Making Too Many Bones: Unbreakable, part 4 - Polaris
My second Gearloc had a slightly bumpier road to completion.
Welcome to the fourth in a five-part series about the making of Too Many Bones: Unbreakable, the final standalone expansion in the Too Many Bones board game series from Chip Theory Games, where I work as a writer and developer. This huge project is now being shipped to board gamers around the world, and to highlight the different facets of how it came together, I will be tackling individual aspects of its creation in an ongoing series this summer. Enjoy! Part one is here, part two is here, part three is here, and part five is here.
Last time, I wrote in depth about the process of creating Gale, one of two Gearlocs I worked on for the Unbreakable round of content. Today, I’ll be tackling the other one.
Gearloc Origins: Polaris
If making Gale was easy, the Gearloc once known as Rubble was a different story. First of all, she wasn’t going to be Rubble; CTG co-owner Josh Carlson wasn’t vibing with the theme of the jackhammer ability I’d come up with, largely because he was having trouble imagining it being used on the raft mat that comes with Too Many Bones: Undertow. Instead, he suggested a theme close to his heart: magnets. I don’t know how often we talk about this in our public-facing posts at Chip Theory, but Josh is obsessed with magnets. All of our offices are made out of shipping containers, and, at Josh’s encouragement, we use magnets to hang almost everything. At any given moment, you can walk into Josh’s office and see five different types of magnets lying around. So, he suggested, why not change Rubble’s ability to activate fault lines into an ability to control magnetic orbs that could be hurled around the battlefield? With that in mind, I suggested “Polaris” as her new moniker (fun bit of trivia: Polaris is the only playable Gearloc with a three-syllable name), and I set to work retheming her.
Though both of my theme ideas for my Gearlocs were changed, I’m grateful to Josh for allowing me to pursue Polaris’s new hook: If she was going to be a magnet-based character, I would make her into magnets the way that crystals people are into crystals. As such, she looks a little like an alternative medicine guru, and if you read her character skills, you’ll see references to all kinds of of home remedy hocum and assorted medical quackery from ages past (my personal favorite reference is trepanation, the long-discredited practice of drilling a hole in a patient’s skull to cure various ailments).
When I originally was sketching out Polaris, I took Shannon Wedge’s idea of a secondary mat and created a grid that matched the number of spaces on the TMB Battle Mat. If one of Polaris’s orbs was on a certain location on the grid, it would be considered to be in that position on the Battle Mat. The grid would be applied in translucent spaces over the Gearloc portrait on the character mat (you might know it as the Active Area). Originally, the dice symbolizing Polaris’s orbs would be placed directly on the mat; later, Josh suggested replacing the dice there with metallic orbs that represented them. None of us realized it yet, but this would become a huge part of the character design’s ultimate success.
When it came to Polaris’s orbs, I had one big idea: the recall ability, which would pull all the orbs on the grid back to Polaris’s current position, damaging any enemies they passed through along the way. I put a major and minor version of the recall into Polaris’s backup plan and organized most of the remaining skill dice around accommodating the recall. For example, I made a line that allowed Polaris a large freedom of movement, allowing her to get into good positioning for the recalls, and another line that encouraged her to push enemies into advantageous locations before she executed the backup plan.
My other big idea with Polaris was delving. In my time working in design, I’ve found that I love tempting players to take a chance on something highly advantageous with the risk that their gamble comes back to bite them. The delve line of dice could not be used in battle, instead being rolled in the recovery phase at the end of a day. Most of the dice sides would give you positive results that you could use in the next battle – additional HP, extra bones, and even the ultimate prize of bonus training points – but a few sides could stick you with really nasty effects instead, like losing HP or adding an additional enemy to your Baddie Queue. It was a fun risk-reward mechanic that I hoped would intrigue players into giving it a shot – and, occasionally, failing.
Polaris problems
Right away, Josh had some issues with Polaris. Though he liked the basic concepts I’d presented, he feared that the character was too one-dimensional – essentially, that she would be left without meaningful tools in battle if her recall failed to kill enough enemies, and that if she didn’t roll enough bones, she’d never be able to use her premiere ability in the first place (I had worried about this second factor, too, which is why I had included the ability to generate additional bones in the delve dice). I made a few small tweaks to the character based on his notes, but I wanted to see what the players had to say when we started exterior testing.
Reader, they did not like Polaris. Josh’s concerns were right on the money, and Shannon and fellow playtest supervisor Salem Scott also found that people considered her too simplistic. It seemed like her only viable strategy was to use the recall, but the best Gearlocs have multiple build options that allow them to be played in a variety of ways according to player preference. Worse still, no one was using the delve mechanic; people didn’t think it offered enough benefit for the investment (it will, I think, be a perennial frustration to me how risk-averse the general player audience can be, a topic I’ll probably return to in a month or two when I write about the creation of 20 Strong).
