Welcome to Meeple to Meeple uniting players around the world, a 30 minute exploration of PJ and Gareth's four-game experiences from across both sides of the Atlantic. Each episode, they share their thoughts and opinions on the World of War games, including their favorite themes, games, hot topics, and much, much more. Hey guys, and welcome to episode 67. That's right, we are still here.
And today is Don't get deserted. We're going to talk about a new game coming to Kickstarter called Isla. As always, I am PJ. And I'm Gareth. And we've got an exciting never before. We've got 3 guests today, Gareth. This could be chaotic, could be sensational, but we're going to learn about Isla, that is that I got to play first of all the UK Games Expo in 2022, right? And the team and Isla kindly sent me a protocopy, which I've been playing with friends and
family. And the preview goes up on Tuesday. But let's everyone introduce themselves. I'm going to pick it. Pick from my rights, Aaron. Hello. Yeah. Firstly, thanks for for having us on on the podcast. We're very excited to be and hopefully it's not too chaotic for having three of us here. Yeah, I'm Aaron. So yeah, one of three in Ocean City Games, the publishing company that has created Isla. I tend to do a lot of the sort of behind the scenes number
crunching. Yeah, some bits of art and yeah, and just general game design. OK. Thanks, Aaron. Aaron's. Aaron's The Number Cruncher. I like that, yeah. Is is. Does that mean you're the data, dude? The data, dude. Yeah, I like that one. That's one of the nicer Monica's. I think that's OK. I'm a data dude too. We could talk later. Excellent. OK, cool. Hi, I'm Alita, so I tend to do most of the critiquing when it
comes to the games that we make. So I haven't had the initial ideas yet, but I come in and go, oh try this, try this, take that out. And also I'm the one behind our social, so our marketing and things like that. Great. Thanks. So that confirms that confirms my story. Olita is the boss of this team. Most definitely, most definitely and. The podcast right there. And everyone's just nodding, Even I'm nodding. And Alex, the final third. The final third.
Hi. Yeah, I'm Alex. So I do all the graphic design, all the pretty pictures, and then I come up with all the wacky ideas that break all the games. Very important role. Very important role, yeah. So shall we? Let Aaron give us no view of the game. For those who haven't seen it played. It give us a a kind of an overview of somebody starting out the game, kind of what the the theme is and kind of the core mechanics. Yeah, absolutely.
So Isla is a a Roland Wright game that encompasses some more of your typical ball game components and gameplay. The theme is that you've stumbled across or you've set out to find a an island that has been has not yet been charted, and you need to make your way through the island, discovering as many species of fossil fauna and flora as you can, and make it off the island successfully and safely.
That's a that's a big one and yeah you along the way you earn research points that will go towards your total. At the end of the game it's yeah, as I mentioned it's a Roland Wright and there's a a really fun mechanic within within the the movement of the island. So we come up with a a dice exhaustion system that uses 5 polyhedral dice, and that's AD 4D6810 and A12. You're choose from one of these dice in a dice pool, exhaust the one that you want to use, and then move the many as many
spaces as the dice shows. However, what this means is as you exhaust the dice, you can no longer choose that dye in a later round, so your your options for movement become less and less. However, throughout the island there are certain spaces that you can stop and have a rest, at which point you get a specific dye back. So there may be a tile that has AAD 8, an icon on it, and if you've used your DA previously, you get that back.
So it's really a efficiency puzzle in that you need to make sure that you've got enough dice available to you to keep hopping between all of these refresh spaces enable to make it to the end. One big question, we get quite a lot when we're teaching the game. First is, well, why don't I just make my way to the end, Get off the island. You know, get those extra points
for leaving the island 1st. And yeah, the the biggest reason for not doing that is at the end of the game you're going to get a -, 1 point for every space that you haven't explored. So every space you haven't drawn on. And bearing in mind you can't backtrack on yourself, you can't draw over a place you've already drawn on.
Yeah. The idea behind this being that you know you've you've you've gone off to explore some remote island, you've just steamed through it, you've come back and what stories are you going to tell? You know you haven't really haven't really soaked in all the experience of the island. So yeah, you get more reputation the more you know about the island. You know more about the island, the more you've explored it.
