Elysium is an aggressive game. Bold, unapologetic, and full of emotion. It’s no surprise that, more than 10 years after its release, I still remember it so fondly.
Having worked at Libellud since 2017, you might think I mostly thrive on cozy, feel-good games. But in reality, I’m especially drawn to games with guts, those that aren’t afraid to take risks. Elysium is one of those games that delivers frustration in generous amounts, but when the game ends, you know exactly why you won (or lost… oops). So when I was offered the chance to work on the highly ambitious reboot of this classic, I didn’t hesitate for a second.
This time around, the expert audience was no longer the target: the goal was to preserve the essence of the game while making it more accessible. The designers’ prototype was quite striking, with a completely reworked experience:
- Playtime was cut in half: you can now finish a game in about 30 minutes, setup included.
- Activated effects are gone: now, when you play a card, all effects are resolved immediately, and that’s it. No more stockpiling effects for later. No more rounds: the game is easier to follow, with uninterrupted play. On your turn, you either take a card or retrieve your columns. It’s smooth and dynamic.
- But above all: the drafting mechanic has been completely transformed. Gone is the intimidating setup phase at the beginning of each round, along with frustrating situations like “oops, I don’t have any yellow columns left.” Now you simply play within zones: if I’m already in a zone, I can’t access it again until I retrieve my columns and that’s all there is to it.
You can still recognize the original game, but part of the spice that gave it its flavor is gone. No more cutthroat end-of-round moments where your opponents can deny you an entire turn, no more muddy endgame fights over the exact quest card you need, no more endless planning phases. At that point, I was skeptical, because a lot of the game’s fun and richness also came from those divisive—but distinctive—elements.
Fortunately, this Elysium 2.0 still has plenty under the hood. The unique tension of this engine unbuilding system is still there, arguably even more highlighted than before. The new pacing emphasizes the importance of being the first to reach certain objectives, while the reduction in permanent effects refocuses the game around collection-building. Instead of just a lighter version of Elysium, we ended up with a game that uses those concessions to reinforce its strengths.
Still, there were more things to improve in terms of accessibility: scores tended to climb into the hundreds, and there was still too much text on the cards. In its current form, the iconography alone wasn’t enough—there was too much uncertainty and ambiguity. That’s where I came in.
It may sound obvious, but I started by cutting almost all the game’s point values roughly in half. Sometimes that was easy, but other times it was tricky: should a 3-point value become a 2 or a 1? That kicked off a fairly long balancing phase aimed at finding the best compromises. I knew the cards would never all be perfectly balanced, but I also knew that the game’s deeply interactive core gave me flexibility and room for error: with drafting and synergies, the objectively strongest card can lose relative value. The hardest part involved cards already sitting at the benchmark value of 1. For example, I couldn’t leave Zeus’s blessing at 1 VP while reducing Athena’s blessing to 1 as well, when hers requires spending gold. So I chose to vary the costs too, in order to create meaningful alternatives: if I spend 3 gold to gain 2 VP, is that really worse than gaining 1 VP for free?
Overall, I’m very happy with the game’s current state. Even if not every card is balanced down to the decimal point, they all become interesting in the right circumstances. And as expected, the scores have been cut roughly in half, making final scoring much lighter and easier to handle.
Accessibility isn’t just about the content of the rules, it’s also about how the rules are presented. We experimented for a long time with a kind of “overview” section meant to ease players into the rulebook, but it didn’t produce the results we hoped for. Paradoxically, the simpler the game is, the harder that approach becomes: if the overview feels like it explains all the rules already, players get confused when the same information appears later in greater detail. In the end, we opted for a more traditional rulebook structure, but I still wanted the rules to feel light and streamlined. That’s why we chose to include an appendix.
The effects in First Giants are fairly simple and rely on a very consistent grammar. Rather than detailing every single effect in the rulebook, I decided to create a sort of toolbox, a player aid that helps decipher every effect in the game using only the minimum amount of information, alongside an exhaustive encyclopedia of every card. This makes the initial read much smoother, while still allowing players to quickly find answers in the appendix whenever they have doubts (especially thanks to the tabs).
Today, I’m happy to see that First Giants is very intuitive to learn, and I hope it finds its place as a game that sits right on the border between hobby and family gaming: light, but deep. I know longtime Elysium fans won’t find the expert-level experience they loved so much (but that’s okay, Elysium is still an excellent game and still exists). But I hope they’ll see First Giants as an opportunity to introduce the essence of the gameplay they love to friends and family members who may be a bit more casual.
Lucas Forlacroix
