A Game 5 Years in the Making
As well as keeping you up to date with everything that’s happening with Jarren’s Outpost, we also want to use this blog to highlight the wonderful process of making this board game and how it came to be.
It was mid 2018, we were about to embark on our first international tour of our silly little podcast Plumbing the Death Star when a mutual friend (Alex Wynnter) reached out to us about potentially making a board game together. He’d just come off a successful Kickstarter campaign for his board game The Brigade and we were eager to do something different. We spoke about a few ideas and as luck would have it he had an almost finished game! Maybe we could re-skin it, give it our own spin and slap our 100% legally different enough logo on it so that big rat wouldn’t sue and call it a day. But it wasn’t for us and the amount of work we’d have to do to shoehorn our bullshit into the parameters of the rules was something we didn’t want to do.
We wanted something that was uniquely ours, something we’d be proud of and something that we wanted to play. At the time we had amassed a rather large board game collection and tended to gravitate towards games like Scythe, Gloomhaven and Root. The perfect inspiration for first-time board game developers. We could have re-skinned Werewolf or Cards Against Humanity, but no, we wanted something complicated. Hell, even just having the same movement sets, stats and abilities for every character would have made things easier but no, we wanted each character to “feel different” and “unique”. We are, in a word, clever geniuses. 5 years later and here we are. We have something we’re proud of. But it was a journey.
In the upcoming weeks and months check back regularly as we deep dive into some of the features of the game, showcase the beautiful art our incredible artists have produced and read about our slow descent into madness as we try to overcome the biggest obstacle in making this game: ourselves. At the end of the day, we’re still us and that’s the problem.