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Sunken Tower is a company who dives deep into both the past and the future!
They collaborate with other game creators to develop fantastic digital experiences, while also designing and publishing historical board games. This means they wear many hats: historians, writers, and even funding partners! On the history side of things, they delve into real-world events to create accurate content for our games. They also love crafting alternate history scenarios, letting players explore “what if” situations. And to bring these projects to life, they sometimes assist developers with securing funding.
An example is the Anjou Bible, a magnificent bible of 1340 as the basis of an historical card game. Games can be a powerful way to learn! By playing and exploring these digital worlds, players can gain knowledge about history in a fun and interactive way. It’s like stepping into a time machine and living history firsthand!
Today, most games are played and sold on mobile phones. Because nearly everyone always carries their phone with them, that also means that they have always access to those games. I think that’s a powerful tool for many historians and heritage institutions to tell stories about the past. In fact, we already see museums and organisations creating their own gaming apps. A lot of these games also play into the possibilities of Virtual Reality or Extend Reality.
In practice, that means that our next card game will explore Japanese ukiyo-e production, using the actual 18th and 19th century woodblock prints. In this game the players will take up the role of an ukiyo-e publishing house, aiming to bring the best set of cards on ‘the market’. Other publishing houses will try to thwart them, and the government (or Bakufu) might issue annoying censorship decrees.
The players take up the role of assistants in the illumination atelier of master Cristophore Orimina. Orimina whas the master-illuminator responsible for the images in the Bible, but the game stresses that a lot of work was done by anonymous assistants. So that is where the game and historical practice touch one another. The players are each given a section of a manuscript page to decorate, whereby they try to follow the master’s instructions as well as they can. Moreover, by choosing for more complex images, they are awarded more points and thus rise in standing with master Orimina. Ultimately that is the goal of the game: the manuscript the players are decorating is technically a collaborative effort, but you still try to outdo your fellow-assistants. That dynamic fits very well with the historical realities of creating such a rich manuscript.
The Anjou Bible is one of the foremost heritage possessions of the KU Leuven, which says something at a university founded in 1425. It counts as one of the best and most beautiful examples of medieval illumination art, and is therefore incredibly well-studied and well-preserved. Importantly, the teams of KU Leuven libraries have also taken the effort to digitize the entire bible, so everyone can marvel at it online. The actual manuscript is only rarely taken out of the vaults at the Faculty of theology, but whenever that happens, it attracts a lot of attention. The Bible is also recognized as a ‘topstuk’ by the Flemish government.
Professor Watteeuw and the KU Leuven marketing team were very kind and helpful, but I brought them fairly late into the process. The reason for that was simple: I needed a good game first. Only when I was certain that Anjou was strong enough as an actual game, I wanted to reach out to potential partners and specialists. Luckily professor Watteeuw was immediately enthusiastic about the game and its potential. She immediately helped me out with the ‘historical background’ section that is added to the rulebook. It helped a lot that I had her backing.