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Loyalty or Liberty? with Daniel Lessin and Jason Grossman
20 Plays1 year ago
Looking for a healthy dose of historical accuracy and tactical challenge packaged together in a single deck-building bundle? Check out Loyalty or Liberty? by Black Labrador Creations! Daniel Lessin and Jason Grossman shared their enthusiasm for the game - and Daniel's incredible depth of historical knowledge - for this episode of the podcast. Buckle up, break out your American Revolution textbooks (not required!) and enjoy the show.
Learn more about Loyalty or Liberty? at blacklabradorcreations.com.
Shout out to our friends at Hero and the Horror for the opening music on the podcast. Check out their site at heroandthehorror.com.
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Transcript
Introduction and Acknowledgments
00:00:00
Speaker
Hey everybody, this is Corey from Grim Steel Games. Thanks for checking out this episode of Should I Play It? Before we introduce our guests for the show, I wanted to start with a quick plug. I was asked after our first episode about the music we used during the intro. The clip is from a song, Another World, by local western mass rockers, Hero and the Horror. They have a new album coming out shortly that I can't wait to get my hands on.
00:00:24
Speaker
If you're in the hard rock and heavy metal like I am, check them out at herointhehorror.com. The guys from the van are awesome, and I can't thank them enough for giving us permission to use the track for the podcast. Speaking of which, here it is.
Guest Introduction and Game Overview
00:00:41
Speaker
Welcome back, everybody. I want to also welcome today's guests, Daniel Lesson and Jason Grossman from Black Labrador Creations, who are here to talk about their tactical, historical, very cool deck building game, Loyalty or Liberty.
00:00:53
Speaker
Before we get into the game, can you both take a moment to introduce yourselves and talk a little bit about Black Labrador Creations for me? Well, I, Daniel Lesson, I'm the board game designer, the CEO, and the author for Black Labrador Creations LLC. Apart from that, I do a bit of ballroom dance, a bit of reenacting, and a bit of figuring war gaming and painting for fun on the side, basically.
00:01:22
Speaker
Yeah, it's essentially Black Laboratory of Creations is an organization where we try to sort of engage in a bit of writing of books and designing of board games that fit historical themes usually, but we're trying to branch out a bit from there as well. So usually a bit of alternative history stuff when we do do the history stuff as well, because it's fun to see all sides of the story.
00:01:48
Speaker
Awesome. And ballroom dancing. I'm guessing that of all of my guests moving forward, nobody is going to say that they're a ballroom dancer on the side. Well, it's a lot of fun. I actually highly recommend it when you get the chance, basically. I recently had a fun time dancing, swing dancing, actually triple and single swing at a famous hideout for 1920s Minneapolis based mobsters, which is pretty cool, basically. That is awesome. So cool. And Jason, how about yourself?
00:02:18
Speaker
Yeah, I'm Jason Grossman. I'm the art director for Black Library of Creations, but I've also been working as a freelance illustrator for over 15 years in the publishing industry, video games. If you need something drawn, I'll get it done for you. And I've had the honor to work with this fine gentleman here, working on his projects, on his last two books, and The Glory to Liberty, which we're going to be talking about in a little bit.
00:02:45
Speaker
So it's been a good time in our career. Yeah, and I'll say that having looked at some of the publicly available art for Loyalty or Liberty, very cool stuff. Looks awesome. You're talking to kind of a history nerd myself. So that's kind of what piqued my interest about the game. So let's dive right into it. Before we get into the why, what's it all about?
Game Mechanics and Strategic Elements
00:03:11
Speaker
So it's a deck-building card game of the American War of Independence, whereupon it's a point-driven system. Basically, the two players agree upon a certain number of points you want to spend towards purchasing an army therewith, basically, the army of which is comprised of an officer, a soldier's weapon loadout, event cards, and the currency cards used to sort of deploy the soldiers and activate the event cards for future consumption and usage on the battlefield.
00:03:41
Speaker
And when you pick an officer, you're looking at one of the three officers of seven different historical factions of the war. The officers themselves are historical too. And there are buffs, rallies, and special abilities basically. And general capacities on the field are based around how they actually performed on the battlefield historically and everything. And they kind of help maneuver the army in ways similar to their, well, similar to the counterparts, of course.
