Wandering Pine Games

Author: WanderingPine

The Sheep Farmer Who Wrote Switzerland’s Neutrality

Charles Pictet de Rochemont, 10,000 merino sheep, and the sentence Switzerland still argues about two hundred years later.

This one came from the die. Faces of Vienna works simply: people suggest European countries, a die chooses one, and I go looking for a real person tied to that country and the Congress of Vienna. This time the die landed on Switzerland — and it sent me to a man who spent most of his life farming sheep before he ended up writing the clause Switzerland still leans on today: that it is perpetually neutral.

His name was Charles Pictet de Rochemont, and before I explain what he did in Vienna, I need to explain the world that made him useful there.

Geneva at the end of the eighteenth century was not the Switzerland we know now. It was a tiny, proud Calvinist republic wedged between France and the Swiss cantons, with no real army and no titled nobility. There was exactly one survival strategy available to a state like that: don’t provoke anyone, and make yourself useful to everyone. The Pictets were old Geneva patrician stock — generations in the city councils, generations in foreign military service. Charles’s father was a colonel in Dutch service. This was a family that looked outward, that learned languages and read the English and thought about Europe rather than just their own street. You don’t come out of a household like that as a local notable. You come out of it as someone who can talk to every table at once.

Before he was a diplomat, Pictet was something closer to what we’d now call a knowledge broker. In his twenties he spent nearly a decade in Swiss regiments in French service, but his real interest lay elsewhere. He’d learned German, Italian and English at school, and back in Geneva he co-founded the Bibliothèque britannique, a journal that systematically translated British science, technology and agriculture into French for the rest of the continent. That’s the thread that runs through his whole life: a man standing halfway between worlds, translating one into the other. English into French. Science into practice. And, later, the interests of great powers into the survival of a small state.

Then he went back to Geneva and did something that had nothing to do with diplomacy and everything to do with the instinct behind it. He imported Spanish merino sheep and built a flock that reached roughly 10,000 head by 1806. He trained local shepherds and shared every improvement in breeding and yield with the farmers around him. His wife, Adélaïde-Sara, ran the other half of the enterprise, overseeing the production of luxury shawls and fine wool cloth, trying to turn weaving into winter work for the Geneva countryside. This wasn’t a rich man playing at farming. It was a real transfer of skill and labour — bring in the best of something, then teach it to everyone else. The same reflex that had driven the Bibliothèque britannique. The same reflex that would later reshape a continent’s map, on a much smaller scale than he could have imagined at the time.

Then the idyll ended. Revolution reached Geneva too, and reached it hard. The old city councils were suspended, equality declared, and the old patriciate — the Pictets among them — found themselves on the wrong side of it. In 1794 Pictet was sentenced to a year of house arrest, though he was amnestied and freed after barely three weeks, when the radical government fell.

His brother-in-law, Jean-François de Rochemont, was less fortunate: sentenced to death by the revolutionary tribunals and executed. In 1798, the French Directory annexed Geneva to France outright, and the republic Pictet had known simply stopped existing. He withdrew into his sheep and his fields. It wasn’t surrender. It was patience — the kind that turns out to be invaluable once the great powers finally sit down at a table and need someone who knows how to wait without losing his head.

That table was Vienna, 1814. Napoleon’s victors were redrawing the map of Europe. Metternich, Talleyrand, Alexander I, Castlereagh — great powers, armies, millions of subjects. And off to the side, tiny Switzerland, wanting exactly one thing: for someone to acknowledge it existed, and to let it stay out of the next war. Pictet went to represent it, as plenipotentiary of the Swiss Diet. He had no army to threaten anyone with and no territory to trade. What he had was what he’d spent his whole life practising — languages, contacts, and the ability to translate a small state’s interest into the language of the great ones. His argument wasn’t force. It was that a neutral, inviolable Switzerland served every great power simultaneously, because none of them wanted the Alpine passes falling into a rival’s hands.

It worked. In 1815 the great powers recognised Switzerland’s perpetual neutrality and the inviolability of its territory, and Pictet drafted the document that sealed it. Along the way he also negotiated the modern borders of the canton of Geneva and its entry into the Swiss Confederation.

