Race to Adventure!™ is an easy-to-learn family board game you can play in 20-30 minutes. Snatch a golden eagle egg from a Himalayan mountain peak, escape the Mummy King and much more in a worldwide scavenger hunt! Suitable for ages 8 and up. Read more.
Designer Dan Solis provides a first glimpse of the RtA card layouts.
When I heard that Evil Hat had brought in prolific game designer and art director Daniel Solis to create the look and feel of Race to Adventure’s cards, I was tremendously excited. I had already observed Dan to be a thoughtful and innovative designer, and I couldn’t wait to see his vision for RtA’s card layout.
In the future, we’ll be sure to do a designer diary on the process of working with Dan and Evil Hat co-president Fred Hicks to create a clean, language-neutral visual language for the game. But for now, enjoy the sneak peek at the cards. They’re sure to bring lots of fun Spirit of the Century flavor to your plays of the upcoming board/card game.
And while you’re on Dan’s site, be sure to check out some of his other posts. His blog is one of my favorite regular reads.
This is Part II of the Q&A with Evil Hat co-president Fred Hicks. If you missed Part I, start here!
Q: How does the playtesting process differ from RPGs to board/card games? What has the RtA playtesting process been like for Evil Hat?
Fred: Card games have a much more strict range of possible outcomes because there’s usually not a lot of game time that lives outside of the rules, and the rules are focused on a particular set of activities rather than the wide open field of actions that characters in an RPG can take. RPG playtesting can be pretty grueling at times because there are so many variables in play and so much flexibility. So coming from that to the RtA experience has been a bit of a culture shock. Prototyping is fast, and playtesting is breezy. That’s not to say it hasn’t been extensive, but the timeline just runs a lot faster because the gameplay experience is so much more tightly focused.
Evil Hat co-president Fred Hicks
Q: What stands out in terms of the challenges (or advantages) of publishing a card game in comparison to publishing role-playing games?
Fred: From a development and publication perspective, RPGs are more expensive on the time investment side than card games, but they’re also much cheaper when it comes to production. Ultimately you’re putting out a book, and books have gotten pretty cheap to manufacture these days. Card games flip that around. They haven’t quite seen the extensiveness of print-on-demand solutions that books have had over the last decade, for example. Solutions do exist out there, but they’re still very dawn-of-the-industry by comparison, so the quality and price aren’t *quite* there yet to where they can compete with the larger-scale printing operations. But when you’re locked into those larger scales, your costs go up due to volume. So we want to start modestly with our first few games outside of the RPG sphere, but modestly still means between 3,000 and 5,000 copies as your minimum print run. If we can sell that kind of volume, we’ll be doing great, but those are pretty heady numbers in RPGlandia. Spirit of the Century has sold more than 6,000 copies of the RPG, and it is looked at as a pretty solid success. But that looks like an entry-level number for a card game. So we’ll have to see if we can reach not only the card-game-friendly SotC player, but also folks who’ve never heard of SotC and aren’t necessarily RPGers themselves, if we want to sell that first printing.
Q: There’s a combat card game in the Spirit of the Century universe called Zeppelin Armada that will be coming out as well. How do you view the relationship between RtA and ZA (if any) from a publishing perspective?
Fred: They’re sister games. Race to Adventure! lives in the heroic space. It’s not cooperative, per se—it’s a competitive scavenger hunt—but it’s good-natured and occasionally you get to zap the bad guys with your lightning gun. InZeppelin Armada, you ARE the bad guys, duking it out in a winner-takes-all battle in the sky. ZA is just a little more complicated than RtA, too, but that’s a good thing; as a “fightin’ game” pitched at a slightly older audience, we won’t be totally overlapping RtA’s fan base, which should mean we’ll reach more people in total.
"Evil Hat believes that passion makes the best games." -Fred Hicks
Q: You’ve commented previously that there are some expansions planned for RtA. Is there anything more you can add? From a philosophical standpoint, how aggressive do you believe a publisher should be in producing board and card game expansions?
Fred: That’s all still in “internal discussion” right now. We see some directions the game can go, but it’ll need to see a very successful launch to justify the expansions. The fans have gotta want those things, they’ve gotta be asking for ‘em, for them to make sense. Otherwise I think you’re serving them better by producing something self-contained, standalone, so folks don’t show up and immediately feel like they’re having to make a deep, long term financial commitment just to “keep up” with the full game experience.
Q: And what’s this I hear about a Spirit of the Century novel? Any plans to play off the novel in SotC game expansions?