00:04:11
Speaker
And the army is comprised on a battalion level of seven different types of troops per faction, each with special abilities on a unit and national basis. So, you know, line infantry across the board have similar special abilities, but based upon the
00:04:28
Speaker
nation they come from they've got different training and training levels and styles and everything so they've got special abilities so therefore French and British line energy would operate similarly but also differently at the same time and they're drafted as chits with little reference cards determining their loadouts their defensive values their movement abilities and their morale threshold and everything like that basically and
00:04:54
Speaker
Yeah, they've got their range in melee weaponry, which can sort of differ from the starting, which you can cause to have differ from the starting loadout, basically. And, you know, by raising or lowering the price of the unit, basically, you can give them better or worse weapons, which allow you to get more troops or fewer troops with higher quality and everything.
00:05:12
Speaker
And in order to access these troops from your reserves, you're going to need deployment currency cards. You start off with a couple basically at the beginning, but they're only enough to really get like militia and line inventory onto the battlefield. So if you want to get like specialist troops and everything, you need to get the higher tier deployment currency cards, which will cost more basically.
00:05:34
Speaker
and the number of troops you can move to the battlefield per turn is based off of the movement value of the officer card as well and sort of puts a cap on the maximum number of units you can deploy for that turn basically.
00:05:50
Speaker
They're also lady luck cards, which are part of the currency loadouts as well basically, currency deck as well basically, like the deployment cards. And they can allow you to impact the battlefield event cards, which are powerful one-time usage cards, which can change the tides of battle on the field and incarnate themselves as anything from like, you know, calling in surgeons to treat your wounded troops through the first aid card.
00:06:17
Speaker
to restore unit hit points, or reinforcement cards allow you to sort of deploy troops for free in terms of deployment, but it costs a bit less of lady luck points to do so, and even stuff like naval bombardments and everything like that.
00:06:34
Speaker
And so again, as I said, you start off with a few of each of the low denomination versions of both Lady Luck and deployment cards, but you need more to access the better stuff, basically. And when you have your decks all set up sufficiently, you and your opponent proceed to start building a map of the battlefield together. And basically you, because the battlefields in this game are sort of historically feasible, but not historically accurate,
00:07:00
Speaker
And the players take turns putting down a number of terrain cards equivalent to the scout value of their officers, trying to form a five by five map and trying to disrupt their opponent's positioning and sort of hem them in using the, in sort of a mini game before the battle, sort of scouting the map, trying to figure out how best to sort of confound opposition, enemy placement and opposition basically.
00:07:27
Speaker
And then basically the game really begins with players taking turns drawing four cards per turn from their currency deck to see how many lady luck points and currency points they can rack up for that round, allowing them to deploy troops and activate event cards. And then when deployed, troops in their little JIT format can maneuver the battlefield from the terrain card to put down and sort of fight each other using Dungeons and Dragons-esque statistics.
00:07:55
Speaker
And in the meantime, when you get enough lady luck cards to activate event cards, you can bring them to bear any time you want after they're paid for in lady luck points. And as enemy troops are defeated, the overall army disposition of the forces suffer. And the army disposition is sort of like life and magically gathering, in a sense, basically. So you start off with 20 usually.
00:08:24
Speaker
When your enemy troops are routed, the player controlling them loses army disposition equivalent to their deployment value. And it also doesn't help when the enemy camps are ravaged, which is done by stationing your troops on the far side of the map where the enemy camp is and then having the troops pass their time there so they can sort of pillage the enemy camps.
00:08:48
Speaker
And between those two factors, basically, the enemy is slowly whittled down based off their army disposition. And when it equals zero, the game is lost for that side, and that particular enemy is routed. It's fun times, I would say.
00:09:04
Speaker
That sounds fascinating. I think one question they have, and I have a question for Jason too, but when it comes to the starting values, those starting low denomination cards, a lot of deck builders begin with exactly the same starting values. It sounds like you actually have a little bit of leeway and it's a little strategic at the beginning before you start versus some of the other games, which is just you get these cards to start and then you build your deck up. Is that a fair assessment?