I think that I mean the certainly when I played it at the games Expo and then we've been playing it at home, that dice mechanic can exhaust exhausting a dice and then trying to to get the most optimal route without losing the points and getting off the island first. But also collecting that fauna, Fauna and the Fossil part makes a really a really nice puzzle, particularly pull off a nice little combo of trying to get that dice unlocked.
It's a really clever part of the part of the game design. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, there's nothing more satisfying than getting the perfect role on your, say, your D8. That sends you just to the next D8 refresh so that you can use it and then refresh it in the same turn. That's the ideal. I think it's a backtracking as well. The fact you can't, you've kind of not bit like snake.
You don't want to end up blocking yourself into a corner or somewhere where you just can't, you know, get back to optimally and call yourself negative negative points. Yeah, absolutely. That that happens in quite a few games. You're you're drawing your route out, it's going really well. And then suddenly you're like, oh wait, I can't get those spaces anymore. Because if I do, then yeah, I guess like Snake, I'm going to eat my own tail. I won't be able to get out.
Lost forever on that, on that, on that island. What's the what's the journey been in terms of the how long, How long has the game been under design? And it's taken a couple years to get the Kickstarter since I guess I saw it. What's the journey been? Yeah. So we launched our first game back in 2020 and obviously had a lot to do around distribution and and you know everything that comes after a Kickstarter.
So isn't about 2021 that we started developing this and we were, yeah, the end of 2021. So we were developing a different game. I won't go into it in detail, but yeah, we decided to to switch on to to this new one. So yeah, it's been about two years roughly of of development. We foolishly. Yeah, it's it's going. To be easier to produce, we sort of thought this one will be. It's a rolling, right? How hard can it be to produce A roll? How can it be? And nice. I mean, he's got no, no fancy
components. It's just that little did you. Know. Little did we know? No. We fell right into that trap. Absolutely. So what? What? What happened? What was? Tipped to the other game or? No, Yeah, no, this game is that. It just it just took time to to fine tune or. We just want wait the more. I think we. Sorry, Aaron. No, go on. It's gone. I was going. To say I I think just the more we the more we fine-tuned it and the more we worked on it.
I think the more the more perfect we wanted everything to be about it and the more experiential we wanted it to be. Like So what started off as a roll and write with them. You know a pencil had a paper and some dice kind of we we suddenly we were like well, this could be much more immersive if we have you know proper tokens and meatball. This could be more immersive if we think about how we have other things that interact with them with the player.
Something Aaron, I'm not sure if you mentioned actually, but we have this kind of threat deck which kind of acts on the whole rolling A1 and that kind of negatively hinders your progress. And suddenly we found ourselves going, well, this is no longer just a role and right, this is a proper strategy that sort of bridges between exploring strategy and role and right altogether. So suddenly we found ourselves this simple little role and
right become this big journey. And also about a year ago we went, we don't want this to just be a two to four player game, we want to include a solo version as well so that then we wanted to make sure we could get enough play testing and make a really good solo version. So it's not the same game as the competitive two to four. It introduces a mythical keeper who's trying to protect the island, and so we've dedicated time to play testing the solo game specifically as well as the
main competitive game. So that's lengthened the process. A little bit that that makes sense now. Yeah. I've yeah, I've forgotten the that was added on after the after the UK games Expo. I do like the threats that that threat mechanic that Alex mentioned or where if you roll the ones, the the start player has to pick up that many cards and deal with it. But sometimes it's good stuff.
I've got something in front of me where you might find the sights here but a lot of time it's booby traps. I mean, there's some hallucinations going on, end up being poisoned. It's not always a happy trip through that island. Oh no, no. Yeah. There's no, you know, it's it's hard. It's a, you know, it's a an island that you have no idea what's going to happen. You know new species. Yeah. That threat deck was it's taken some balancing I think.
And I think anytime you're introducing luck into a ball game, we've got to be very careful. People enjoy luck in very different ways. There's a quite a wide spectrum. And yeah, like you mentioned about picking up as many threat cards as the ones you've rolled. That's. Yeah. So we had we changed that slightly. So now you you just draw one threat card no matter how many words you roll. Yeah, we do.
