Rethinking Emissary for the "Red Frontier"

Emissary is a design I’ve been iterating on for a number of years now. And while the vagaries of life pulled me away from design work, recently I’ve had a window of time to resume my eternal tinkering.

For those unfamiliar, Emissary was created for a PnP design competition to either create an express version of a bigger game or a micro-game (or both!). At the time, I was experimenting with a number of games using the Decktet system, and I came upon the idea to take Hegemonic and distill it down to its 4X roots (explore, expand, exploit, exterminate) by using the decktet. The resulting design worked quite well and had a vaguely Magnate-like feel to its balance of resource management, hand management, and area control.

Emissary's Thematic Conundrums

Emissary was originally designed for the PnP Express/In-a-Tin Design contest using the Decktet. It was envisioned as a card game "express" version of Hegemonic transplanted into the fantastic and odd world of the Decktet universe. If you are curious about the gameplay of Emissary, check out this prior post on the topic: Emissary: A Study in Brain-burn and Emergence

As much as I love the Decktet, using the Decktet cards posed some playability challenges. Players had to mentally map the card's ranks into a Tier structure used in Emissary, each of which had certain implications for the cost of using those cards. It was hard for players to keep it all straight in their mind (and required a reference card at a minimum) and as a consequence the flow of the game bottlenecked a little bit.

If the game was to mature beyond its roots I felt it had to deviate away from the Decktet. Custom cards could facilitate learning the game and streamline the play considerably by using clear iconography to identify the various ways of interacting with the cards (costs, build allowances, etc.). But this opened up a whole separate question, what to "theme" it around. I was torn whether to embrace the games forefather (Hegemonic) and go with a spacey theme, or do something more subdued and landscap-y. I couldn't decide so I did both!

Onward to the eye-candy!

A Call to Arms!

Hello all!  It's been a little while since posting, and among other reasons was the most prominent one: last month saw the birth of our second child and all that entails. Things now seem to be slowing down on the crazy-factor scale, so I'm crawling out of the cave with a little request!

I've talked about Emissary in prior blog posts (Emissary: A Study in Brain-burn and Emergence) but I wanted to more formally open up the doors for broader playtesting of the game. It's been tweaked and developed quite a bit more since the last time I talked about it, and I'm now at a point where getting a broader set of opinions and reactions to the game would be just stupendous!

Emissary: A Study in Brain-burn and Emergence

Hopefully this whole post doesn't come across as pompous - but here's the gist of what I'm talking about today: I designed a Decktet game called "Emissary" as a Hegemonic-inspired light 4X style game. And, having played quite a number of games so far, I've been pleasantly surprised by the amount of "brain-burn" and also "emergence" that seems to be emanating from the game. Apologies for the self-indulgence - but that's how I feel about it, and it makes me excited.

So, I wanted to take a step back and look at the game through my critical-ish filters and articulate why it seems to induce brain-burn (in a good way mind you!) and emergent gameplay. All this in a game that plays in about 15 minutes per player (and supports 2-4 players). Maybe we can learn something along the way...

For the Love of the Decktet

This past father’s day a little package arrived in the mail, which contained the official Decktet book. I’ve owned a copy of the Decktet cards for about two years – and was mostly relying on the Decktet wiki to look up rules for games I heard about and wanted to try. But having the book itself has made all the difference in the world – and has somehow magnified my appreciation and love for the Decktet.

This post will reflect a little on the Decktet and some of the games I’ve played (and enjoyed). In addition, I wanted to use this opportunity to highlight a Decktet game I’m creating – one that is attempting to create a 4X / Civ style game using the Decktet; a tall order for a little deck of 45 cards.