Crafting Arzium is a documentary feature film about board game designer Ryan Laukat and his wife Malorie Laukat (the core team behind Red Raven Games). Follow the two creators as they attempt to bring their latest game called Now or Never to life!
What is Arzium? Arzium is the world setting of many of Red Raven’s games, including Near and Far, Above and Below, and Roam–among others. Arzium is a fantastical world filled with desert oases, lush pastures, turnip farms, amber mines, jagged mountains, glogos caverns, iron cities, and exotic flying continents! It is a world which has entertained and inspired thousands of gamers and which captures the imagination.
The idea for Crafting Arzium came about after the completion of The Game Designers and was directly inspired by that movie.
In The Game Designers we set out to capture as much as we possibly could about the world of modern board game design and we traveled near and far to collect numerous stories and interviews. We followed five main designers and interviewed over 70+ people in total. The result of that effort was a film that was very far-reaching and over-arching and touched on a lot of points regarding the subject.
For Crafing Arzium we thought that it would be fun to delve into the same topic, however, instead of casting a really wide net like we did last time, we wondered how “deep” we could go with just one individual. So we set out in our early pre-production stage and made a long list of designers who we potentially thought could work for the film. Over time the list got shorter and shorter (for different reasons) and we eventually decided to team up with Ryan and Malorie Laukat!
Collaborating with Ryan and Malorie was great from the very start and has continued to be a great experience. For this film we wanted to find the right individuals who were willing to be open and honest about their challenges–both in regards to the games they made and also in real life matters. Ryan and Malorie were up to the task from the start and have opened up and shared a lot of great information–which really shines through in the film.
