Supervillain #5: Gorgonex

And last, but certainly not least, is the petrifying Gorgonex:  a beast out of legend, a horrific hybrid of a minotaur and gorgon.

Gorgonex has made his lair beneath the ruins of the Athenian Acropolis. Contracts in Europe and Africa are within close reach.

Thematically, my goal was to include one supervillain that tied into ancient mythology. In part, because comics have always tapped mythological traditions for amazing story-lines (see Wonder Woman for a good example of this). Also because, in some general sense, comic books are a form of modern myth. Part of what draws us, and our children, generation after generation to comics is because they present archetypal stories of good vs. evil, of human frailty and strength.  

My original conception of Gorgonex was more medusa than minotaur, because mechanically I wanted a villain whose strength was an enhanced ability to attract henchmen but whose weakness was a penchant for overly extreme punishment. When Rob heard the general idea, he pitched a minotaur-medusa hybrid and we all loved it.

Gogonex's strength is "Intimidation," which grants you 1 free attraction point at the start of the Henchmen Phase. The timing of this is optimal; at this point, everyone has played their rooms for the round and made their "bids" for various henchmen types. You can then use this 1 extra attraction point to give yourself that final push you need to score a key henchmen.

His weakness is "Pitiless Contempt." Mechanically, this ability went through numerous versions before I hit on this one. Your henchmen can never heal (Gorgonex doesn't care about their pain!), so Injury tokens are permanent. Furthermore, if a henchman ever gains a 2nd Injury token, they are immediately Captured. This weakness becomes a real nuisance once you realize there are Scheme cards out there that let your opponents directly injure your henchmen. So if you play Gorgonex, you've got to continually push for lots of henchmen and treat them like expendable commodities. After all, you cannot make an omelet without breaking some eggs, eh?

Supervillain #4: Empress Ishii

Empress Ishii is, in many ways, an example of the classic "criminal overlord" trope. She'd fit right in in a James Bond flick. Indeed, the inspiration for placing her secret base location inside of Mount Fuji came straight from You Only Live Twice, which influenced me quite a bit as a child (as did most James Bond movies).

So I apologize if any of this sounds just too derivative; I've tried to be playful with many standard comic book tropes in Infamous.  Think of these supervillains as archetypes; representations of our collective unconscious, brought to life by Rob Guillory's expert pen.

Empress Ishii doesn't want to freeze the world or watch it burn or eradicate humanity. She just wants to make lots and lots of money. Oh, and be really really powerful. Simple. To that end, she and her side-kick, Ninja Girl, train an army of geisha-assassins within the bowels of Mount Fuji, using them to expand her vast criminal network across the globe.

Ishii's unique strength is, in fact, "Criminal Network."  She can automatically trade time for money (e.g., spend 1 week to gain $200,000), which can be incredibly useful if your contracts aren't paying out as much cash as you'd like.

Her unique weakness is "Perfectionism."  Attempting hard contracts costs an additional week of time, while legendary contracts cost +2 weeks.  Ishii does not tolerate failure and likes to plan out every variable before hatching a new scheme. As such, when you play Empress Ishii with all the fixins', you'll need to be heavily conscious of time as a resource to manage carefully.

Rob's original pitch for Ishii was "Akira-like Neo-Tokyo Yakuza Queenpin" and the first sketch was pretty amazing. I somewhat regret us moving away from that original idea. But we decided we wanted Ishii to be a bit more "empress-like" - more formal and intimidating and traditional?  All I know is I wouldn't want to get on her bad side. That smile is vicious.

Supervillain #3: Pachacuti Jr.

Ever wanted to be a reincarnated Incan god-emperor?

Pachacuti Jr.'s has founded his base at Machu Picchu, rebuilding the ancient Incan citadel into a modern-day supervillain fortress.  His closest continent locations are South and North America.  Thematically, I envision Pachacuti as insanely powerful but somewhat naive and comically dim-witted.  He garners his mystical power from the sun (and human sacrifice, of course), and his schemes consistently revolve around how to harness the sun's energy more effectively.  His lackey, Priestess Quilla, is more of a co-conspirator and administrative assistant than "lackey."  Truth be told, if it wasn't for her sagacity and organizational skills, Pachacuti would have destroyed himself and the entire planet in his last plot to shift Earth's orbit (directly into the sun).

Pachacuti Jr.'s strength is "Solar Power":  after revealing a contract, you can exhaust Pachacuti to lower the target value of that contract by 1 (making it easier).  Or you can exhaust both Pachacuti and Priestess Quilla to lower the target by 3!  This is an incredibly powerful ability that will greatly reduce your likelihood of failing contracts - especially Easy and Hard ones.

