Postmortem- The Gothic Game Fails to Fund, But Is Still Awesome
Rise from the grave.
Last week, Blackletter Games announced that their Kickstarter campaign for Damnation: The Gothic Game was cancelled. It’s coming back in March, but I can’t help but be disappointed that this ridiculous, malicious, and utterly singular game did not fund compared to all of the copycat garbage that today’s gamers throw money at on a daily basis. It’s not a game that comes with 300 bubblegum machine figures. It doesn’t try to trick you into thinking that the five years’ worth of expansion content is actually worth having or that you will actually play any of it in the two weeks your group is interested in the game. It doesn’t come with the FOMO prize of a three foot tall statue of a squid man created by one of genre fiction’s most racist writers. It’s a stupid, obnoxious roll-and-move game focused on player elimination. It flies in the face of modern game design, thumbing its nose and blowing raspberries. We need more games like this and less like whatever this week’s worker placement spreadsheet or Heroquest clone design happens to be.
I will be reviewing a prototype of the new edition soon- I already have a number of hot takes about it. I think the art direction is in the wrong direction (More Edward Gorey, less Mike Mignola) and it needs to position itself as an alternative to the morass of modern gaming mediocrity. And it needs to be just The Gothic Game, not “Damnation”. Regardless, in light of its failure to fund I wanted to boost this obscure 1992 game’s signal. Following is the review I wrote for this game ten years ago when I was writing the tabletop games column at Gameshark.com. I think it gives a good idea of what the game is all about, which I’m not sure the Kickstarter campaign did adequately. Moreso, I think I get into what makes it so unique.
When I wrote this review, the game was already 17 years old – an eternity in game years – and it was painfully difficult to find. I’ve only ever seen two copies and neither were for sale. I would very much like to see this game rise from the grave, but I also think it needs to do so with care and consideration. It’s a fragile thing – atavistic and rebellious, a morbid whimsy and a sense of good natured wickedness.
In past installments of “Games from the Crypt”, I’ve covered a lot of games that really weren’t dead at all. In fact, most have enjoyed a favorable afterlife and are still beloved by many gamers around the world. Some of the dearly departed games that I’ve written have even been brought back to life via new editions, suggesting that perhaps eternal life through republication is where good games go when they die.
In honor of the Halloween edition of this semi-regular series and for your reading pleasure, I have decided to exhume a game that is completely dead and buried with little or no hope of resurrection. It is unfortunate that the game is, in its post-partum condition, both stupendously great and outrageously rare because chances are this column is as close as you’ll ever get to it- if you would even dare to face the shocking horror that is…THE GOTHIC GAME.
To be clear, when we’re talking about THE GOTHIC GAME we aren’t talking about some Eurogame wherein the players represent mall-rat teenagers trying to impress the local vampire lord by collecting wooden cubes standing in for tubes of eyeliner, Sisters of Mercy records, and bad poetry. Nor does it have anything to do architectural styles or early Germanic tribes. This is a gothic horror game full of dread, insanity, murder, and the macabre with a decidedly British sense of mordant humour and sinister atmosphere. The goal of the game is very straightforward and to the point: kill all the other players. Each player starts with a set number of life points that generally fritter away as the game progresses until all but one player has been slain.
Each player gets an old-fashioned pawn with which to wander the doomed hallways of the haunted castle depicted on the garishly illustrated board- it’s really, really ugly but I wouldn’t have it any other way. On each turn, a player rolls a die and moves, possibly entering a room or taking advantage of one of the castle’s secret passageways. If a player enters a room, they get to draw a card in classic adventure game fashion. Each of the castle’s seven rooms has a small but unique deck so that the kitchen knife is always found in the kitchen and the iron maiden is always in the torture chamber. And the chandelier always falls in the Great Hall.
Sometimes, you might find a useful weapon and if you manage to land next to another person’s pawn you get to murder them and put them out of the game- unless they have an appropriate counter item. Other cards describe generally terrible events that befall the players- poisoned prunes, bloodsucking leeches, rampaging taxidermy, and untimely sewage dumps can happen with typically hilarious effects. One of my favorite cards is the vengeful ghost- if you get murdered your spirit lingers and kills anyone who moves into the space where you died.
There are also a couple of special rooms, a spiral staircase, a tower, and a crypt. The spiral staircase traps players, forcing them to move down toward oblivion for every roll that isn’t a six. On sixes, the hapless pawn gets to move back toward the exit. The tower lets you dump burning oil on players below, or if you have the Congolese Blowpipe you can snipe any player on the board. The crypt is entered by brave souls who have made the life-changing decision to become a vampire. Once in the crypt, the player sticks this larger black pawn over their normal one and has several turns to wander around making like Pac-Man after a power pill. For every other player that the vampire manages to catch, it extends the length of their vampiric transformation. Of course, if the vampire tries to bite the player with the wooden stake or flaming cross then its black, satiny curtains for the bloodsucker instead.
