At GenCon this year, one of our longtime dreams will come true: the release of our first tabletop game, Unearth. In Unearth, you lead your tribe of Delvers on a quest to reclaim and rebuild the wonders of their lost civilization. By placing dice to claim ruins, playing tactical modifier cards, and strategically building game-changing wonders, you'll lead your tribe to victory. We're thrilled with Unearth, and we think our collaboration with Brotherwise Games has produced an amazing game. It was a long journey from our prototype to the final version of Unearth, and we would like to share that story with you.

Before it became Unearth, our game was about bees and bee hives called Petals. We took Petals to GenCon 2016 in search of a publisher. We pitched our game to several interested publishers, but we were very excited when we received an offer from Brotherwise Games. We knew from previous experience that we would have a good working relationship with them. Chris and Johnny were immediately excited about Petals and had some great ideas for theme and art direction. So, in October 2016 we began the journey of transforming our game from a creative and functional system into a fully realized game ready for the market.

~ From Flowers to Delvers ~

We worked collaboratively with Brotherwise in developing the theme for the game. It was important to them that it would resonate with fans of their hit game Boss Monster, and fit into their growing brand. Brotherwise knew they wanted to do something using isometric vector art to give the game a unique and appealing style. But, we had work to do to develop the thematic material. The two game elements of claiming cards and tableau building needed to blend smoothly in the new theme. We initially began to explore mining elements for the game; claiming mines, digging for gems, and building tools. At the same time, Chris challenged us to start generating stories and lore about the denizens in the game world, called Delvers. We wrote a variety of short stories and myths about them. While these are not in print anywhere, they helped to develop our evolving world and characters.

Eventually we settled into the idea of reclaiming a lost civilization: players would excavate and claim ancient ruins and gather mystical stones to rebuild great wonders. Around the same time we realized that an isometric 3D block, when viewed from the side, formed a hexagon. Since the tableau building aspect of Unearth involves building rings out of hexagonal tiles, this was too perfect to pass up. Now the game could tell its story: tribes of Delvers exploring their world, digging up ruins, and working to remember and rebuild the culture of their distant past.

~ In Search of that Extra 10% ~

When we began development, Brotherwise challenged us to push the design and try to find that last 10% of polish to make the game great. In Petals, players scored points for placing hexagonal tiles in larger hexagonal rings. The number of points scored depended on the color composition of the rings. Brotherwise asked us to expand the tableau-building into a crafting system that offered players options in addition to scoring a fixed number of points. We found that this concept worked very well, and we ended up making two types of cards for this new crafting system: points cards and powers cards. Some of these gave you a unique way to score points, while others gave you a special power for the rest of the game.

While designing this new system, we constantly asked ourselves: “what do we want to do that we currently can't do in the game?” We found that generating ideas for scoring points was pretty straightforward, but trying to devise powers that players wanted without being too powerful was more of a challenge. The powers needed to add fun and desire to gameplay while avoiding becoming just another “thing you can do”. We also wanted to make sure we had enough powers in the game to allow for a great deal of re-playability. We ultimately settled on a selection of 15 of these powers, six of which are randomly available in any given game.

~ A Collective Vision ~

As new game designers, we didn’t know what to expect from the development process. Brotherwise had goals and ideas for how they wanted the game to turn out, and it was up to us to realize these ideas within the system we had created. As we developed the game we were also developing a collective vision with Brotherwise of what it would be — the Delvers and how they live in their world, the mechanisms that drive the game, and how these elements combine to create the player experience. Building that vision in collaboration with our publisher let the game grow naturally over time to become something better than we could have imagined on our own. Bringing Unearth to life has been a great experience, and we can’t wait to share it with you.