Mario Sacchi
Our job is not made only of games to develop and of boxes to fill with cardboard tokens and meeples. For a game publisher it’s also fundamental to build good relationships and to create strict collaborations which often turn into beautiful friendships.
For this, we think we’re lucky: in the gaming clubs where we play every week, we had the opportunity to meet people who are passionate gamers, who recognized the value of our products and they have become real fans of Post Scriptum, loyal supporters and tireless testers. Some of them started to create games, and with great pleasure we supported them with our experience, tested their prototypes and gave development advice.
Danilo Festa, one of our trusty play-testers in the years has become an all-round game designer, who can develop both complex games and fun party games (he is the author of Pazzaparola, the latest amusing card game published by Post Scriptum!).
One day in May 2019 he asked us to try a new game that he had created, a Roll & Write transposition of Florenza, which we immediately tried. Not only it fully convinced us, we even decided to publish it by the end of the same year, with the title: Florenza the Dice Game!
But what did we like of Florenza Dice Game? Danilo was great at converting the original game into a portable version which is quick to set up, but also keeping the original flavour and complexity. Opposite to many Roll & Write games on the market, Florenza Dice game is a real Euro Game, challenging and full of possible strategies, which requires one hour of intense playing.
Florenza Dice Game is a great alternative to its predecessors, with the advantage that it can be set up in literally 5 seconds!
The decision to publish the game after only a few months from the first test forced us to speed up development and production times, but we had two big advantages: on a development level, the set-up speed and the game duration allowed us to try the game in many occasions and try it even several times on the same night, thanks to playtesters who were willing to play more than one game in a row, and to the many players who were drawn to the tables and were curious to try the prototype; on a publishing level we had an extensive archive of illustrations that we could use, created for the previous games of the Florenza series, reducing times (and costs!) of production.
During the production stage we worked a lot together with Paolo Vallerga from Scribabs to find the most ergonomic solution, in order to keep the players’ boards as clear and easy to use as possible. We also considered to add some erasable boards, instead of paper blocks, but we soon realised that players love keeping the sheets of paper with the results of their games!
We decided to add pencils with eraser to the box because, even though the game doesn’t entail erasing anything on the boards, playtests pointed out that it was possible for players to make mistakes or to want to undo their last moves.
Short anecdote about this: we had asked the printing factory to add 4 pencils inside each box, but by mistake they added only one. This forced us to contact another company near our warehouse to open all the boxes and add the missing pencils, and to cellowrap them again. This goes to prove that the publishers’ job can have problems even for games that are apparently easy to manage!
In the end, in a few months, we developed a game that we’re really proud of, that is fun and challenging, and I would easily recommend for game nights. After this great experience, the next Post Scriptum game has been created to reduce the set-up time to the minimum and the author is another dear friend, and tireless playtester for our games. We’ll annnounce it soon!
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