After the Fog
Wow, A Game!
After the Fog, playtesting at OrcaCon 2020.
These days, my biggest game is After the Fog. This has been a long and complicated project, and it’s nearly finished.
I created the Dew Point universe in 2011 as part of an unpublished RPG project. I started writing new short stories in the world in 2013, and in 2017 I decided it would be a good setting for a board game. The world is a Renaissance-flavored fantasy world with politics, wooden airships, and a rising fog that threatens to drown the world in darkness. (Yay!)
I started with the idea for a competitive ship building game. I wanted to set it in Venice, but there was nothing competitive about real-world Venice. They were one big enterprise, which is why they were so successful. So I put it in Marino, the capital city of DeVere. Because of course they would have competitive airship building. Why not?
About six months into that project, I abandoned that game in favor of one about exploring the map, because the “exploring” part was the best thing about the original ship building game. (I still want to fix that game, though.)
About six months later, while I was meeting with Greater Than Games, they liked the Dew Point universe and said they’d like to see a game set in this world. So now I had a potential publisher, and things started to get serious.
After the Fog is set during the second major recession of the fog, in what amounts to the Renaissance in DeVere. The Dearworth Valley has been deep in fog for centuries, but now it has begun to clear, and many forgotten places are being rediscovered.
So you start with a city, and an airship, and a map half-buried in fog, and you spend the game taking over territories, collecting resources, and building stuff like towers and ships. It’s a resource-generating, engine-building, area-control game, just like all those other ReG-EB-ACs (Regebacs?). It’s much larger than the games I usually make, and therefore it’s going much slower.
This particular version of the game mechanic was brand new one year ago, and I remember testing a very early build at OrcaCon 2019. Exactly one year later, at the same con, with some of the same testers, I am getting very close to the final build.
A single game takes about two hours, so it’s hard to get as many replays as I want. It seems I spend about ten hours rebuilding the components for every one hour I spend in test. This is a far cry from making a new Pairs variant, which I can pretty much throw together in one afternoon and finish in two weeks. But it’s finally getting solid, and it’s certainly worth the extra time.
I recently set myself the deadline of March 1 to deliver a draft to Greater Than Games, and I expect if they buy it, they will keep cycling on it for another year. I am sure a lot of details will change, and plenty of the cards still need balancing, but I at least want to hand them a core game that is solid. I feel like I’m almost there.
If you want to read more about Dew Point, there are a few pages about it at World Anvil. Check it out.
The setting for After the Fog. Learn more about the Dew Point universe here.