Year: 2020

We’ve been on a trip to the northern part of Sweden to find out more about Chartagon. It’s been an exciting week, and although it is impossible to share all the wonderful moments we’ve had, I’d like to share some of them…

We started out by car from the Stockholm region, and got 800km further north. The coast is very flat and has lots of stones. The forests reach almost all the way to the water, and there are many desolate coves and islands. My grandfather had a small hut used for fishing out in nowhere, and I’ve spent most of my summers here fishing with nets. There is no electricity or running water. Fortunately, the cove where the hut lies is very shallow, and get relatively warm according to Swedish standards, and is very suitable for swimming. Perhaps some shallow plain lakes in Chartagon has a similar temperature profile: warm on the surface, cold a few meters down.

On the walls of the hut there are a few old objects. A harpoon for throwing at seals, fishing intruments, binoculars, and a necklace made frome the spine of a giant pike. If we had rented this hut I would suspect that they were all atmospheric fakes, but knowing my grandparents I think otherwise. As the night fell, we had an urgent need to play Chartagon, accompanied by the sounds of sea gulls… This was the perfect spot to play!

The next day we packed the boat to go further out to sea, and visit an old fishing camp with a light house. Of course I also packed some Chartagon maps that wanted an extra adventure! The way there was a bit hard, because we did not have a nautical chart, and we had to pass a few other islands. However, by taking the longer route with safe distances to the shallower passages we made it without mistakes. The feeling of walking among the simple huts and houses, where people have lived for generations in close relation with nature, was wonderful. This must have been very close to the standards of the constructor, the light house keeper, his daughter, the poet, and the clerk. Except that they rarely built more that one or two houses on the same island.

Unfortunately the light house was closed (as many are), and we could not get up to the balcony. On the other hand, we were fortunate to witness a wedding couple who got married in the small chapel on the island. Life will go on here, just as everywhere else. And it makes us wonder who got married with the constructor?

Chartagon and RuleThemAll has come a long way together, and earlier this week we promoted Chartagon on the RuleThemAll Facebook group:

“This is the second drawing ever made using the Rule-Them-All app that I’ve created (still unpublished though). If you read this post, you’ll learn why I post it now… In approx. 2010 my daughters and I created a board game about an alternate past. That was “Storm Island”. There were five characters in the game, and I decided that I should draw what they looked like. I failed miserably. My drawings looked like crap, and I decided to learn how to draw. For this sake I created the Rule-them-all app, and the drawings became more that satisfactory! I hope you like this leery guy!

This week I published a follow up board game called Chartagon on TheGameCrafter, in a design contest!!! IF YOU LIKE “GO”, OR NEED A GREAT GIFT FOR SOMEONE, THEN HAVE A LOOK: https://www.thegamecrafter.com/games/chartagon:-competition

IF YOU WANT TO SUPPORT RULE-THEM-ALL INDIRECTLY, ALSO VOTE FOR THE GAME BEFORE TUESDAY, JUNE 9:th: https://chartagon.com/vote“

By now, more than 10 000 people have been reached, and let’s hope that some of them will help out with voting. The results for the semi-finals will be released any minute now! Wish us luck!

In the world of Chartagon there are many different cultures, and they speak many different languages. Eventually they evoled to the languages we speak today… and because we want to share the Chartagon game to everyone, we need to translate the cards and the rules. Right now we only have translations for English, German and Swedish, and therefore reach out to the community: can anyone help us translate Chartagon to more languages? Spanish? Portuguese? French? Once we have a translation it will be available for download for DIY people, and as an option in the online shop.

We also want to translate to languages which have different charsets (symbols/signs), such as Mandarin, Russian, Hindustani, Arabic, etc, but at the moment we only know how to translate into latin charaters. If you want us to try other charsets, just let us know, it would be super exciting to try!

It takes ~3 hours of work to translate, and you will get your credit on the contributor page, and a game box. Just send us an email if you are interested!

The other day was a great day! We found a new piece of the Chartagonian puzzle. One of the Queen’s explorers apparently took notes of the cultures he/she encountered during the exploration of Chartagon. As we are deciphering these notes we learn about the stories and customs at the time of the Queen’s reign. As an example, let us tell you about the “shadows crossing your path” superstition.

When the population of the mainland archipelago grew, villages appeared where there were enough natural resources. Naturally , people wanted to interact and paths between villages were established, often on ridges and high grounds. These paths remained over generations, and when settlements along the way disappeared, only stone artefacts stood the test of time. At the time of the Queen’s reign it was not uncommon to pass old stones that was placed next to the paths. By then, no one knew who placed those stones, or for what reason. However, what is known is that when the shadow of the stone crosses the path, you better walk on the other side of the stone. Chartagonian people believed that a curse fell on anyone who crossed the stone shadow, and especially when the shadow had crossed your path. Some claimed that entering the shadow gave an immediate chill down the spine, and that there was an urgent need to run. Others said that stopping in the shadow was a way of confronting and defying disease and bad luck. Of course, the Chartagonian scientists acknowledged the beliefs of other people, but rarely studied the phenomenon itself.

