I the recent weeks I worked a lot on the sequel of Eldritch Express which does no have a title yet. It will take place in a Steampunk fantasy world with esoteric magic. Since I put recently a lot of time on the project, I thought I should advertise it a bit here.
I am currently working on an early prototype, I have a map with encounter tokens and some characters. I have still a lot of things to define like character special abilities and stuff written on cards. I'll probably test with just some core materials and see if I could design the cards afterwards. I feel like I might hit a wall soon that should prevent further design.
I am currently planning my components according to gamecrafters available list. I am trying my best to reduce the number of components necessary and keep the price of the game low. I want a deep and small game. I want an adventure game where there is strategy compared to other games where you are the victim of the outcome of the game.
I ordered some books to gain more information and ideas about the steampunk universe, I also read some esoteric magic book, especially Authentic Thaumaturgy which I read a long time ago. Not sure if I will be able to imbue the game with a lot of thematic content as it might be very compact. I am using double use cards which takes a lot of space. I would love to add some artwork and flavor text for the theme, but I understand that it is more work for me.
There is a lot of mechanics from Eldritch Express. Originally I wanted to upgrade Eldritch Express, but considering the copyright restriction and the limited time I have, it would be easier to just jump to the next game. That was anyway the original goal of the "Save the world" system, where each rule update is a new game with some twists of it's own instead of updating the game.
The first major modifications is the order of play which is much more streamlined and closer to the original Eldritch Horror. The second major modification is the removal of monsters from the board, as the scale of the map made it illogical to have a monster defend a whole continent. Those monsters now must be on cards where players have a choice during the combat resolution, but there are still a few things to clarify. Finally, I also wanted to remove the need to constantly hunt for equipment to be operational. There will be ways to upgrade your character, but they will be less mandatory and more permanent.
I would love to have a solid game by the end of the summer and just need to start the production process. But as any of my project, I cannot guaranty anything. I don't have any classes this summer, but I am still pretty busy. I will post some pictures when I'll have something more solid ... and a title for my game.
Enjoy and have fun!