Time for you and me is not the same as in Chartagon’s early days. The Constructor obviously must have spent enormous amounts of time when he single handed built all the lighthouses for the first islands, without getting worn out or older. From the few notes he left we know he was tired and exhausted after some days, and he did get sick like all of us, but there was always time to rest. The Clerk and the Constructor met a few times, and when they did we have quite good descriptions of how the Constructor worked, which combined clever use of mechanical-, balance/gravity-, and blood-sweat-tears-strategies. The patience and hard work of the early years is impressive and we conclude that time must have worked differently to allow all those light houses to be built by one person.

So what have we done recently, during the time that has passed since the last post? Let’s make a list:

• Regular lore research. We are continuing to create an inventory over the fragments already found, as well as finding new pieces to the Chartagon puzzle.
• The fourth game in the Chartagon main series has made significant progress, and we have started tweaking parameters and test playing again! We’ve started the graphical design of both the cards and the boards(s), and we soon need to print a first test game as a next progress step. The music score has a ready main theme, but we think that we’ve only come half way.
• We also started development of a solo-player mini game called Chartagon Foghorn. In this game you play a teenager who has been challanged by a friend to sound the Queen’s foghorn before midnight, and you could obviously not skip that challange! You’ll have 40 minutes to sneak past the Queen’s palace to find the way to win the challange. We ordered empty cards over a year ago, so the overall idea has matured for a long time. Unfortunately, time is not as forgiving as for the Constructor and there has not been time to plunge into this project until now. We’ve been working intensly on this during the last two weeks, and we are glad to say that the mechanics and conceptual layout is fully done! We need to make the graphical design, which will be a bit more complicated than previous games, so this might take quite some time. We also need to make independent play tests to see how we can make the instructions easy to follow, and to allow minor mistakes in interpretation. But overall: we’re confident that we’ve got a good game for some side-lore of the Queen’s palace!
• We’ve evaluated a new game component for Chartagon: Discoveries/Competition which allows placing two or more markers on the same post! This balances out some of the advantages you get from being player one, and especially so on a map with one especially favourable harbour post. We’ll possibly get back to this in a later post, and we need to insert it into the rulebook.
• We’ve just started developing a new mobile timer app for Chartagon: Discoveries/competition, which is intended for very large maps with unlimited players. Each player will have their own timer which says when they are allowed to make a move. The timer runs independently from the other players and also have a random delay (counterbalanced between players) that eliminates downtime. Or at least makes downtime fair.

So as you can tell, we’ve been very active! The greatest obstacles are time and money, so we will continue to make slow progress whenever we have the possibility!

Happy new year! We hope it will be a good year!

We’ve started the year with entering a very special board game contest, the single-card challange at TheGameCrafter (https://www.thegamecrafter.com/contests/single-card-challenge)! The essence of the rules is that the whole game, including rules, should fit on a single poker-sized card… very tricky, but fits well for a game like Asterism, where your imagination and creativity goes beyond what you actually see! The game we submitted can be found at: https://www.thegamecrafter.com/games/asterism1

The one card game is very similar to a Chartagonian game which has been described both by the clerk and writers in later Chartagonian cultures. The widespread use of this game is perhaps because of it’s early origins, its simplicity, and it’s appeal to human creativity. The game has been described as both using the actual night sky, and by throwing pebbles or sea shells on the ground, to get the points to connect as star constellations or asterisms.

We think this was a good start for 2023, and hope you enjoy the game!

While the previous two proverbs both had a serious aspect to them, the following proverb have not, and therefore get its own post. “It is the first pancake that taste like the pan” was found in the margins of the Clerks own notebook, when he reflected over his first writings as a clerk. Surely, it must mean that his early writing style was heavily influenced by his supervisor or that he was naive to the situation and let the context influence his texts.

As a side note, I remember once as a ph.d. student, I entered my professors office and looked at his wall full of bookshelves and books. I sighed and asked, “did you really read all these books?”. He had a very friendly nature, and said with a little laughter, “you don’t need to eat the whole apple to know it is rotten”. When I look back, it is so obvious how my first scientific studies was influenced by my senior supervisors, and I cannot but take my hat for the Chartagonian proverb. Of course, this also applies to children growing up, and what they learn. Over time we will find our own ways in lift, but the first pancake will taste like the pan.

We have not been able to find many proverbs from Chartagon, but they undoubtly existed, just like they do in society today. However, the Clerk documented a short phrase that was scribbled on one of the sills within the Storm Post lighthouse: “hunger is meaning“.

We believe this inscription was made by the Lighthouse keeper’s Daughter, but it’s meaning is here ambigous. It could either mean that they were really starving, and fighting to survive. This was not uncommon, and it is easy to imagine parents telling their children to keep their spirit up. Hunger is meaning. In the case of the Daughter, it is also possible that she was starving for company and was longing for someone (i.e. the Constructor). This proverb hints at how human drives and motivation stems from basic instincts, and that higher order meaning can emerge from the need to satisfy basic needs. In that sense, all meaning can be seen as a kind of hunger.

