We were very excited to get an email from Greater than Games in July of 2017 asking if we wanted to do some development work on the (then) core box expansion to our favorite game, Sentinel Tactics. We had been all but managing playtesting for the expansion’s content, and had actually designed some of the first rough drafts of the characters for both Prime War, and Rise of the Ennead, which was to have been a smaller expansion that was published alongside the core box.
We had been passionate fans of Sentinel Tactics, and were very bummed to hear about the postponement of the Broken City/For Profit expansions. As we assisted in playtesting for both that wave of content, and the Prime War/Rise of the Ennead wave, we started to explore what some of the systemic things were that had turned people off to the game. We began drawing up a draft of what it would look like to make a game like this from the ground up. One that had all of the excitement that had drawn us to it in the first place, but that wasn’t carrying the baggage of what was driving people away.
When we got that email, we sat down and got our ideas organized, designing a system that used nothing from the original except the general team-focused structure. We also tried to come up with a set of modifications to the Sentinel Tactics system, in case >G wanted to keep as much of the same framework as possible. We tried to keep ourselves as detached as possible, as we didn’t know what to expect from a meeting like this, and didn’t want to set our expectations too high.
As we sat down with >G at Gen Con 2017, we started explaining what we had identified as some core issues with the existing system and what we wanted to do to help improve on them. They listened to everything we had to say, but pulled on a couple of threads we had unintentionally dropped and got us to discuss the new design we had been workshopping for the last few months. They encouraged and built upon the pieces we described, including a neat iteration of our tournament ideas for how teams could be formed to have lasting narrative impacts on the lore as the game went on. Eventually, the weekend ended, and they left us with the guideline to “Make the game that [we] want to play”.
We knew we were fighting an uphill battle with a new design on two fronts: Sentinels players didn’t seem to want Competitive play as much as we did, and Competitive players wouldn’t look to a “Co-op brand” for a deep tactical experience. We decided to build the core system to support character-level combat and, after several iterations, developed a system that allowed competitive and co-operative play to coexist and thrive alongside each other, depending on what individual game groups wanted to do.
Fast forward to the first PAX Unplugged, where we had brought a printer, paper cutter, and scissors, as we had planned to show >G our playable prototype, but had been making edits up through the drive from VA Beach to Philadelphia. We had built out a set of 6 playable characters and a rudimentary group of co-op threats, and were nervous to demonstrate how this new system played. We needn’t have worried, as everyone loved it, and immediately jumped in to show us how this or that could be improved by the removal or addition of some other minor mechanic to help things run smoother or more in line with the theme.
We would end up going to St. Louis a handful of times over the next two years, and showing off in-progress content at the next PAX Unplugged and the next two Gen Cons. The Co-op system underwent five major overhauls by our count, two major revisions of the core system, and the characters required constant balancing to keep everyone in line with whoever felt best after a given change. We ended up creating content for 16 characters in the debut roster, as well as 15 for the remaster of the characters from the original Sentinel Tactics Flame of Freedom and Uprising rosters. We made six different cooperative arcs of 3-5 scenarios each, to be split between the two boxes, made up of something like 15 different “minion” classes, 7 “Lieutenant” targets, 10 “Boss” characters, and 12 “Threats”. (Threats would be the only concept that would survive to the last iteration, and incorporated many of the best bits of all of the concepts from previous iterations.) We eventually built out each different universe into their own “environment” deck, introducing some additional randomness and excitement into both the competitive and the cooperative modes. We would end up fleshing out four major competitive match types, a set of 7 different “Boons” for each faction, multiple tools for custom scenario building, and a set of scenarios to cover each of the old Sentinel Tactics playmats.
If you’ve not picked up on it yet, we Loved this game. We’re very sad to see it close down, and (like all of you, and everyone involved in the project) we’ll probably always have a little bit of curiosity for what it could have been. We are planning to take the Meanwhile system “on the road” to see if anyone has a home for it in their line, and are utilizing it to help practice our video game development skills; so who knows? You may see this project in some form or another in a little while. And remind me to tell you sometime about the alternate squad-based 1v1 game we made on my birthday after finally seeing some bigwig comic IP’s squad-combat game in person at PAXU.
For those interested: we will probably push out a Print and Play of 6-8 characters, a couple of maps, a rulesheet, and most likely a cooperative scenario. We’re still hashing out some practical and legal issues, but we want to show you all where the game is now, and let you all feel some of the joy we had (and still have) with this game!
–Smith at the Forge
Lore Forge Games 