A whole lot’s been going on in the Guntower this month, but before I get into that I want to spell out how I’m going to do these updates from now on.
I’m aware that many of you who have subscribed to this Newsletter have not invested in Pandora Celeste and our progress updates to backers are not particularly relevant to you. So from now on, while this Newsletter will still touch on the progress of Pandora, this will be a more personal post about my design philosophy and how that affects Pandora and other Guntower Games designs than you got in previous Newsletters.
But before we get into that, we’d be really grateful if you would answer this simple poll and tell us how you came to hear about Guntower Games and Pandora Celeste.
It’s just 5 questions to help us to figure out where best to target our tiny marketing budget as we move forward with Guntower Games. Please do take the time to answer this: it is truly important to us.
NOW, A QUICK TL;DR ABOUT PANDORA CELESTE
Playtesting is going well. I’ve now balance tested all the extra content and we’re in the process of blind playtesting the Rules and Learn to Play Booklet, which you can find here.
We have started submitting files to our manufacturer for validation and are also close to the point where we can lock down our Fulfilment Rates.
This means that we are planning to open Pandora’s Pledge Manager later this month.
And that means 2 things:
1) We’ll be sending out PnP and Collector’s Editions to those backers.
2) The Extra Mini Pack is now available.
EXTRA MINIS
The Extra Mini Pack contains one outsize
mini of FN(R1R) the CyberHound along with minis for Marina, Keni, the Time Jumper and the ShapeShifter, enabling you to play with all of the Stretch and Add-On content in the game (Fenn and the Fluffies are always represented by tokens, so do not need a mini).
Here’s a sneak peek at an early prototype. This is of course WIP and not the final product – but even at this early stage you can see that they will bring a great 3D presence to the table.
PLAYTESTING
Playtesting these and all the extra content has been a blast! There are so many great stories that emerge from the new Protocols and Agendas. Marina and Keni bring some really interesting new choices to the Crew, along with Greaseball and The Kid teaming up with the original 4.
I’ve seen things in these playtests you would not believe: I’ve seen the whole ship on fire off the shoulder of Orion; treachery and self-sacrifice in the pale fire light. I’ve seen a knife fight in the phone booth of the cramped Escape Pod, Crew transforming into ShapeShifters as the Shuttle’s about to leave, Trojan viruses, Self-destruct sequences – and at one point the entire front of the ship completely engulfed in flames as the back of the ship collapsed into pieces, leaving the surviving 4 Crew battling for the 2 available spaces in the Shuttle as if their life depended on it (which of course it did). And the good news is that while some of the Agendas are definitely easier than others, they are all great fun to play.
That’s important, because these Agendas aren’t intended to be fair, they’re designed to be interesting. They and the Emergency Protocols provide you the player with a set of goals to aim at, rather than randomly roaming round the Ship with no purpose – and even more importantly, they provide you with a story arc that makes you feel like you’re a character in one of these movies we enjoy so much. So the ‘balance’ I’ve been working to achieve is
not about making every single Agenda equally achievable – it’s about making them enjoyable without breaking the game. As one of our reviewers once put it: Pandora Celeste is a game for people who like to dive into the experience – and as part of that experience, there can be multiple winners and multiple ways to win as you put yourself into the personality of the character you’ve chosen. Because for each of these characters – or to be strictly honest for most of these characters – simply staying alive is their prime concern and fulfilling their Agenda is the cherry on the cake.
The other crucial balancing act was Marina the Colonial Marine. On the face of it, she runs the danger of tilting the goalposts too far in favour of the Crew with her combat expertise and arsenal of weaponry. In fact, I will say that having tested the game with her and Greaseball in action, I decided to up the Hits of almost every Big Nasty by 1, to give them just that little bit more resilience required to keep them truly dangerous. But Marina’s weaponry is very dependant on pushing her luck – and that can go horribly wrong just as often as it can go triumphantly right. That was important to me, because Marina stands for all those characters in these movies whose overconfidence makes them take one too many risks and plunges them into danger: whether it be a Colonial Marine, a Special Forces Operative, the Men in Black or the local Police Force. If you choose to play Marina it’s because you don’t want to back down from a fight: but the way she works means that the odds may not tilt in her favour, and that’s what makes her interesting.
NOW, OTHER NEWS FROM THE GUNTOWER
Final payments are now in from Gamefound and Kickstarter, and we raised over £40,000 in this our first campaign. The good news is that not only enables us to bring you Pandora Celeste in all its glory, but also helps fund development for the next game(s) on our list. This will include a Pirates & Salvage Expansion for Pandora Celeste (of which more in later Newsletters) as well as something completely different.
That ‘something different’ will not include minis. To be brutally honest, the minis hurt us: we haven’t sold nearly enough for them to break anywhere near even and we didn’t make enough from Pandora to swallow that kind of cost next time around. So I’ve promised Lynn that the next game on the list won’t include minis.
I have 4 designs that I think are ready to go:
Space Ark: A mid-weight Eurogame in which Mega-Corporations competitively co-operate to convert a giant asteroid into a generation ship to save the World.
Survival of the Fittest: A cut-throat area control game where species evolve to outcompete one another on a constantly moving plate tectonic map of the World.
RUS, Age of the Vikings: An historical wargame charting the rise of the medieval Russian Empire which can be played simultaneously as a 4X Amerigame or as an engine-building Eurogame depending on your play style, with equal chances of victory.
But unless there is a massive outcry for one of the above, the game I want to develop next takes me back to my first love: the Roman Republic…
CardMap Empires, Rise of Rome: is a mini-4X in which the great Familiae of Rome competitively cooperate to expand Roman influence in an empire-building game that mixes engine building, area control, bluffing and a hell of a lot of dodgy dealmaking all played out on an ever-expanding map made of playing cards laid onto the table.
While the CardMap is its main USP, another feature of the game is that the 4 or 5 Actions available at the start of each turn become more powerful the fewer people make them. So if you can anticipate what the other players will do and choose an Action that nobody else takes, that puts you in a much stronger position than going with the crowd.
This will be (I hope) the first in a series of CardMap Empires, which will eventually include Ancient China, India, Persia and the Russian Steppes that at some point far in the future could potentially combine into one giant CardMap game that links them all together.
So whaddayouthink? Does it sound interesting? Let me know in the comments below.
And until the next time, watch out for those dark corners…
Comments