The second proverb was found in a drawing of the Queen’s upper floor library entrance, where one can read above the large double doors: “no one is normal but some are different“. Our interpretation is that it urges us to think about who we are and what we can do. Human characteristics differ in so many ways, so no there is no such thing as “normal”. Everybody has something that distinguish her from everybody else. On the other hand, we also have many similarities with each other in most dimensions. If one person deviates in many dimensions (mental or physical strength, temperament, beliefs, etc) from the closest people, that person may be regarded as or feel different. These people can do extraordinary things, and define the boundary for what “normal” is. Notice that the proverb is neither positively nor negatively valenced, and in the library context, we think it promts for reflection: who are you that enter, what information will you seek and for what purpose, and who are you when you leave?

The third proverb was found in at least thee transcript of the Queen’s audiences. Most of these text are lost, but sections where the Queen or someone said “you have not done your best if you have not asked for help” (or fragments of this sentence) has been found several times. The interpretation is easy: asking for help is something positive, and asking for help is a human superpower.

It is quite counterintuitive, but Chartagon has some specimens of reptiles and amphibians. However, the long cold autumns and winters, make their hybernation very long, and they are only active during very short periods of the Chartagonian summer. They have only been observed and studied at the mainland, and we have no reference to these beautiful animals from the islands. They live mostly in forest habitats, but some species can also have small populations in the plain habitats. The study of reptiles and amphibians have been focused on their potential use in medicine and anesthesia. Rumors say that the Queen has a green house garden with different spieces and habitats, but we have not found any proof or details about such a building yet.

“Mirorale” was a popular beverage in Chartagon which was served both as a regular dinner thirst quencher and as a luxury drink during solemn occations.

Mirorale was produced by putting a special type of onion, “Annealyn”, in water and letting the roots grow for a couple of weeks. The roots are covered with a net of symbiotic fungus, which together with (friendly) bacteria started a fermentation process. This process made the water turn white, as if someone poured milk into the water, and sometimes Mirorale have been refered to as Mirorale-milk, “Mirorale -gomaen”, when the drink was of extra high high quality. The fermentation process could be stopped at various timepoints to add other ingredients, such as sweetener or flavour. If done correctly, the beverage could be botteled and aged for decades. However, it is not known whether Mirorale was also used for alcoholic beverages. In addition to drinking, Mirorale was also used in cooking and baking.

Unfortunately, we have not found an substitute for Annealyn onion that could be used today, but the taste should be similar to Kefir or Kombucha.

Happy new year everybody! To be honest, 2021 was not the best of years for us. But we have not backed a single step. Actually, we have advanced and our visions and goals are now more concrete.

For example, development of Chartagon was finished, and we made an online version for competitions. This allows us to have online tournaments, and people can try and practice the basic rules to decide whether they want to purchase the full board game.

Another example is the Storm Post, the first game in the Chartagon series. It has been designed and tested since 2011 but was finished during 2021. It is more or less ready to be manufactured now. Storm Post is a really cosy family game, which is really easy to learn and enjoy. It encourages eating snacks together, so we can almost guarantee a good experience 🙂

We have also applied to arrange at GothCon 2022 in Gothenburg, Sweden in April, and I think we need to have at least one release party before then. This is a step toward a Kickstarter project or some other crowdfunding project. We’ve found a possible manufacturer in Hero Time, so we might have found a solid path forward. Remember: publishing the game is only the first step, and we are already looking beyond that.

All in all, 2022 has potential, and we just need to continue unlocking it!

All our enthusiasm in October about having a release in 2021 was killed in November by an unfortunate series of events. TGC mistakenly did not include the final rule book that we needed to proof, and sending a replacement took a very long time due to covid-19 transports. When it finally arrived it looked good, but it was too late to order and recieve a larger order before Christmas. So we decided to postphone the release and consider other options than TGC.

Perhaps it all turns out to the better. We’ve been in contact with other game manufacturers, and there seem to be some options. We’re now also thinking about a Kickstarter project, depending on what the game manufacturers can provide. As usual we don’t talk a lot about the plans, but we can at least say that we dropped one plan because a third party failed and adopted another plan. Adaption is key not only for survival, but also for evolution. Long live the plans!

Today we found some scraps and pieces that may contain information about the Queen’s capital. Preliminary analyses suggest an archipelago or, more probable, a river delta giving shelter from the ocean. Navigating into and out from the harbour required an intricate system of navigation aids, and it seems like there was at least five small light house stations involved. These small stations, with three or four houses each, were served by families living for different periods of time at each station. Communications with the city was regular, and there was something like a ferry line transporting supplies and guests several times a week.

Information about the the city itself is still scarce. It can not have had more than 10 000-15 000 habitants, but we know that there was a palace and a lot of administrative and academic buildings.