From our earlier CQC prototype (along with a few others that didn’t quite pan out), we arrived at something we were calling at the time Outwitters: Skirmish. It was “Outwitters” in name only; there were no races, no bases, and no fog of war.

In Skirmish you chose 3 heroes, and each hero had its own minion class (the little guys with the numbers). You’d win the match by owning all 4 flags, defeating all the enemy heroes, OR by earning enough Victory Points. VP was a way to keep matches from dragging on too long; you got them from taking over flags or defeating enemies.

A lot of these ideas are still present in Game 6 in one form or another, but a lot has changed.

The biggest cut feature from Skirmish was character customization. Each of these heroes had something like 5 special moves to choose from, but you could only equip 3 moves for a battle. So we might both pick the Scallywag Captain, but we could still be using him in different ways.

This was very cool for variety, but it took a lot of reading and comparing to choose from all those moves (choose 3 characters, now choose 3 moves each). It didn’t help that the moves were also fairly complicated and interacted in all sorts of weird ways. They involved things like status effects and passive attributes that basically went full RPG.

Overall it was a lot less approachable than Outwitters and a lot harder to teach, which is not what we’re going for. Our goal for Game 6 is something as elegant as Outwitters, but with more flexibility and surprises in the way characters can be used.

Here’s a look at a few of the game pieces we had for the myriad status effects and traps in Skirmish:

From this prototype we learned that customization was cool, but we had to keep complexity in check.

Want to know more? Stick around! We’ll be posting lots of artwork and details here weekly. If you haven’t already, be sure to sign up for our mailing list to get email reminders when we hit big milestones for our followup to Outwitters, like the launch of our Kickstarter, Early Access/beta, and the official release.

The road to Game 6 started with some pretty simple questions. What do we like about Outwitters, and what could we have done a better job with? As game designers, we explored these questions with lots and lots of prototypes. Some of them never got passed the “idea” phase to a playable state, like this abandoned “gameboard” file I found while digging through our old stuff. I think I was in the middle of figuring out what size everything needed to be on a phone screen.

We explored all kinds of stuff. Should moving a piece really cost you a wit? What about square spaces instead of hexes? What if you could push people into pits? Does that kill them? How can we make teams more unique from each other without adding a ton of production time to new races?

This is one of our more “out there” prototypes; what we’re working on now is a lot closer to the classic Outwitters map setup. I throw these gameboards together in Adobe Illustrator (much faster than having Alex actually code them), create a quick and dirty PDF manual, and we copy/paste game pieces around the board to play.

I called this prototype “CQC” because we were experimenting with very small boards. Positioning your units was important, but it wasn’t as crucial as how you played your character’s abilities.

Only red team could move on the red spaces, and only blue team could move on blue. The three brown spaces in the middle could be used by anyone. Your general, the mustachioed guy, could only jump between the 3 dark spaces, and you lost if he was defeated. Each player had a deck of cards with troops you could spawn and crystals to trigger their special moves. As you can see we had lots of different minions, and you could choose which ones you wanted to add to your deck.

The card deck portion felt too random for an Outwitters follow-up, and the board size was pretty stifling. But the idea of having a general, like a living Outwitters base that could fight back, was one that we decided to explore further…

Want to know more? Stick around! We’ll be posting lots of artwork and details here weekly. If you haven’t already, be sure to sign up for our mailing list to get email reminders when we hit big milestones for our followup to Outwitters, like the launch of our Kickstarter, Early Access/beta, and the official release.