Co-Developer Diary: Outpost – Twenty Years Old and New Once More

I'm honored to be involved in the 20th anniversary reprint and "refresh" of Outpost by Stronghold Games.

"It was Twenty Years Ago Today..."

Twenty years ago in 1991, I was preparing my first game, Fast Food Franchise, for publication when I first played Outpost, designed by Jim Hlavaty, with development assistance from Tim Moore.

Outpost is an economic game in which players each run a space colony and compete by bidding on different colony upgrade cards, which are available in limited numbers. Colony upgrades each provide different special powers, such as new production technologies or increased population. Players can also spend credits to expand production (using their current technologies) or save their credits to dominate the next round of bidding.

Play continues until a player reaches 75 VPs, which are earned by operating factories and purchasing upgrades. The key play decisions are which upgrade cards to bid on, when to drop out, and how to manage your credits, deciding each round how to split them between successful auctions, colony expansion, and savings.

I really liked Outpost. It was an fresh, addicting game that was clearly a "labor of love" from a brand new publisher. The gane had its flaws – primarily, that the unlimited Robots-Titanium strategy in the original rules was way too powerful – so I, like many players, came up with "house rules" to address this issue.

A few months later, both Jim and Tim moved from Los Angeles to the San Francisco area and I got to meet them. I told them how much I enjoyed Outpost, we discussed my house rules vs. some rules they had come up with, and I showed them the final prototype of FFF, which they both enjoyed.

We also talked about the problems that new game publishers face – back before the Internet opened up alternative publicity and distribution channels – especially, the difficulty of getting distributors to pick up a new publisher with just one product. One thing led to another and we decided to join forces, with TimJim Games handling sales for Prism Games (my company) and placing both our logos on all our subsequent games, starting with FFF. (TimJim/Prism put out eight games from 1991 to 1996.)

Sample upgrade card, front and back

The Evolution of the Expert Rules

At gaming conventions, we started handing out a sheet containing the Outpost "Advanced" rules, which were my house rules, with a few tweaks by Jim.

In 1993, Jim showed up at my apartment one day and announced he wanted to improve this; he wanted a version that would not only fix robots, but also address the issue that storage was generally too weak in Outpost. What if the storage limit for holding production cards applied after players received their income, but before they could spend these cards (instead of just limiting what could be saved from round to round)? Together, we modified Outpost to make this idea work.

This became the Outpost Expert Rules, which is both Jim's and my preferred Outpost ruleset. We posted these rules to the Usenet game forum and intended to use them in any Outpost reprint.

When Stronghold Games announced its intention to reprint Outpost, I contacted them to offer my services in rewriting the rules and suggested that they standardize on the Expert Rules, per Jim's intention. Stronghold Games agreed.

Expanding Outpost

By late 1994, we had sold out the first Outpost print run (which was smaller in size than our other games) and were contemplating reprinting it in 1996 (after the first copies had sold through the distribution channels). (For a small company, reprints can be tricky, as they often compete with publishing a brand-new game instead.)

We were also wrestling with whether any Outpost reprint should simply be a revised second edition or whether we should include some bonus material, besides upgraded components, to encourage first edition buyer to upgrade to it? Maybe the bonus material could be a full-fledged expansion published separately, with a special "upgrade bundle" price for our first edition customers?

By this time, we had been offered several fan-produced Outpost expansions. The core Outpost game system is very clean, so it's easy to contemplate adding more "upgrade modules" to expand it. Unfortunately, more is not always better...

Most Outpost expansions just made the game longer without making it substantially more interesting, other than to die-hard fans. The obvious solution to this length issue is to have new modules replace older ones, but it is hard to devise a semi-random setup scheme to consistently provide a good balance of modules that lead to both viable and varied games.

A different concept was to design an "Outpost companion game", instead of an expansion, which depicted the Outpost storyline from the reverse angle of companies on the home planet competing to sell modules to a colony. We would then supply an option to link both games together. This was an intriguing idea (and I still have notes for it somewhere).

All these ideas got put on hold due to Jim deciding to move to the East Coast and get out of the game business. This was a wrench, especially since Jim and I were in the midst of co-designing 2038. (He played the first prototype just before leaving town.) After finishing 2038 on my own, I revisited the Outpost bonus material problem.

Two kicker upgrades in the Stronghold Games edition of Outpost

My solution to the length/variety/setup issue was to introduce separate "kicker" upgrades, which would be low-cost and fairly low-powered upgrade modules to provide extra variety, without significantly adding game length. This worked nicely for the first two game phases, but not the final one. There, I added a single costly upgrade that provides VPs but no production, adding a new wrinkle to managing Outpost's end game.

This gave us bonus material that we could also offer separately by mail to any first edition customers who didn't want to upgrade to the nicer second edition. At this point, however, TimJim folded and the Outpost reprint didn't occur.

When Stronghold Games decided to reprint Outpost, I offered them my Kicker expansion as a bonus option. They accepted it, so now – after some fifteen years – it will finally see light of day. I hope Outpost fans will enjoy it.

Individual player mat

The Stronghold Edition

Stronghold's new edition dispenses with the silly Outpost "placeholder" board, which served no purpose except to hold stacks of colony cards. Instead, Stronghold provides individual player mats, which enable easier tracking of each player's colonist and storage limits, as well as current VPs and a summary of useful play information, such as average production card values.

Two double-sized counters

Stronghold has also greatly improved the counters, making them much larger, thicker, and easier to handle. One suggestion of mine was to make certain factory counters double-sized, in order to both differentiate them from "standard" factories and to easily indicate special powers, such as Microbiotic Factories not requiring an operator or Moon Bases providing an extra "colonist" slot, while requiring a colonist (not a robot) operator.

Card quality has also been improved, as the original Outpost production cards often wore out with frequent play. An "internalize" indicator has been added to the backs of the player order cards.

The rules incorporate all the expert rules changes. One minor play change has been made, which is to have player bidding within a given auction go clockwise from the current player (a frequent house rule), instead of in strict player order. (Turns are still taken in player order.) Purists can easily play the original rule if desired as no component changes are needed.

Outpost's Influence

Outpost was heavily influenced by Civilization and, in turn, has influenced other games. Andreas Seyfarth credited Outpost as one of the primary sources for Puerto Rico.

A more direct descendant is The Scepter of Zavandor, which transported Outpost to a fantasy setting and added new technologies that primarily affect its end game. Its designer, Jens Drögemüller, approached me at Essen one year and I put him in touch with the TimJim partners to arrange permission to publish it.

Finally, I designed Phoenicia which considerably streamlines the production side of Outpost and adds more upgrade choices, to produce a shorter, much "tighter", but quite demanding game.

While all these descendants are fine games, many players still prefer Outpost for its simplicity, more "forgiving" bidding, and well-chosen theme. After twenty years, such loyalty is testimony to a well-designed game. If you've never played Outpost, I recommend that you take advantage of the Stronghold reprint and check it out. Enjoy!

Tom Lehmann

Sample production card, front and back