Creation & Design: our Goose Game

What has always fascinated us about Marie-Antoinette is her complex personality and disconcerting modernity; it was crucial for us that the participants not only have a good time in the company of France's most famous queen, but that they leave this exclusive experience feeling closer to the character.

But how could we be sure that this information would be conveyed? The participants were not joining the exclusive circle of the queen's close friends only to feel like they were attending a lecture! Was there a way to turn a life story into a game?

And then I remembered all those hours spent playing the Goose Game when I was a child; the illustrations were always magnificent. I also knew, through my research on the 18th century, that the Goose Game already existed at that time and even enjoyed great popularity: some gardens were adorned with giant boards for games in which servants took the place of pawns!

I also knew that the board had often been used as an educational tool, whether to glorify the revolution or teach children about the lives of previous kings. A Goose Game decorated with the key moments of Marie-Antoinette's reign would be the perfect tool to allow the queen to talk about her life and the participants to ask questions, while trying to cross the finish line first (and it's not as easy as it seems – as we've already said, the queen is not afraid to cheat!).

There is no Goose Game about Marie-Antoinette, but that was not a problem:

we were simply going to create it!

So I set out to divide Marie-Antoinette's life into small parts, key moments that would be both easy to illustrate and summarize in a few sentences when a player lands on a story square (some squares just represent birds and other animals the queen would have appreciated, to keep a good game pace).

The funniest part was finding stories for the special squares: The Well, in which a player is stuck until another player arrives, would become the king's forge, where Louis XVI could stay for hours; The Bridge, which moves the player several squares forward, would become the flight to Varennes; and of course, Death would become the guillotine. Once I found all my stories, the hardest part remained: finding illustrations for the 63 squares on the board!

I had two imperatives: I wanted the illustrations to date from the 18th century or as close to that period as possible, and I wanted them all to be 100% free of rights and free for commercial use. Fortunately, my work was greatly facilitated by museums around the world that, for years, have been digitizing their works and making most of them accessible to the public for any use. I spent quite a few hours on these sites looking for the illustrations of my dreams... and I saved quite a few others for my personal collection!

After a few weeks of hard work, our first prototype was born. To start, we printed it on laminated paper - not having a real board would slightly reduce immersion, but we thought it important to first be able to test the game in a real situation.

The game was an immediate success, giving Marie-Antoinette the opportunity to share some of her memories while keeping players' attention, especially when one of our actresses had the brilliant idea to ask them to cackle and flap their wings every time someone landed on a goose! The board had proved its usefulness, and after a few rule changes to make games even more enjoyable, we decided it was time to get down to business: we ordered a prototype from a board game manufacturer.

The process of going from our original design to a professional board is a bit tricky, so I will spare you the details, but the result speaks for itself, don't you think? For now, we only have one copy, but who knows, maybe our fans will be able to buy theirs very soon!