It was time to let Essen fever subside and resume work on my prototype. Now that I had already found a publisher, I didn't have to spend any energy on that aspect of the game and could instead focus my attention solely on development – and I had many precise development details to work on as those Belgo-Mexicans at Repos know their stuff and were quick to get their hands dirty.

Give Me Two!

Their first request for development concerned the Wonders. Each player has his own Wonder board, and since game boards are inherently two-sided, they asked me to develop an alternative version of how each Wonder could be built. Of course – I should have guessed. Why? Because they had already asked me this once before for the powers of the Taoists in Ghost Stories. So the next major modification of the prototype (v6.0) was an alternative of each Wonder. I took this opportunity to bring in new effects and make them a bit more technical so that the Wonders would now offer an "easy" side as well as a "technical" side. They should, however, remain at the same power level so that players can choose which side of the board to use without regard for the decisions of their playmates.

The second major change concerned the scientific buildings and how they would score points. Until version 7.0 the number of victory points awarded for these buildings corresponded to their number squared – so four science buildings equalled 16 points. The problem with this rule is that the scientific strategy was profitable only if a player managed to build a lot of them, say, at least five, and often their construction wasn't profitable even when you could build free buildings chained off those you already had. This all-or-nothing aspect made the science strategy too limited.

The Repos team agreed with my analysis, so I took out pencil and notebook to consider an improvement. The answer was simple and summarized by a number. 7? Oh, no, not this time – 3. Three different scientific domains would be equally distributed across the set of scientific buildings, and with twelve buildings of scientific study at the time, each of the three domains would be represented through four buildings. The rule of the square remained in the game, but now it applied to each individual domain. And a second way to score points was added; a family of three buildings from different scientific domains would yield 7 bonus points. (The number returns!)

Thus, the scientific strategies were enriched: It was still possible to play a lot of them to score as many points as you could at the expense of other areas, but now it was also possible to build only one building of each type for ten points or to construct four buildings of the same type, building some of them for free and perhaps picking up a free one of another type as well. This change was adopted quickly and unianimously by testers and editors.

These two significant changes, however, required much less energy than what was needed to tweak all the fine details of the cards, such as the costs of building resources and the value scale of victory points. The chaining between buildings and the distribution of cards based on the number of players was a real headache...

Miguel Coimbra

In parallel with this continued development, I started talking about the graphic design of the game with Cédrick and Thomas. We knew each other well, so they knew that I was as attached to the visual aspect of my games as they were to their development.

Miguel Coimbra had shown great work recently (with no bad feedback) in Small World and Cyclades. I ogled the look of his website and was caught in the lines and strokes of his creations. The Repos team answered my wishes – and without me even needing to use that compromising video I filmed one night in Essen. (So much the better as it will serve me well for the next game.) I did not have to urge anyone on; they told me that Miguel was ready to embark on an adventure. I don't need to linger on the illustrations that he's produced as several are already circulating on the web, enough so that everyone can form their own opinions. Personally I'm content to give a "Wow!" to the look of the Wonders. It's hard to be completely objective, but I feel that the work he's done for 7 Wonders is better than any of his previous game illustrations.

I have not been in contact with Miguel directly, except the short mail I sent him to congratulate him on the work. Cédrick, who manages the illustrators for Repos Production, made me look at all the sketches together so that we could determine their consistency with our vision of the game. Some buildings have been altered or were newly designed toward the end of development, causing us to order a few additional illustrations! Conversely, one or two illustrations will not appear in the box...

First published in French on Antoine Bauza's blog. Translated by W.Eric Martin and republished with permission of the author. You can see it in complete on Boardgamesnews.