by Brant Guillory, 10 November 2024
Adam Blinkinsop is the designer of GMT’s upcoming Echo from the Dark, a sci-fi take on the newer Irregular Combat Series (ICS) with its own tweaks on the system. The game is currently on p500. We were able to snag a bit of his time to ask about his new game, as well as some of the development work he helped with for Red Dust Rebellion.
OK, so to date all of the COIN games have been grounded in history, and then Red Dust Rebellion falls from the sky. All of the ICS games have been historical (or historical-ish, in the case of A Gest of Robin Hood). Then you show up and now we’ve got an outer space entry in both series, one you designed, and one you helped develop. What gives? Historical stuff just too boring for you? Sci-fi just a favorite genre?
I do like science fiction — but I went into Red Dust Rebellion in late 2019 assuming that I’d need to do some development for GMT Games before they’d bother looking at one of my designs. I know a little better now, but the development experience was certainly helpful when understanding how the sausage was made. RDR just happened to be the next one on the development list.
My other favorite topics are operational Napoleonics and North Africa in WW2, and I’ve got about as many designs in the works on those topics as I have in science fiction. I thought that it’d be harder to get enough interest in a new designer’s new system about Napoleonic logistics than a space game, so here we are.
… Of course, while I was at the October 2024 Weekend at the (GMT Games) Warehouse, I started talking to Jason and Kai about other projects. No plan survives contact with the “enemy,” I guess?
As you were building Echo From The Dark, what did the process look like? Was there already a setting / story you wanted to tell and used the ICS to tell it? Or did you have some ideas for an ICS game and built a sci-fi setting around it to explore the way you wanted to adapt the system?
In 2012 I was working on a game about the fall of empires: Ozymandias. It went through versions including a deck-builder, a hand-builder, a bidding game, a stock investment game, and so forth. The joke in my design group is that I made about half-a-dozen different games that they’d like to play and then threw each one away. In a sense, Echo from the Dark is just the next iteration of that concept: what does a 4x game look like when the empires fall?
In developing RDR I saw how much COIN/ICS is good for expressing imperial decay. The civilization genre of games doesn’t care about population sentiment at all — in Twilight Imperium it’s just a fixed number on each planet, and in Space Empires: 4X it grows over time but never gets disloyal. I really wanted to see an insurgency in a civilization game.
click images to enlarge
Early prototypes of the Echo From The Dark, when it was still called Ozymandias
The setting of the story seems totally unconnected to any other sci-fi setting that we would already know. What can you tell us about the setting and what’s the ‘elevator pitch’ for underlying story?
As a designer, I’m interested in building a system that gives the players room to tell a hundred stories more than a system that follows one specific narrative. I pulled from all my favorite science fiction when thinking about narrative forces that I wanted to be in the game. As a historical gamer I was also interested in where these concepts came from, so I read up on the development of science fiction over time.
While COIN’s model is about insurgency being a quagmire, science fiction is generally built on some kind of comparative progress. That meant I needed a way for factions to grow and change over time. COIN’s scale is generally smaller (RDR being a major exception), so I knew I needed this game to show scale differently. COIN is about a measured area but civilization games need exploration and expansion, so I knew I needed elements to incentivize pushing out.
Outside of narrative forces, I also knew I wanted certain things from gameplay. For example, I knew I liked the “knife fight in a phone booth” feel and a quick setup, so to I needed all the factions to start in and around Sol. That meant the story had to begin when faster-than-light travel became possible.
After all this, I asked around in my role-playing game groups for folks who were interested in doing some writing. Names and flavor text are always difficult for me, and I knew from my RPG experience that having several people play in a narrative space always pulled a more complex and interesting story together than can I come up with on my own. I nailed down the underlying concepts for the factions and the forces at the start of play and then Louis has been producing all the awesome fiction: the italics at the start of the P500 game description is his, for example.
As you were playtesting Echo From The Dark, what’s an example of something that changed based on player feedback? How much did it differ from how you originally envisioned it? Was it an evolution, or just a hard change that you had to make and how did that ripple elsewhere in the rules?
So many things, but not usually the way the players suggest! The most helpful kind of feedback is emotional: “when X happened, it felt great” or “I was so bored when I never got to do Y.” The players testing Echo have some great ideas for fixes too, but the system is so interconnected I can’t usually take these unchanged. A couple recent changes:
Fighting over Technology. I was sitting in on a game where a tech came up early that allowed players to remove enemy forces from other tech. Usually, your standard action for removing pieces only applies the map, but the interest people showed in that tech — and the knowledge that any given tech will only become available in ~25% of games — meant I needed to look at what it’d cost to bring it into the core system.
Aside: A major concept for my local design group is the idea of a complexity budget. In order to get the most bang for your complexity buck, every system and rule and component needs to pull at least its own weight. In addition, as a game gets bigger, any additional increment of complexity is actually multiplied by all the previous increments it interacts with. COIN/ICS is a big system, so increments of complexity are immediately huge.
Allowing War on sectors or technologies with your forces has a minimal impact on complexity compared to what it supports in functionality, so we’re testing the change now.
The Salt Cycle. Another couple games I was in saw the special resource (Salt) become available too easily for certain wide-ranging factions, get spent too quickly to be stolen by aggressive factions, and end up not driving the dynamics of play the way I wanted. Players that could find it easily remarked that they lost interest in some other game pieces (because Salt can fill in for those) and players that couldn’t find it weren’t often bothering to War over it (because Salt was removed when spent). There was a lot of feedback orbiting this core issue, but any one piece of feedback on its own would have described a fix only to the proximal cause.
I knew I couldn’t just reduce how much Salt entered play, I also needed to have it stay on the map longer in order to allow factions to fight over it. My group was also talking about the narrative behind Salt — if it pops up all the time, gets moved around, and gets spent, it doesn’t have any weight as a narrative force. Further, Salt placement mechanics were tightly bound with the anomaly system, which was bound into the research system and the war system, and so on and so on.
We ended up making three changes: Salt would enter play less often (impacted anomaly placement, movement rules, and expansion forces), it would only get removed sometimes when you spent it (impacted standard actions, faction special actions, and war incentives), and when it got removed it would instead decay to an anomaly (impacted future Salt placement, dangers of war, and technologies).
When you’re not working on one of your projects, what are some of the games you enjoy playing just for fun? What are some of the main wargames that shaped you as a wargamer and inspired you design your own?
People play games for fun? (I kid.)
I think the first GMT title I got my hands on was probably Twilight Struggle (at the time, it was #1 on BGG), and it’s still my partner’s favorite game. She always plays the US against my USSR, and at the time the USSR was favored early game, so the struggle was real for her. Learning that game together was certainly the best way to get into the complexity of it, and start figuring out what a card-driven system could do.
I got Space Empires: 4X in 2011, Maria in 2012, and even ended up with Combat Commander from a 2012 Reddit Math Trade. I love seeing how designers play with systems to produce the kinds of amazing narrative that come out of games like these, it’s inspiring.
Probably my favorite wargame is Here I Stand. Every year around Memorial Day I have a time set apart for the kind of “event games” that are hard to get to the table during a normal game day. For the past decade or so this has meant wargames: long, complex, and full of wild moments. I played Here I Stand (as the Hapsburgs) first in May of 2014 and again every year or two since, with both new and experienced folks in the friend group. I’ve played Napoleonic Wars (which inspired its system) and Virgin Queen (the sequel), but Here I Stand remains my favorite.
Huge thanks for taking the time to join us for this quick interview!
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