There is also an absolutely brilliant rule dubbed “the power of adjacency”. When a player starts their turn next to another player’s pawn, that player gets to choose where they move. Perhaps it represents misleading information or psychic suggestion, who knows. At any rate, the result is that a player exercising this power can force the other to step on the unstable walls of the castle parapets, possibly causing them to fall in the moat. Or they can cause them to move closer to the vampire. Or they can simply shove them into the Oubliette space and eliminate them. It’s wicked, nasty, and a fun way to be hateful toward one another.
That’s pretty much the entire game, and truth be told it is incredibly stupid. It flies in the face of almost every tenant of modern game design aesthetics, values, and expectations. It’s ruthless, directly confrontational, and almost ludicrously dependent on die rolls and card draws. And the actual goal of the game is that big no-no of modern game design, player elimination. This makes it a game that requires gamers who enjoy fun and laughs over mechanics and precision to really work. I introduced the game to a group of Eurogamers who asked me over and over again if it was really a game or just an activity. They sat and stared at their cards and wondered what they were supposed to be doing as they searched for clever mechanics and efficient strategies- neither of which exist in this game. I cackled with glee as I offed them one by one, but my malicious fervor was dampened by the fact that they were glad to be out of the game.
It sucks to be them, because THE GOTHIC GAME is also one of the most fun games I have ever played, and every single session among spirited, willing players has had at least three or four turns of events or interactions that wound up with everybody at the table dying with laughter. There is one story in particular that I’ve probably recounted every time we’ve played since it happened where a player got set on fire and had his eye pecked out by a bird before he fell in the moat and drowned. And then there was the time that somebody actually made it out of the Spiral Staircase, an event still refuted by those who didn’t actually witness it.
Among some of my friends, THE GOTHIC GAME has also taken on several house rules that we’ve sort of incorporated over the years. One is the ironclad law that any player caught rolling the die without the assistance of the included dice cup is immediately killed and out of the game. This rule has created a bizarre metagame wherein players try every trick in the book to get the person following them to forget to roll with the cup. The classic method is to hand the person the die but not the cup. Sometimes, you can catch someone off guard and they’ll kill themselves. Another rule cropped up when my friend stuck this pewter, ruby-eyed Grim Reaper figure in his box for no apparent reason. The Grim Reaper starts in the Spiral Staircase. If any player ever touches the Grim Reaper with their hand or their pawn, they die instantly. So the strategy there is to roll the die at the Grim Reaper and knock him into the pathways or into pawns. It’s hilarious when it happens.
The real woe and misery of it all though is that THE GOTHIC GAME is so rare it may as well be considered entirely unavailable. I have never seen a copy of it for sale anywhere, and those who do have it probably purchased it sometime in the early 1990s when it was briefly in print. The designer, Robert Wynne-Simmons, claims to have actually designed the game in 1966 and if this is true then it was a pretty groundbreaking design that prefigures some of the same concepts in TALISMAN and other adventure games by nearly twenty years. It is the only game to Mr. Wynne-Simmons’ credit, although it is definitely worth noting that he was the screenwriter for 1970’s BLOOD ON SATAN’S CLAW, a particularly good British horror picture that scared the dickens out of me when I was a kid and I saw it on Elvira’s Movie Macabre. Mr. Wynne-Simmons has also apparently written a stage musical about THE GOTHIC GAME, although I suspect it has never been performed.
I love THE GOTHIC GAME, but I am also enormously predisposed to love it. I am a gothic horror fanatic, and specifically I love English gothic horror. I have a fondness for all things spooky and morbid, and I think anyone so inclined would love this game as much as I do. I love it so much that a couple of years ago Dollar Bill (whom you may remember from the Cracked LCD series “There Will Be Games”) and I contacted Mr. Wynne-Simmons to see about possibly reprinting the game in a new edition with the classic gameplay intact and a modernized version with some new elements included in the box. He was very receptive to the idea, but plans never fully materialized and the initiative was lost. Chances are we would have lost our shirts on it. I’m not sure the polite world of modern boardgaming would have been very receptive of a game that encourages you to kill everyone at the table in the most gruesome ways possible.
Editor reviews
One of the most fun, most obnoxious games ever published.
