It was indeed. If you’ve played many prototypes, you know what they tend to look like, and how designers will have scribbled and crossed out and sharpied all sorts of things onto the components after every iteration. Not Tau. Every time we played (it seemed), he would note the needed changes, which meant back to the spreadsheet to rebalance everything, and then back to the printer to make the proto again, a process that took many hours because there were so many cards. The effort that he put into the game was incredible, but obviously it shows in the final product.

My daughters, then pre-teens, joined in the testing and what fascinated them most was the rich back-story about each of the races and how it fit into the broader world he had created. So, I’ve heard Tau expound at great length about this subject, but we also insisted it had to happen during pizza breaks or else the girls would keep him engaged with their curiosity and we’d never actually start the game!

It interests me because obviously you don’t have to know too much about the backstory to enjoy the trading. But I think there’s an analogy with Tolkien here: that you don’t have to know the gory details about Beren and Luthien recovering the silmaril or that there are two different elven languages or any of that stuff; but to /Tolkien/, it was incredibly important that all of that exist and be clear in his mind as the backdrop for his story, and I think Tau’s game functions similarly.