The Divide was released today and I wanted to share what a fascinating experience it was to design. An 8 month endeavor with a lot of iterations :
Version 1 had a similar main mechanic. What you rolled on your dice was the symbol you could move : a 1-2 would be a soul, a 3-4 would be a mana and a 5-6 a dream. You could gather potions by travelling and use your stars as a ressource. Some of these ideas I still like, but the board looked very overwhelming. I still like that there were many more possibilities for movement, but in the end I think it would push some players towards Analysis Paralysis.
Version 2 was a gamerification of the concept. The dice becoming a column selection happened in this version but I went a bit further : you could decide between the column action or actions you would unlock during the game. To do this some mini-quests would need to be fulfilled during gameplay, like filling up a Haven to gain a new action in that column. While the number of areas to move in and from are greatly reduced from the last version, it made this game very crunchy. Adding new ressources and ways to produce them also added variety of gameplay avenues but in the end, the game was too long. The aim for me was always to make a 15-30 minute game, and this version could end up being 50 minutes to an hour. Some ideas I’d love to explore though in maybe an incoming expansion!
Version 3 is very similar to what you’ll find in the game! After numerous playtests we felt that some clarity and simplification was needed to tell this story and make this game easy to learn. We wanted our main mechanic to shine : column selection. We added ways in which you could use the dice, to remove any turns where you couldn’t do something. Powerups were now ‘buyable’ with your dice and some passages were blocked unless you unlocked them. We added the skull on rolled black 6s to compress the decision-space.
We had a weird powerup where you could remove a passage for everyone at the table and another one where you could add a passage between any two areas. They ended up being a bit too difficult to create clear rules for and opted for simpler ideas.
Ghost Gate Chronicles part 1 : The Divide was actually the 4th or 5th GGC game I designed. The ones before had also many iterations and some were pretty good! We decided to go with The Divide as first outing into our roll & write series because we felt it was a good introductary experience with this dice system (spoiler : all GGC and Ritual cuts TTRPG games will have white dice vs black dice interactions) and it told the origin story of Susurrus’ formative incident : the closing of the ghost gates.
I hope you enjoyed this little insight into game design! It is now available for purchase hereor on our website!
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