The End of (some, not all) Things

Scene: late spring, 2019. I've just walked out of the Norwood Legion Hall in north Edmonton, after a productive, if long, day of playtesting at EPOC, a local prototype-focused design convention organized by the inimitable Nicholas Fong (designer of ROLLING EMPIRES). Since I was only able to attend a single day of the convention, I'd booked myself solid, running three of my own games and testing others' designs in between. I was feeling mildly chuffed: the tests had gone fairly well, and the feedback received seemed to bear out my own expectations in terms of where the designs happened to be in their development (~80-90% finished).

One of the designs I'd tested that day was a light, Egyptian-themed, dice-based game titled SCARAB OF RA, a name old shareware users might recognize. The theme was inspired by my wife, who'd spent any number of hours on her old MacIntosh poring through the dark corridors of the temple of RA, facing down devious traps, cunning monkeys, cobras, lions (!), and a roving mummy, all while managing a variety of interconnected metrics (food, gold, lamp and lamp oil, overall weight, speed, etc).

(screen capture from Scarab of RA, courtesy Wikipedia).

The earliest version of the design attempted as straight a translation from computer to board game as possible. The result was as convoluted as might be expected when one disrespects important genre boundaries. Managing these various metrics in the video game is easy because it's automatic, and therefore smoothly integrated into the game flow. In a board game, however, the same metrics would likely require numerous tracks and multiple resources, amounting to both a great number of components and a deal of busywork.

Over various iterations, I simplified and streamlined the concept of the game, jettisoning anything resembling upkeep (spending food; depositing gold/dropping items to reduce weight and increase speed). I set myself a task for keeping the game within certain boundaries, like the use of a square grid, so the board became a modular conglomeration of grid tiles that could be oriented in different ways for variety. I abandoned action cards for dice. But the real hook of the game was a pair of mechanisms which saw the mummy chasing players around the board and the pyramid itself collapsing over time, limiting opportunities to acquire treasures and, ultimately, escape.

After EPOC, it was time to prepare for another local convention, KEFCON, a smaller event that takes place in the autumn and is geared towards heavier titles. Every year, KEFCON follows a specific theme, and in 2019 they went with "Western." Being on friendly terms with the organizer, I asked if I could run a prototype. He said, "sure...is it Western-themed?" To which I responded: "Yyyyyyyeeeeesss?"

To be fair, I'm sure I could have run any of my prototypes and it would have been fine. But I was momentarily gripped by the possibility of re-theming SCARAB OF RA as a Western game. The thought of designing something completely new felt too difficult to pull off in time, and I was mildly spurred (pun intended) by the relative lack of Western-themed games compared to the surfeit of those dealing with Egypt/mummies. The result: THEM THERE HILLS.

The soullessness of the core mechanisms meant that much of the game transferred seamlessly to the new theme. The mummy became the mad gold prospector "Frank," cobras became rattlesnakes, monkeys became bandits, torches became survey maps, and so on. And while people continued to enjoy the game, feedback increasingly revolved around whether the theme was marketable enough. It seems that cowboys and crazed prospectors don't hold the same mystique as Indiana Jones-lite archaeologists and undead Pharaohs. And so, with the 2020 summer pitch season upon me, I changed the game back to its original theme. Undead indeed.

SCARAB OF RA refused to die, and so here it is, back again for the first time. THEM THERE HILLS has hit the dusty trail and, as a result, its page will no longer be accessible on ASE. Gone too, at least for the moment, are the custom dice. This may be a mistake, as the dice were perhaps the most consistently well received aspect of the game. Nonetheless, this may simply be a function of the inherent fun of rolling dice and not the way they actually interact with the rest of the game system. I decided to switch back to a card system that's 1) far cheaper to produce, and 2) is more in line with the kind of light Euro experience I'd originally intended, things along the lines of Kramer and Kiesling's ADVENTURELAND, Kiesling's SANSSOUCI, or Knizia's QUEST FOR EL DORADO. SCARAB OF RA doesn't play exactly like those games, of course, though anyone familiar with them will find some of their DNA. Functionally, the cards largely work the same as the dice. The cards also solved one issue, namely, that there wasn't enough "health/prestige" input during the game. There were numerous ways of losing health/prestige over the course of the game, but there were only ways to neutralize these losses, and no mechanism to gain health/prestige during the game. Now, a player gains health/prestige for any discoveries they've made when they reach the end of their deck.

In any case: plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.