The Plateau Story

The following is a short history of the development of Plateau.  It covers the thirteen year period from 1984 to 1997 as told by Jim Albea, Plateau's inventor.  The impetus for Plateau came from a dream in 1984.  For two years after that the game changed and matured, reaching its final form on May 12, 1986.  Over the next ten years, operating part time and on a shoestring, the promotion of the game never really caught on.  Then came the Internet and the Web...

Visit http://www.PlateauGame.com where you can download Virtual Plateau for free and order a real game set!

It Started With A Dream...

Plateau started as a dream. As dreams go this one was pretty typical, lots of going to and fro, with no apparent point. In this particular dream I happened to walk through a room in which a game was being played. The game looked more like a toy train set than anything else. It had a mountain, trees, tunnels, and all kinds of other stuff. It was on a table about five feet square and extended about three feet high. Somehow, in the dream, I understood the rules of this game. The object was to move a character up to the top of the mountain. On its way to the top the character had to avoid various obstacles and make moves to prevent other characters from reaching the summit. In fact, Summit was the first name given to the game.

When I woke the next day I vaguely remembered the dream and that fascinating game. I immediately set out to try to codify the "rules." As invention goes it was sort of cheating because I was merely noting down what had come to me from the ether. It turns out that I wasn't really that clear on what the rules were and the more I worked on it and thought about it the murkier the rules got.

Ground Zero

After a few days I completed the first version. It was a grid of sixteen by sixteen squares with steps going up to form a four-sided pyramid. The top was a single square. The object was to move your "guy" to that top square. The rules were a Byzantine mess of pieces, playing cards, and dice throws. The game was awful. I thought it just needed a few "adjustments." Thus I embarked on a year of game tinkering. The year was 1984.

The first thing to go was the cards. Then the dice. The number of pieces in the game went from a high-water mark of about 30 for each player to occasionally only one piece as I churned through version after version. The size of the board swelled and shrank. For a while there was a football type object which the pieces carried and passed back and forth in the quest of landing it on the top square. As time went by the single square at the top grew to more and more squares and the rest of the mountain shrank down to one row all the way around -- eventually to go away altogether. That's the rationale for the name Plateau. The entire game is played on the flat top of what was, in an earlier stage, a mountain. The football object went away along with the concept of a single character making it to the mountain top. The object became the construction or coalescence of several pieces.

At last I thought I was done and now the world could gain the benefit of this wonderful new game called... Pinnacle (later changed to Plateau). It was a grid of six squares with an "onboarding" ring going all the way around. To win, you formed a six-stack of pieces. Pieces could be dropped of and picked up while moving. There was diagonal, straight, and "dogleg" movement. Captured pieces were simply removed from the board to be onboarded again later. Pieces had two sides which could be flipped to change direction. Flipping a piece was a move unto itself and occupied an entire turn, ensuring that any surprises came at the speed of cold molasses. The game was ready for serious playtesting.

The Lion and the Unicorn. Friday September 13, 1984.

The Lion and the Unicorn was a game shop in Birmingham, Alabama. They specialized in Fantasy and Role Playing-type games but carried a variety of other types of games as well. Every Friday night they held a playtesting session there in the store usually attended by twenty or so rabid gamers. I arranged to be the game-du-jour for the evening of Friday, September 13, 1985. It was a big success. The participants may have just been trying to be nice but they genuinely seemed to be enjoying themselves. The playtesting format was a single elimination tournament. Even those who had been knocked out of the tournament continued to play. When the event was over I was sure that I was on the verge of mega gaming riches. (Ho, Ho, Ho.)

Game Company Rejections

In between selecting the name of my future yacht and picking the best locations for my various future vacation homes, I needed to select which major game company to award Pinnacle to. I selected Parker Brothers. I had warm regard for several Parker Brothers games and felt they could best handle the world wide-flood of sales that were sure to come. Big wheels turn slowly so it took several months to get a carefully worded rejection letter which took great pains to explain that for legal reasons they would not even review the game. I got more or less the same story from every other game company except for a small politically correct outfit in New Jersey that suggested that I try redesigning the game without any nasty old capturing. Thus Pinnacle died its first death, buried under a pile of rejection letters. Pinnacle had been rejected by dozens of game companies almost all of which never looked at it. I resolved to produce it myself someday.

