- What was the process like for creating your game? How did the limitations influence your design?
I was really impressed with Outpost18’s ability to distill Magic the Gathering style play down into such a small package. I had tried doing so myself before with 100 cards and failed miserably. With this I still wanted to do something ambitious and Twilight Imperium is notorious for being The BIG Game with lots and lots of things and rules. So Vengeful Stars is my attempt at that.
I spent Tuesday-Friday faffing about in the design cave and made the art and rulebook over the last three days. I started the design trying to think of how I could fit territory and money into the game, trying to cram as many little systems as I could into the tiny package. This is where I got the idea of ripping up the cards to act as tokens I intended to use as currency and tokens to move through space. After discussing the idea with the Discord consensus was that this was against the spirit of the jam.
The next iteration of the design focused more on just getting the social dynamic of Twilight Imperium down. I figured I would worry about the aesthetic experience of making it feel BIG after I got some good rules down. This version consisted of 12 action cards, each player would have a hand of one action card and would draw a second card at the start of each round. All players would play simultaneously and would get to keep one of their cards between rounds. I think this version would be fine to play but the action cards don’t carry much thematic weight and not enough rules existed to build faction abilities off of. So, I shrunk the game down to 6 cards and dedicated the remaining cards to secondary systems that would help give the game a sense of scale. This ended up being the Planet cards.
- How do you think it turned out?
I Chronically dislike almost everything I make, but I still want to work on this a bit until its more like what I wanted out of it in the first place. I think this version of the game doesn’t feel BIG enough but I’m hopeful for the next version.
- Do you have future plans for this game?
I want to extend the game by another 18 cards. Using this space to let the game support 3-7 players instead of only 5. I’m going to add faction art as well as split the faction cards into 10 separate cards one for each faction. Additionally, I want to create separate VP counter cards and clean up some of the existing art.