PERSEVERANCE

Dávid Turczi and Viktor Péter catch us up with their epic Eurogame

When your cruise ship goes off course, possibly interdimensionally, and crashes on an isolated island you’d think you’d have enough on your plate. But raiding parties of dinosaurs crashing through your fledgling civilisation is certainly the icing on an already unappealing situation cake. That’s the theme of Perseverance, a four part episodic Eurogame from Viktor Péter (part owner of Mindclash, designer of Trickerion and Cerebria) and Dávid Turczi (Tekhenu and Rome & Roll most recently, and Anachrony with Péter). Putting together a game of this scope from the start seems… bonkers, frankly. Two Kickstarter campaigns, one successfully funded last year for parts one and two, and an upcoming crowdfunding drive for parts three and four in 2022 means we’re at a midpoint in the series. What better time then, while the designers are in the thick of it, to catch up with how this undertaking is going.

Like many games, it was nearly about Vikings. Péter comments that the pair’s earliest email exchanges about the game were back in 2015, when Turczi took a prototype mechanic from a bidding game and flipped it into one about Icelandic democracy. Still, in a year where Feast for Odin and In the Name of Odin appeared at Essen, Péter decided ‘the game stays, the Vikings go.’

“We came to a conclusion that if we want to simulate democracy, we need a scenario where people are building society. And why would they build a society?” says Péter, before commenting that it has to be a society – getting compared to Robinson Crusoe wasn’t going to be a great first steps into the world for a game. So, the ‘modern day cruise liner crashing on a dinosaur infested island’ theme was born.

FLEDGELING SOCIETY

The four act structure allows for a kind of intergenerational narrative to be played out across the four games.

“You are spending more than a lifetime on this island, until you dig deep into its mysteries and realize what’s going on, it’s going to take decades,” says Péter “the first generation just establishes a foothold, builds a city, builds a wall, tries to defend against the dinosaurs. But as the years pass their descendants start to spread out into the jungle, expand the settlement, become a bit more tribal, a bit more attuned to the island and the dinosaurs and sooner or later you’ll find out what’s going on. But it’s going to take four games.”

Each episode of the game in the series has also offers slightly different or expanded mechanics. The core of rolling and choosing dice to select your actions, and having playercoloured dice that represent their influence

stays the same, but players will be asked to step up in each new board they encounter.

The dice mechanic is very appealing, on your turn you can convert white dice to those that belong to your faction. This represents having convinced that worker, through deeds or words, that you’re probably the best leader for the island. Which in the end is what it all comes down to – you want to gain the most influence and become the major player in this new democracy after all. Naturally, anyone using your dice from the pool will have to pay.

Episode one is a few months long, whereas episode two is a number of years. It is the third episode that we’re now approaching which is the core of the game – the inspiration for the whole series. Despite this, “episode two is what I consider the best Mindclash game right now,” says Péter. We’re assured that the game won’t scale up in difficulty, but it’s more of a change of focus.

“Episode two is very much about, doing two or three of things all the time,” says Turczi, “and you’re trying to cook your mix of ‘if I’m going to buy these skills that make me better at this, but I need to do one of that.’ Whereas episode three, which will have a much bigger map with the island and adventuring.”

The third instalment will include, amongst other things, making friends with the dinosaurs on the island. We swap then from Jurassic Park, to Dinotopia.

“By the end of the second version in the net or the second episode in the narrative, you find something that makes you realize that the dinos might not be enemies,” says Péter.

“There’s the whole map where you can go and benefit from the dinos and do stuff while maintaining the city with the political and the influence mechanics stuff,” explains Turczi, “in fact, while the political stuff in one and two are 99% the same, the political stuff is getting a big change in episode three.”

“There’s a new simultaneous vote element to it. It’s less like you’re doing many things simultaneously – three is all about riding down the depth of the jungle to collect all the riches and return to the city to build all the buildings. And then you use the influence you got from those to pivot

into politics.”

“You have these four goalposts and you write down one of them, then you ride down the other one, but as act two is much more, as I said, the mix, your own soup of strategy. That’s how we could achieve more, not needing to have more complexity. In act three there will not be a board of 30 skills because that’s act two’s flavour.”