The Traces soundscape is available here! You can play it to get environmental sounds while playing the game, or anytime else when you want some Chartagonian atmosphere… We don’t know who originally composed this song, but we guess that it is not the Clerk/Writer, because of the rhythm and tempo. We speculate that it is an more “modern” Chartagonian tune from the time of the Queen’s reign, but because it comes from the Traces island it is also possible that it is much older.

The last weeks have been very exciting, and we’ve learned so much about what happened to the Storm Island people. An important Chartagonian artefact is the letters that are mentioned in Traces (on the card “Box with letter”). We’ve incidentally got hold of a photocopy of the letters and while the copy was quite poor we have now made a reconstruction. Enjoy!

We recognize the header, and think it was written on Storm Island itself, at the end of April. The final phrase is also written on common elder Chartagonian, and is signed by the Constructor, but the main text is using a different phrasing that we cannot recognize. Still, we think that the Chartagonian language is very beautiful in itself, and some words just make us happy. Sigh. We wish that we could speak it fluently.

The next steps would be to decipher the text. We just don’t have a clue on how to do this, so let’s hope for a Rosetta stone sometime soon.

We’ve got exciting news!!! We discovered another musical piece from the Storm Island period, and it is nothing less than a wedding waltz! This most likely means that the Constructor and the Daugther actually married officially, and telling from the musical signatures the waltz was composed by the Clerk/Writer, as most tunes are. It is easy to imagine the wedded couple dancing to this tune during a calm evening. Of course, there are many alternative interpretations. For example, it is possible that the Constructor in the end married the Poet (though rather unlikely for different reasons). It also raises questions whether how many attended the event? The poet? Even the light house keeper? Anyway, we assume that you want to listen to the song. We’ve reconstructed as much as possible, and this is what we think it sounded like on a piano…

When we discovered the ProtoATL 2020 contest ( https://www.protoatl.com/design-contest ) for game designers we created a brand new game based on the version of Chartagon focusing on discoveries. The new game is called “Chartagon Competition”, and it is almost the opposite of the “Chartagon Discoveries” because the competition game has no randomness and is a strategy game in its purest form. However, they can still be played on the same maps. Another very important difference is that Chartagon Competition is designed to fulfill the ProtoATL contest criteria. Among the criteria we find that:

• The game must be explained in less than 5 minutes.
• The game must play in less than 20 minutes.
• The total cost of the game must be less than $20.

Wow! That is really tough, but we must say that we love the challenge!

The new game will be created using the GameCrafter’s online system, and will be available through their online shop after the contest is over, probably somtime during or after the summer. You can find more information at the GameCrafters web pages: https://www.thegamecrafter.com/contests/protoatl-2020-contest.

Of course there are virus and bacterial diseases in Chartagon, just like here. Right now, Covid-19 (Corona-virus) halts our progress, because the GameCrafter shut down their production for some time. That means we cannot get our orders from there, and that we just have to wait… I think you understand the situation, you are probably also affected by the pandemy. Stay healthy, and you will soon be able to order the game!

Some days before Christmas we decided to explore a lake in the middle of the forest, where we hoped to find some adventure. It has been a mild winter, so we guessed that there would not be ice covering the lake. We were fortunate. Only the beaches had a thin layer of ice, and we could easily bash our way out to open water. The water was perfectly still, and a thick mist covered everything. Soon we could not see any land, and small rocks appeared and disappeard as we silently passed them. Night was falling and we hope to reach our destination, a larger island with sandy beaches, before it was completely dark. It’s a good thing that our eyes adapt to darkness, and this time we really pushed our limits. After some hours of canoeing we finally spotted the island, as it emerged as a dark shadow from the white mist!

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It took quite some time before we found a good place to land, and after sitting still for so long it felt good to finally walk the beaches. However, because we forgot the tent at home (!!! we realized this already in on the way to the lake, but decided to continue without the tent), we had to find a shelter where we could keep an open fire. We now walked in complete darkness, and the only sound came from our footsteps and the water dripping from the mist covered trees. After some time searching we found a shelter which contained both roof and fire wood, and we decided to stay there. Still, sleeping next to an open fire without a proper sleeping mat is somewhat uncomfortable… so very early in the morning we decided to head back home. But all in all, a very nice trip!