I tried to make modest adjustments after each round of playtesting, but nothing was working. I was also stubborn; I was so convinced that my mechanics were good and that all that was needed was for the character to be adjusted in just the right way for those mechanics to reveal themselves to the player. Finally, in a strained Skype call (if I recall correctly, I was stuck at home because our kids were in a remote-learning period during the pandemic), I was told that Polaris just wasn’t working, and that Salem had come up with a suite of significant changes to retool the character.
I was dejected; I think I came off as grumpy on the call, but mostly I was just sad that something I’d done had so clearly been a dud. I told the group that since what I’d done was such a failure, I would accept whatever suggestions Salem had to overhaul Polaris, giving up my original vision for the character. Salem very graciously and patiently replied that they were still trying to keep my core ideas for the character intact, and asked me for some input about what I felt were Polaris’s most interesting hooks. I gave a few notes and listened, in a slight daze, as Salem listed a litany of changes to be made to Polaris’s mechanics.
Polaris playable
I didn’t see it at the time, but Salem saved that character and made it so much better than it was before. Polaris may be one of the most complex Gearlocs in the Too Many Bones line, but she is also one of the most varied, surprising, and fun to play, and while I’m happy that some of my initial DNA lives on in the design, Salem is the person who figured out how to make it all work together.
If I had to peg Salem’s key revelation, it would go back to Josh’s decision to replace the dice on the grid (we call it the Trajectory Board) with metal orbs. When I first conceived of the character, the orbs had innate, unchanging properties that were indicated on the dice themselves (for example, one orb poisoned foes it passed through, while another dealt true damage). When Josh replaced the dice with orbs, our solution was to color-code the orbs so you could tell which one went with which die. Salem’s idea took the orbs one step further: if we’re no longer using dice to represent the orbs, why not make the orbs way, WAY more versatile?
Under this model, the orbs are placed when the player rolls certain dice, but they have no inherent effect (unless the player is using minor or major recall, which remained in Polaris’s backup plan under the redesign). Instead, they can have all manner of game-changing effects when various dice are applied to them. One die effect might allow Polaris to heal herself on an orb space, while another might shove an enemy in a certain direction or place a negative status effect. The recall could still be used for a giant, satisfying killshot, but Salem’s design gave you a myriad of reasons to keep the orbs in play, transforming Polaris from a glass cannon into a master board manipulator with some big damage effects up her sleeve. We started seeing results right away. Finally, Polaris was fun to play!
I tested her again myself later in the process, and I immediately apologized to Salem for any lingering bitterness I may have projected about the failure of my initial draft. I couldn’t see it at first, but Salem had used the germ of my idea for the character and extrapolated what was good about it into a fully-formed mechanic – something they’ve continued to do on multiple occasions over their last few years in the development department.
Eventually, all that was left to figure out was the delve. I think the rest of the design team was a little more ready to replace the line entirely, but Salem loves a mischievous mechanic just as much as I do, and we worked hard together to correctly balance delving until it became attractive enough for players to use while still not without its downsides. In so doing, we took one of Shannon’s insights to heart: it would be OK to lessen the potential negative effects of actually rolling the delve dice when balanced against the fact that players would need to spend three valuable training points to actually use the delve dice effectively, no small expenditure in a game like Too Many Bones. On every project I work on at Chip Theory, I realize anew how much I owe to the other designers and developers on our team, and when it comes to my own designs, that goes double for the playtest-whisperers like Salem and Shannon.
I worked on other small bits and bobs of the development of Too Many Bones, but at this point, I think we’ve covered the majority of my mechanical involvement. However, this series has one more part: the lore, and specifically Unbreakable’s lorebook. At the time of this writing, the lorebook is not widely available, although it should be soon. As such, I may end up delaying the end of this series until the book has made its way to more people. Either way, I’ll see you in a couple of weeks.
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What else is good on the internet?
This is a good, if spooky, article about AI writing capabilities.
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From the vault
I’m currently writing a piece for my old newspaper about a recent run of films that glamorize corporations and elevate their products as inherently moral artifacts. It reminded me of The Founder, a little-seen movie from about five years ago that’s the perfect antidote to that kind of thing. I wrote about it back then.
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Follow me on Twitter @RTHowitzer, read my Letterboxd reviews @mrchumbles, listen to my Star Trek podcast at outofcontreks.podbean.com, or email me at outofcontreks@gmail.com.