Objective cards and Defense plans

I added Objectives for Invader and I added hidden Defense Plans for defender. There is 10 cards in each of the deck. Each of these cards changes the game, each Objective will encourage Invader to consider particular move, each Defense plan will show Defender different options to surprise opponent.

Objective cards have some small task to achieve like ‘Have Orcs on two adjacent wall sections” or “Destroy two wall sections” and if the Invader manages to achieve this task, he is awarded with small bonus like “Gain 2 additional orcs on each foreground” or “Destroy one cannon”.

Defense plans are opposite. They give a bonus to the defender, but there are bad consequences. Use each of your cannons twice this round, but then remove them from the game. Get additional action points, but then loose two units. Your soldiers are doing their best, but there is a price for that.

With 10 Objectives and 10 defense plans I was able to add new layer of replaybility into the game.

***

I changed many things in the game. Instead of few weeks of easy peasy work on a new print run, I spent with my testers long months of playtesting new edition. It was huge task, it was revisiting the castle for hundred of hours and balancing this game over and over again but the final result is amazing. When we finished testing with my team, they were tired, they were sick of the game, they were so happy that we are finally done and that finally I will stop calling them and ask for another test game.

But what is most important, we were proud. We did so much more than just reprint. I have no doubts you’ll send us few Thumbs up, when you’ll play new edition. I know we earned them. Can’t wait for your feedback.

We are preparing final files to print Robinson Crusoe. We are ordering wooden cubes, we are ordering cards, we are preparing tens of tokens. We are doing all that stuff that I really really hate. One mistake and man, you are in serious trouble. Robinson is a huge epic game. Reminds me Stronghold. Reminds me August 2009…

***

In August 2009, when we were finishing work on Stronghold every single day I was wondering what mistake we will do. I wasn’t wondering if we make mistake. I was wondering what mistake it will be. Oh, yes, I was sure that we will botch something. Nearly 150 tokens, nearly 100 cards, 60 pages long rulebook in 3 languages, more than 300 wooden pieces. It was a big production with 'FFG’ impetus. It was like ride on rollercoaster. It was fast, exciting and it had to end badly. In August 2009 I had no doubts about that.

We were not FFG. In Portal there was 3 guys. 3 guys making biggest game in their lives. 3 guys scared as a hell. 3 guys that wanted to make good worldwide impression. 3 guys that tried to do 'FFG production’.

We had no marketing department and yet we were on #1 place on The Hotness list on BGG for many weeks before Essen. We had no budget for advertisement and yet we had movie trailer presenting Stronghold. We had no copywriters and yet with our GDJ series we were one of the most discussed games before Essen fair.

Production of Stronghold exceed our possibilities. Not twice. It exceed it ten times. We were doing our best. And yet every day we were motivating each other to try harder. It was our life time moment. Our biggest game.

You, gamers, saw cover and board of Stronghold, you read GDJ stuff, you watched movie trailer, you were participating with this whole hype and buzz, and then, after Essen you were nominating us for International Gamer Award or Golden Geek but did you know that this whole fuss was done just by 3 friends?

Production department in Portal? Whole department – Michał Oracz.
Testing team? Oh, sure! Big big team! Rafał Szyma and Ignacy Trzewiczek (and bunch of our close friends).
Marketing department? His Majesty Storyteller Ignacy Trzewiczek
Artwork director? Michał Oracz, again.
Game development team? One Man Team – Ignacy Trzewiczek, again.
Movie trailer? Michał Oracz.
Essen stand design? Michał Oracz.
etc.

Yes, it was crazy. But we did it. There was no mistake in Stronghold. We did one of the most famous and respected games of 2009. It was awesome.

***

Today Portal is twice as big. We have 3 guys responsible for Neuroshima RPG and Neuroshima Tactics miniature game and 3 of us responsible for boardgames. We grown, but still – in a fact – we are bunch of few friends doing their best to bring you best games possible. This year we will bring Robinson Crusoe. This year again we have to exceed our possibilities. This year again we will do everything we can to stand next to FFG and other great publishers.

Have dreams. Have courage to follow these dreams. Do your games. You don’t need to have big budget. You don’t need to have 20 people crew. You don’t need anything except passion and will to fight. Fight for your success. It is at your fingertips.

It’s Cedric’s fault. We met in a hotel in Essen, in 2008 – two people from Portal and three people from IELLO, and discussed our publishing plans. I told them about a game I wanted to design – I told them about Stronghold. It was October 2008, the very beginning of my work on that game. I spoke about the huge numbers of troops, about hordes of skeletons and orcs storming the castle.

In the end the skeletons didn’t make it to the game, orcs did. The game was shown in Essen and I had a lot of fun with it.

I met Cedric again in October 2009. We discussed publishing plans again. I told him about a Stronghold expansion. I told him I was considering replacing the orc cubes in the Invader’s army with the undead.

”That’s it!” he exclaimed. ”The last time you spoke about Stronghold I imagined hordes of skeletons. It’s going to be great. I’d wished you had included skeletons back then!”

I came back home and started working on the expansion. I wanted to make the expansion similar to those modules for Race for the Galaxy. You buy a box with four, five sets of new rules inside, pick the ones you like and ignore the rest.

I started with making 8 new Heroes fighting in the stronghold. That was easy since Stronghold’s realm, the realm of Monastyr, is very rich. It didn’t take me long to think of distinctive features for Heroes from Kord, Gord or Doria, interesting rules would immediately come to my mind. Some two weeks later the first part of the expansion was ready for testing – a new set of game transforming Heroes.

