It all started years ago with a conversation between two friends about creating a board game. After that, we decided to start a shared doc that let us collaborate. Since then, it’s been a wild ride. Here’s a peak into what got us where we are and some of what we learned along the way.
Crash Landing
Our board game design adventure began with what we called Chasm:
“During an exploratory flight into an charted region of the world, your plane suddenly veers off course and the lights go out. You hear muffled yelling and then gunshots. Suddenly the plane takes a nosedive and begins to shake violently, and you scramble to put on parachutes in the darkness.
You barely manage to jump from the plane before it breaks apart, and you deploy your parachute and drift down away from the other passengers as the ground looms below you. Once you land, you gather what you can from the wreckage near their landing site and start to struggle for survival.
You meet other expedition members, but who can you trust? One of them may have been the attacker on the plane. So you hesitantly work together, each desperately looking for an escape from this chasm… and each other.”
Survive Together, Triumph Alone
Chasm was a semi-cooperative game where players were competing to escape the Chasm first and gain victory, but they had to work together to prevent events from destroying all their progress and causing everyone to lose. We thought “that sounds awesome, I want to play!” But take it from us: it was a pretty rough game. Who knows, maybe we’ll return to it someday.
What Chasm Taught Us
We, uh, have a lot of versions of things…
We owe Chasm a lot. It turned two random dudes into board game designers, it taught us how to approach designing a game (and how not to design games), and it directly impacted Alynthia.
Fail big or go home!
The most important lesson we learned was: don’t be afraid to fail! When we first started, we made a lot of mistakes. Then we made a lot more. We never stopped, and we followed the ideas that worked. That led us to finding Alynthia. We’re so excited to continue our board game design journey. We know though, if our time designing Chasm is any indication, it will continue to be really difficult while also being incredibly rewarding.
The Beginning of Something Great
While it was definitely a different game from Alynthia, it taught us so much. You can still see some elements of Chasm in Alynthia.
- The OG Board: The semi-modular board was one of the first elements we designed, and it’s stuck around. Albeit, it got a bit smaller (and way prettier).
- Action Cards: Although we don’t have any original action cards like “Start Mudslide” or “Guard Dog”, the concept behind these helpful, one-time benefit cards is pretty much the same.
- Outposts: In Chasm, Outposts were called “Collectors”, and they could have up to three tiers. They served a similar purpose of Alynthia’s Outposts as a player’s main resource collection structure.
- Focus: Originally called AP (or Action Points), you got a unique amount of them each turn by rolling two four-sided dice.
- Asymmetric Abilities: Instead of leading a guild, you were a character with a unique profession like “Botanist” or “Navigator”, with your own set of abilities.
- Playtester Feedback Forms: It was maybe too long of a form at first but it laid the foundation for our continuing goal of playtesting with a purpose.
Woo, this was hideous. No one ever said play testing was pretty.
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[formidable id=2]Also check us out on social media – we’re always posting about games we’re playing and what we’re learning.