We write how people die on our score sheets and save them. Looking over the old score sheets the number one killer is "Death by Prunes."
ubarose wrote: We played just this weekend. I have vowed to write up rules clarifications (which may actually be considered house rules, as some of the rules are a bit ambiguous). I think there is only one issue that needs to be addressed, which is that when the game gets down to only two remaining players it can drag. I'm thinking of adding a house rule that when the game gets to that point, players lose 10 or maybe 20 points of heath at the beginning of every turn.
We write how people die on our score sheets and save them. Looking over the old score sheets the number one killer is "Death by Prunes."
I like the house rule. I save my old score sheets, too, and I am surprised that your Prunes are so lethal. I estimate at least 1/3 of the deaths that I have seen involved the vampire.
Shellhead wrote:
ubarose wrote: We played just this weekend. I have vowed to write up rules clarifications (which may actually be considered house rules, as some of the rules are a bit ambiguous). I think there is only one issue that needs to be addressed, which is that when the game gets down to only two remaining players it can drag. I'm thinking of adding a house rule that when the game gets to that point, players lose 10 or maybe 20 points of heath at the beginning of every turn.
We write how people die on our score sheets and save them. Looking over the old score sheets the number one killer is "Death by Prunes."
I like the house rule. I save my old score sheets, too, and I am surprised that your Prunes are so lethal. I estimate at least 1/3 of the deaths that I have seen involved the vampire.
I think it is because we nearly always play with 8 players, and the Kitchen seems to be the most visited room due to it being in the middle of the board, it's proximity to Dracula, and the fact that it seems to have more beneficial cards than the other rooms (butcher knife, garlic, Christmas pudding). Therefore, we always run through the Kitchen deck, so Prunes always makes an appearance at least once, if not twice. I think Prunes ding you for about 40 life points, so it can be a killer.
Our Draculas seem to be more successful at getting themselves killed by garlic, stake or not returning to the Vault in time than they are at killing other players.
Anyway I better go now as I have likely earned ire from many people and they are probably all thinking of a terrible misfortune for me ... likely very gothic.
But I do think a modest 500 piece print run would sell through, especially if it were only very lightly updated.
But this is not a million dollar KS. Or even a $50k one.
Firstly, I just want to say thank you to everyone from here who backed the game on Kickstarter. Obviously, it didn't go the way I wanted it to go on this occasion. I need to consider the options now in terms of moving forwards, but I'm still committed to releasing the game in the future.
Also, I just wanted to respond to a couple of points that Michael has made in his excellent piece, as well as to some of the subsequent comments.
Michael's version of the game
I would have been really interested to have seen your interpretation on how to take the game forwards - I'm sure you'd have done a great job of it. However, if you'd gotten a little further with the venture, you'd have hit a couple of significant barriers. Firstly, the trademark had lapsed. I couldn't have called the game 'The Gothic Game' without the risk of being sued by the people who developed the 'Gothic' series of video games. I contacted them to see if we could come to an arrangement (I didn't want to alter the name), but it didn't lead anywhere.
If anyone thinks finding a sensible, original, available ‘.com’ URL is tough... try finding a decent trademark that's available in the UK, US and the EU. Personally, I'm delighted with Damnation - apologies if anyone doesn't like it. Whatever your take, I really don't think this would have had too much bearing on whether people backed the game or not.
The second barrier was that the creators (Robert and Nigel) didn't own the IP for any of the artwork, which includes the logo. So I had to start from scratch with all of that too. Using the same box art was simply never an option.
Art is obviously hugely subjective, but if there's something about this game that's drawn - almost - entirely positive feedback, it's the visuals. I think this game would have worked with a Gloom, or Escape the Dark Castle aesthetic, but given the positive reaction, I have no regrets going down the Mignola-inspired route.
Second Kickstarter
No, this is absolutely the one and only Kickstarter that has been run for this game. This is obviously quite concerning to read. Shellhead – if it’s not too much trouble, would you mind asking your friend if they have a link to that campaign? I’ve not been able to find anything on there myself.
The Gothic Game in today's climate
Thanks for your blunt assessment, Southernman (Tom?). This clearly characterises the views of many people.
During the development of this version I've not shied away from making changes to the game in an effort to make it more appealing to a modern audience. People will read that and I'm sure blood will begin to boil... but just from reading the comments on this site, this is a game that is almost universally played with a set of house rules. I’ve just tried to expand on what most fans have already identified as being improvements to the game.
Fundamentally, here are the two things I wanted to try and improve:
- I wanted to speed the game up, particularly after the first player has been eliminated
- I wanted to increase the number of options available to players
Having read the comments on here, as well as on the other post, I hope the first stated aim is something of a no brainer. On the second aim, the original can feel like a 'spectator sport' at times - even if you're still alive in the game! I wanted to give players more choices and decisions to make, which I think adds a great deal to the experience.
