The Fog Is Here
After the Fog is now in public beta!
I’ve mentioned this game many times, but I’ve never revealed many details. Now I finally have a draft of After the Fog that’s ready for public beta. So please check out the game’s main page for more information about how to play it.
A History of This Project
I started working on the high-complexity resource management project more than three years ago. My oldest notes in this thread are from October 2017: early ideas for a competitive ship-building game set in Venice. I wanted to create a “gamer’s game,” something meatier than my usual lightweight designs.
As it turns out, ship-building in Venice wasn’t historically competitive; everyone worked for the same shipyard. (Duh.) So I thought, what if we were competing airship-builders in the Dew Point Universe? The best thing about fantasy worlds is that they don’t have to match up to reality, and the second-best thing is that they can have airships.
I created a ship-building game that was basically Fish Cook with more rules, and I was playing it by Thanksgiving 2018. It didn’t work very well, but the most interesting part of it was the exploration mechanic, where you sent merchant ships out after resources and hoped they came back fast and in one piece. This was, in turn, based on an older game I’d built about Venice and also abandoned because it wasn’t working.
I still want a competitive ship-building game set in Marino, and I might make it someday, but for now it’s on the back burner.
Instead I built out a completely new game that focused on exploring. This game took place on a map of Skye, with Marino as the starting point, and every city from the map reduced to a single resource that it produced. Players would pick up contracts for specific lots of resources, and fly from space to space collecting and trading, to get what they needed and bring it back to Marino. I was playing that game by Spring 2018.
And, once again, this game didn’t quite work, though I liked some of the mechanics associated with production. I still want a racing-and-trading game set in Skye, and I might make it someday, but for now it’s on the back burner, right next to the shipbuilding game.
And so once again I started afresh and built a game about exploring and producing. In this case I liked the idea of “re-exploring,” in territory that had been populated and then forgotten in fog. So I wrote the history of the Dearworth Valley and zoomed in on a section of the world map, creating a game somewhat based on one of my old favorites One False Step for Mankind. I was playing this new game by December 2018.
One False Step is a simple resource-management game in which players take the role of Old West towns in a slapdash race to build a rocket to the moon. I love that game, but it falls way outside most people’s comfort zone with a schedule-wrecking four hour run time. I like the map, and the mechanics for expansion and conflict, and I figured I could shave some time off the game if I did it right, so this was my new starting point.
The Current Draft
Many versions later, After the Fog is now version 9.5.2 of that same resource-management engine from late 2018. So I guess technically it’s been just over 2 years for this game, if you don’t count all the time I spent rejecting entirely different core mechanics. (Regarding my numbering system, I usually update the version number each time I make a fundamental change that requires reprinting all the components, and I use decimal increments when I only have to update some fraction of the components. The hundredths place is basically “I changed a few cards.” After the Fog began its life as a 1.0 in late 2018.)
The most recent core revision was based on feedback from a publisher. In the early-2020 draft, players could choose to buy extra airships, which were very expensive, or they could buy cards which gave them extra actions with the ships they already had. There were other permutations of this, but basically the question was: do I spend my money on cards now, or save it up to buy another ship, which will get me more velocity later?
The split-plan strategy was hard to balance. In fact, it was potentially impossible. If all the players decided to buy ships instead of cards, the game would go on for too long, because our timer relied on pulling cards from the deck. So if at least one player was buying cards, the game would eventually end. If no one was, then the game could go on forever.
We could have invented a different game timer, but the two paths would still have been difficult to balance against each other. Instead, we addressed this issue by taking ships off the market altogether, and instead unlocking them as a side effect of buying cards. So now the choice is a little more clear: whether you are going for ships or not, you’re definitely buying cards, and that drives the game timer forward.
Still to Come
There are still some things about this game that I don’t like. I think the explanation of Windfall and Tribute is overly complicated, though I think they are important for game balance. I think combat is hard to calculate, though again, it’s important to the game. And rules like the distinction between “produce” and “collect” make the game feel a bit fiddly and over-designed.
But on the flip side, I certainly enjoy playing After the Fog, and it doesn’t really take that long to absorb all the rules, even the fiddly ones. So I don’t know enough to judge it yet, and I can’t wait to see some good feedback from the public beta.
On the Art
One note on this beta is that I stripped out all the nice-looking art that I don’t own, and replaced with silly clip art that I can use without copyright issues. The exception is the gorgeous character sketches, which were created for this game by my friend Nate Taylor. So try not to be too distracted by the goofy cartoons. I would rather have clip art than nothing at all!
Our last printed version, before I changed out all the art I can’t use.