Traveling the Lands of Galzyr, With Designer Sami Laakso
Lands of Galzyr is more than just cute animal-folk. If you haven’t played the narrative adventure board game from Snowdale Design, trust us. It’s easy to lose yourself in the rolling hills and forbidding peaks of Galzyr. Wendy became so engrossed with the polecat adventurer that she was playing, she now owns a shirt with his face on it.
So we were very excited when we got the chance to ask Sami Laakso, the designer of Galzyr, about his design process and why he keeps returning to this enchanted land populated by animals.
Let’s start off by talking a little bit about your history with board games. What games did you play early on in the hobby? Were there any that stood out from the others and really made you want to look more into board games?
While I’ve heard many who fell in love with the hobby later in life, I played games since I was a child and kinda never stopped. When I was young, we had a wide variety of board games that I liked to play with my family and friends. Special mention to many Ravensburger family games – those were great! My hobby grew naturally from there. If I’d have to mention a few individual games, I’d say such classics as Labyrinth, Star of Africa, Ticket to Ride, and Carcassonne. Those are just a few among a bunch of great games I grew up with. And also the standard deck of cards. We played countless different games with those. I remember especially fondly how I played a game after game with my grandmother, who also taught them to us.
Your games tend to be very thematic and story-driven. When you’re designing a game, do you start with a story you want to tell and let the mechanics come out of that? Or do you start with a central mechanic and build a story around it?
Which comes first for me differs from game to game. For Dale of Merchants, the first proper hobby game I designed, it was definitely the mechanisms. I wasn’t particularly fond of any of the deck-building games I had played, so I took it as a challenge to make one that I would actually enjoy. That led me to begin the project. Later, when I had designed its mechanically connected decks, I came up with the animal-merchant setting, where each deck would be themed around a certain animal. The merchant part came from the idea that you’d be setting up your own stall of goods when you let go of cards from your deck to get closer to victory.
On the other hand, Lands of Galzyr is quite the opposite. It’s a game where we wanted to evoke in the player a feeling of an open world, a game in which you could fully immerse yourself. That meant we prioritized the theme, and mechanisms had to support that goal. Similarly, Peacemakers: Horrors of War is the culmination of me wanting to create a game where players’ goal is to end a war, not fight one!
Non-violent conflict resolution seems to be a recurring theme throughout your games. What is it about this idea that attracts you? And why do you feel it’s important to equip players with tools to resolve conflicts without violence?
Guilty as charged! As mentioned before, Peacemakers is the culmination of a thought process which started from me figuring there were enough games about warfare already. What would it look like if I tried to do the opposite?
With Lands of Galzyr, we also didn’t want to make a traditional adventuring game where fighting monsters would take the main focus. Instead, we created a wide array of skills and items players can use to tackle a similarly wide variety of problems.
Chasing a group of raccoon bandits with a fellow adventurer? Descending into the depths of Earth to find signs of a mythical monster? An elderly mole needs help knitting a scarf? The multitude of problems we wanted you to be able to face in the game needed similarly flexible tools from the playable characters to resolve them! In the end, it’s about creating games we want to see in the world, games we believe in, games that push genres into new and exciting directions.
All of your games are set in a world populated by animalfolk. My wife has adopted Bumir as her spirit animal and regularly asks if we can get a polecat as a pet. So I would be remiss if I didn't ask, what's your favorite animal?
My favorite individual animal must be my cat, Kenzi. As for the favorite species, that’s hard to say. I like so many of them, as each of them has their own unique quirks, such as color-changing chameleons, magnificent parrots, goofy pangolins covered in scales, or newts and their different stages of life for example.There’s a never-ending supply of weird and interesting things to learn about the animal world.
Bonus Question - Where can people go to purchase your game or find out more about what you’re working on next?
Our home page is the hub where you can learn more about our games, buy them, subscribe to our newsletter, and more. In addition, we have a friendly community on Discord, which is open to everyone.
A huge thanks to Sami Laakso for taking time out of his busy schedule for this interview. You can follow his work at snowdaledesign.fi.
