Fire Season
Fire Season is a boardgame about controlling the spread of a wildfire. It's too late for prevention, now you have to deal with the problem of a fire in the forest. I released this in Late October, following a trio of fairly bleak games, so wanted this to be a bit more exciting. You're still fighting off an ecological disaster, but at least you have some agency here and get to move little guys around a board solving problems!
In Fire Season you are tasked with managing the spread of a wildfire across the board, controlling your agents to take actions against the fire, control the routes by which it can spread, and ultimately contain it in order to prevent it from reaching Critical Buildings, representing infrastructure which will cause an additional cascade of disaster if it is impacted by the fire. You have various options available and the fire changes direction of spread every turn. You can work as a team, and can take risks to secure more resources to fight the fire with at the cost of maybe allowing it to spread further while you prepare to act. It's a game of urgency, trying to balance action vs reaction, and reading risk.
The whole thing takes place on a large hex grid style layout, the first time I've actually made something like this. It was quite fiddly to put together, but I'm satisfied with how it worked out. The Crows Know also had its own area layout, but that had originally been based on putting it together from a chessboard, so this is the first truly custom layout I'd done for this. Trying to come up with ways of representing the different paths and nodes, and how to diagram everything with enough brevity that it would fit onto the document while still being readable was a fun challenge. To strike a balance between readability and aesthetics I used different types of dotted and solid lines and boxes, as well as basic easily identifiable shapes to denote common elements. I find drawing arrows and boxes on things to be quite fun, so I can see why the clickbait conspiracy weirdos online do so much of it.
I think this mostly worked, perhaps the choice of accent colour (bright orange) wasn't the most clear one, but it was used all throughout the rest of the document and I wanted to maintain consistency, so we can only compromise so far. I added a blurring and noise filter to the map in order to create the forest effect underneath, which helps outline the map and give if a bit more character, as well as softening the overall document (the high contrast node map was pretty stark and not the easiest to look at previously). A healthy forest should be easy to look at, not a pointy jagged thing, as though someone had burned it all down...
Perhaps the most direct inspiration for this game, from a mechanics perspective, is quite obviously Pandemic. This also features a team (also of specialists if you use Fire Season's optional rules), a map of nodes through which a threat gradually spreads, and a race to contain the threat by various methods. Of course I didn't want to just reproduce another game, and for Fire Season I wanted to lean much more into the chaotic and difficult to predict nature of fires and weather, and play into a more risk management oriented game than one by which one player can simply command the rest of the team on the "optimal" strategy, as the circumstances will be likely to shift somewhat on every turn. It's a quick game that can be easily replayed, and can easily get out of hand.
Like most games in this series, I've tried to keep the material resources required to play quite minimal, and continue to use D6 for most randomising work, as they are the most commonly available type of dice. You need loads of them for this, as they function both as the countdown timer on the fire, and the way of determining Wind Direction using the hexagonal compass. That's another advantage of a hex-grid, you can use a D6 to very easily produce results directly actionable to it.
I actually really hate the sort of Quarterbacking phenomenon that some co-operative games like Pandemic and Forbidden Island can sometimes encourage, in which one player essentially becomes the team manager and just tells everyone else what to do. This results in most of the players not actually being allowed to make any decisions without having an argument with the Quarterbacking player, and if they aren't making decisions they aren't actually playing the game any more. It's quite hard to tell other players what to do in Fire Season, because circumstances typically change every turn, and so any grand strategy tends to be pointless. You have to be responsive and resourceful, and willing to take your own risks. You can also just choose to push your luck (a thing I like to get players to do) and try and secure more resources while increasing the risk of fire spreading faster.
I don't think I solved Quarterbacking here by any stretch, but I do prefer to try and design against it wherever possible. I do not like being subjected to this style of play. It's one reason why I like games with secret objectives or hidden knowledge, because it makes it impractical for one player to simply take charge. The secrecy increases the demand for dynamism. Plus, if you actually do enjoy that sort of team management stuff, it's trivial to just play multiple roles yourself in this game, which is way less admin than in most co-op games designed for groups.