It wasn’t decoration. It became a foundation of Swiss identity for two centuries — and it’s still a live, contested one. When Switzerland adopted EU sanctions against Russia in 2022, the country argued openly, and not for the first time, about whether the neutrality drafted in Vienna still means anything, or whether it has hardened into a myth people invoke rather than a principle they follow. People are still arguing, in earnest, about a sentence a Geneva sheep farmer helped write two hundred years ago.

Pictet died in 1824 and never saw where it led. A century later, the League of Nations settled in Geneva. Today it’s the European seat of the UN, the WHO, the Red Cross, and dozens of other international bodies — the place the world goes to talk when it can’t talk anywhere else. I don’t think Pictet planned that; nobody could have. But he helped build the one thing without which it couldn’t have happened: credibly neutral ground, recognised by everyone. The instinct that made him translate the English for the French, and bring in sheep to share with his neighbours, became the function of an entire city. Same instinct, same place, two hundred years apart.

This is part of Faces of Vienna, where a die sends me to a country and I go looking for a real person tangled up with the Congress of Vienna. They feed a board game I’m designing — Vienna 1814: Waltz of Nations — about the Congress seen from the side of salons, gossip, romance and ambition rather than treaties and borders. Pictet had none of the salon glamour, but he’s exactly why I keep digging: real people, real leverage, and the stubborn fact that a small state’s survival was written by someone who knew how to be useful to everyone at once. The game is still in development, and I’m building it in the open.

Which country should the die choose next? You can vote on my socials.

September 15, 2026
Of Whatever Nation You May Be

Tudor Vladimirescu, a garden pavilion at dawn, and the corner of Europe the Congress of Vienna never counted.

This one came from the die. Faces of Vienna works simply: people suggest European countries, a die chooses one, and I go looking for a real person tied to that country and the Congress of Vienna. The die chose Romania — and it sent me somewhere I did not expect, and somewhere I cannot tell lightly. So this time the usual salon wit stays in its box. What follows is a story about betrayal, and about how hard it is to say who betrayed whom.

A cold dawn in Golești, in Wallachia — the southern half of what is now Romania — on 21 May 1821. A man is asleep in a garden pavilion, and does not know that this is the last morning he will spend free. Before the day is out, his own allies will seize him. Within a week he will be tortured and killed, and his body thrown into a pit. His name was Tudor Vladimirescu. The question this whole story turns on is deceptively simple: who was the traitor here, and who the betrayed?

To answer it, you have to know the man. A few years before that dawn, Tudor was a well-known captain of the pandurs — the free-peasant militias of western Wallachia. He was born to free peasants and rose by merit and trade: cattle, grain, leased estates. He became an estate steward, then a vătaf, a local commander and lawman — a self-made man who climbed into the minor gentry. Hold onto that detail. It decides everything later.

And you have to know his world. For a century, Wallachia — an autonomous principality under Ottoman overlordship, never simply part of the empire — had been ruled by the Phanariots: Greek elites from Constantinople who bought their thrones from the Sultan. A prince paid a fortune for a seat he would hold for two or three years, and so he extracted everything he could, as fast as he could, before he was rotated out. Crushing taxes. A country milked.

Pitesti from Views in the Ottoman Dominions, in Europe, in Asia, and some of the Mediterranean islands (1810) illustrated by Luigi Mayer (1755-1803).

And yet it was not simple darkness. The same Phanariots abolished serfdom, brought Enlightenment law codes, Greek schools, printing presses. The “Phanariot yoke” is partly a later nationalist invention. The system was predatory and it modernized — both at once, in the same breath. (This is the kind of thing I keep running into when I dig: the honest version of history rarely fits the flag.)

Tudor knew the abuses from the inside — he had administered estates himself. In January 1821, in the Proclamation of Padeș, he made his case. Notice the frame of it: he blamed the Phanariot chieftains, not the Sultan, whom he cast as the distant good emperor. It was an appeal to the overlord against the middlemen — not secession, but the restoration of old Wallachian rights.

And here honesty matters most, because he was no saint. He preached the people’s cause, then restrained and punished the peasants who looted the manors. He wanted reform, not revolution; he struck at abusive privilege, but not at property itself. He had risen into the propertied world, and his rebellion had the limits of a man with something to lose.

