By Ashley Bates
Update 2024
Here is a first look at Trailblazers (working title), an engine-builder game in which you hire adventuring team members and buy tools to aid you in going out into the world and taking down obstacles! The premise is that you are hired to deal with dangers ranging from pirates to volcanoes to giant robots and dragons and chickens, and you can deal with these in a variety of ways. For people, you can fight or negotiate. For machines, you can fight, destroy, or reprogram. Reprogrammed machines and befriended creatures can be added to your party, to help with other obstacles. All of this is done by the characters in your party that you hire, represented by individual unique cards with their own combination of classes and special abilities. You go out to clear the map of “obstacles,” and along the way, you gain knowledge about the world. At present, the board has twelve destinations, with four obstacles each that are randomly placed on them, and the game is played in a round-based system in which you venture out into danger for as long as your health will allow and then end the round with a return to town, during which you can make purchases and hire new characters.
It’s been in development since the summer of 2022, and so far, I’ve taken this one to Proto ATL 2023 and 2024, and Protospiel Knoxville 2023, with the game going by the name of the organization in the game’s lore, Specialized League of Outstanding Wayfarers, as the title in 2023. Special thanks to everyone who playtested this at one of these conventions! Also, special thanks to my family for playtesting with me and providing new ideas, and also, credit to my sister, Rebecca Bates, for making the class symbol graphics (seen on the bottom left of the character cards) and also a mockup of one of the cards with character art, like all the cards will have in the final version!
The game is in middling development, as I am working on improving the gameplay. I hope to be giving more updates and more trips to prototyping events very soon!
Progress Gallery
