To understand the game crafted by us (Asher and Ron), you must first understand the undertaking that was its design. We started innocently enough: playing around with a couple of board games that each of us likes. Specifically, the greatest inspirations came from Dominion and Catan. Each of us came out of found mechanics we liked — Dominion’s diversity of resources with limited numbers, and Catan’s trading system, to be more specific. At the same time, we had some mechanics we didn’t want to transfer over. For Dominion, it sometimes felt as if there were turns where there was no real strategy to play around. Having 3 cards to play per turn, when the raw cost of most cards was 3 or more, certainly didn’t help matters. For Catan, the devil was randomness. Yes, there is plenty of strategy around the fact that certain tiles have higher or lower numbers to roll. That, however, doesn’t make it any less virulently annoying.
So, we set to building the foundations of our game. For trading to be a core component of the game, we needed a variety of resources, which just started out as the colors of our markers: green, red, blue and brown. We also decided to borrow, from Dominion, a singular more limited resource, initially marked as gray. The resource in question wasn’t meant to do much on its own, but it could be traded for other resources, at a 2:1 ratio. With all these resources, we needed something to spend them on. Instead of a Catan-style system where you can randomly draw from a near endless supply of development cards, though, we decided to have several cards with different costs, but which the player specifically chooses.
Among these cards we came up with, was a set of persistent cards. Think, continuous spells from Yugioh. In this case, persistent cards which would allow you to recoup resources at a greater rate. From there, our ideas for theming finally began to take shape. From a limited number of resources, some being non-farmable, and a cutthroat trading system, we ended up landing on a shortly post apocalyptic setting for our game. Players are now competing for what few resources they can farm or salvage, exploiting whatever, and whoever, they can to survive and flourish. The idea is just a work in process, but hey, at least you won’t roll four 12s in a row.