Playtesting and Digital Prototyping
Throughout these games and for many of the subsequent ones I've made heavy use of digital versions of the games for prototyping. This has been done pretty much exclusively in Tabletop Simulator. While sometimes a strange tool with odd controls, Tabletop Simulator has been invaluable in letting me rapidly iterate on designs in several games, without covering my entire work surface in boardgaming paraphenalia. My desk is already occupied by a massive keyboard and putting down a chessboard and loads of counters and cards would make it impossible to take usable notes. Plus I'd have to search through my dice and cards for what I need, whereas I can just make them appear from thin air in game, or tell it to shuffle the deck for me to ensure proper card distribution.
I'd recommend Tabletop Simulator for this purpose. It has all the components you need to mess around with basic mechanics and rules tweaking without having to do loads of prep and cleanup. You can save a basic version of the game and then just restore it every time you want to start over or change how a rule works. Ultimately it's just a way of keeping loads of board gaming junk to hand without actually having it occupy space in the real world. I haven't really used it for anything outside of game design to be honest (though I'd certainly like to).
If you're going to use it for this, I strongly recommend you learn the controls and hotkeys, and make strong use of the ability to save different versions of the starting state of your game. Don't worry about getting anything overly fancy or visually impressive imported, unless that's a route you really want to go down, the main thing is that you have tokens and abstractions you can play with to test how mechanics work, how the game flows, whether things feel balanced. It's (usually) a quicker way of running through and making sure your systems actually make sense in practice. Use the simple tools at hand for drawing shapes, plopping down tokens, and rolling dice. Just these basics will take you a long way, and you can pretty things up when it comes time for actual production. Prototypes don't have to be fancy, this isn't even Minimum Viable Product. It's a proof of concept, that's all.
Also, more annoyingly but equally important, you can use it to more quickly figure out when a game just doesn't work, so you can go try something else. It's frustrating but it's better to reach this point quickly via a simulation than spend ages fiddling around with tokens and dice on your table only to realise your idea is rubbish. Though I expect flipping the table IRL is somewhat more cathartic than doing it in game, if more work to clean up.
Some More Notes on Theming...
As I'm based in the UK, I don't live in a country prone to huge terrifying wildfires. We still get them (see these recent examples) but nothing like the scale of the vast wildfires we've seen images of in the news these past few years. The California Wildfires for just one example, with images of entire horizons ablaze, the sky choked with thick red smoke, and people unable to leave their homes miles away without risking sickness from the fumes.
We know this situation is only going to get worse. Several of these games are inescapably about or influenced by the climate crisis. In some ways they all are, as visions of more-or-less possible futures spiralling off from our own, and our own future is one in which climate crisis is going to be a series of ever escalating climate catastrophes. This isn't just the future. These wildfires which have already happened were exacerbated by anthropogenic climate change. Hotter and more drawn out fire seasons, dryer summers and wetter winters. Everything is going to be more intense and there will be more of it, and we have to do something about it.
In the game Fire Season, the premise is that it's already too late for prevention, and you have to act now to save what matters. You get an advance warning that imminent disaster is on its way, and you respond by taking the best action you can. I've made a trio of games where you reflect on what's already passed, perhaps feel despair or grief at what's already lost, at what you can't change, at what's yet to come. I wanted to make something more active, where you at least have some agency, even if prevention would have been better than the disaster you're confronted with.
It is too late to prevent the climate crisis. It's already happening. It's been happening in far off places we perhaps don't hear or think about so much for years now, allowing we in The West to dither and tarry, and now it's knocking on all our doors. We still have to act now to save what matters.
The best time to deal with this is already long past. The next best time is now.
(ORIGINALLY POSTED 22/05/2024)