Pachacuti Jr.'s weakness is "Heretical Dogma":  every time you succeed at a contract, you lose 2 attraction points.  Basically, Pachacuti becomes more insufferable and demanding with each success he has, making him a less attractive supervillain to work for. Strategically, it means that you might want to think twice about simply trying to complete as many contracts as possible; focusing on fewer, but higher difficulty contracts is likely a better option.  As is looking for other ways to earn Infamy (via Room card effects and Scheme cards, for example).

When Rob first showed me his sketch for this piece, I went gaga.  It just wasn't what I was expecting and surpassed anything my imagination could have come up with.  Another example of how Rob just sees the world differently from the rest of us mortals - and thank goodness!

Supervillain #2: Dr. Hominoid

Let's meet the great doctor...

From the beginning, the consistent favorite among Infamous playtesters has been Dr. Hominoid.  And why not?!  The trope of genius-gorilla-scientist has long been fun for comic book fans (e.g., Gorilla Grodd, Monsieur Mallah), and I admit to a certain predilection for hyper-intelligent non-human primates.

Dr. Hominoid resides on the island of Madagascar, and as such, the closest continent locations to his secret base are Africa and Australia.  Thematically, he's a militant environmentalist who believes that eradicating Homo sapiens is the best way to save the planet.  His lackey is the lovable Mr. Jones, a quick-witted but lazy research assistant who'd rather be playing video games than conquering the world.

Dr. Hominoid's strength is "Evil Genius," which gives him two benefits.  First, he starts the game with an extra Scheme card.  Second, every time he visits The Underground special location, he can draw 2 Scheme cards (instead of 1).  Scheme cards are very helpful in Infamous.  Each one comes with two possible benefits:  a) you can play the card for its "help you" effect, which gives you a benefit or bonus at some point during your turn, or b) you can play a Scheme for its "hurt them" effect, which negatively impacts other players (basically, a "take that" card).  If you enjoy scheming and possibly messing around with your opponents, then Dr. Hominoid is for you.

Dr. Hominoid's weakness is "Incompetent Assistant" - which, you may guess, has to do with the capricious Mr. Jones.  When weaknesses are in effect, you must use the "incompetent" version of the Mr. Jones lackey card, which significantly reduces his value when assigned to contracts.  Most likely, you'll be keeping Mr. Jones around in your base, where you can keep an eye on him...

And what can I say about Rob's art that doesn't speak for itself?  I love his tie, and the pens in his pocket.  He's also clearly good at multi-tasking.

Supervillain #1: The Arctic Queen

We're probably a little over a month away from the launch of the Infamous Kickstarter.  I also have a bit more time in my schedule to write/blog about Infamous, since the academic year is closing and I'll be submitting grades this week.  Of course, summer research begins at the end of the month, but I'm going to ignore that for now...

Let's start meeting the central characters of Infamous:  the Supervillains!  Each player will choose one of five different supervillains to play.  The supervillains are differentiated by their flavor and artwork, their secret base location, their Strength, and their Weakness.

The Arctic Queen was one of the first supervillains I came up with, and my daughter Inara helped me flesh out the idea.  The Arctic Queen's secret base location is in Glacier Bay, Alaska - which means that contracts in North America and Asia are closest.

Thematically, she's got the whole sorceress-who-wants-to-freeze-the-planet thing going on.  Inspired by The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, as well as the The Snow Queen (Danish folklore).  She's introspective and isolationist.  Rob's artwork is just brilliant, I think; he's made the Arctic Queen sensuous and otherwordly and intimidating, all at once.

The Arctic Queen's lackeys (to be shown at a later date) are supernaturally intelligent, sibling saber-tooth tigers:  Sabra & Sable.  If you choose to play with the Arctic Queen's strength ("Exceptional Smilodons") Sabra and Sable become more powerful than any other lackey in the game.  The Arctic Queen's weakness is "Suspicion & Discord," which punishes you if your contract teams are composed of different henchmen types. 

Who's the Queen best suited for?  Your daughter, of course!  Or anyone who's jonesing for some serious climate change.

2-player Infamous? Enter the D.O.P.E. squad!

Infamous has several interlocking mechanics, but perhaps the most central is the opening draft for Secret Base Room cards.  At the start of each round, players draft up to 3 new rooms to build into their base.  These rooms are central to your strategy.  Each one will provide a certain number of "attraction points" for different henchmen types (Beasts, Criminals, Scientists, and Mystics), and many rooms also possess unique activated abilities.

Drafting is a great mechanic for so many reasons.  I love how it speeds up play through simultaneous activity.  Every player is reviewing and choosing at the same time - not sitting around and watching someone else deliberate.  I also love how the cards you're choosing from are in your hand, and thus, easily readable.  Games which force players to choose from a communal line-up of cards lead to frustrating usability issues; for example, players not being able to read small card text from across the table.  Finally, drafting is a form of light player interaction.  The decisions you make influence the ones subsequent players can make.