Now go back to 1814. His patron had sent him to Vienna to settle a family estate, and he stayed six months — while, in the ballrooms nearby, the Congress of Vienna was redrawing the map of Europe. He had no seat there and no voice. But he was in the city, and he wrote home uneasy: ministers were expected in October, the Emperor of Russia too, and something, he feared, might be decided about these lands as well. The great powers were remaking the continent — and had not counted his corner of it at all. (I will be honest: this is the whole reason he qualifies for a series about the Congress of Vienna. He was not at the table. He was a man in the same city, watching the powerful settle the shape of a Europe that had no plans for him — which may be the more common experience of history than the one we usually tell.)

Rudolf von Alt, Der Graben, Vienna

Wallachia was not alone. Greece too was straining against Ottoman rule, and a secret brotherhood — the Filiki Eteria — was organizing a revolution. In 1821 their rising and Tudor’s were tangled together from the start: coordinated enough to lean on each other, never driven by the same goal. His aim was Wallachian autonomy. Theirs was Greek independence. Two freedoms, pulling apart.

A 19th-century Romanian lithograph by Carol Isler showing Tudor Vladimirescu and his pandurs crossing the Olt river.

The Greek leader was Alexander Ypsilantis — himself a Phanariot, from a line of Phanariot princes. He crossed into Moldavia counting on Russia to back him. But Tsar Alexander, bound to the order built at Vienna and to Metternich’s horror of revolution, disowned him. The system assembled in those ballrooms now cut the ground from under the very kind of rising it might have blessed a generation earlier.

Tudor read the signs. Russia was not coming; the Greek gamble was doomed. So he did the pragmatic thing and opened talks with the Ottomans, to spare Wallachia the reprisal he could see approaching. In his own mind, the pact with the Greeks was already void — he was finishing the fight he had started, on the only terms left. To the Greeks, it looked like something else entirely.

To them it was not caution. It was treachery. An ally who had pledged a common front was now dealing with the enemy at the decisive hour, and every conversation he held with the Ottomans weakened their revolution. Their fear was not paranoia; it was survival. The charge that he had sold out to the Turks was never proven — but from where they stood, they did not need proof. They had reason to feel betrayed. And he had reason to try to save his country. Both of those are true, and they could not both be acted on.

At dawn in Golești, Eterist officers seized him in his sleep. They took him to Târgoviște, and on the night of 27 May 1821 they killed him — tortured, on a charge no one ever proved, his body thrown into a pit. Two sides, each with its reasons, and a man dead who did not need to die.

Then the bitter irony. The Phanariot regime did fall — in 1822. But not because Tudor had won. It fell because, after Ypsilantis, the Sultan stopped trusting Phanariots at all. A Phanariot’s revolt helped end Phanariot rule — while that Phanariot’s men killed the other leader who had risen against it. The system fell. Both leaders lost.

A hand-coloured engraving by W. H. Bartlett, “The Plains of Lower Wallachia.”

Tudor died on a false charge, killed by his own allies, his body in a pit. Months earlier, in the Proclamation of Padeș, he had called out to his people — veri de ce neam veți fi, of whatever nation you may be. A man who spoke across nations, killed by the war between them.

Those words are two hundred years old now. They were written for a scatter of villages in a small, half-forgotten principality — and yet they read like a line meant for a whole continent, one that still argues over who belongs to it. Nothing here was fated. Everyone in this story chose — the brave and the murderous alike. Europe was never destined to become one thing, and it still isn’t. But of whatever nation we may be, we could still choose what we become.

This is part of Faces of Vienna, where a die sends me to a country and I go looking for a real person tangled up with the Congress of Vienna. Most of them are lighter than this one. They feed a board game I’m designing — Vienna 1814: Waltz of Nations — about the Congress seen from the side of salons, gossip, romance and ambition rather than treaties and borders. Tudor sits at the edge of that world rather than its centre; his was not a story of ballrooms. But he is exactly why I keep digging: real people, real tensions, and the stubborn fact that history was made of choices, not fate. The game is still in development, and I’m building it in the open.

Which country should the die choose next? You can vote on my socials.

August 11, 2026
Red flags in board game design

Some time ago, while wrapping up the manual for the 3rd iteration of “Vienna 1814: The Waltz of Nations”, an unexpected thought appeared — what if my game is too complex?

Maybe it was the fact that the manual had grown to almost 30 pages. Or that I had just spent two hours self-testing it.