Fred: We’ve got to get the thing written first! But yeah, the novel will be titled Dinocalypse Now, written by Chuck Wendig, and featuring characters from Spirit of the Century, Race to Adventure!, and Zeppelin Armada all in the mix. Psychic dinosaurs invade the 1930s and the Century Club fights back! And if that novel does well, we’re looking to push it into a trilogy format. A successful novel could also spawn expansions not just for SotC, but also for RtA and ZA.
Q: You’ve had a lot of positive things to say on Twitter about the Ascension iPad app. Is Evil Hat planning to releaseRace to Adventure! and Zeppelin Armada as digital apps? If so, what will you be looking for? What makes a good game app to you, and what would an RtA digital app have to do well for you to be satisfied?
Fred: RtA absolutely *could* be, but we’d need to find a good app-making partner with a proven track record to make that work. I think it’s exactly the sort of thing that could work well as an iPad app. ZA on the other hand can get really interrupt-driven, which is tricky for online play unless everyone is on and active at the same time, so I don’t know how strong of a candidate that makes for app-ifying. It’d probably work just great in a you-vs-the-computer sort of way.
Aside from Ascension, I’m also a fan of the Carcassonne app. Both are strong translations of the board game to online play, and they’re gorgeous to boot. But I haven’t tried quantifying what makes them tick yet, since that line of thinking is still very pie-in-the-sky.
Q: What’s next after Race to Adventure! and Zeppelin Armada on the board/card game front?
Fred: That would be telling.
Fred Hicks is a dad, a gamer, and a game publisher. He runs Evil Hat Productions, and does freelance art direction and layout work for the occasional other game publisher. The rest of the time, though, he’s looking after his kids, and spending time with his wife. Life is good.
Fred Hicks is co-president of Evil Hat Productions, the publisher of Race to Adventure! He’s also a really thoughtful and knowledgeable guy who shares his views on the gaming industry in his blog, Deadly Fredly. Fred offered to do this week’s Designer Diary in the form of a virtual Q&A session from the publisher’s perspective. We were thrilled to take him up on the chance:
Question: What made you decide to take a meeting at Origins 2011 to hear the Race to Adventure! pitch?
Fred Hicks: Chris Ruggiero and EndGame. Pure and simple. EndGame is an “anchor” store for us at Evil Hat, and Chris is a part of why EndGame is so fantastic. If he said something was worth our attention, it was worth our attention! So that was the foot in the door.
Q: So, you heard the pitch and then had follow-up meetings that brought in co-president Rob Donoghue. At that point, what was Evil Hat’s process in determining if it would sign and publish Race to Adventure?
Evil Hat co-president Fred Hicks
Fred: One of the things I look for in a game design is “stickiness”—how much does it occupy your mind once you’ve walked away from the play experience? Are you thinking about the stories implied by the play? Are you looking for ways to “hack” the game to squeeze out another few percentage points of awesome juice? Do expansions to it suggest themselves readily? That sort of thing. RtA had that kind of stickiness for Rob and I. Combine that with fortuitous timing—Evil Hat was fresh to the idea of expanding into non-RPG games—and a good fit with our existing catalog, and it all made sense.
Q: What did you like most about the RtA prototype/gameplay? What caught your eye or captured your attention?
Fred: I was most taken by RtA’s quick, family-friendly play. One of the great “curses” of working in the game industry is that you can find yourself without a lot of time to play games. So games which play quickly, where you can get several plays in during one evening, or where you can combine it with time to play other games, are particularly attractive to me right now. I know I can fit them in!
Q: What’s Evil Hat’s philosophy when it comes to game design? Are you hands-off, or do you like to get in there with the designers and develop mechanics and hash out problems?
Fred: Rob and I can’t see publishing anything we don’t truly care about. That’s right there in Evil Hat’s mission: “Evil Hat believes that passion makes the best games.” And when we care about a game, we can’t help but tinker with its guts a little. So yeah, we’re hands on, but never (hopefully) in a dictatorial way. Collaboration is key. The designers have to care about the game too, and *still* care about it by the time we get it to publication.
"Evil Hat believes that passion makes the best games." -Fred Hicks
Q: Since Race to Adventure! will be your first board game, what will be your criteria for determining if RtA is a “success” for Evil Hat?
Fred: There are a lot of ways to find success. But when it comes down to brass tacks, you’ve got to look at the financials. If we can cover the costs of the first print run, and earn enough royalties to pay the designers a nice first check, I think we’ll be there. Depending on how smart we can play that, that could be within the first few hundred copies sold, but I suspect it’ll be a ways further out than that.
Q: You’ve had tremendous recent success with RPGs, especially The Dresden Files RPG. Where do board and card games fit into the Evil Hat equation?
