It’s Here!

Last Thursday, I received an advanced copy of my most recently-published game (and my first non-FFG-published game), Innsmouth Escape.

I took the game out to Con of the North, a local gaming convention, to show it off some friends, and of course they wanted to play. I hadn’t actually played this thing since sending my lone prototype off to the publisher (Twilight Creations) almost a year ago, so I was a little nervous and out of practice.

“How does this rule work?” my friends asked, and I had to confess I didn’t know. But I knew where it should be in the rulebook, and… voila! The answer was there. This happened a couple times during the game, which I found strangely gratifying. It was like a gift from a past version of myself, who had looked into the future and foresaw the most common rules questions.

Thank you, past me, for the gift of a well-written rulebook.

“That’s all very nice,” you say, “But show us the hundred plastic deep ones. That’s what we’re here for.”

Fair enough:

How about some close-ups? Here you go:

And another one:

And here’s the terrified little human, with his four numbered companion cubes:

So what’s the game about? In short, it’s board game for 2-5 players, in which one player controls a lone human who is running around Innsmouth trying to rescue his friends from the Deep Ones and escape out of town. Captives are worth victory points, and once the human has eight victory points, he can escape off the board to win.

The other players each control a horde of Deep Ones, and are trying to kill the Human while collecting resources from the board.

The key mechanic in the game is a card-based hidden-movement mechanic that the human player uses to secretly plot his move each turn. The Deep One players can deduce where the Human is going by the cards has has played and the cards he has left, but the Human is revealed each round, so you’re never left in the dark for long.

You can download a copy of the rules here from Board Game Geek if you like. I’m sure they’ll be posted on the Twilight Creations site soon enough, but this will do for now.