At some point, I'll write in detail about the individual changes I've made. I’m sure there will be people who disagree with them, but I can talk through the reasoning for each one in more detail at a later date if anyone’s interested.
For me, the magic of The Gothic Game is in the way it generates "remember that time when..." moments. I think there's something about these shared experiences that transcends 'modern' or 'old school' tastes. Does the game feature mechanics that are considered outdated? Clearly, yes. Does that mean it can’t be popular with modern gamers? I’d argue, no – but obviously it will always be something of a niche audience.
I'll be honest with you all, I was pretty terrified when I sent out the review copies. I was braced for the absolute worst, but I've been blown away by the reaction to the game, which has been hugely, hugely positive - one guy actually said it's his game of the year (!!!?!?!). It gives me hope that this version does have an audience, despite suggestions to the contrary.
Thanks again for all the comments - I enjoy reading them. If anyone has any thoughts and suggestions, I’m all ears! I’m a huge fan of the original, just like you, and I want to make this game the best it can be.
Kris
Please do.Kris wrote: At some point, I'll write in detail about the individual changes I've made. I’m sure there will be people who disagree with them, but I can talk through the reasoning for each one in more detail at a later date if anyone’s interested.
One of the issues I wanted to address right from the very beginning of this project was speeding things up, particularly when the first player is eliminated from the game. That's the point at which it can become frustrating for some people. The longer it drags on, the greater the frustration. I tried to address that by adding a set of Deathknell cards that are revealed as each player is killed in the game, each one introducing a new rule that will speed up the game - for example, The Creature means that from that point onwards entering The Moat is fatal. The idea was that once 2-3 of these are in play, the game is going to end pretty quickly. This definitely helps, but it still wasn't there.
Next, I gave players an incentive to play aggressively by rewarding players with 'Soul' tokens when they eliminate another player. These can be traded in at a new room called The Dark Tower for super powerful cards like The Vampire Cloak which allows you to always move up to your movement total while you hold it. Again, it helped, but it wasn't quite there. We played a couple of games in Spiel in 2019 where the two remaining players basically played incredibly defensively. Both quite happy to just move up and down a corridor on opposite sides of the board. I'll be honest, it was a painful experience to watch!
Since then, I've come up with a solution. The game now takes place over four chapters, which I'll summarise here:
The Arrival
This chapter covers the characters entering the castle while it's still dusk and so there's still some light outside. Each player takes four turn back to back in order. They can't interfere with other players during this time and a couple of rooms are locked. It basically gives players the opportunity to pick up 2-3 cards before the game begins properly.
Anyone who's played The Gothic Game will be aware that the area at the beginning of the game can become something of a bottleneck. It could descend into a power of adjacency back and forth, which while sometimes fun, could lead to players dying having had very little to do. Again, sometimes amusing.
Once this chapter concludes, the characters are dispersed throughout the map and everyone has had a chance to pick up a couple of cards. Plus, by making it back to back, it's really quick - about 5 minutes at four to five players.
Nightfall
Once all players have taken their four consecutive turns, the game starts for real. Players can very much interfere with one another from this point onwards!
The Descent
The third chapter is triggered when that first player is killed in the game. This is the crucial turning point and by honing in on this moment in time we can start to put pressure on the remaining players. During this chapter, the Descent tracker will move down a space at the end of each player's turn. There are a couple of spaces that will lead to players revealing Deathknell cards, and once the final space is reached, the fourth and final chapter is triggered - The Fall.
The Fall
I read that the original ending to Dracula would see the castle crack and fall into the ground but Stoker considered it too similar to 'The Fall of the House of Usher.' Using that as inspiration, during this chapter, the castle begins to crumble which causes 1 damage to a player at the end of their turn. Only one room is safe from this - The Great Spiral Staircase. In addition, players can no longer gain health, and entering The Vault is instant death (no more deals with The Vampire!). Essentially what this does is put a clock on the game.
As of now, games tend to finish around 10-15 mins maximum after the first player is killed. Quite often games conclude while still in The Descent. It works perfectly and is consistent. Finally!
Another major change we've made is to introduce the concept of haunting the castle. Inspired by the video game Crawl (absolutely amazing game by the way). Once killed, players flip over their character boards to reveal the Haunt side. From this point onwards, on that player's turn they can choose from one of six powers to subtly influence the game in various ways. For example, they can look at the top two cards off any room deck and return them to the top or bottom of that deck in any order. Or they can become a wraith and until their next turn, players who pass the location where they were killed suffer 2 damage. There's even an opportunity to roll 3 dice and on getting a '666' return to the game - obviously very unlikely, as it should be.