Fred: Right now we’re looking at them as vehicles for extending the experience of our more popular games. That’s why “transmedia” is such a buzzy word right now: When you give people multiple different ways to experience a given world—whether that’s the Spirit of the Century universe or The Dresden Files—then you’re increasing the likelihood that they’ll spend more hours of their day “living” in that world in some way. Folks enjoying Jim Butcher’s novels can make that experience last by playing the RPG. And similarly, folks having fun in a Spirit of the Century campaign can continue the SotC experience with board and card games, and even fiction, set in that same universe. RPGs aren’t a fits-all-sizes thing, too. Sometimes folks don’t have the 2 or 4 or more hours to play an RPG, but they might have time for a 30-minute card game. It’s important to offer something for both of those slices of someone’s schedule.
Editor’s note: We were lucky to get Fred to answer a ton of questions, so we’re breaking this Q&A into two parts. Check back next Tuesday for Part II, which includes answers about playtesting, publishing, companion games, expansions, a Spirit of the Century novel and board game digital apps!
Fred Hicks is a dad, a gamer, and a game publisher. He runs Evil Hat Productions, and does freelance art direction and layout work for the occasional other game publisher. The rest of the time, though, he’s looking after his kids, and spending time with his wife. Life is good.
My name is Chris Ruggiero, one of the co-designers of Race to Adventure! and co-owner of EndGame in Oakland, Calif. Evan has been doing a bang-up job on these designer diaries, and I’m taking a turn this week. Hope you enjoy it.
Race to Adventure designers (left to right) E.K. Lytle, Evan Denbaum & Chris Ruggiero.
So you’ve heard quite a bit about the genesis of Race to Adventure! and how it got its name. But how did it go from being a game built on a dare to being published? In many ways, it’s a reflection of the unique opportunities my store presented for E.K., Evan and myself. EndGame is home to a great community of gamers—people with all sorts of interests, skill sets and backgrounds. Within that community are a lot of smart gamers whose opinion I respect deeply. EndGame has also been a prime testing ground and incubator for several games, including Eric B. Vogel’s Hibernia and Cambria. So our little community has a history of innovation and intelligence, which is why when that community embraced Wallet: The Game, we knew we were on to something.
When Wallet hit the table, it was an instant hit with almost every stripe of gamer. We realized that this wasn’t just a fun little game built on a dare; it was something special. You see, I love games … and I enjoy sharing that love of games with others. As co-owner of what many gamers refer to as “the best damn game store in the country,” I get the privilege of introducing many people to their very first miniatures, board or role-playing game. I get to see and play a lot of games. So, I have a clear idea of what has appeal, what will sell and what won’t. I also have met and interacted with many people on the publishing side of the gaming equation. And if you have something special like we clearly did with Wallet, in my opinion you should share it.
Believe it or not, the biggest reason for me to publish is that I think the game is good. If I can get a good game published, it will reach more people who will get to enjoy it and share it with their friends. It’s why I’m such a big proponent of Eric B. Vogel’s games. Sure, we all want to make money. But personally, it’s getting to share something I’ve helped create with more people. E.K. and Evan were just as excited to share the game with a wider audience and pitch it to publishers.
Finding a Publishing Partner
The Evil Hat crew accepts their many 2011 ENnie Awards.
Once we all had decided to publish, we had to find the right publisher. Oftentimes that can be a tricky process, but for me that answer was very clear. EndGame has had a very long and happy relationship with Evil Hat Productions, a company best known for their award-winning role-playing games. Evil Hat and EndGame share a similar ethos of “love of gaming” mixed with solid business acumen. I had gotten to know many members of the Evil Hat family, especially Ryan Macklin and Fred Hicks, not to mention that my business partner (and paterfamilias of Ian Hanrahan) Chris Hanrahan has a podcast with Fred called That’s How We Roll.
Another key factor for me was Evil Hat’s sterling reputation as a good and honest company. I’ve heard horror stories over the years about game publishing and payment. With Evil Hat, I knew that co-presidents Fred and Rob Donoghue would be upfront and honest with their opinion—and if they did agree to publish our game, they would do so quickly and treat us fairly and honestly.
Personally and professionally, Evil Hat was the standout choice for me. This prompted a Wednesday afternoon discussion with my EndGame co-owner Chris Hanrahan about how good a fit Evil Hat would be. And essentially, that discussion transformed Wallet into what would become Race to Adventure! I went back to Evan and E.K., Spirit of the Century role-playing book in hand, and told them we needed to change Wallet into a pulp adventure game in the Spirit of the Century universe. I already knew the guys were open to other themes, and what followed was a crash program to rebuild Wallet into the Spirit of the Century role-selection game, which we would pitch to Evil Hat at Origins 2011.