However,  early on in playtesting, it became clear that drafting for room cards - and the subsequent attraction of henchmen to your base - didn't quite work with 2 players.  There wasn't enough interaction during the draft itself, and there was too little competition for the available henchmen.  Players could easily accrue a large retinue of henchmen each round and fulfill a bevy of contracts without feeling substantial pressure.

As such, I started to develop a dummy player (or automata) for 2-player games who could spice things up a bit.  Rather than make the dummy another, potentially faceless, supervillain, I thought it might be interesting to thematically dress up the dummy as a squad of superheroes.  These heroes interfere with the players by stealing away (arresting) henchmen during the Henchmen Phase, and patrolling the world during the Contract Phase.  

Perhaps most importantly, the automata rules were simple to instantiate and involved only a single deck of Hero cards.  As such, 2-player Infamous is:  1) only slightly different from the regular 3-5 player game, and 2) thematically fun - as you find yourself getting easily annoyed by the D.O.P.E. squad.

This post also gives me the chance to show off another piece of Rob's fantastic artwork, and also the superlative graphic design work by Kody Chamberlain.  This one piece of art (for the heroes) took some time, as I wanted to work through a set of specific characters with Rob:  one "defender" for each continent.  We wanted the cultural ties to be somewhat obvious without being offensive.  Personally, my favorite is Baby Penguin - defender of Antarctica!

While the D.O.P.E. squad is limited to the role of automata in Infamous for now, I have big plans for a future expansion which makes their presence much more... intrusive.

Developing Art for Clockwork Wars

Among the seemingly endless list of things of do for Clockwork Wars lies one particularly enjoyable task:  working with a large group of very talented artists, as they complete the remaining illustrations for the game.  From my first conversations with the folks at Eagle Games, we knew that CW was going to need a large number of unique art pieces to enhance its flavor and theme.  Each Discovery and Espionage card called out for a different scene.  Given that there are 60 different cards just in the base game, art was always going to be a major issue in our development - and by issue, I mean time, money, and quality.  It takes time to find appropriate artists, and for them to complete the commissions.  Every piece costs money, and you don't want to take advantage of these extraordinarily talented freelancers.  And you can't sacrifice quality for time or cost, or it will adversely affect how people perceive your game.  The importance of artwork (and using it to draw in your potential audience) is especially clear when considering the role that KS campaigns play in modern board game development and publication.

I'm currently working with 8-10 different artists, located around the world.  Each one is going to end up doing between 5-10 pieces for the game.  The advantage of this diversity in artists is two-fold.  First, it rapidly speeds up development time.  Every artist is working on a piece concurrently, and there's a solid possibility we'll average 4-6 finished pieces per week for the next couple months because of that.  Second, working with different artists brings different visions and styles to a game.  I've always loved Magic the Gathering.  But if I was going to be honest, I'd say that at least 50% of my love for that game has to do with the artwork.  From the time when I first started collecting in the early '90's, I loved the imagery - and the different styles that various artists brought.  Personally, I always loved the immediately-recognizable style of both Rebecca Guay and Chippy:

Now, there are disadvantages of working with multiple artists too.  First, the logistics are more challenging, since you're in communication with many different people, all working on different projects at different stages.  I'm a very organized person, fortunately, so logistics don't bother me.  Second, the diversity in artistic approaches can be a detriment to stylistic consistency within a game.  Not all our Rhinochs are going to look the same.  Some of our artists have a more "photo-realistic" style, while others are a bit more impressionistic.  Take, for example, this image of a steampunk Gargoyle, drawn by Shane Braithewaite:

Compare to this illustration of the University, by Marco Morte:

And this image of the Harvester, by Ben Jackson:

These artists have such different visions and styles, and I absolutely love all three of them.  To me, the variety in art in a clear boon to Clockwork Wars.

The process of working with these folks is just flat out fun.  The first step is to generate some ideas for what a particular card's "scene" might be.  I really have to immerse myself in the world of Clockwork Wars to do that, and exercise my imagination.  For example, here's a description I recently sent to one of our artists:

Card name:  Sabotage
Theme:  Espionage
There's a large water mill or dam in the image.  Some Troglodyte spies/saboteurs are planting explosives that will blow up the mill/dam.  OR the dam is already exploding, and the Trog spies are observing from a distance.  I imagine a somewhat distant point of view for this image, so the Trogs don't need to shown in clear detail.

I'm trying to provide enough guidance and inspiration without over-detailing and impinging upon their creative process.  The fact is, I've been surprised and delighted by nearly every single piece our artists have come up with.  Their visions are much more imaginative and interesting than anything I could possibly generate.  This is why I'm a scientist and not an artist.  The artist will then get back to me with some initial sketches, which we'll chat about and possibly revise/dump before they proceed into coloring and detail-work.  

I hope you enjoyed this brief look into the art design process for Clockwork Wars.  Everything has been a learning experience for me, but that's honestly been one of the best aspects of all this.  Gaining some insight into an industry that I've always been curious about.