We don't want to be too punishing and we also want to make sure there's equal opportunity for people to to receive threats. And yeah, we've we've also mapped out some alternative game modes. So that's taken quite a lot of time as well. So we have things like playing without a threat deck, we have an alternate map in in the works and obviously obviously solo mode like like you mentioned. So, yeah, well, that's kind of taking a lot of time and balancing and replay testing.
So I I have a question about player count. Alita, you were talking about including a solo version. So one of the problems that I've had general this is a general experience is our player group has five. So tell me when when you were when you were working this out and you you landed on two to four players, how did you come up with just two to four? And is it possible to add a fifth player without altering the game experience too much?
Well, that one seems like more of a question for Aaron and Alex, but I'm. I'm happy to take it. Yeah, but I think mainly it's around. I don't think it would change too much of the game play, but it's more the length of time for adding in the fifth player. And we also don't want to have to increase the price of the game quite a lot by adding in the tokens and the mutable for a fifth player. Yeah, absolutely. I completely agree with that. I think you know we're a very,
very small publisher. We, this is our second game. We want to make it accessible. I think obviously gaming groups in terms of numbers very drastically. Yeah, four was kind of the sort of sweet spot for us when we're looking at manufacturing and stuff like that, Yeah, want to keep the price point down. There's nothing stopping you though for you know, getting 2 copies between a gaming group, mixing all the research cards together, all the threat cards.
In theory you could you could just get an extra set of tokens and have an extra map. Obviously that's untested in terms of how many research cards are available and threat cards, but you you have, there's quite an exceeding amount of of research and threat cards. So yeah, we have found that that can work, but yeah, in terms of what you'll get in the box, you'll just have the four set of tokens.
That's. Also where we differ from most rolling rights because like you're saying most rolling rights you can have up to 100 players and that we in a way. Also like myself personally, I think it's more important to include that solo game because there aren't that that many games out there that focus on a solo mode that's slightly variant from the main game. So I thought that was, is my personal opinion, a better thing to focus on than the five players as well. Absolutely, absolutely.
Yeah. No. So thanks. And Aaron, one of the things I was thinking about was a different map. Is that something that's been easy to add or I guess balancing can be quite tricky in terms of the route, how different is the map? Is that something coming later? It's it's fairly new. It's not drastically different, but in in this game where you've got, it's like it's an 8 by 11
grid. For those who don't know, you start taking out some of these spaces and although you know there might be two or three spaces missing, it has quite a dramatic effect on on the balance of the game.
And we've also changed things like the placement of the Diary Refreshers to make it a little bit more chaotic, actually, to give you a background of the idea that we have for the alternate map, it's set in the future when humans have started messing things up. So, you know, if they've brought their ships over, they've started to mine the quarries, chopped down the forests, you know, all that bad stuff, rising ocean levels, you know. So some of the tiles have sunk.
Yeah. So it does look fairly different. And we've played it and it it works. It really works. And yeah, little one, of course she's. Yeah. So far it's worked. And it's sort of been like, oh, I don't know why it's worked. I was hoping I was thinking, you know, I have to do a lot more fine tuning and we still do have some of that to do. But actually, yeah, I guess a long answer to your question. It hasn't been as hard as we thought so far.
It's good because I was one of the things about was it about maybe replayability, that after a while even the randomisation you might start to work out a bit of an optimal route. So having another choice of maps sounds like a great idea. I love the the theme of the future. Well, the current day, I guess, yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. We want to keep people engaged and that's where all the alternate game modes come in as well.
And we're planning on some online content as well that will release hot words, which Alex can tell you, I can. Yeah, we. We so wait, go. Through Alex. In the solo mode, we've got these, these keepers, which are kind of like mystical creatures that protect the island. So it's quite exciting.
It's it's an intense play actually, and one that I'm terrible at. But what in instead of sort of competing against each other, you have these these little monsters moving across the map chasing you down. I'm, I'm not supposed to call them monsters. We're supposed to be calling keepers because because it sounds safer and like less, they're less like they're horrible monsters because they're not. They're very lovely, but they will make you lose the game when
you're playing on your own. So they're kind of chasing you down. We did some nice illustrations for these and we've got these four primary keepers that sort of like an easy mode, a medium mode, a hard mode, and a really, really, really, really, really hard mode to play against.