I’ve heard through the grapevine that you’ll hear about that meeting and what followed from Fred himself in the near future, so I’ll save those details for Evil Hat. Until then, happy gaming …
Race to Adventure! will be at Big Bad Con Oct. 7-9
Today-Sunday is Big Bad Con at the Hilton Oakland Airport, and Race to Adventure! will be there with awesome Spirit of the Century prizes. Today, you can learn the rules and enjoy casual play. Saturday and Sunday will be the first-ever Race to Adventure! round-robin tournaments. Expect special guests, fun rewards for winning and cool surprises all weekend!
Excerpted from the Big Bad Con website:
Are you a Spirit of the Century fan or just a pulp adventure enthusiast? Would you like to get a sneak peek at Evil Hat’s first board game months before it hits the stores? Do you have 20 mins to spare to stop Doctor Methuselah, Shadow Mathemagician, from overpowering the poor people of the UK? Then join the co-designer of the game for the first-ever tournament for Race to Adventure! – The Spirit of the Century Exploration Game.
If you win either tourney, you get the ultra-rare printed edition of Spirit of the Season!
If you emerge victorious from this round-robin tournament, you’ll win the ultra-rare printed edition of Spirit of the Season, featuring characters and rules compatible with both Spirit of the Century and Truth & Justice.Spirit of the Season is no longer available in print, so the only way to get one is to win this tourney! (There will be one tournament on Saturday and one on Sunday; both Big Bad tourney winners get Spirit of the Season.) Since Race to Adventure! hasn’t gone to print yet, you’ll be playing the early prototype. So yes, there WILL be cool art on the cards … eventually!
Special guests include:
Spirit of the Century co-author Leonard Balsera
Evil Hat Productions’ Ryan Macklin (From the Internet)
Race to Adventure! co-designer E.K. Lytle
Race to Adventure! co-designer Chris Ruggiero
If you’re local, come race around the globe with us at Big Bad Con. It’s going to be a blast!
Here, then, is the “thinking man’s ape”—Professor Khan, a massive silverback gorilla stuffed into a houndstooth jacket (replete with elbow patches) and a tartan kilt (after all, you try to cram an ape into a pair of pants). Khan is not merely erudite: He is a genius whose intelligence is surpassed by few, and further has read most of the books the world has to offer. This academic ape is the pillar of knowledge.
Professor Khan, Spirit of Knowledge
And yet, Khan is troubled. While he knows so much, he has experienced so little—for a long time as a scientific anomaly he was kept cooped up at various universities, sequestered in those hallowed, vaunted halls, absorbing knowledge like a sponge, eventually becoming a professor at Oxford University. But he so rarely left the comfortable cradle of academia that Khan’s street smarts and common sense are scraping the bottom of the barrel.
Worse isn’t what lives inside Khan’s mind but rather what lurks inside his massive ape heart. Professor Khan was once known by a name he has long since rebuked: Son-of-Khan. He is the genetic progeny of Gorilla Khan, Conqueror Ape. The vile Doctor Methuselah, at the insistence of Gorilla Khan, replicated Khan’s own genetic material to create for him a son and successor: Son-of-Khan.
Son-of-Khan found himself liberated not long after birth, however, and was not raised to be like his father, a figure he fears, loves, and despises in equal measure. Just the same, Professor Khan’s blood is that of his progenitor, and in his heart he sometimes feels a pulsing howling rage at night. His blood pounds and a word whispers in his ears: conquer.
Knowing full well that he mustn’t grow complacent, Professor Khan has put aside his professorial mantle for the time and now travels as one of the Century Club. He no longer wants only to learn; Professor Khan wants to do. Action above words! For what good is knowledge without a way to use it to make the world a better place?
Chuck Wendig is the author of the upcoming Spirit of the Century novel, which is set in the same universe as the Race to Adventure! board game. Chuck is the author of the upcoming novels Double Dead (November) and Blackbirds (May) as well as a series of books on writing advice available for purchase at his website, terribleminds.
The naming of games in development has always come rather easily. A strong theme is extremely important to me and my co-designers. And when you have a core mechanic and rich theme, often a representative name makes itself known. I’m preferential to one-word titles that encapsulate the thematic experience, and my working titles are always one defining word.
Creating a jigsaw puzzle of keywords in an attempt to name the game.