00:09:31
Speaker
That's one of the biggest parts of this game is how strategically every phase, even the beginning of picking your units and going into the factoring, what type of map you might be facing, you're being strategic. And that's such a big focus. Because with this game, you have to be comprehending, okay, well, I really want to be using artillery. I really like it. But if I really focus on our artillery-based army,
00:09:57
Speaker
my opponent might start placing a lot of obstacles for me to lose some mobility of my units. And I might have the range, but if they get in close, I'm going to have some issues. And you're going to be thinking about that. So even if you think you figured out the perfect army, each game that army, even if it was perfect for one, it's not going to be perfect for next because there's so many factors of changing how the field's going to go. And that's something that I really love about this game.
00:10:21
Speaker
Jason, before I get into the main question of the podcast, I got to ask you a side question. You're the artist, or one of the artists.
Art Direction and Design Choices
00:10:29
Speaker
What was your favorite card to draw? Trick question, right? Well, when it came to the artwork or the cards, I actually ended up working on two of them. My artwork was mostly the stuff for the cover artwork and the manual artwork.
00:10:45
Speaker
But if we were just going over what my favorite artwork in general is, I've always really liked the naval bombardment. I thought that it did a great execution of that feelment of ships firing these large artillery pieces from the decks. It's always been a big thing for me when I came to the artwork for this game.
00:11:07
Speaker
Um, one of the things that I will say, when we were, wouldn't just with the whole field of artwork in our game is that we really tried to keep it period accurate. And that was something that I think was a great suggestion from Daniel, because all the artwork in the game is based off of that, that time periods painting styles. We made sure to mimic that as much as we could to really keep that feel of, of these really beautifully painted oil paintings, uh,
00:11:37
Speaker
but keeping the feel with the oil techniques combined with more modern techniques of creating action. And that was a big difficulty, but we really overcame it. And that was all because of Daniel's vision of how he wanted his art for his game with you. For people I've worked with, he's been a great envisionary of what he wants for his games.
00:12:03
Speaker
I certainly tried my best, but I couldn't have done it without the incredible assistance of Jason himself, and as well as the original artists for the cards as well for that matter too. Carl Duff did a spectacular job with the soldier cards and the event cards as well, basically, and everything like that. And I just know I might have had a couple of
00:12:27
Speaker
interesting ideas here and there, basically. And I suppose I definitely, and I came up with the mechanics, I guess, basically, but they're considerable contributors, basically. And as I know, nothing of the art world and everything like that, basically, apart from the odd, you know, Benjamin West and everything like that, basically. It was wonderful to see it actually take on a fantastic reality, I would say. And their moral support as well was out of this world, to say the least.
00:12:56
Speaker
That's great. I think it's important to have a cohesive designer and an art collaboration when it comes to these things or else they get to be really difficult. All right. So here's the crux. Here's the reason why I wanted to do this podcast and I can't wait to do more of them.
Unique Features and Audience Appeal
00:13:12
Speaker
What makes Loyalty or Liberty unique? If I'm sitting there in the store or I have it and maybe a couple other deck builders in my shopping cart online, why am I going to keep that in my shopping cart and buy it? What's the thing that's going to make me really want to play this game the most? Then from doing art, I also brought up the game. I thought the thing that really got me is that everything that you need to play this game is in the box.
00:13:42
Speaker
From a lot of military games like this you got to buy so many extra units and expansion packs And then you you're investing so much money like I'm a huge war hammer player Yeah, my cheapest war hammer army cost me $600 and I still and that's not counting the painter anything at the time I got a painting both Daniels game right out of the box I have everything I need to play I Just need to take a look at the manual and just a probably in about 10 minutes I'm ready to go figure out how I want to build my deck and
00:14:10
Speaker
And, and I can't say that a lot of, uh, miniature tactical games like this, they take so much time to prep and the prep time to get it off the ground. And after you're done building your army, that's your army. That's what you're gonna be playing for the rest of the time with, with your.