And not like I've been in the easy mode yet, but I'm working on it. But we kind of thought like, what I like about this is that there's this kind of with a solo mode, there's this constant player like replayability. And actually if we kind of adjust those rules a little bit and sort of push the boundaries of where we can take those solo play rules, like you know, do we start to mess around slightly with the way that those keepers interact with the tokens and
things like that? Do they interact with the way that you as the player move and things like that? We can sort of slightly vary the gameplay for every solo play experience. So we want to introduce this Keeper Compendium online so that we can have guest illustrators and designers and things submit ideas and we can come up with our own as we go and and have these constant challenges like on our website. And, you know, it'll just obviously just be a part of part of our website that anyone can
access that has the game. I mean, it's pointless to access it if you don't have the game, but, you know, but some people might want to, I don't know. But yeah, it's. Yeah, exactly. So it's kind of a nice little, just like a way of keeping the sort of momentum fresh and that replayability really. Is that something that will go live through the Kickstarter? Do you encourage people to submit those ideas or is that something that happens? Yeah, I think so. Yeah, yeah, I think so.
I mean we're we're working on having a few things ready like for the launch. But yeah, I mean I can absolutely foresee us doing that as part of our Kickstarter campaign really it's like so encouraging a little bit of contribution there, a little bit of interaction. I I just kind of like I'm intrigued as sort of like when people we mentioned earlier about the kind of pushing the boundaries and adding an extra player. I'm like I'm all for doing stuff like that.
You know like I'm all for messing around with the way that you play a game and sort of introducing your own roles and stuff like that. And you know unless it's Monopoly, but you know I'm all for all that kind. I'm all for that kind of stuff. So like you know I'm I'm intrigued as to what other people come up with.
When we when we released Salvage Hidden Treasures, our first game, we when we when we went to UK Games Expo following that, we had a few people talking to us about how they'd done things a little bit differently. They'd you know they'd played with five or six players. They'd changed the way the maps worked. Instead of having this equal 4x4 grid that they they were looking at something actually we could make a different shape to that. It doesn't matter.
We can sort of change the way that we play the game, and I like the idea that people come up with their, like, we'll see things that we haven't and that's really, really cool. And Alex, you're the artist behind the game. Is that all all been designed from the start in terms of I guess look and feel or has there been like an evolution or a change of direction as you've gone through the the artwork
process? Well, interestingly this one has been a collaboration between myself and Aaron, so Aaron's a bit of a wizard as well as with the data with 3D. So with Blender and early on when we were looking at how this how the artwork for Isla was going to look, we played with a
few different ideas. I started coming up with these kind of elaborate layouts in Photoshop, come up with these vector illustrations of jungles and things, and me and Aaron were looking at this kind of minimalist low Poly 3D stuff at the time that's been used really successfully and a lot of like in the video games. And we're kind of looking again, why can't we use this in a board game? I think it'll just work really, really nicely. We can bring this really vibrant, colorful world to life
in a board game. So, So yeah, it's a bit of a collaboration between us. So I've designed tokens and all the cards and all the layouts and I've sat. I was the sucker that had to sit and work through the design for a rule book and stuff, which for anyone that's designing games out there will know the pain of putting together a report like a rule book for a board game. No, we need more pages.
No, we need more pages for that. But yeah, it's been a really, really nice collaboration and I think me and Aaron worked really well together on this, this kind of artwork style, so it's been fun. I've learnt a bit of 3D in the process as well, which has been good. It's good. Yeah. The rule book I I gave good thumbs up to. It was nicely laid out and and and I could teach and learn for it very quickly. So I'm a bit of a stickler for rulebook. So you've you have passed the
rulebooks. Check. I will put games back on the shelf if it's too hard and I've got to get a video. Absolutely. I'm played for a while because I just haven't, you know, It's got to be easy. So that's, yeah, well done on that one. Excellent. So in the the in the process, when you all started, when you decided you're committed to this, this idea for this game, was it always the plan to go through Kickstarter or how did that conversation develop? Should I go earlier?
Yeah, so, So yeah, I think going forward we'd like to continue to be a indie publisher. So going through Kickstarter, manufacturing underneath our name, that's what we did for our first game and we learnt a lot from it. So that's something for our second game we want to stick with so we can learn more and understand the ball game world a little bit more as well. OK, so how smooth was your first experience with Kickstarter? Oh, it. Was beautiful. OK. It wasn't. It was.