“In act three the depth of options and of complexity will come from the fact that, that you say like, ‘here’s your main goal. Here are your three secondary goals. Here’s the map, here’s the boards: go’. And this gives us extra space because we lost the 30 skills you have to learn. And we feel that space up with the simultaneous voting, with the interaction, with the different types of dinosaurs. There’ll be marginally more stuff to learn, but less things to keep in your head during playing then episode two. So it’s a different kind of complexity.”

CRETACEOUS CHRONICLES

Turczi and Péter are also working on a campaign mode for those who want to be able to play through all four games in a row. Although when we suggested that we’d like to lay all the games end to end, we were told our table won’t be big enough.

“There are campaign games out there which make smaller gameplay leaps from one game

ABOVE BELOW to another. But because these are different games, they can be played in ‘skirmish mode’,” says Péter. Instead the campaign mode is kind of like a mini expansion, a layer to go over the top of the main games “it has overlapping progression for your character, your leader, with your tribe. And your decisions made in one game will affect the next game, which is basically a different game because it’s a

different episode.”

“It’s not a legacy game. We don’t surprise you with the rules,” says Turczi, “we don’t destroy components. When competitive games attempt legacy, I am always frustrated by not being able to cost my strategy.”

The chronicle mode adds ‘titles’ to the game, which function as player powers or one off special action for the game you’re currently playing. These are flipped for your next game, using the perk on the bottom of each of the titles – “it’s the legacy of your achievement.” “Because there is a new society in the making here, you are fiercely competing to be someone in the new society. There are titles up for grabs like the defender, the builder, the scout and stuff like that.”

The passage of time is important in these games then, and this is reflected in the high standards Mindclash bring to their production. An example of this is the food resource tokens. Thematically it makes sense that in the first game the survivors are living off canned and stored goods from the cruise liner they unceremoniously parked in a velociraptor holiday resort, and in the second they’ve cultivated the land to produce vegetables.

“The thematic immersion is absolutely complete,” says Turczi, grinning. It’s not just down to whether you make your own soup or you’re happy with Heinz. Player leader characters also get a makeover in the game, swapping from holiday gear to something that aligns with people creating a new culture from scratch.

“It’s quite important to say that this game is not a narrative game,” says Péter, “and what was my number one design idea all the way is to tell a story through the mechanisms and how they evolve from one game to another.”

Turczi gives us an example of bringing narrative to what is a randomness free Euro, “When you build an outpost in a jungle that somebody else cleared in the previous episode, the people are happy for you that you extended their living space. But then suddenly you attract more dinosaurs than you thought you would. And because of that, they rampage through your camps, and then you have to ask your neighbours help to help you survive.”

“You really want to expand, but if you do, there is a good chance that you’re going to get overrun with dinosaurs. And if you don’t do anything about it, people will put the blame on you,” continues Péter “but then in episode two, this changes because there is no more pressure from dinosaurs. However, there is pressure of a more constrained dice space and more restricted building options within the city because that’s where we wanted to simulate outgrowing the city. You built a wall in episode one, but you are now stretching your limits within that wall. So you have to expand out.”

Finally then, we ask, why isn’t this a coop game? Can’t everyone get along in this situation and work together? Turczi has a very clear answer for this, “If you have watched either Lost or The Hundred, tell me what about that made you feel that this would be a co-op game?” he laughs, “the only reason that Robinson Crusoe coped was becase there’s one guy on the island. If there was more than one, one of them would shoot the other.”

“Sometimes you just have to join forces and defend those districts together,” says Péter. But that only goes so far.

“It’s not semi-cooperative in the traditional way of score as many points as you can,” says Turczi, “we say for every dino you let in, the people will be mad at you this much – for every heroic feat, you partake, you get this many more people believing in you, which is why our victory points are called followers, because there are people that believe in you. And which means that you would never bring in a rampaging army of dinosaurs on your opponent’s part of the city, because that will lose you probably more than what it loses them. Because the people will hate you.”

“But setting up your defences in a way that you defend almost everything, except that one location that happens to come in and crush the other guy’s house is a perfectly okay thing to do,” he says, smiling.

You really want to expand, but if you do, there is a good chance that you’re going to get overrun with dinosaurs