But how would I even know? My goal was always to design something a bit complex. I enjoy games that take around 3–3.5 hours — that’s my sweet spot, especially for thematic euros.

During the design process you inevitably encounter problems. Some are easy to adjust. Others signal deeper structural issues. The hardest part is noticing them — especially when you’re emotionally attached to your project.

These signals are often called red flags.

Red flags can appear at any stage of development. Not every one of them means your game is broken. Sometimes what looks like a problem is a conscious design choice. And this is fine. But when several appear at once, it’s usually a warning sign.

Below I list few of the most common ones, ordered from those you might notice earliest in the design process, to those that only surface during playtests:

Ambitious overdesign.
If your first game is already an epic universe with planned expansions, your expectations might be outrunning your experience.

Unclear target player.
There is no game for everyone. Trying to design for everyone often results in designing for no one.

Too many mechanics and too much nuance.
“How many is too many?” is a dangerous question. Adding new mechanics feels productive, but they can accumulate quietly.

Component and design overload.
Wanting to include everything often leads to a table overflowing with components — and overwhelmed players.

Teaching Time Disproportion.
If explaining the rules takes longer than the gameplay itself, something may be fundamentally off.

Rule complexity.
Small modifiers, edge cases, and conditional bonuses quickly increase cognitive load. At some point remembering it all becomes impossible.

Players are repeatedly confused during playtests.
If different players stumble in the same places, something hasn’t “clicked” in the system. This require deep insight.

Reading this, it may all seem obvious. In practice, it isn’t.

One reason is the sunk cost fallacy. You’ve spent months designing your game, refining mechanics — removing some part of it now feels like admitting that time was wasted.

Another reason is simply love. When you fall in love with your project, you become blind to its flaws.
“Not my game. It wouldn’t do that.”

And sometimes it’s even simpler: it worked in your head.
Our brains are excellent at connecting ideas — and terrible at simulating friction, real-time decisions, or the simple act of moving a pawn across a crowded board.

So what can you do?

Test.
Self-test. Then test with real people — at a real table.

Watch the energy. Notice hesitation. Afterward, ask about the most confusing or unnecessarily complex moments.

And most importantly — be ready to remove things.
Limit elements. Simplify where possible. Kill your darlings.

In the upcoming posts, I will look at each of these red flags in more detail — sharing my own experiences and exploring what can actually be done about them.

February 28, 2026
How I discovered the Art of Board Game Design

In my youth, boardgames weren’t just entertainment – they were a doorway to imagination. Years later I rediscovered that same spark in the modern boardgame renaissance. This is the story of how it all began – and how it lead me to the Congress of Vienna.

In my youth I discovered that boardgames, for me, are more than entertainment, they are an experience. An experience that evokes unique feelings. It excited my imagination in a similar way that books did, but at the same time there was so much more there, thanks to the physical aspect. Components like tokens, cards or dice which you could touch and which represented something real, like a bridge between reality and imagination.
I recall creating elaborate boards/maps in the end of my notebooks at school, and then trying to figure out how players can interact with whatever I placed there.

At some point I got into role playing games. With a group of friends we explored dark realms of The Old World and later Forgotten Realms. That was an extraordinary discovery, I realized that imaginary adventures are something that can bond people in a very unique way. Some of the friends I’ve made then last until this day, and it was over 25 years since we started.

Then life happened. So for many years I was out of the hobby. But the feeling stayed, always deep inside.
I rediscovered boardgames about 10 years ago and got sunk for real this time. I discovered a plethora of new, unique, evocative, visually stunning games that started to pop up back then. I’ve noticed some of them do something truly unique – they combine mechanics and interweave it with the theme in a unique way that enhances both. That was extraordinary, and I’ve noticed that this is what creates an amazing experience for me.

Some of my favorite boardgames (only a part of my collection).

Obviously, at some point I started thinking about creating something on my own (but that is common in this hobby). However I needed something truly unique and special that would inspire me. And I knew from the start that if I will create something it needs to allow players to travel into the world of my choice, to ignite their imagination to the levels they might have not experienced before, and definitely I needed to make sure that theme is well integrated into mechanics and vice versa.
And then I discovered a historical book about the Congress of Vienna. And the rest of my story you can actually read in the previous entry.

