Jarren’s Outpost v1.0

Rummaging through files, both physical and digital, really showcases just how much we’ve changed this game from its earliest iterations. It also highlights how we probably should have made extensive notes and documented the changes as they happen, but here we are. So instead of a development blog, think of this as a development retrospective.

This is the very first version of Jarren’s Outpost. Printed on paper, using placeholder art and in desperate need of a lot of playtesting.

Here’s the first prototype in all its glory. Including the messy notes we’d scribble and change up the cards on the fly

Looking back on this version it’s surprising to see what stuck around, what was immediately thrown out, what we went back to and what never really changed. The basic gameplay loop is there, the different playstyles of each character is there, how you move around the city and interact with different elements of the game is there but it’s all very different to where it ended up.

Visually it’s a lot busier, location cards were rectangular which looked very strange laid out. Everything had unnecessary information like the races of NPCs or if a location was populated or fortified, taking up valuable real estate. We had alignments. And not just good and bad but ‘undecided’ because aren’t we a clever bunch? There were a lot of finicky rules dependent on the end or start of your turn or the end of the round. When you’re dealing with cards half the size of a regular playing card, it is challenging to keep everything in check.

A very busy mission card

We ended up having a mantra where “everything is Strategems until it isn’t” which stems from an old bit we used to do whenever we’d first start playing a new board game that was on the more complicated side of things. There’s a lot of games out there that over complicate things and have certain rules that kick into gear only when certain conditions are met. Some games do it well and some don’t. We didn’t want to fall into the latter category. We kept coming back to what the feel of the game should be and that should be based on the podcast this all stems from. Faced pace, a bit frantic, plans change and you need to turn on a dime. A lot of the rules we had in place didn’t allow that and others  we got rid of were in the name of speed, efficiency and to keep it simple.

This first version was very mission based and extremely slow. Set up was everyone drawing several missions first, seeing what cards are needed and ensuring those cards are included in the set up of the board. Those missions were then shuffled and re-distributed to the players. Locations were mostly face down except the ones with an eye icon and items and NPCs were also face down only to be revealed when a player moved onto the tile. This led to what we would call the “exploration phase” of the game where for the first few rounds everyone was just looking for the thing they had to. No one was scoring any points, everyone was moving around a little aimlessly and for the slow characters, endlessly frustrating if you’re trying to find one item and then another player reveals it halfway across the board. On top of this, each player had their own mission and the overlap of what was needed (if there was any) was left up to RNG so there was no sense of direct competition. It felt like a neat single player game and my friends were also there.

A dearly departed early item

Combat involved another roll of the dice to see if you got hit, you could attack other players as well as steal from each other if you just happened to be on the same location and passed a skill check. This led to a horrible feedback loop of stealing an item back and forth and back and forth and it just wasn’t fun. Gold was a thing, with items costing gold, worth gold if you traded them in, missions gave gold and gold was used in the endgame for more points. It was another resource and a game mechanic in an already fairly complicated game that we wanted to be quick and relatively easy to pick up and play. It was no surprise that it was the very first thing to be cut.

Looking back on this early version it's fascinating to see how far we came and how each element evolved to what is now the final version. There were a lot of missteps along the way, we included mechanics to solve an issue that we’d later take out and be left with a solution to a problem that was no longer there. Whole characters were re-designed around a rule we included that ended up cut so we had to re-re-design it. All in all, it’s a very particular brand of hell. One of our own making.