Next in line were the Invader’s cubes. I looked at the white, green and red cubes thinking what I could do. The white ones became Phantoms, the red ones became Vampires and the green ones… The green ones were Skeletons. Rotten Skeletons, sort of, but Skeleton nevertheless. What do Phantoms do? They… fly. Bang! A rule just got created – white Invader’s cubes don’t need free spots at the walls since they don’t need ladders to fight. Vampires? They spread vampiric power and strengthen the Phantoms. Skeletons? You kill one and its bones return to the game. It’s not discarded but reused (back then I didn’t know in what way yet).

There you go, nice and easy.

I looked at all Invader’s actions very closely to check whether they fitted the undead army. Some of them were inconsistent with the plot, I mean, do Vampires use Saboteurs? Do Skeletons use Saps?

At some point I should have given up on analysing whether Skeletons make Poisons, build ladders or Trebuchets.

I didn’t. I went into it.

Does a Necromancer send his troops to build machines? No. He casts spells and uses powerful magic to summon nightmarish ballistas and catapults. He doesn’t need wood or nails, he doesn’t send ghosts to paints banners. He summons it all with his magic. Very interesting possibilities started to appear. I was entering a fascinating world of spells. There were Warhammer Battle books with Vampire armies on my table and galleries of undead artwork opened on the computer screen. Wherever I looked, there were cemeteries and skeletons.

I couldn’t stop myself, I would create, write down new ideas. The board started to fill up with cemeteries, strigas, mists, ghost illusions… The situation was getting out of hand, especially when I looked into the castle one day. How about new ways of defending against the undead? I created Priests, Exorcisms, stakes for the vampires and tower crossbows…

After a few weeks it turned out that the whole idea of modules of different new rules in this expansion might as well be scrapped. The Undead would grow and expand with every working day, slowly taking over the whole expansion. There was no more room for anything else. I would create new Invader’s actions, new actions in the Castle and slowly realize that this idea is big enough to simply dominate the expansion.

Today the testers don’t say that Undead is a good expansion. Today they say that they’re playing Stronghold 2. An entirely new game. And that it’s great. Much better than the first one.

Sometime around the end of July 2009, shortly after all bloody tests were finished, I realized that I hate Stronghold. I was fed up with it. I hated it. A few weeks later, when the production of the game started – a ride with no handlebars, I hated it even more. My heart would stop at the mere sound of the word “Stronghold”. I was fed up with phone calls from Rebel, or from the office regarding publishing. Of course back then I didn’t really know that much about hating Stronghold. Essen was the place where I finally learned what hating this game really meant.

Essen 2009 was tough. I have a gift of composing words into nice sentences and expressing emotions, but I fail to describe the horror of the last year’s fair. An unbelievable job held in the rhythm of a 15 minute game presenting monologue. The game is about a siege. One player plays a role of Defender, the other is Invader… Trzewik, this customer would like an autograph, will you sign it? Yeah, I’ll sign it, defenders know that there is no chance to save the castle…. Trzewik, this man is from a Portuguese portal, he’d like an interview. Ok, let him come back in an hour, they fight only for two reasons… They earn time for women and children to escape from castle… Trzewik, this guy asks if you have a publisher in Brazil. I don’t know, ask Rebel, I’ve no idea what they’ve signed so far. And they fight for honour, for history. They want to be remembered as brave warriors. Spartans, you know… Trzewik, the guy asks if the box contains a manual in French. No, it doesn’t, the French edition is made by IELLO, defender has altogether 30 cubes representing soldiers. Invader has 300. Question is not if he breaks into castle. Question is when… Trzewik, a guy from Phalanx Games just came in asking for some detailed rule. Trzewik, that Woman from the Czech Republic is back, what do I tell her? Have Multi explain the rules to him. And have her leave a business card, I’ll call her back later today. This is Glory board. It represents glory that players earned. It’s cool, I’m from Poland, you can explain in Polish. I can’t do it in Polish, I’ve been doing it in English for three days now. At the beginning of the game Invader has 10 glory points… Trzewik, Petr is asking if you lend them a copy for the night in the hotel. Yes, I will. After every turn of the game, he will lose one… Trzewik, Rebel say the Dutch are interested in 2000 copies, wicked! Cool, chronicle will say: 'Well, defenders fight brave’… Trzewik, do you want to swap?

We would get up at seven, eat breakfast, drive to the fair, explain Stronghold rules for 10 hours, come back for the night, hit the bed dead on our feet and repeat it the next morning. Yes, I really hated Stronghold then. There was no way in the world anyone could talk me into a game of Stronghold.

“Trzewik, you have to do an expansion, you know that, right?”, Piotr Katnik, Rebel’s boss asked me at the fair. “It’s an absolute hit of the fair, we will sell everything we brought with us. The stock we have in Poland will sell before the end of the year. People will want an expansion. You’ve made a hit, now you have to make an expansion.”

I knew that. I knew that bloody well. And I hated Stronghold even more. The thought of setting up the board and testing an expansion made me sick.

“I need a few months break, then I’ll make an expansion. I promise.” I answered.

I kept my word. I made an expansion for Stronghold. I put all my heart and talent into it. I bent over backwards to satisfy the players, to give them a new story, a new chunk of emotions and joy over the board. I’m looking at this expansion, I’m looking at the testers and I know I did a splendid job.

And now I know that before it was just teasing. Oh yes, now I do really hate Stronghold.