In January 2009, the creator of Barbarian Prince (Martin-Pierre Frenette) played a game of Cosmic Encounter with his family and his friends.

Amongst the player were his then 6 year old French-speaker daughter. The only way for her to play the game was to pair her with another player to enable her to know what the various cards meant.

During the evening, Martin-Pierre realized that most of the advanced board games were played with elements hidden from the other players.

For most games, this is not a problem but sadly, this also means that younger players or beginners cannot ask help from other players without revealing their hand.

In the following weeks, Martin-Pierre worked hard in designing 3 board games which offered various strategies and options for players without requiring them to conceal complex elements from the other players.

The first completed was Alien Salvation and is somewhat of a failure. Barbarian Prince is the second one and the best hope for Martin-Pierre at this moment.

 

In a perfect game environment, each player is competing alone for victory. When random players meet in a tournament, this is exactly the case.

When friends sit down to play a friendly game, natural alliances eliminate that balance. When couples play for example, they will sometimes tend to avoid direct fights against one another, or a father might avoid doing a move which would eliminate his kid from the game even if that were the best move available.

This is natural but sadly, it makes certain single players uneasy about playing with couples since it might mean they will compete alone.

Alien Salvation was the solution by Martin-Pierre Frenette to that problem by making each of the players compete together against a common enemy.

In Barbarian Prince, the players compete against each other but indirectly. The only combat is made against the Barbarians, a common enemy which strikes semi-randomly.

There are even rules for a shared victory, allowing a couple to collaborate against the other players openly without disrupting the game flow if there are enough players.