00:14:29
Speaker
your playthroughs with daniel's game each time you play you're gonna be playing a different army you're gonna be trying different strategies you're gonna be looking at the different officers you're gonna have so many options so it has so much replayability which is something that i really love about his game um to the fact that uh we were just uh showing the game uh just a few weeks ago at odicon which is i don't know if you're familiar it's a pretty big anime show you wouldn't think uh history based board game would do that one on an anime show how does this connect right but
00:14:57
Speaker
on our very first day we sold a very good amount of copies and we had people coming back the very next day talking about after their don't show that night they came they came back to the whole tombs after a long day at Cavesh you know they're tired but they found this is the perfect game to play before they go to bed and get ready for the next day and we had multiple people coming back saying that to us we had people even coming back on the sunday coming to buy a second copy for their friends
00:15:26
Speaker
And it's just the fact that this game is so easy to get off the ground and start playing, it works so well that way.
00:15:36
Speaker
Absolutely, basically. I think the mechanics and replayability are pretty spectacular and reasonably worthy of consideration, for sure. They certainly don't require an apology, if you ask me. I think they're good. But I think also it's kind of nice, too, because a lot of them, American War of Independence themed war games and everything, also basically tend to downplay the role of the indigenous population or the African-American population.
00:16:03
Speaker
or the various other European powers that were not the British or the Germans or whatever, basically, because, you know, it was all about America and everything like that. But I think it's very important to basically show, I thought it was very cool that my game shows elements of, you know, the
00:16:19
Speaker
the French and the Spanish playing significantly more roles, basically. I went so far as to basically translate the flavor names, basically, of all the line infantry and everything like that into the proper languages for the faction in question, basically. So, you know, in fancy regiments, such and such, for the Germans, whatever, basically, or, you know, regimentio de linea for the Spanish and everything like that, basically.
00:16:47
Speaker
and across the board for all the unit, different types and everything. And I think it's also cool that I did the cultural diversity. I didn't just call them indigenous or Native American allies or whatever, they gave them their own faction with their own officers. And, you know, I also gave different sorts of cultures of Native Americans, different abilities, too, and everything. We have the Miami, we've got the Delaware, and we've got the
00:17:12
Speaker
Iroquois Confederacy, which I should have called them the Haudenosaunee. Sorry about that, you guys. But, you know, it's I only recently learned about that change in name myself or the change in what you're supposed to call them myself. And also for that matter, too, we are seriously considering releasing some expansion packs that add in additional characters that were sought after by some of our constituents as well. Basically, a lot of people were outraged that there was no Hamilton card.
00:17:41
Speaker
when he was a Colonel of Artillery, if I'm not mistaken, basically, which is, you know, an important role, but not quite on the level of the other guys, but we were considering adding him in for future runs. Because, you know, much as we're a library of expansions, we want to also cater to the population, too. I never eat something like that, too. And we also wanted to add in some African-American heroes, as well, which is why we're adding in the loyalist officer, Colonel Titus, by any chance? Are you familiar with him by any chance?
00:18:11
Speaker
I remember the name from history class, for sure. Yeah, yeah. He was a famous African-American partisan warrior, basically, who led a... He was originally part of a... He was from New Jersey originally, escaped his master, basically, went down to Virginia to sort of join Lord Dunmore's Ethiopian regiment, which was basically a force comprised of freed African-American slaves, became a sergeant amongst them, basically, and...
00:18:40
Speaker
fought very well and very hard in the initial battles, but eventually they were pushed back. So he was called upon to evacuate to New York City, where upon Sir Henry Clinton offered him a position as the commander of a group of combat engineers, pioneers they're called basically. And he actually politely declined this position basically, and instead went on to go back to his homeland basically in Tom's River, New Jersey, in that general area basically,
00:19:16
Speaker
great action basically, for many years actually, very successfully against rebel recruiters and rebel militias in the area basically, quite an interesting character to say the least, yeah. And he had like 20 men in his command at all. The fact that he was a colonel is more of a just non horrific basically, but at the same time, these 20 men did a considerable amount to damage rebel recruiting efforts in Southern Jersey territories.
00:19:30
Speaker
and terrorized the rebellion population there with a partisan force of his own basically.
00:19:45
Speaker
So hearing that, I'd say one of the things that strikes me is the amount of research that you did into the War of Revolution, the War of Independence. How many hours did you spend researching as you were creating the game? Well, as I was creating the game, maybe not as many as I probably should have. I brushed up as a thing, basically, due to the fact that
00:20:09
Speaker
I have a reenacting background is the thing basically. Back when I was living in New Jersey before my Minnesota days, I was part of the Royal Provincial 4th Battalion New Jersey Volunteers. Lowest line infantry basically, the green coats that you'll find in the game. And yeah, actually we served under Cortland Skinner, which is one of the officers as well, which is partially why I included him. But yeah.
