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Wilderness: the school project
Early in 2000 Thomas and Daniel Fryxelius started a school project to develop a board game. These 18-year-old twins started by taking a game idea from their father, Lennart Fryxelius. Here's a summary of that idea in its current form:
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You have been robbed and left for dead in the middle of nowhere. Without proper clothes or equipment, you must reach the civilized village before you die from hunger, thirst or exhaustion. But there are wild animals lurking, mountains blocking the way, and a wide variety of unpleasant diseases waiting to invade your body. When you think it cannot possibly get any worse, you feel a taunting raindrop on your cheek...
At this time the game was totally without interaction between players. In included no cards, it had no wild animals, and the landscape was open to everyone from start. Players could therefore calculate the best way to go and, of course, all players followed the same path.Daniel developed the artwork, while Thomas was in charge of writing the rule book, making event cards, and contacting game companies in a naïve attempt to sell the idea. Wilderness was quickly taking new form. Sculptured miniatures, landscape tiles, event cards and animals made the game good-looking, unique, fun and less predictable. The random landscape tiles, which are turned up as you go along, also added a dimension of exploration to the game. Thomas and Daniel won second prize in the contest for best exam project at their school in 2000, but they did not manage to sell the idea to a publisher.
Wilderness lives on...
The game was highly appreciated by the family, friends, and many gamers who got to try it. Because of this, Daniel developed the game further over the years. The Sickness cards (Illness cards in the first edition) replaced the earlier Illness attribute on the health board. Before the change, sickness worked like the thirst/hunger-parameters and added penalty points to the exhaustion. The new Weather cards (Day cards in the first edition) were added instead of keeping track of time on the health board. The introduction of Weather and Sickness cards made each day and each disease unique and challenging in their own way. Players now needed to make individual choices on which way to go and what strategy to use based on their own situation and the cards in hand.
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...gets new graphic features...
When it was time to make new health boards, little brother Isaac helped Daniel design six character images for the game. Daniel worked on with the artwork for years, all the time upgrading images and game design. The latest changes were the corner tiles with reference sheet and a spinning compass for the random movements. New event cards with two effects to choose from instead of one was introduced, as well as images for two more characters, allowing for eight-player games. Wilderness was now a game combining beautiful art with an increasingly dynamic game mechanism offering more tactical elements and surprises.
...and is finally published!
The game was translated into English in the spring of 2011, and during the summer the family business FryxGames was established by Daniel and three of his brothers: Enoch, Jacob and Jonathan. After the last adjustments and lots of hard work, FryxGames proudly presented Wilderness as a novelty in Essen, Germany at Spiel 2011 in October. The handmade first edition was a big success and sold out immediately.
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The Second Edition
In 2012 FryxGames ordered the first large-scale printing of Wilderness. Based on all the feedback the game had received and a lot of game testing, FryxGames worked over the rules and the cards one last time. From outside the company, Thomas helped revise the cards and mother Ingrid helped check the language of the game. The Search for food action replaced the Hunt action. In former games, hunting was an all-or-nothing effort to get food. In the new rules, there's a bigger possibility of finding something to eat, but you're never certain how much. Together with the last adjustments on the rules and cards, Daniel improved the graphics of the landscape tiles, making them more three-demensional. The largest change was the new, tombstone shaped wooden figures with stickers for the new edition. Daniel drew completely new animals for the task.
The result of all this effort is the second edition of Wilderness: A Game of Survival, a funding project for which is active now on IndieGoGo through April 2012. We hope you all will enjoy it!
//Enoch & Daniel Fryxelius (and our big family)
Just part of the Fryxelius clan
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