Hey Reader —
the game I almost made
For about two years, I was absolutely making a board game.
Not designing it in the abstract — I was playtesting, building mechanics, producing physical prototypes, doing the whole thing.
The premise: a chain of islands, each one a different kind of world, each with its own rules and its own kind of danger. A world caught mid-apocalypse, where the western coast of America has dissolved into a few island nation-states.
Players chose from a set of characters with elemental identities — a fire character, a wind character, a glass character, each built around a different relationship to power — and moved through the lands in pursuit of seven artifacts scattered across the board.
I was good at this. The interlocking systems part, the way a well-designed game mechanic is really just a story engine you can hold in your hands — that came naturally. I understood the architecture. I could see how the pieces fit.
The problem was the characters.
when they become real
I was supposed to be balancing initiative values and I kept writing scenes I had nowhere to put. Not notes, not flavor text. Scenes. Full dramatic situations involving people I was supposedly designing as player tokens, and I couldn’t stop, and they kept getting longer, and more specific, and more emotionally true in ways that had nothing to do with the game.
The fire character — Thomas, the Bard, a silver-tongued rogue with a red shirt and a past he can’t outrun — had been exiled from the only land he ever loved. This had no mechanical function. It wasn’t in the design document. I just knew it, and then I couldn’t un-know it, and then I had to figure out why, and that became three pages, and then twelve.
The game became a vehicle I was only using to get somewhere else. At a certain point I admitted that and did what I always do in these situations, which is: retreat into a novel.
the detour
I tried interactive fiction first. Twine, branching narratives, the dream of a container that could hold the game structure and the full story simultaneously.
It was the right instinct and the wrong execution. Interactive fiction is genuinely brilliant at certain things — the weight of a choice, the consequence you carry forward, the specific electricity of a door you didn’t have to open but did. It can do things prose can’t.
But every time I tried to write a Dreamer inside it, they flattened into a decision tree. They became functions — if player chooses X, character does Y — instead of people who might surprise you. The novel was always where this was going. I just had to rule out everything else first.
what the game left behind
The Chain still works like a board. Seven lands, each with its own genre of apocalypse, each requiring a different approach to survive.
Santana is a desert island where the Dry Witches guard sacred fires underground and the first Ace waits — a scorched tin cup that holds the power of annihilation.
Redwoods is a primordial forest that has swallowed a 20th-century shopping mall whole, where the health of the land and the emotional state of its Dreamer are the same thing, which makes everything there politically unstable.
Arcadia is the most beautiful place on the Chain and the most dangerous.
The Lands don’t bleed into each other. You move between distinct worlds. Each one operates by different rules.
The Dreamers still have what you’d recognize as mechanical identities — roles they were built for that shape how they move and what they can do, even when they’re working against type.
Holder Stone is the oldest of them, the healer-tank who has been making this work for a thousand years, who is the only one who still knows who she is, who loves the others with the specific exhaustion of someone who has watched everyone she loves die and somehow keeps going.
Our Lady Maeve is the goddess character — charismatic, luminous, catastrophically present, with terrible object permanence and an absolute belief in Her own divinity that is, probably, not wrong.
Queene Death is the glass cannon who cries after, neither boy nor girl, capable of surgical white-hot violence and a tenderness so fierce it could break you.
The Aces — the seven artifacts scattered across the lands — are loot drops with mythological weight. You need them. Acquiring them changes you. Not in ways that are always good, or easy.
The structure is still there underneath everything. It’s just wearing a novel over it now, which I think is the right outfit for it.
what this means for you
If you’ve ever played a tabletop RPG or a really good adventure game and felt that specific pleasure of a world that has rules you can learn, a world that becomes legible and navigable the deeper you go — that’s what I’m trying to build here.
The Lands have logic. The Dreamers have roles they exceed and fail to meet. The Aces are collectible and consequential.
You traverse, you acquire, you change.
I wanted to make you something you could play. I ended up making you something you can read. The board is still in there. You feel it in how the story moves — the structure underneath the story, the architecture underneath the structure, the game I couldn’t stop playing long enough to finish.
I’m glad I didn’t finish it.
Jacob