Perhaps that’s why the naming of Race to Adventure! threw me for a bit of a loop. In titling the game, we were attempting to do a number of things at once: convey its pulp-adventure goodness, honor its Spirit of the Century roots, acknowledge a scavenger-hunt-style race around the globe and strike upon a sense of excitement or mystery that would conjure something fun in the mind the person picking up the box.
Ultimately, it’s a game about racing around accomplishing cool missions and stamping your passport in all the worldly places you visit. The player who stamps every section of their passport and returns home first is the winner. So, “Passport” seemed a natural place to start. Passport to Peril was in the mix, but we weren’t confident “Peril” would inspire enthusiasm—especially in younger gamers. Plain, old Passport was too generic and didn’t give you a sense of what the game was about. And so we moved on to an exploration of terms such as “scavenger hunt” and “adventure,” and well, “exploration.” But nothing felt quite right.
One night soon thereafter, my wife and I curled up to watch Julie & Julia. In the film was a scene where Julia Child (the amazing Meryl Streep) and her editor wrestled with the naming of her Julia’s debut cookbook. They wrote down relevant keywords and manipulated them back and forth, up and down until they found the perfect combination.
In Julia Child’s book, My Life in France, this process was described as: “Judith was playing with a set of words like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, trying to get them to fit together.” So, I did the same, as you can see in the accompanying image. The exercise was constructive, but not definitive. It felt about time to go outside our little designer bubble and see what names actually resonated with some gamers. One such gamer was extraordinary eight-year-old Ian Hanrahan, whom you met in the last Designer Diary post. Ian is our youngest playtester, and one of our finest. And to him, the name of the game was obvious. In fact, Ian steadfastly refused to accept anything other than his mash-up of the two title options presented to him, which were the leading contenders. The following audio is the exchange between EndGame co-owner Chris Hanrahan and son. Ian nailed it with aplomb!
Check back every Thursday for the Featured Centurion of the Week. All the Centurions spotlighted are characters in the Race to Adventure! board game.
If you were to use one word to describe Benjamin Hu, mystic detective, it would be “incisive.” From the tip of his deftly wielded rapier to his keen insight and eagle eyes, Benjamin Hu will always put a fine point on any problem put before him—no matter if that problem is a world-shattering occult mystery or an onrushing horde of Hashashiyyin assassins!
Benjamin Hu, Spirit of Mystery
Hu was born in Hong Kong, where mounting British influence led commerce in the territories to take off: silk, silver, spices, as well as trade and truck in stranger realms—mystical texts, mysterious artifacts, unidentifiable procurements of occult antiquity. Benjamin’s parents became dealers in such bizarre relics, a profession that took them around the world—from London to Istanbul to Chicago.
Benjamin first put his keen mind to use when he was very young—not yet a teenager. Someone broke into his family’s secret Chinatown storehouse and stole an archaic and purportedly antediluvian idol from a long-forgotten race in a crass act of burglary. His parents were distraught, and so young Benjamin thought to investigate the theft—but doing so was like kicking over a hornet’s nest. The boy stirred tensions between a powerful Chinese tong (led by the Three Sisters of Water) and a mystic society of ghost worshippers, inciting a full-on mystical war in the back alleys of and passages beneath Chinatown.
Benjamin’s parents tried to put a stop to it. The last Benjamin saw of his parents was when they left him outside and ventured into an illegal gambling house to help negotiate a truce.
That day, they vanished. It haunts Benjamin, and drives him to obsessively hone his skills as a mystical detective and world-class fencer. Hu is like a dog with a bone when confronted by enigmas, and he won’t let one go until he has untied that terrible knot. This makes him a valuable ally to the Century Club, whose members confront a constant stream of seemingly unsolvable puzzles.
To this day, Benjamin still hunts for both the stolen idol and his lost parents.
Chuck Wendig is the author of the upcoming Spirit of the Century novel, which is set in the same universe as the Race to Adventure! board game. Chuck is the author of the upcoming novels Double Dead (November) and Blackbirds (May) as well as a series of books on writing advice available for purchase at his website, terribleminds.
One of the chief goals of Race to Adventure! was to create a game that younger and casual gamers could quickly pick up and enjoy … but also a game that could scale up in difficulty sufficiently to keep our older Eurogamer friends interested. To test the lower age limit and accessibility of the game, we brought in playtesters such as eight-year-old Ian Hanrahan. Not only did Ian improve the game with his feedback; he also named the game itself! “The Process of Naming a Game” will be the subject of the next Designer Diary. Until then, we wanted to give the magnificent Ian Hanrahan a chance to share his thoughts on Race to Adventure! (from an undisclosed location somewhere in Egypt).