I mean, it was. It was all new to us, wasn't it? And I mean we we got, we got everything done, then we got, you know, we stuck to our deadlines. We we got the the game shipped as we expected it in time. But it was a lot of work. It was like. I say 22. I was just looking now on the full Game Geek. It's 2020, so that must have been a challenge in its own right.
We did something very clever how we We saved I guess some time but mostly money we wanted we wanted it to be as as cheap as we as we could get it for our backers. So we thought right we're going to it's a low run. We're going to do a lot of this stuff ourselves. So I I won't bore you with all the things that we talked we said we'll do on our our own but one of them was the inserts.
So we had this card insert in the GameStop all the components flying about and we went oh we we don't need to pay for tooling and cutting for these. Well you know it's it's it's quite a short run Alex. Should we just do it on a weekend? Oh my goodness. Cutting out hundreds of these card inserts took us days, and our hands were cramping up by the end of it. And it got to the point where a day before we had to ship all these, we still had about 100 to do.
Because I think I'd been ill and we were just there had 50 sheets between us cutting them out. It was. Awful. It nearly killed that nearly killed Aaron A. Broken Man. Yeah that was, yeah. So if anyone owns a copy of Salvage Hidden Treasures and looks at that lovely, lovely in insert, which is very nice, you can sort of know that. Well, not literal, but nearly because we did it with with Exacto knives and and rollers and stuff. But like yeah, that that nearly killed us.
So if you've got one of those, that was hand done by by the creators of the game. Handcrafted. I remember looking at it was this was the Expo as well I think. Now look at now look at the artwork, it looked like a good game. The design and the artwork layout was really nice. And just behind a rule book is a good insert. So yeah. Exactly. It was last week's episode. We were talking about inserts, won't we? Yeah, we weren't about Darwin's
journey. The Deluxe edition comes with a really nice insert and BJ was complaining. The retail version comes with nothing. It's just how vastly different the experience is in terms of setup and put away when you've got a decent insert. You know, my wife and I were playing a game this morning that's predominantly cards and we were commenting on how nice the insert was and that's that's not common, right, for a game to
come with a decent insert. And it really makes, it makes, it makes a game after the rule book. If Gareth can teach it to me, then he's going to keep it playing on the table. And if it's, insert if, if. If it doesn't go all over the place, I'll always ask for it so. The worst thing is when the game comes and the insert's so bad, you throw the insert away. Oh yeah, it's just money. And. Environmental waste. Sometimes they are shockers.
I'm just writing a note as well to add an insert to our manufacturing. The question is. Though do you always lift up the insert to see if there's any? Yes. Yeah, good. Yeah. Every time. No. No PJ you might miss. You. Always got a check. There is no reason. There is no reason for you to hide components of your game. Underneath the. Insert. Seriously, sometimes there's things there. Yeah, I just check anyway. Then it should be in the insert I'm. It's a surprise. So I can do.
I don't do surprises when you come over. I'm going to hide some components under the tray, just just so you can hunt for them. That's fantastic. Just stating what? I need to do a game section PJ and think well games might have some hidden components, no? 1. We know one. So Alita, this comes to Kickstarter on the 8th of Feb. Yes, Thursday. And what time do you guys go live? We're going live at 10:00 AM GMT. It's a nice thing to do before
your lunch break. Yeah, just that little pressing go. And then how long is the campaign running for? It was running until the end of February, so OK, that'd be 3 weeks later on the 29th of February. 20 OK, 29th of February it is well. Thank you for joining us listeners. Don't forget to check out Kickstarts on Thursday at 10:00 AM on the eighth of Feb when the game goes live.
Any questions? People do just drop me in the comments, or drop me or PGM message or the guys at Ocean City Games and message on Instagram and we can answer those questions there. I'd like to thank Aaron, Alex and Lita for joining us. Yes, absolutely. Thanks guys. Thanks for taking the time into your day. We appreciate it. Thank you very. Much thanks. BJ, it's been a pleasure. Thank you.
Thanks everyone for listening. Please subscribe and as always, we'd love to hear your thoughts and ideas, so make sure to leave those in the comments. And don't forget, you can also chat with us both on Instagram at meeple to Meeple.