Now I’m fully committed to turning this game into reality.
It’s a long road, with its share of obstacles ahead, but I’m already too deep into it, so I know there’s no turning back.
And there are still so many stories to tell.

So hey – thank you for being here, and for being part of this journey.

October 4, 2025
About summer book and ghosts of the past…

So this is my first entry. I think that it is a great opportunity, or maybe even a requirement to introduce myself a bit, and tell you about what actually I am trying to achieve here.

So my name is Łukasz Sosnowski. My last name comes from a well known tree – sosna which is a pine in English. I wander a lot both in real life, and in my imagination hence wandering pine. Yes, and there is this games part. Well I love board games, for a variety of reasons, which I will probably at some point explain, and currently I am in a process of designing one. So Wandering Pine Games.

So maybe now a few words about my project.

I believe that it has been seven years since I bought a book “Vienna 1814” by David King, which at the first glance appears to be a historical book about The Congress of Vienna. How I stumbled upon it was actually a complete accident.

Slightly used, but I’ve read it couple of times.

In Poland it is common that during summer, book tents appear in small seaside towns, where you can buy a book to read on your holidays. I like to visit those, just to browse, cause their collection is very diverse, and prices often more than reasonable. There I found that little gem. I bought it on a whim, cause I found the blurb entertaining. Blurb is what do publishers call the sort of an advert for a book usually on the back of a cover. I found it curious that a history book can have such a captivating blurb. Back then I didn’t like history much. I was never interested in the past, and hardly paid attention in school, so even the feeling of being interested in this particular book was unexpected to me. Especially that the Congress of Vienna always seemed boring to me, like a bunch of people discussing politics – yawn. Anyway I got it, and after a couple of minutes I was reading the prologue. And there was another surprise: the prologue was also entertaining. I could read it like a normal book, not a bunch of dates, and related events (like back then I thought history books look), but an actual story about a man returning back to his place after a night full of entertainments where his butler gave him some important letters that had just arrived. The person was tired and decided to read them in the morning. After a brief sleep he woke up, and tired and sleepy started browsing messages. And then those words “Napoleon is nowhere to be found” suddenly sobered him up.

So, Napoleon deserves its own paragraph. I will tell the whole story maybe a bit later, and probably rather in a short video format, however after over 15 years of war, unrest, and basically chaos in Europe, the self-proclaimed emperor was captured by joined armies of Russia, Austria, Prussia and England. They together decided to put him in an island in the Mediterranean Sea – Elba (near the west coast of northen Italy). It was supposed to be guarded and observed by a garrison of England’s soldiers.

Map of Elba. It is very small island, around 224 square kilometers only. Very tiny piece of land. And they’ve lost Napoleon here (in fact he of course escaped on a ship, but that is a different story).

And this story in a prologue to a history book seemed to me so funny that I literally started laughing out loud. I’ve had my share of parties in the past, so I could imagine how tired the person was in the morning, but being woken up by such an event, where you are literally on a party that already taken at least 4 or 5 months, which started because you’ve captured one guy, and then you’ve read the note that you kinda “lost” him, that had to be devastating, for him. For me it was utterly funny. Especially when I realized that this event actually took place like 200 years before. This realization was eye opening – back then I felt some weird connection to ghosts of the past – they were actually humans like me. Not just barely names (and dates) in history books, but humans with their own passions, emotions, feelings etc.

The rest of the book was written in a similar tone, and the author very fluently switched between prose entries, informative facts and even recreated dialogues. I really enjoyed annotations which often explained some unclear details or let the author explain from which source this information was taken. That greatly increased the credibility of the book, which added to my enjoyment. Overall the book showed me this whole event from a perspective I never thought of – more of a social and interpersonal event where politics often happened in the background, between words, behind the curtains. Book showed me a broad range of interesting characters, personalities with fascinating traits, unusual backgrounds, and interesting histories or origins. It was almost like reading about fantasy characters we all know from games and movies, or books, but this time they were real people that walked the earth.

Back then I was heavily into board games. One of my favorites was always Lewis & Clark which had very nice illustrations and all characters in the game were actually real historical personalities. I greatly enjoyed playing it and imagining myself recreating or even reshaping their actual stories. At some point after finishing the book I had an idea that maybe, just maybe I should try to design a game based on the Congress of Vienna. But from this social and interpersonal perspective I found so amusing.

And this is how it started.

September 15, 2025