The Haunt mechanic means that eliminated players are still engaged in the game, which again reduces the frustration people feel. Balancing these powers has been really important and I'm very happy with where they are right now.
So those are the two major things I've changed. If you're reading this and you hate these ideas, perhaps you're a Gothic Game purist, well we've got a 'classic' game variant that removes them and tries to recreate the feeling of the original as much as possible.
If you'd be interested in checking out the campaign, here's a link to the campaign. As I say, it will be going live on Tuesday. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/blacklettergames/damnation-the-gothic-game-0/
I'm excited for the campaign and have a couple of really nice surprises lined up - look out for Halloween! I've also got a couple of interview with Robert Wynne Simmons that I'll be sharing as well.
If anyone has any questions, I'd be very happy to answer them.
Thanks for reading - so much for brief eh!
Kris
That Haunt graphic has a spelling error: "Decent" should be "Descent".
If someone actually did it, no one would ever forget it!
I suppose some sort of dice manipulation could happen to increase the odds. Something like +1 reroll for each round after death that the game continues. I have never played this game so I am just throwing out nonsense.
hotseatgames wrote: I suspect it's meant as an option you can pick if you really don't want to do the other choices, since the game will end soon anyway.
If someone actually did it, no one would ever forget it!
I suppose some sort of dice manipulation could happen to increase the odds. Something like +1 reroll for each round after death that the game continues. I have never played this game so I am just throwing out nonsense.
Exactly this. And then imagine you come back to actually win! Stuff of legends right there.
I am very conscious about making it extremely unlikely. Possibly it's too unlikely right now and I will consider that. Someone else suggested you get three rolls and you can 'stick' any sixes you roll. But it's speed as much as anything. You roll your three dice and bang, next player.
There's also the issue of there being a balance between people opting to use the other powers. If it was more likely then possibly every eliminated player would just do this over and over. Playtesting so far has seen a pretty broad use of the Haunt abilities, which is obviously exactly what I'm going for.
I have the original but I will be backing this. Great stuff!
Now I'm no math scientist, but wouldn't this be the same type of situation as your odds of winning the lottery? No matter how many times you play, your odds don't change?Shellhead wrote: A single roll of 3 6-sided dice yields only a 1 in 216 chance of getting three 6s. But if someone commits to that roll for 10 turns in a row, they have nearly a 1 in 20 chance of getting 3 6s on one of those rolls.
Disgustipater wrote:
Now I'm no math scientist, but wouldn't this be the same type of situation as your odds of winning the lottery? No matter how many times you play, your odds don't change?Shellhead wrote: A single roll of 3 6-sided dice yields only a 1 in 216 chance of getting three 6s. But if someone commits to that roll for 10 turns in a row, they have nearly a 1 in 20 chance of getting 3 6s on one of those rolls.
I'm not an expert on probabilities either, but I think we can both agree that the chances of flipping a coin and getting heads once is much better than the chances of flipping a coin 10 times and getting heads each time.
The odds of rolling three 6s with three six-sided dice is 1 in 218 (1/6 * 1/6 * 1/6), or roughly 0.46%. So the chance of not rolling three 6s is roughly 99.54%. The chance of not rolling three 6s in 10 attempts would be 99.54%^10 (.9954 * .9954 * .9954 etc), or 95.49%. So someone rolling three dice 10 times in a row has about a 4.51% chance of getting three 6s on at least one of those 10 rolls. Assuming I got this math right.
I would disagree; the chances are the same. As previous flips have no bearing on subsequent flips, you would start from the baseline (50/50) each time. The same should be true for dice rolls.Shellhead wrote: but I think we can both agree that the chances of flipping a coin and getting heads once is much better than the chances of flipping a coin 10 times and getting heads each time.
Though maybe we are confusing our terms? Is probability different from chance?
Disgustipater wrote:
I would disagree; the chances are the same. As previous flips have no bearing on subsequent flips, you would start from the baseline (50/50) each time. The same should be true for dice rolls.Shellhead wrote: but I think we can both agree that the chances of flipping a coin and getting heads once is much better than the chances of flipping a coin 10 times and getting heads each time.
Though maybe we are confusing our terms? Is probability different from chance?
Each individual roll is independent, yes. But the question is not about an individual roll, it's about a series of rolls. To go back to the coin flipping example, which has higher odds?
1. Flipping a coin once and getting heads.
2. Flipping a coin ten times, and getting at least one head.
#2 is significantly higher, because you only need 1/10th of your flips to come up heads in order to "win." #1 needs all of your flips to come up heads.