Tempête sur Magellan

Introduction

Tempête sur Magellan is a space exploration game in which, one or more players, will have to face numerous hazardous situations, which they must survive using their equipment and their collective thinking.

The game take the form of a boardgame, mixed with card booster. Indeed, in addition to the starting elements (The resources helpers, some cards, part of the board), a booster is needed to play a game. This booster contains the rest of pieces needed, the spaceship and the events players will face. This way, each game is unique due to the random nature of the events and the ship, found in the booster, making the discoveries in every game as interesting and fun as possible, much like the thrill of unraveling a new card in a classic TCG booster pack.

Pitch

Onboard your new ship, fly through the uncharted space and its dangers, in missions scattered around the galaxies.

Intention

At the start of the design, our major priority was the renewal of the experience and of the situations offered to the players. We wanted the renewal to reach a point which would prevent players from mastering the game and thus losing this feel of discovery.
With this goal in mind, we looked at the idea of incorporating boosters, containing procedurally generated cards arrangement, ready to be played directly out of the box.

Furthermore, during the early playtests, we witnessed that people outside the game tended to participate in the overall arguments about what the next move should be for the players. We found that behavior interesting, so we choose to embrace it by remove any maximum player count and reworking the game to fit that new player structure.
So instead of calling the game “Cooperative”, we call is “Collaborative”, because of the way each player has the same abilities, status and state as the other. And of course because of how all the players have to decide collectively of the next actions, rather than individually.

Mechanics

Event cards

Each card in the booster is an event, those are the event the players will have to face and solve. Once resolved, this card can be added to the solved card pile.
Events are generally hostile or ally ships, that must be destroy when hostile and helped when ally.
The front of this type of card contains every information about the event itself ( Type of ship, Hull, shield, etc…) and a special effect that can be used by the players once per game, but only after the event is solved. And the back contains resources that will help players manage their ship.

Card tearing

Manipulating the game’s physical ellements take a central place in Tempête sur Magellan’s design. Indeed, in multiple occasion, players will face a choice, tearing or not a card, specifically solved event card.
By doing this, the players will be able to gather resources located on the back of the card, to then dispatch those (Piece of card) on the game board (The ship). But, all of this as a cost, every thing located on the card front is lost.

Game pieces

The game is played using the following pieces:

The starter pack, which include, the turns helper, ressources management helper,  some special reusable cards, several rule cards (to avoid players looking up the rule book too often) and a complete rule book.

And the card booster, containing every card event, the ship and a mission brief, setting the narrative starting point.