The Journey So Far - Part I

Before diving more deeply into Garden of Alcinous and my goals for the project, I think it is worth taking a moment to stop and cover the journey I have already taken to get here.

The board game Odyssey began nearly two years ago on an unremarkable night when, looking for something to do, a close friend and I began noodling on new project. What began as an ill-defined ‘we want to make something fun’ evolved quickly and, come 6am, we were gleefully playing the very messy first iteration of our new brain child - Balance of Power, a clean energy inspired engine builder (familiarly, BoP).

Was the game particularly fun? No. Was it balanced? Certainly not. Were there gaping flaws built into core gameplay mechanics? Certainly yes. But we were undeterred and, more importantly, we had caught the bug - the game development bug. HMS BoP wasn’t sea worthy yet, but we believed.

We were captured by the intellectual purity of the endeavor: the mission to create something that married mechanical simplicity with unfathomable depth. And what’s more - having travelled from nothing to something in a single creative burst - we were thrilled by the potential speed of development and iteration.

A week later, we returned to give it another play having mulled over and refined the core ideas. Once again, it wasn’t particularly fun BUT there was a kernel of something that we knew was just waiting to be unlocked. After that session, we introduced a new rule - the worst component of the game gets deleted, to make room for the things that worked. That night, our victim was the board itself - Balance of Power was becoming abstract…

Over the next few months, our ship developed in the stormy waters of rapid, destructive iteration. Soon, it had ceased to resemble the initial idea at all, as one after another the original elements of the game succumbed to the worst thing is out edict. And, noticeably, the game began to improve. It was, with a touch of hesitancy, fun and - although balance still proved elusive - we were beginning to plug the gaping holes that had sunk many previous voyages.

The game had settled around a handful of key mechanics - a power grid (onto which players placed power blocks to gain income), a power plant deck (with each generation type offering different advantages), and an opportunities deck (chance cards dealt and drafted at the start of each round). Aside - the spinning skill development tree concept pictured above was soon left on the cutting room floor.

Put the remaining elements together and… it sort of sailed. But it took fair weather, a patient crew, and it wasn’t very original (think: poor man’s Terraforming Mars). Overall, it just wasn’t quite there. Plenty of good ideas and a fun story had summed together into a slightly jumbled mess that was fun if you built it but - as our playtesting began to reveal - less fun if you did not. 

Around the point of this realization, my co-creator left town for the winter and with the wind out of our sails and half its two-man crew absent without leave, HMS BoP was caught in the doldrums. Lacking the skill to turn the fair ship around, before long it was scuttled on the rocks of lacklustre inspiration and its inexperienced captain was stranded for the winter.

But - just as trickling water slowly, imperceptibly carves great canyons - the idea, the board game bug, continued to percolate through my brain. And then one night that following spring, like the voice of Metis in the ear of Zeus, inspiration returned in a great, gushing outpour.

The answer, in fact, had been there in the wreckage all along - the simplest, most elegant, most innovative feature of BoP: the grid. Indeed, were the grid given the space it deserved, the love and attention it required, it could be the star. It was, in fact, the inverse of the worst thing is out rule - only the best thing stays.

And so, just as Odysseus spent seven years adrift on Calypso’s island before crafting a raft in a mere five days, I too escaped the land and set sail on a raft constructed from the wreckage of my previous voyage.

It would not be a direct route to reach the Garden of Alcinous but each of us was on our way and each of us was closer to that blessed place than we had ever been before.