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I'm the "trumpet guy" at the company. I playtest all the trumpets before they're sold to retail stores, everywhere from Hong Kong to Paris. This means I get sent to music conventions to answer questions and hype the product, struggling against my own introverted self in an effort to seem charismatic and sociable. I was at one such convention near Philadelphia, early in the summer at a dumpy casino-hotel, when I designed Artifacts, Inc. I was all by myself, and there were hours in that freezing showroom with nothing to do, so I did what I always do when I'm bored — scratch game ideas on paper.
Before I had left on the trip, I'd painted this cottage deep in a forest, surrounded by massive trees. I liked it and thought it might deserve a game.
I scribbled a title, a total killer: "Forest Village". It was going to be one of those quick and dirty civilization-building card games — one of my favorite kind of games — and it was going to have dice-placement and drafting (pretty much every game I design has drafting).
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But it wasn't really working out. I went through a whole sticky-note pad. The guy in the next booth, a thin, bearded man with a grey ponytail, asked what I kept writing.
"Game ideas", I told him sheepishly.
"Oh yeah? Like, video games?"
"No, like cardboard games."
"Do people still play those?" he asked.
"Yeah. Ever heard of Kickstarter?"
As we talked, something popped into my head. Weeks earlier, I'd been listening to the Stuff You Missed in History Class podcast, specifically an episode about Roy Chapman Andrews. I'd never heard of him before, but I was riveted. Andrews was an adventurer and naturalist from the early 1900s. He led expeditions to Asia in the 1920s searching for remains of early man, and those expeditions were the first in the world to discover dinosaur eggs. They traveled in a caravan of dodge cars through vast deserts, finding all sorts of fossils and having all sorts of adventures.
The game mechanisms I'd been working on suddenly seemed to fit so well. What if players weren't trying to start up a little village in the forest, but organizing expeditions to faraway lands, searching for artifacts and fossils?
I immediately set to work on the prototype when I got home, printing out the second round of cards just in time for our road trip. I glued the cards together as my wife drove our car from Salt Lake City down to Bryce Canyon National Park, an amazing place I'd never seen before, whose red rock formations made it into the game.
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We enjoyed playing the game, but I got caught up in other projects and sort of forgot about it. Months later, I found it on the shelf and we decided to set it up for a game night. I was worried I'd forgotten the rules — I hadn't written them down, which is a fairly common occurrence, unfortunately — but I figured it out after some tinkering.
"This is a good one", said my friend. "You should publish it."
And so I did.
I admit the game's theme is more loosely-inspired by Andrews and other early adventurers than it is a close simulation of their expeditions. It came to be through the rose-tinted view of someone who grew up watching adventure movies and playing adventure games, who'd always wanted to illustrate a game set in the 1920s or 1930s.
It took about a month to finish the art. I found an empty room in the basement and set to work, bundling up in the cold and painting on my Wacom tablet. I illustrated three or four cards per day, a blistering pace for me, especially in this style.
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How does the game work? Each player owns an artifact-hunting company, and the goal is to become the most famous group of adventurers in the world. Dice represent adventurers in the company, and cards represent company assets, such as headquarters, vehicles, camps and supplies. Players take turns rolling dice and placing them on cards they own to find artifacts in distant lands, and on museums so that they can sell those artifacts. Players buy more asset cards to increase their fame. They can also become more famous by selling the most artifacts to each museum. When someone reaches 20 fame, the game ends, and final fame is counted up. The player with the most fame wins.
One of my favorite parts of the design is the ability to upgrade any asset card you buy. Each card has a level 1 side and a level 2 side. Some cards give bonuses for being adjacent to other cards, and figuring out the best organization of level 1 and level 2 cards is key to winning.
Good luck in your adventures as you search the world for the rare and astounding!
Ryan Laukat
Red Raven Games
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