Following the extreme success of Harebrained Schemes’ Shadowrun Returns Kickstarter and subsequent on-time launch, studio founder and game designer Jordan Weisman wanted to return to his roots.
In recent years Weisman is arguably best known for his work designing games like the rebooted Shadowrun for Xbox 360 and Microsoft’s Halo 2 ARG "I Love Bees." But in the early 1980s he founded FASA, creators of beloved tabletop games like Battletech and the original analog versions of Crimson Skies and Shadowrun.
Bottom line? Both Weisman’s tabletop and video game credentials are more than legit.
Harebrained Schemes’ next project, Golem Arcana, attempts to combine video and tabletop gaming in a way that only someone with Weisman’s background would attempt.
“Golem Arcana is a tabletop game hybrid. It uses a smartphone or tablet to handle game rules and recordkeeping,” Weisman told IGN. “It takes what has traditionally been a genre of games that can be very intimidating, hard to learn, and sometimes hard to play and makes them flow much faster.”
The crux of Golem Arcana is its stylus-like “TDI,” short for Tabletop Digital Interface. All of your figurines and all squares on the board have microdots on them that the device reads with an infrared camera. When you tap a figure or an action with the TDI, data is transmitted to your screen via bluetooth, displaying things like chance to hit and other detailed data. But the game’s digital elements are purely supplementary -- this is still a tabletop game.
“We want your hands on the game board -- on the figures. There is a special energy sitting around the table with friends. When you have the energy of the room and the visual and tactile dynamics of the board and the playing pieces, it becomes a more intimate experience,” Weisman explained. “ You don’t have to be holding or touching the screen -- it’s more like a scoreboard at a baseball game. It’s there when you need it.”
There's something elemental about tabletop gaming.
Having a digital companion for a physical board game makes a lot of sense from a quality-of-life perspective. No more arguing about line-of-sight, rewinding a game due to a mistake, dice-rolls determining AI movements or any other headaches. But Golem Arcana’s digital element opens up a very interesting design space as well.
“[Digital] allows us to do things like ability cooldowns, or units turning ‘invisible’ for a turn or two," Weisman enthused. "The mobile device would plot its moves for a few turns before it materialized back into the game.”
Golem Arcana is intended first and foremost as a one vs. one or team-based PvP game, but the its digital component also opens up potential for AI play, perhaps as a stretch goal, if gamers respond to the Kickstarter.
“Players might be able to make test scenarios to try out a new army composition against an AI-driven force. Or play cooperatively to defeat an opposing AI army. We’d also like to do things like scenario-play. Perhaps during a winter scenario, a previously impassable river is now frozen and can be walked over. The digital companion can track this," Weisman said.
The final big piece of the digital/physical hybrid puzzle is the ease of continuity that comes from a digital companion. No need to enter end-game stats into a spreadsheet or web form.
“If users choose to opt-in, match data could be uploaded to our server, letting you track your win/loss record against your friends or globally. We could also track and report other play data, like strong or weak army compositions,” Weisman explained.
This kind of data sharing also has interesting personal play opportunities. “We’d like to do things like having a battle you played today set up a scenario for your brother in another state to play tomorrow,” Weisman said. It sounds not unlike the persistance found in a game like Risk Legacy.
So, what about the game itself? A quick interview isn’t the best opportunity to learn the ins and outs of a tabletop game’s systems, but Weisman did give us a quick overview of how Golem Arcana’s battles will play out.
Can Harebrained Schemes Duplicate its Kickstarter success?
“Golem Arcana is at its heart a combat game," Weisman explained. "You build your army out of a combination of golems -- your physical figures, mages -- your golem ‘pilots’ that only exist digitally and provide their moveset, and Ancient Ones -- passive units that provide global buffs.
“One big problem we tried to solve was ensuring that the player that lost the first unit wasn’t playing catch-up the rest of the match,” he continued. “We accomplished this with mana. Mana funds your units and special abilities, and when a unit us destroyed a large amount of mana is ‘released’ back to your Ancient Ones, letting you fire off more blessings and miracles to help keep things balanced.”
Golem Arcana’s Kickstarter will launch in August, with far more details on the game systems, backstory, pledge levels, and what players will get in the box to be made public at that time. What we know for now is that the base game will come with a board, six pre-painted figures, and the proprietary stylus. The essential digital app will be a free download for iOS and Android.
“This is a big project, with complex hardware and software requirements,” Weisman told us near the end of our conversation. “We’ve pushed this very far before presenting it to the public. The hardware prototypes, the game systems, the story depth... it’s all there. But there is still a lot of work to do.”
Justin Davis is the second or third best-looking Editor at IGN. You can follow him on Twitter at @ErrorJustin and on IGN.
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