The Buried Giant booth was the hottest place for board game fans to be at this year’s Gen Con. I’m not talking about temperature (though the Indiana summer was a trial for my British sensibilities). I’m talking about energy.
Playtesting tables always seemed packed, with throngs of loiterers waiting to fill last-minute gaps. The games shown, from Eerie Idol’s smash-hit debut The Old King’s Crown to former Leder darlings Oath and Arcs, are among the most innovative in the industry. And Buried Giant honored that by showcasing them in thoughtful, unusual ways – megagames, generations-long chronicles, you name it. So much was going on under one giant, inflatable arch.
Between all the business, I caught up with acclaimed board game designer and Buried Giant co-founder Cole Wehrle. Gen Con is just a taster of what’s coming next for the studio, and I had lots of questions about its upcoming roster of games:
WG: How is Buried Giant’s first Gen Con going?
CW: We’ve all been doing shows a long time, but we wanted to do things a little differently. We have a lot more events, and we’re showing so many games. We have more of a floor presence with our giant inflatable mouth.
It’s actually a great example of what it feels like to work at Buried Giant. Every person on the staff has been flowering in these wonderful ways. Someone will suggest thing like ‘what if we had a giant mouth?’ and everyone gets to work.
One thing you’re showing off is Oath: New Foundations, which is currently in production.
With New Foundations, we are doing something I always dreamed of doing. In our room, we’re hosting three simultaneous games of Oath all day, and each picks up from the previous. If you come back, you might see the far consequences of your actions or a speck of dust you left behind. We gave every player a notebook, and it’s a way to communicate with future players. You could leave them a note about the location of a specific treasure or a multi-generational grudge.
I love seeing players engage with it, because about halfway through, people realize they’re not just playing a game of skill – they’re playing a game about history. These dramatic tools that had laid dormant, because games don’t really access them, are now present, because two players can be so unified against a common enemy that they can make a pact and join families, and the game will tolerate it. The outcast chancellor who’s out in the sticks can bribe his way back in, and all players are now part of one uneasy alliance, and the game can tolerate it. Players have really gravitated towards it.
Now we’re in the production stages for New Foundations, and you can step back and really look at it, what aspect of the design are you most pleased with?
I’m very happy that it made the base game simple without really losing anything. It’s not a specific mechanism – although there are mechanisms in the game I’m very proud of – but it’s really the slow work of development where you’re tightening all these screws. The whole engine runs so much quieter and more smoothly.
One of the common refrains I hear from players is ‘you know, I played two or three years ago, and this just felt so much easier to play and become immersed in’. And they’ll look at me quizzically and say ‘I don’t actually know how you did that, because the rules feel the same’.
Another thing I’m really proud of is something extremely simple. I wanted players to care about multiple game strategy. It was always a goal.
Oath is built without points. That’s a very important part of its design conceit. When you play a game, there’s a winner, and everyone else loses. But I realized points were actually very valuable, because what is a score? It’s something that can be added, or divided, or grow. It can track participation, and that’s actually what you want out of a multi-game sequence.
So, Oath is a very simple system that says, at the end of the game, you win a base number of points that do nothing – except now you can compare a big win and a small win. If I win three games poorly and score low, and win one game in a brilliant way, you can catch up to me – which means we can now make multi-game gamuts.
Then we added this other little thing, which is that players can share points. Only the winner can score points, but they can then burn that score down to give points to other players. So, at the end of the game, you can be in a hopeless position and say ‘but if I help the person who’s winning, then maybe I can earn a point’. You get these fabulous coalitions, and players design their own area majority game organically. I’m very happy with that.
One more thing I’m happy with is a crazy, 11th-hour change. When I was working on Oath, I had an opportunity to play a bunch of five-player games at the end, and I realized it has a kind of unregulated tabletop. You can say whatever you want whenever, but every conversation about who should win is sort of the same. As a designer, it’s quite disappointing, because I spend all this time working on very specific mechanisms, but if players are having a conversation they might have after a game of Risk or Twilight Imperium, why have my game do anything special?
So I imposed a negotiating limitation. You can only coordinate your actions when you’re at the same spot and in the same location. You can kibitz, you can complain, but you can’t coordinate unless you’re together. What this means is, if you and I bump into each other, we might never be in the same spot for the rest of the game. Maybe now we make a pact and you go out to find a piece of information that’s desperately important to me. Do you run back to me to communicate it, or do you just hope I’ll figure it out through innuendo?
There’s this lovely grey area. It has allowed the five- and six-player games, which had been my least favorite player counts, to become my favorite player counts.
You’re also working on new Arcs stuff at the moment. We’ve had lots of updates for the Lost Vaults expansion, but it sounds like Beyond the Reach is still quite up in the air.
The campaign materials entered testing at the beginning of July. I think we’re looking at 12 plotlines – the precise mix is still up in the air, but I think probably half of them are going to be A fates, and the other half is a mix of Bs and Cs. They have really started to come alive. I think, by the end of August, we’re going to have all the plotlines written and in development.
The plotlines fall into a couple different categories, and we’re trying to create fates at every level of complexity. Some fates are simpler than anything in the base game, and they’re designed for a newer player or your first campaign, but they’re still meant to be compelling and competitive – a bit like The Partisan in the original Blighted Reach campaign.
Right now I’m working on an invader plotline where you’re essentially playing a wargame. It’s somewhat straightforward, but nothing in Arcs is ever straightforward. We have some really crazy plotlines.
I also have a plotline I’m working on called the Successor, where you start the game and you’re either a pretender or a true heir. Everyone knows you’re one of those two, but no one knows which. The entire game, you’re trying to ingratiate yourself with the other Imperial players, and at the end, if you’re revealed as a pretender, you’re immensely powerful, completely selfish, and very hard to dislodge. The true heir will instead help the entire empire be elevated. It adds an element of social deduction to the game.
How are things going with Take?
That’s been in active development. The only thing that hasn’t been settled on is the name. It’s fantastic, though. It has been worked on quite a lot over the past year, and there have been half a dozen changes, ranging from pretty impactful to very subtle.
If you had to sum it up in a few words?
This is a game about busting or cashing out. It’s a game of gambits and getaways. It’s a game where you’re scrambling to run these increasingly unhinged heists, in the hope that you’re somehow able to run out of the store with the register – and find a place to put the money before the cops come. It has an energy to it that I think is quite liberating to play, because it’s so open. Yet it’s genuinely quite a strategic and deep negotiation game.
This is a heist game that says ‘what if we design a game that has the strategic charge and pedigree of something like Arcs, which is serious about its mechanisms, but is about running a crime ring? The result, I think, is quite unique and quite special.
I find most games about heists don’t really feel like heists. The theme is almost incidental. For this game, Ted [Caya, designer of Take] immersed himself in the history of heists. How can we make a game where being caught because you were seen on camera feels different from being jumped by a security guard? How does it feel different if you’re investigated by the FBI versus chased by a local cop? We wanted to build a game that expressed those ideas. It’s not just about adjusting the challenge rating.
It sounds like it’s lives in a very unique space in the Buried Giant catalog.
That’s right. Our core ethos is playfulness and depth and empowering players to tell amazing emergent stories. You can do that in a lot of different ways.
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Source: Wargamer