Check back every Thursday for the Featured Centurion of the Week. All the Centurions spotlighted are characters in the Race to Adventure! board game.
Mack Silver, Spirit of Freedom
The roar of the plane! The smell of the exhaust! The distant chatter of machine guns and screeching angry ape pilots! That’s how you know Mack Silver is here, and that it’s time for him to deliver the goods.
Silver—sometimes called “Mack the Knife” or the “Silver Fox”—is a smuggler by trade, traveler by heart. This is who he is and who he always was: even as a child he’d sneak dime novels, fat frogs, and rock candy past the nuns and into school for those willing to pay him back in pennies or favors. When he got bored of that, he’d do what he always did: pack a bag and run away from home for weeks on end. Eventually his parents would find him somewhere completely unexpected: traveling with a theater troupe, riding the rails as a faux-hobo, sneaking on board ocean liners bound for distant isles.
That theme persists in Silver’s adult life. He could’ve lived a comfortable life of constant luxury—after all, he grew up the child of wealthy parents. But something about that got under Mack’s skin. All that complacency. The obscurity. The lack of adventure!
These days, Silver lives the life he wants to live, globe-hopping in his heavily-modified Boeing 314 clipper, one of the so-called “boat-planes” that never needs a runway—just a tract of open ocean in which to set down. The plane, rebuilt from the ground up by Sally Slick, now serves as a mobile clubhouse for the Century Club …
… though, it’s the Century Club that causes Mack the most confusion. He’s a rogue, a rake, a cad—he tells everybody he’s in it for nobody but himself. He likes to be on his own, he says, which is why he never settles down with one woman (and why he’s ignorant of Sally’s unrequited love). It’s why he chooses to travel to distant horizons, establishing new trade routes with lost civilizations or fighting dinosaurs to create new cargo cults on lost primal islands.
And yet when the chips are down, there he is, serving the Century Club’s interests above his own every time. He tells them it’s because he “likes the adventure,” but one wonders how long he will continue believing this fiction.
Chuck Wendig is the author of the upcoming Spirit of the Century novel, which is set in the same universe as the Race to Adventure! board game. Chuck is the author of the upcoming novels Double Dead (November) and Blackbirds (May) as well as a series of books on writing advice available for purchase at his website, terribleminds.
If you missed Part 1: The Origins of Race to Adventure!, it’ll help to read that first.
'Wallet: The Game' components: gym membership card, ATM card, credit card, money clip, cash, driver's license, family photo, player coins and the wallet itself.
When we each looked through our wallets, a few game “components” emerged easily: The ATM card, the credit card, the driver’s license, cash — along with a couple that varied from person to person but were best encapsulated by a gym membership (representing all membership cards) and the family photo (representing “the keepsake”).
Now that we had six items, what could you do with them? Well, when you spread them out on the table, they felt like “community” components one might select. So, in the interest of momentum we quickly decided on a “role-selection” game, sometimes referred to as a variable phase order game. (In short, each person selects an item that grants them — or everyone — a special power). From there it was easy to get an early sense of what “power” each item might bestow: The cash and credit card were either the currency of the game or how you spent it. The driver’s license would relate to travel or movement. The family photo would have something to do with “Home.”
But what was home? And what were you actually doing? … That’s where the business cards came in. Between us there was a smattering of biz cards on the table — the ones that get tucked into a dark corner of your wallet after meeting someone (or exiled to a back jeans pocket before trips through the wash). And by virtue of self-reminders, community networking and chance encounters, all those business cards appeared to be local destinations. By sprinkling in some creativity and removing redundancy, it seemed we could easily come up with a number of “places” our players might go.
The temporary business card "locations," featuring some of our favorite designers.
Fast forward to a few meetings later, and E.K., Chris and I had our destinations: Feld’s Gym, VlaadaBank, Roubira Veterinary Care, Bauza Kung Fu School, Leacock Auto Repair, Launius Hardware, Lehmann’s Groceries, Kramer Dry Cleaning and Reiner’s Flowers … along with “Home.” We also had actual home-printed business cards for those locales along with a “To-do List” for each player.
Yup. Before it was adventurers racing around the globe, it was folks in the ’burbs running errands to and from the strip mall. Sometimes in those early days of development we just called it “Wallet: The Game.” Some of the earliest playtesters affectionately called it “Honeydo,” as in: “Honey, go do this errand for me, okay?” We all knew the theme was temporary and just serving the advancement of gameplay mechanics. But it will always be an essential part of the game’s evolution.
