Influences

I had a board game revelation in 2016. Until then, the heaviest games I'd played were Risk: Godstorm and half of a Risk Legacy campaign (cut short, sadly, by a move from Illinois to Pennsylvania). I didn't even know there were cooperative board games until friends visiting for a weekend brought Pandemic. But the real epiphany came when the same friends later brought Betrayal at House on the Hill (2e). This was a game not just with roles, but with characters. A game with narrative. And, not insignificantly, a game with gear and rudimentary leveling up.

I went through high school with Stephen King and Kurt Vonnegut in the (very large) pockets of my jeans. My adolescent brain marinated in JRPGs and CRPGs and ARPGs and MMORPGs and...RPGs. (I cut my teeth on Mario RPG, but Final Fantasy 6 will forever be my north star.) In the summer after my sophomore year, the girl who worked at Video Update and I would rent five horror movies for five days for five dollars and watch them all, and she would Be Kind and Rewind and return them when she went back to work. Flawed as it was, Betrayal opened my eyes to a glimmer: a board game could, somehow, touch all of that. Not quite a choose-your-own-adventure story, decidedly not a video game (more on that here), but still thematic, still engaging.

Clockwise from top left: Final Fantasy 6, Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon, Baldur's Gate 2, Arkham Horror 2e. Whether for feel or mechanics or both, these are some of the games that have most influenced me.

After that weekend, I didn't have anyone to play with. My kids were little, my wife was not a heavy gamer, and DuBois, Pennsylvania didn't have any gaming group that I knew of. So my eager search was "games like Betrayal at House on the Hill that can be played solo." I discovered the Board Game Geek forums. They led me to Arkham Horror. It was like I'd been led to the door of a castle and told, "Welcome home."

Arkham Horror (2e) will always hold a special place in my heart. I still get it out, the game and its eight expansions packed efficiently in my stained Arkham Altar. I could wax poetic for more words than anyone would care to read about what absorbed me so thoroughly. I'll spare you. Suffice it to say, if Betrayal was a whisper of what games could do, AH was a symphony (an often-dissonant, arrhythmic symphony, but reason will never triumph over my love for this beautiful mess). After Arkham, I was hooked.

I went on the spree that's probably familiar to most people who were bitten by board games. In short order, I spent time with Mage Knight, Pathfinder: The Adventure Card Game, Imperial Assault (pre-app, RedJak on BGG developed a polished solo variant), Sword and Sorcery. Later standouts included Gloomhaven (an eye-opener in terms of the potential scope of a campaign), Folklore: The Affliction, Middara: Unintentional Malum (a tune in harmony with my JRPG roots), 7th Continent, Isofarian Guard, and Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon. There were dozens of others, of course, but this is already a long post. I discovered loves, likes, and wishes in all of these games.

I started thinking about making my own game early, in 2017, as I played Arkham Horror and found myself wishing I could explore the world more deeply. In March of that year, I started working on a much more naive, much different version of Empty Earth: Brockton. I wasn't sure at the time if it was going to be an experimental book with game elements or an experimental game with book elements. As time passed (and as extended narrative text and campaigns became more commonplace with the boom of Kickstarter games), it coalesced decidedly into a game. But three common pillars have emerged among all the drafts of Brockton and all the games I love most, and they call back to what I grew up loving: rich theme, engaging mechanics, and organic exploration and discovery.

My hope is that those three pillars run straight through the foundation of Empty Earth: Brockton. Over the coming months, I plan on ramping up playtesting to refine the game to the point that it's worthy of mention among the games I've listed here. If you're interested in playtesting or receiving updates, you can sign up for the mailing list here, or visit the Events Page. If you want to learn more about the game's mechanics, check out the [Rules] section of the site. If you're interested in Brockton's story and characters, check out the [World Book]. (The website is still a work in progress, and it's second fiddle to the development of the game, so I'll link these sections as soon as they're presentable.) Onward!