Andy Oakey, designer of such games as City of Guilds, Pandemic Express, and Cactus Creek, is working on a new Cthulhu mythos themed game. The game started as a simple re-theming of Forbidden Island, but has since evolved into a new game in its own rights. The working title is Forbidden Village, however this will be changing as the game moves toward publishing.
4 gate cards
24 spells/charms/artefacts
11 events
I really wanted to have the feeling of exploring the village, rather than just having the whole village there to start with.
Events
The events will include 3 “time passes” cards (same as Waters Rise in FI) and 8 other events. These events are mostly encounters with cultists, elders or deranged locals.
The way I’m thinking encounters will work is they will require you to either discard cards from hand, or take a hit to your health or sanity. Certain spells/charms/artefacts will then modify these requirements. (e.g. if you encounter a cultist you must discard 2 cards or lower your health by one, unless you have the pistol, in which case only discard one card)
Spells/Charms/Artefacts
These have multiple uses. Unlike in FI where you can “shore up” a tile as an action, in FV you need to use a spell, charm or artefact to allow you to do this. You start off with a number of charms (represented by cubes or bead, etc.) and each time you find more you increase your pool. However each time you “shore up” a tile (need to come up with a thematic name for that, something like banish the darkness, or hold back the fog maybe) you have to use up your supply.
This is one of the reasons for the larger deck. Players start off with 4 actions per turn, instead of the 3 in FI, and can use actions to search a location and draw more cards. This is how they find the gates, pick up spells/charms/artefacts and trigger the events.
Some spells are more powerful, allowing additional effects, etc. and artefacts represent all physical objects, from an occult statue to the pistol. The players health reflects both the number of actions they get per turn and also the maximum weight of artefacts they can carry (artefacts have a weight from 0 to 3).
Unlike in FI, the locations of the gates (treasure locations in FI) are not set, but must be discovered. Also there is only one of each, so once discovered the location must be secured against the rising fog, lest it be secured by the elders (lost in the fog) and you lose the game.
“Instead of having the location all laid out in a pre-set pattern they would be placed as the players move onto the locations, sort of like Zombie in My Pocket (and many others games).
This would also mean scrapping the location deck (shame as I like the design of those cards). To replace I’ve come up with a chit pulling idea. In early turns there would be no “flooding” phase. For each location tile placed, a corresponding location chit/token would be placed in a bag. Once the first “Time Passes” investigation card is drawn then each turn chits are pulled from the bag in a similar fashion to drawing cards from the location deck. When another “Time Passes” is drawn then all the previously pulled chits are put back in the bag, plus an additional copy of each of those chits (there are a total of 3 chits for each location). This makes it more likely to pull the same locations again, but still possible to pull different locations.”
Currently, The mechanics are done, the rulebook is almost done and Andy is working on the playtesting package, of which a select group will be asked to test and provide feedback. Let’s hope that if all goes well, we will be seeing a published version of the “Unnamable Game” sometime in the near future.
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