Mutant Pizza

Hello Otherworldly Beings,

A while ago, a game called Existentialitis was spit into multiple games. One has been called Pilgrimage and another has gone through many working titles, with the current one being Galaxy Story.

This might feel messy to anyone who has read through prior entries in this journey. But that’s game design. It’s messy until it’s neat. It makes no sense until everything suddenly falls into place.

Let’s talk about the journey to reach a game that “makes sense.”

A brief recap

As noted in prior entries, this game has gone through many names but it’s also transitioned through many themes and several styles of gameplay. It began as a narrative-building game set in present day where all players stepped into the shoes of one person who had to struggle through the difficult, and very real, traumas that life throws at us. I mean, they were very real. Like your best friend gets cancer and you lose your job kind of real. Like you’re just standing around, minding your own business, and then you suddenly realize you’re going to die someday and you’re so small and insignificant in the grand scheme of the universe that your life is so infinitesimal kind of real. You know, a comedic game.

There were divergent ideas in the thematic and mechanical direction of the game.

Thematically, scifi, existential, and fantasy elements were all competing for greatness. Mechanically, many gameplay systems were all competing for fun tension.

What that truly meant was that a system of mechanics needed to exist which could work with many themes. Enter, uh, Untitled Storytelling Game that’s currently called Galaxy Story (working title) (seriously, the title will probably change at least five more times in as many months).

The building blocks of a strong narrative

How do you tell a good story? Action? Romance? Tragedy? Comedy? All of the above? The real answer might seem boring: Structure. That’s right, you need a good foundation, a good tempo, and a few key elements that shift the story in new and interesting directions.

What’s interesting about storytelling is that it exists within tried-and-true methods. There’s a three act structure, a five act structure; there’s the hero’s journey, the story circle; there’s Kurt Vonnegut’s six different types of stories. Ultimately, there’s a formula to follow. The formula is simply a framework, all of the motives, actions, and outcomes are for the storytellers to decide.

That’s where you come in. In Galaxy Story, you get to tell the story using various characters, objects, and locales within sprawling galactic societies.

A system for many themes

This game is still in the early days of development. The key factor that needs to be airtight before being expanded upon is how the overall system of gameplay works. This is still a “board game” but it’s also a “narrative building” game. In this type of game, there’s no need to balance player abilities or create win conditions. There’s no need to playtest a certain card over and over again to see if it’s over- or underpowered. This is all about giving players the right constraints such that they can tell a compelling story. That means giving players an easy, logical, and fair system such that all players involved get an equal share in crafting a fun story.

Oh boy, has this been interesting to design. It’s been a learning experience, and the key factor that I’ve learned has been to unlearn what I know about game design. Yeah, wrap your head around that.

The game started out as such: You receive a row of cards, face up in front of you, that you can’t rearrange. On your turn, you must play your leftmost card. But before you do, you’ll have limited access to rearranging your row or other players’ rows.

This system has gone through many iterations. First, you had powers on each card based on their suit. This felt too unpredictable and therefore unreliable and forgettable. Then, each player had a power, which felt like something that needed to be “balanced” and therefore players would compete for the power that allowed them the most agency and freedom to play cards as they like. I even had a brief moment of weakness where I tried to make this a trick-taking game, where whoever wins the trick gets to pick a played card and use it to tell more of the story.

Side note: I have nothing against trick-taking games but this mechanic didn’t work at all. It meant that someone who is good at trick-taking games got to tell the lion’s share of the story, and meant that something could be “won” and therefore players focused on taking tricks, not telling cool stories.

Ultimately, I went back to a new version of my initial system…

Everyone takes part in the story circle!

Okay, first, apologies for that wall of text up there. There’s still not much to show for this game so there aren’t many images. But here’s a screenshot of some cards in the current prototype.

In the current build of this game, you still get a row of cards that you can’t rearrange. You still must play your leftmost card on your turn. However, there are a few new mechanics that at the time of this post haven’t been tested yet. (But it’s on the to-do list!)

Now everyone gets the same card rearranging ability, based on a random card drawn at the beginning of the game. This randomly drawn card also sets up the story and gives the first player a direction of the card to play. They must play a card that bears a description word, as seen in the upper-left corners of each card in that image above, from a small list.

When it’s not your turn, under certain circumstances you can play a card—regardless of where it is in your row—on top of the one someone else played and add to the story. Neat!

There are also major story “twist” cards where through a random draw mechanic the fates—sometimes cheery, sometimes tragic—of characters, objects, and locations are decided for the story.

A few of these mechanics have yet to be playtested but it’s going to be exciting seeing how the game plays.

Designing a multi-thematic system

Reflecting upon how one game became many has shaped this design quite a bit. The goal here is not just to design a scifi-themed narrative-building game. It’s to design a narrative-building game that can be applied to various themes. There also will likely be a place for the theme that was Existentialitis to be applied to this system, albeit with more lighthearted subject matter…or at least the ability to give players the choice of crafting a jollier tale.

In fact, the overall plan is, once this system is fully designed and finalized, to release multiple games using variations of this same system. AND—and, and and and—to release specifics on how the system itself works so you can develop your own theme and apply it to a variant of the game. That’s right, an open source board game system.

But first, let’s see how the current build plays….

Until next time, Otherworldly Beings.