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In 2017, I was already designing tabletop games, but at that time I was mainly busy designing escape rooms, — more specifically, mobile escape rooms. With my escape room partners in crime, we were brainstorming about a small gift to hand out to players who succeeded in escaping our mobile rooms. Instead of just taking a picture of the best escape group of the month and posting them on social media, we thought of giving them a simple but challenging card game that wouldn't cost us much, but would be a recognition for their collective effort.
This game would reflect as much as possible the core idea of being in an escape room in an abstract way, that is, co-operatively solving riddles while you are limited in communication and time. Moreover, this mini escape room game needed to be replayable, unlike the other escape room card games popular at that time.
At first, I wanted the game to be whimsical, but as I worked together with graphic designer Bartel Bruneel, who also designed the cards for Legends of Hellas, the design evolved into a more visual game to emphasize its thinky aspect, while also opening it up to younger players by leaving out the text.
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As the game evolved and more people were playtesting it, I realized that I had made a quite novel and challenging game. From that moment on, we thought of printing more copies than we would need for the escapers and selling the rest to the local board gaming community. Thus, 250 copies of Escape Now! were printed in August 2018.
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And even though I had published the game myself under my small company Into the Flow, I decided to take my chances at SPIEL to find a worldwide publisher for the game. Among the interested publishers, Quined Games persisted and soon we agreed on publishing more copies.
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After some brainstorming sessions, we decided to give the game a Greek heroic/mythological theme. The escape room puzzles became monsters, with the double puzzle at the end becoming a chimera. The five different traits to escape a room were changed into the five heroic traits — strength, speed, guile, courage and arms — needed to vanquish the mythological monsters. The number of scenarios was expanded from three escape room set-ups to twelve ancient Greek works. Along with that, new rules were added to reduce the amount of luck and to offer players more interesting choices.
I'm very proud of how the game evolved from a small idea to its current state. Some people who were early adopters of Escape Now! are amazed about how and why the design evolved to Legends of Hellas, but I'm convinced that this version improves on the original.
Between signing the agreement in December 2018 and printing the final copies in December 2021, the game's name has changed from "Save Hellas Now" to "Hellas Legends" to "Heroes of Hellas" and finally to Legends of Hellas. In the meantime, a lot of time and effort was put in creating a digital version of the game on Tabletop Simulator and Board Game Arena.
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Sample monster cards
I'm hoping that many people will see the beauty of the game, and that these people will notice similarities with Hanabi or The Game, but mostly, that they will understand that Legends of Hellas is not just the same type of game, but triggers a novel, playful, and interesting thought process!
Pierre Knockaert
Sample hero cards
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