00:20:37
Speaker
So I basically learned a lot about what I wanted to learn about in the reenacting world. And I kind of became a specialist in certain areas. And I like to learn about the various minority populations basically in the Revolutionary War period. And I had a lot of very good mentors because I made friends with some of the lead historians of African-American leadership in the Revolutionary War.
00:21:03
Speaker
led by a gentleman named, possibly one of the leaders on the topic basically is Antoine Watts, for that matter, who is an officer in the First Rhode Island Regiment, basically reenactment group. He's wonderful.
00:21:20
Speaker
You know, I also had the honor of serving under one of the foremost authorities of loyalist studies as well, Todd Brastad, basically, when it comes to the loyalist studies and everything. So I was very privileged in that respect.
00:21:35
Speaker
He definitely brought that to the game to the point that there was drawings that we had to redo because we drew the flintlock mechanism that we drew happened to be too late. It was that we had to redesign it. I think one of them, we were actually, we were doing artwork for the Americans
00:22:03
Speaker
And they were you the flintlock that we used was backstage. It was drawn the right direction the first time, but we flipped the image. So when you flip the image, the flintlock shouldn't be seen anymore. And Daniel with his with his large knowledge of history at the time period caught that because that's something that we want to. So he was when it came to the artwork, to the characters, the history was always important.
00:22:27
Speaker
We even made sure the teapots that were in a few inside the manual were area appropriate. The ones that British officers would use. That's a cool attention to detail. That's something that not many people would pick up on, but I'm sure that history enthusiasts would catch it and say, hey, wait a minute, that looks slightly off. He's one of those history guys, so he wants to make sure.
00:22:53
Speaker
Well, you're a fan of history, you're very knowledgeable, and you know the people that want to buy your game. So you wanted to make sure that even that little detail that everybody else is not going to notice, but there's going to be that one guy, you make sure that one guy is happy. Speaking about buying the game, I mentioned having it in my shopping cart or having it in my hand in the
Availability and Purchasing Information
00:23:12
Speaker
store. Where can people find loyalty or liberty?
00:23:16
Speaker
All right, well, as I understand it, basically, let's see here. In Minnesota, the source comics and games is currently carrying it, basically. We have tower games carrying it as well, basically. So that's in Roseville and in Minneapolis, specifically. We have the chain Games by James, which is like six or eight stores, having it on consignment for the time being, sort of a trial period or whatever, basically.
00:23:44
Speaker
uh and then in colorado i think it's manavault games is that correct we also have uh some stores in jersey right now i know that uh the store that still has it in stock is the guild of raven they still have like two copies left uh but the best way to get the game from us is buying it from our website black lavatory creations uh just
00:24:10
Speaker
Just double check and I get the, yeah, blackloudercreations.com. You can find it right there available. Also available on our site is Daniel's two books that he just raised, The Fitch Folios, which are a great thing to get together with the game. They're nice compliments to each other.
00:24:26
Speaker
Daniel, Jason, I can't wait to check it out. I think this is a very cool concept as a history buff myself. And I can't thank you guys enough for joining me. We will make sure that all of that information is also available in the show description, show notes.
00:24:43
Speaker
and across our social media as well. So I encourage everybody listening, check them out. You guys are awesome. And I can't wait to, if you're ever in a show in my area, please let me know. I will head out. Maybe if you make it to PAX East next year, I would love to love that show and would love to come in and hang out with you for a little bit. So I appreciate it. And thank you very much for joining me today. I appreciate it a lot.
00:25:09
Speaker
It was my pleasure, and I hope Jason's too, for that matter, certainly, yes. It was a wonderful podcast. Hope we get invited back for one of our upcoming projects. Absolutely. You can hold me to that. Amazing. That would be wonderful. Thank you so much. Again, my name is Corey, the editor-in-chief at Grimstool Games. Thanks again for Daniel and Jason for joining me, and we will catch you on the next episode. Take care.