May 12th Revision, 1986

Years passed and I still tinkered with it, occasionally hauling it out and making friends and family members play me a game or two. With the flush and rush of instant wild success a distant memory, I settled down to some quiet tinkering. I changed this and that aspect of the game but it never seemed to be right. I fiddled with the shape and size of the board. I tried out different set-creation goals, changed the capturing rules, added pieces, flip flopped on flipping rules... One change would make the game go too fast another would make it take forever. Then on the night of May 11, 1986 I was over at a co-worker's house who had expressed an interest in the game. We played a couple of games. He was not at all impressed and I headed for home very depressed. I just knew that there was a good game buried somewhere inside this concoction of rules and pieces. It was time to either scrap the whole thing or start over.

The next morning, May 12, 1986, it was there. The board should be a four-by-four grid. The set creation should be a six-stack. There should be a dual goal of capturing six pieces. There should be a total of twelve pieces for each player.  Onboarding should be anywhere.  Flipping and moving should be combined in one move. There should be only one of each type of flipping pieces. Captured pieces should be prisoners to be exchanged using a point value system. The point values were worked out as a tiered system starting with one point for Mutes and ending with twenty-one points for the Ace. It all worked. It was fast paced while allowing for long range strategies. There was an element of surprise and chance but it was based on psychology rather than a dice throw.  The game was complete on that day and it has not changed in any significant way since. I considered naming the game the "May Twelfth Revision."

Playtesting at The Mill.

It was time for playtesting again so I headed to the nearest game/science-fiction store. The owner of the store didn't have a playtesting group like the Lion and the Unicorn but he pointed out a sign-up sheet on the wall for folks interested in Dungeons and Dragons. I copied down all the names and called them all inviting them to The Mill restaurant to playtest my new game. Over the next several months we gathered at The Mill about once a week. The May Twelfth Revision held except for one change: The Twister Revision. It became apparent that the Twister was dominating the game so its path was restricted from a full dog-leg motion to the present: one straight one diagonal movement.

Cons

The Mill playtesting gang introduced me to the "Con" (Science Fiction Convention) scene. I took Pinnacle to my first Con in October of 1986. Although abstract strategy games are not usually found in Con game rooms, it was well received. I made game pieces out of checkers and drew game boards. At this and many other Cons to come it was gratifying to see a couple of guys play the game for hours on end, teaching others how to play, asking where could they purchase this game, and genuinely having fun.

Christmas 1987

Based on the encouragement I got from the Con scene I launched into the first real version of Pinnacle to be ready for Christmas 1987. Custom molds were made for the pieces, boxes were produced and rules were printed for a complete shrink-wrapped run of 500 game sets. Each set was individually numbered and signed.

Years Pass

My plan of part-time bootstrapping Pinnacle into the annals of game history didn't really work out. The wary game buyer was reluctant to buy a largish black and white box of an unknown game from an unknown game company. The ever profit-minded retailer was reluctant to give shelf space to a somewhat bulky product that wasn't exactly jumping off the shelves. My devoted public, the penniless young teenage guy, was well, penniless. Pinnacle had finally had its chance. It crashed and burned, taking the family finances with it. If you happen to ever run into one of those old black and white Pinnacle games sets -- buy it; they're already quite the collector's item. If you're interested, I've still got several (still shrink wrapped) and I'll sell them for $100 each.

Somewhere along the way the name changed to Plateau but it didn't matter because the game was dead. It was worse than dead; the corpse was still hanging around. A good portion of those five hundred game sets was still filling up closets and stacked in corners. Several dozen were destroyed, thankfully, by a window leak.

New Years Eve

Fast forward three whole years to 1990 -- New Year's Eve -- a party at a friend's house. Just for kicks my friend hauled out one of those old Pinnacle boxes. I played a few games with a co-worker who was at the party. The next Monday he stopped by to ask what I though about him doing a computer version of the game. "Why sure! That would be great!" By then I had some glimmering of how powerful the Internet could become. A computer version promoted on Usenet news groups and nurtured with an email list could maybe possibly start that tiny smoldering fire that would eventually build to that towering bonfire of mega-buck success!

The New Renaissance

That computer version was never completed but the rebirth of Plateau was on. Postings appeared on rec.games.board and rec.games.programmer. An email list was started. Guess what you got (free) if you joined the email list? One of those old Pinnacle sets. Meanwhile a whole new set was designed. New colorful graphics appeared. A new local player group was launched at -- where else? -- The Mill. A computer-animated video was produced that explained the rules. Another computer version was started and was eventually completed. That version was called Honor Plateau and facilitated email play.