Even When You Choose a Theme, It Really Chooses You
That takes our story back to my favorite perch in the EndGame rafters. It was the monthly Big Fun Saturday, with open board gaming from store open to close. Most often, it’s when gamers trot out the heavies and longer games that won’t neatly fit into a Wednesday night (or melt your brain too much for a post-work play). During the course of that Saturday I saw many a parent-child pair come and go. Kids would roam wide-eyed like EndGame was Wonka’s factory. But when they tugged on their parents’ clothes and said, “Can I have this one?” it was always something with art and theme that exuded excitement: space, adventure, mystery! As co-owner of EndGame and someone who saw those reactions of delight every day, “adventure” was the theme Chris always had in mind. These moments of Saturday observation beautifully illustrated his reasons why.
And fortunately, Chris had more than just a theme in mind … he had a potential publisher. Chris and fellow Endgame co-owner Chris Hanrahan knew Fred Hicks and Rob Donoghue from carrying Evil Hat Productions’ amazing RPGs. And Evil Hat had five years worth of extraordinary pulp adventure properties — and a commitment to expand beyond the role-playing genre.
Check back every Tuesday for a new Designer Diary. Coming up soon: the incredibly fun process of naming the eventual game and a special video from a very special playtester.
Check back every Thursday for the Featured Centurion of the Week. All the Centurions spotlighted are characters in the Race to Adventure! board game.
Amelia Stone, Spirit of Justice
Bullies watch out: you step out of line, you might just fall afoul of the two cracking fists of itinerant world traveler, Amelia Stone! Stone doesn’t truck with the likes of users and abusers, and she does her level best to track down and bring to justice those who would exert their power over the meek.
Amelia’s father was a Boston banker visiting Paris, her mother a down-on-her-luck Ethiopian-born lounge singer: Amelia herself was born in the City of Lights (La Ville-Lumière) and as a girl watched her parents struggle to escape from under the boot of the Parisian criminal empire headed by its imperator, Le Monstre Aux Yeux Verts, “The Green-Eyed Monster.” Then came the day when her parents could no longer pay their debts—but Amelia would not let them flee Paris. The City of Lights was their home, she said, and they weren’t going anywhere.
Amelia “borrowed” a Giuseppe Gilera 317cc overhead-valve motorcycle off the Parisian streets and rode it to—and then into—the Monster’s warehouse hideaway. The next morning, the authorities were shocked to discover the warehouse burned to cinders, with all the Monster’s men alive but stacked up in the street like corded firewood, hands and feet bound, mouths stuffed with illegal promissory notes. The Green-Eyed Monster himself remains at large, however, half of his face burned away by the fire, now replaced with a half-mask made of pig-iron. Amelia would tear the city apart with her bare hands if it afforded her a lead on capturing him.
Amelia found in that act an alarming joy when putting the beat-down on those malefactors who would exploit the weaknesses of others, and to this day Amelia seeks out this thrill all over the world. Any who meet her would find that nowadays she travels on a cherry-red 1928 Indian Scout Model 101. She lives by her wits and her fists, and that, she claims, is all she ever needs.
Chuck Wendig is the author of the upcoming Spirit of the Century novel, which is set in the same universe as the Race to Adventure! board game. Chuck is the author of the upcoming novels Double Dead (November) and Blackbirds (May) as well as a series of books on writing advice available for purchase at his website, terribleminds.
Every Wednesday, my regular co-designer and I meet at local game store EndGame right after work. E.K. and I spend the time before the weekly Board Game Night brainstorming new ideas, refining rules and mechanics or going through the nitty-gritty process of figuring out what each card in a game actually does. EndGame is an incredible venue for playing or designing games—you’re perched atop a loft-style mezzanine with natural light pouring in, and you have a bird’s-eye view of the store’s entire game layout. And on this occasion, what caught my eye was the treelike stand with plushy bananas hanging from its “branches.”
EndGame patrons look down at the revelry from their upstairs perch during the EG 8th Anniversary Party.
You can see a lot of word games from our perch at EndGame. There’s Scrabble and Boggle and Word on the Street and many, many more. But Bananagrams is the only one that truly stands out. And when you actually unzip that yellow bag there’s more marketing genius: The very functions of the game are called banana “SPLIT” and “PEEL,” with alternate rules with names like “BANANA SMOOTHIE.” In its totality, this simple letter-arrangement game became something much more: a conceptual experience that could be unzipped to find a game inside.
