A little story goes a long way towards making a game more than than just the strategic hunt for victory points. Last week, I wrote about adding story to the simple little Ape City Escape board game. I came to the conclusion that characters, imagery, and mechanical terminology were the three places where I could sneak in some story.
Today, I’m going to pull out my comically-oversized magnifying glass and look at the characters who are trying to escape Ape City. At the moment,they’re just “Red, Green, Blue, and Yellow Pawns,” but with a couple lines of flavor text, I hope they’ll become much more.
- Ms. Red grew up hearing tales of adventure from her father, the great jungle explorer. His greatest triumph was finding the lost city of the apes, but without evidence of his discovery, he was dismissed as a madman and died in shame. Ms. Red has long sought the ape city to validate her father’s claims. Now that she’s found it, she needs to escape with enough evidence to convince the Explorers Guild that her father was right, and she deserves his seat on the council.
- Professor Green is a junior archaeologist at a minor university, where his salary might almost be able to support his family, if the market hadn’t crashed, saddling them with debt that’s slowly crushing them. When a strange visiting professor offered him a small fortune to go on a jungle expedition, Green gladly accepted. But now the expedition is in ruins. The other members are missing, and Green just wants to escape the the city with enough gold to keep his family out of the poorhouse.
- Ms. Blue should be dead. The high-speed car accident destroyed her car and killed her passenger; there’s no reason she should have been able to walk away from it, and yet she did. Blue took her brush with death as a sign that she should embark on a new life of adventure and excitement. Life is too short, she says, to spend it in safety. Her quest for thrills has brought her to the city of the ape, where death may finally catch up with her. She’s not afraid. She’s faced death before, and is willing to do so again.
- Mr. Yellow has no business being in the jungle. He’s a city boy, a troubleshooter who solves problems in the streets and back alleys on the behalf of his mysterious employers. He’s never met his bosses directly, but works through their middlemen. Still, the money is more than generous, so when they sent him to the jungle with a map and a mission, he didn’t ask any questions. Now that he’s here, however, and facing down cannibal apes, he’s beginning to have second thoughts.
A couple notes on what I did there:
First, you’ll note the windows into a larger storyworld. What’s up with the Explorers Guild? Who’s the strange visiting professor? What does Mr. Yellow’s mysterious employer really want? These questions have no answers in the game and don’t matter for gameplay, but they intrigue the audience and hint at a larger world.
Second… No, I still haven’t actually named the characters. Anyone have any suggestions? Yes? How about you in the back? Give a cool name that I use, and I’ll send you a cookie!
