Treasure of the Dwarves is an auction game with an original bidding system. Every round, one or two players auction a magical item card. Each player must make an offer for one of the available cards by putting one or more coins or gems in a small chest.

Treasure of the Dwarves is a bluffing game. The seller may look at the content of the chests in any order, but cannot go back and choose a box they have already seen. It would indeed go against the dwarven etiquette rules, which are even stricter than the Japanese ones, and no one wants to do hara-kiri with a battleaxe. A clever dwarf, and dwarves are usually clever, can sometimes get an item at a good price with a mediocre offer, hoping it will be looked at last. 

Treasure of the Dwarves is a combo game, in which players accumulate resources in gems, coins and cards, and use cards to build their own scoring systems during the game. This “scoring rules building” feels a bit like a game I really like, Fantasy Realms.

Treasure of the Dwarves is mean and highly interactive, with many opportunities for deceit and “take-thats”. Players can both manipulate opponents and sometimes sabotage their treasures.

Treasure of the Dwarves is therefore both a tactical and a strategy game. It is tactical when trying to make the right bid for the right card. It is strategic when planning one’s final scoring.

I don’t think there’s a single boardgame which I have more playtested, developed, or fine-tuned than this one. It is certainly the most representative of my design style, my idea of what a boardgame should be. Over five years, I have played it hundreds of times, carefully balancing and rebalancing the scorings for coins, gems, and cards. Several playtesters added their grain of salt to it, especially Vincent Pessel, who is very good at spotting small imbalances and rules issues, and Croc, who had the idea of two simultaneous auctions. This is what makes it possible to play a fast and fun 8 player game, something relatively rare with non-party games.

The Art

Two artists, Roland MacDonald and Donald Crank, have contributed to the art in Treasure of the Dwarves. The cover art, which could have been featured in an illustrated edition of Tolkien, gives the traditional image of the dwarven society. The many magic items are more surprising. One can imagine that they are very old, and show traces of the distant cultural influence of some other underground people, may be the lizard men living near the underground lakes and rivers. At least one of the dwarves illustration’s looks definitely suspicious. After all, what do we really know of the origins of dwarven culture? In German traditions, dwarves live in hollow mountains but are also linked to rivers and springs.

Dwarves and magical items

Treasure of the Dwarves is not really, or not seriously, about mythology, and the magical items in it have been given names that suggest their in-game abilities. For some time, however, I toyed with the idea of using items from the Norse and German mythologies, in which dwarves are described as small but powerful underground creatures specialized in crafting and guarding magic stuff. The English word “dwarf” comes from the old Norse “dverg”. To learn more about the cultural history of these creatures, I recommend Claude Lecouteux’s Hidden History of Elves and Dwarfs, even when its approach is old fashioned, as well as, in a more specifically British context, Francis Young’s recent book, Twilight of the Godlings, in which I’ve found this marvelous explanation, by Sir Walter Scott, of the origins of dwarfs and of their affinities for caves and metals – dwarves are basically Baltic pygmy refugees.

Dwarves and dragons

There are dragons in several of my games, including of course Dragons Gold, Fist of Dragonstones and, more recently, Dragons. The reason is, of course, that I am often inspired by the generic medieval fantasy setting in which I wallowed as a teenager, and which I still enjoy. I could not bring living dragons into Treasure of the Dwarves, where there are no violent fights, but most if not all of the coins, gems, and shining or magical items traded must have belonged to a dragon at some time. They certainly have great value for dwarves, especially since old tales say that the first dragon, Fafnir, was originally a dwarf, gradually changed into an ugly monster by his fear and avarice.

The crown jewels

Far from the Germanic or Nordic forests, the dwarves seriously considered sailing to Japan to get regalia. Having decided, for game balance reasons, that there would be three or four different crown jewels of the King under the mountain, I had to decide what exactly they were. In France, and I think in most western countries, the first regalia we think of are those of the British crown. Unfortunately, the list is vague and there are, anyway, way more than three. This left me with two official sets of three items. Those from the Japanese emperor, which have never been shown to the public, are a sword, a mirror and a curved and mysterious jade stone. Those from the Austrian emperor, which can be seen in Wien in the Schatzkammer Museum, are a crown, an orb and a scepter. 

Going farther

Thirty years ago, I often, usually in vain, suggested that publishers add a few blank cards in my games, so that players could try and add their own stuff. After all, that’s how I started enjoying game design, with adding alien powers and card effects in Cosmic Encounter. Be wary, however, not to break the game’s balance. Some cards can be better than other ones, that’s what makes auctions meaningful, but not too much, or not always, or not for everyone. Be careful also with the global balance between the three main ways to score, coins, gems and cards.