I’m a marketing writer by trade, so this tends to be the way I think. I walk around my world dissecting the choices people make in life or business. Not judging, but observing those choices and seeing what there is to learn. I learn a lot that way. But on this occasion I was thinking out loud, and E.K. was adding his fine thoughts and soon EndGame co-owner Chris Ruggiero chimed in with his perspective as a retailer. Before long, we were talking about other kinds of games that could be packaged in a clever form to add another layer to the experience. And in the middle of that back-and-forth emerged the dare:
Chris:What if you designed a game called “Wallet” where all the bits and rules had to fit inside a real wallet?
Us:That’s a fun idea.
Chris:No … I mean, I dare you to sit down right now and actually design it.
Now, I’m paraphrasing the above because I don’t remember the exact words, but that’s precisely what we did. We sat down and right there and started gaming it out on the spot. What’s literally in our wallets? And how might those items become integral game components? So, we emptied our pockets onto the table and looked for the potential in everything from the pieces of lint to the wallets themselves. And remarkably quickly, the beginnings of a game emerged …
In next Tuesday’s Designer Diary, you’ll find out what developed from that on-the-spot session … and what any of this has to do with pulp adventure game Race to Adventure!
Check back every Thursday for the Featured Centurion of the Week. All the Centurions spotlighted are characters in the Race to Adventure! board game.
Sally Slick, Spirit of Ingenuity
Got a gadget you need built? Sally Slick’s your girl. With a gob of elbow grease, her signature box-end wrench “Mister Fix-It,” and Sally’s never-ending wellspring of sticktoitiveness, you won’t find anything that Sally can’t build.
Sally was born a daughter with seven brothers on a windswept farm in the Midwest (just down the road from her friend, Jackson “Jet” Black), and yet while growing up she managed to fix things that even her siblings and father could not repair. Soon it became about not just what Sally could fix but about what strange and wondrous devices she could invent, scribbling designs on the old barn wall and cribbing parts from nearby farms. When her father found himself unable to afford an early Fordson Model F tractor, she went ahead and built her own: a beast of hissing steam and crawler treads, no assembly line required!
Wasn’t long before teen Sally found herself called to duty late in the Great War, having to prove herself all over again, this time to a whole new band of “brothers.” But prove herself she did, giving her fellow soldiers the edge they needed. As bullets like lead bumblebees whizzed by her head, she improvised everything from lightning guns to rocket boots, taking the war up out of the trenches and into the sky.
Now Sally serves as a proud member of the Century Club, featuring those exceptional human heroes—the true spirits of the century—who battle the depredations of the callous and unmerciful Shadows. But all is not perfect: Sally has grown restless in her role, in part because of her unreturned (and utterly unknown) feelings for her cohort, the smuggler and social gadfly, Mack Silver. Worse, Sally’s unrequited love for Mack blinds her to the feelings of her old friend and fellow Centurion, Jet Black.
Chuck Wendig is the author of the upcoming Spirit of the Century novel, which is set in the same universe as the Race to Adventure! board game. Chuck is the author of the upcoming novels Double Dead (November) and Blackbirds (May) as well as a series of books on writing advice available for purchase at his website, terribleminds.
Ah! The adventure that is the Race to Adventure! blog has finally begun. We have a ton of great stories planned, including designer diaries from the game’s creators, profiles of the game’s characters, news, event announcements and insights from under the lid at Evil Hat Productions, (the game’s publisher).
Thanks for taking this journey with us.
While we’re likely to whimsically add anything that strikes us as meaningful, we also want to keep to a firm schedule of when you can expect to find the latest blog features. So, here goes:
Tuesdays: Designer Diaries E.K. Lytle, Chris Ruggiero and I will take you through the process of creating Race to Adventure! — from its unexpected origins through the latest developments. (The game won’t be in stores for a few more months.) If you’re a game designer like us, our intention is that you’ll find some worthwhile insights to enhance your creative process or get a game published. If you’re a gamer (also like us), we hope what you’ll find in the posts that follow will add another layer of depth and enjoyment to playing the board game. And if there’s a topic you’d like us to cover, definitely post a comment or drop us a line using the contact form here. These diaries are for you, and we’d be happy to focus on your areas of interest.
Thursdays: Centurion of the Week We’re thrilled that the esteemed Chuck Wendig, author of the already-much-anticipated Spirit of the Century novel, will be writing profiles for all the characters in the Race to Adventure! game. Everything you read (at least until Chuck says otherwise) is in canon, meaning Chuck may drop a few hints about what you might find in the upcoming book. We also wanted to give you more to think about when you select a Centurion while playing the board game. Now, Sally Slick is more than just a face on a token; she’s the very spirit of ingenuity. Well, that’s the idea, at least! For more about the heroes and villains in the game, visit the Centurions page.
As always, stay involved, stay connected and let us know what you want to see here. We’re happy to oblige!
