So, The Artifact...
Of the projects I'm currently working on, this one is probably the one that has most consistently been developing over the last year and a half. It is a co-design with the inimitable Alex Cannon, who I got to know through a couple of Twitch streams in the first year of the pandemic, and who has an uncanny mind for puzzles. Since January 2021 we have been having an online meeting most weeks, usually working on or playing a virtual prototype we had built in Screentop.gg, and sometimes just chatting, partly about life and partly about the project.
Then a few days ago we managed to get together with a physical prototype and play the game on a real table. We sat in a coffee shop for a while, drank beverages, had a couple of plays through, and talked through some of the implications of what happened in the games we played.
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| A 2-player game (the blue meeples are replicants) coming close to an end. Just off-camera to the left are project boards, which are the paths to victory. |
Boy, I have missed this. While we have got this game a long way with essentially entirely online collaboration and testing, you can't beat moving components on a table, at least not when that is the intended playing format for the game.
The big headline is that the game felt pretty natural to the two of us to play, and took maybe half an hour or so per game. How it would feel to other people is unknown right now, but hopefully we'll find out sooner or later. The half hour of play felt pretty good -- a bit of brain crunch that might have been too much if sustained for a load longer -- but it occurs to me that maybe there are too many bits for a relatively short game. The setup and teardown is not exactly challenging, but... I dunno, it's just something in my head as I write this.
Just to catch you up, the central conceit of the game is that there is an alien artifact that has crashed to earth and we are corporations (or something) trying to research and exploit the technology contained within by assigning researchers to work on the expanding knowledge space that is represented by (mostly) domino-like tiles that get added on each player's turn. The game ends when one of the several project tracks off to the side is completed (each works a little differently with how they can be progressed and what benefits they provide, and there is a little interaction between them), and the completed project dictates the victory conditions for the game.
We've been tinkering with a new mechanism based on what we are labelling as alien slime (in this prototype it's to do with the yellow cubes and the black squares), which we think opens up some interesting possibilities, particularly adding more spacial elements to the game (which otherwise are less than you might think for a tile-placing game). The couple of variations on the mechanism we tried were underwhelming, but found some directions we could push in, and a later, virtual session experimented some more. Still a long way to go here, including considering whether we really should be using this.
The Artifact has twisted and changed quite a lot in its 18 month history, with mechanisms added and removed along the way, but it has always revolved around the tile placement and use of workers/researchers to tap into knowledge resources on the tiles. We seem to have settled on a form of path to victory now, but in the last few months we have just been testing with the two of us while we made some major changes, so we don't have the important data from other people looking at what we have been tinkering with week in, week out, and that is potentially concerning. But I think we're getting to that point of going back to our friendly (but occasionally brutally honest) volunteers/friends and seeing what they think.
