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
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