Color Version

All of this computer stuff was done using Intergraph hardware and software (where I worked at the time). It came to pass that some of the images and animations that had been done were good enough to use to showcase Intergraph products. Plateau was selected as an example product for a major computer industry trade show. Two thousand game sets were produced to be given away at Siggraph in the summer of 1992. Family finances took another rough hit but Things Were Really Rolling. It was time to strike. It was now or never. This time I was going to do it right. I put together a business plan. Using the video and nice Intergraph game set I attracted several investors. I quit my job and devoted full time to the effort. By the Christmas of 1993 Plateau would be In Stores All Across America!

Broke Again

The game business is hard. The abstract strategy game business is murder. Oh, the perennials do fine world-wide, year in and year out. Occasionally, something cute or flashy comes along, has a good year or two and then goes back into obscurity. But a game that has more than 2 (two) rules, whose pieces sorta look like checkers and is backed by a one-guy-one-game game company with zero ad budget is... well you know... dead... again. This time a second mortgage on the house got sucked into the Plateau abyss. This time it really, really was over except the corpse was nine thousand game sets out of a 10,000 game set run. Tends to fill up the closets. Thousands of printed game rules and box wraps were dumped for recycling. The recycle place wouldn't take the nine thousand game boards (thank goodness) because they didn't want the gray chipboard.

The Christmas Morning Test

You may be wondering how such a paradigm of gaming perfection could continually falter economically. After all, I had no shortage of verbal accolades except the one that really mattered: "Pay to the order of:". There are a number of societal trends working against new abstract strategy games including but not limited to Television, air conditioning, video games, fast food, the Interstate system and the end of the Cold War. But Plateau also failed the all important Christmas Morning Test. Eighty percent of new game's sales are for the Christmas giving event and a new game's role in that event is to occupy maybe a one half hour segment of the frantic present opening schedule. After that, the game is to take its place in the top of the closet with entrants from previous years. If a game's rules and diagrams can't be sketched on the proverbial thumbnail then it just can't make it in the line up. Alas, Plateau just can't hold its own against mountains of wrapping paper (which, by the way, probably should be added to the list of negative societal trends). Those in the official game biz recognized this about Plateau right away. Learning how to play Plateau by reading the rule book is a real downer on any day -- for Christmas it's a total wipe out. The proper way to be introduced to any good game is from person to person. How do you jump-start that?

Visual Basic

Over the next couple of years it became a regular occurrence for a computer programmer to announce that he was going to herewith launch into a bold and amazing computer implementation of Plateau. My regular response was "yeah, right." The summer of 1995 rolled around and a summer intern, who was kid just out of high school, authoritatively announced that he wished to write a computer implementation of Plateau during some of his lazy free-time summer hours in order to acquire some experience programming in Visual Basic. My response was "Sure, knock yourself out." But it really stuck in my craw. If this kid could do a VB implementation why couldn't I? So, with no prior knowledge of computer programming (my background is Architecture) I launched into a bold and amazing computer implementation of Plateau.

Virtual Plateau and the Web

A year and a half later on March 22, 1997 Virtual Plateau Version 1.1 was released to the world. Six hours later it was withdrawn because a fatal bug was discovered. So, a week later on March 28, 1997 Virtual Plateau Version 1.2 was released to the world. As of this writing (Oct. 97) it is still available and still being downloaded (see the link below). A minor update was made on May 24, 1997 so the current version is 1.3. Virtual Plateau (VP) is a complete engine for learning and playing Plateau. VP has an extensive help system, a computer player , and a robust facility for playing via email.

It has always been the case that a person who knows how to play the game can easily sit down and show another person how to play in three to five minutes. The animated diagrams of the Virtual Plateau and the beginner computer player are supposed to function as such a person. So far, it seems to be working. In the entire thirteen years before Virtual Plateau, I personally taught perhaps a couple of hundred people how to play -- almost all of whom bought a set (yippee). In the years since Virtual Plateau has been on the Web it has been downloaded many thousands of times.

Every passing day about fifty people learn how to play. And orders are starting to come in. While you were reading this someone around the world probably was downloading Virtual Plateau. The game may not ever become a "towering bonfire of mega-buck success" but with the advent of the Web and the computer version I can safely say that it will never die again.

BoardSpace.net

Thanks!

I want to thank all those who have lent aid and encouragement throughout this whole saga, especially my investors and those who helped test Virtual Plateau (you know who you are), but most especially my wife Lisa who had to put up with the whole thing.

Jim Albea
http://www.PlateauGame.com