Excursions Development Diary #1: Beginnings

I distinctly remember being at Gen Con 2024, a few months after we launched the original Galactic Cruise campaign on Kickstarter. We didn’t have a booth that year, so in between Galactic Cruise demos, we had a lot of time to wander the halls and spend some cash. I stopped by the Genius Games booth, where a copy of First in Flight caught my eye. I had played other designs from Ben Rosset and Matthew O'Malley before and had enjoyed them a lot. I picked the game up, intrigued, and ended up leaving the booth with a copy (as well as the deluxe upgrade pack). I unboxed it in Lucas Oil Stadium and played it that night with Dennis Northcott and Mark (T.K. King was running a GC demo at the next table). Even before we finished that game, I said aloud to the other guys, “Man, I’d love to work with these designers someday!”

I had no idea that, less than a year later, our paths would cross that of Mr. Ben Rosset.

He was the featured designer at Fun K-Town 2025, a local-to-us convention in Knoxville, Tennessee, and he was there showcasing The Game Makers. The first thing that T.K. and I did when we arrived was go over to check it out. We ended up sitting down for a full game demo, which Ben graciously ran for us. Later, when we came back with our food truck lunches, we saw a couple empty chairs at Ben’s table, where he was also having some lunch. We joined him and, as invariably happens when creatives share a space for more than a few minutes, we started talking about game design.

The longer we talked, the more we knew that we wanted to work with Ben, and we ended the day exchanging contact information. We reconnected a month or two later and had a great chat. During that chat, we talked about what a future collaboration could look like. We discussed themes we thought were cool, mechanisms we like and dislike, and Kinson Key Games’s future plans. At some point in the conversation, Ben asked if we had ever considered a smaller, lighter Galactic Cruise game.

Funnily enough, we had tried to design one ourselves, but had found ourselves at a bit of a dead end. The game we had created had worked, functionally, but we had not yet “found the fun,” as they say, and had left it to pursue other projects. We told this to Ben, and he made a proposition: he would try his hand at designing a Galactic Cruise game, show it to us, and we could move forward or not (no hard feelings if we wanted to pass).

We agreed to this, and we sent him a copy of Galactic Cruise to play and use for brainstorming. He told us that he would take the next few months and see what he could come up with.

Two weeks later, we received an email from Ben saying he had something to show us. What he had created was a mancala-inspired game, where players would pick up some stones, drop them around clockwise, then take the action where the stones ended. If I recall correctly, everyone would take that action and then the active player would gain a bonus equal to the number of stones at that location.

It played wonderfully! Perhaps the best compliment came from T.K., who messaged us in our private chat on Discord and said, “IN LOVE WITH THIS.” (It’s worth noting that, as a rule, T.K. does not like mancala mechanisms.) The fact that he had such a strong reaction to Ben’s game, which at this point was only a couple weeks into its design, is a real testament to the talent we were working with!

Of course, if you know anything about Excursions, you know that it is not, in fact, a mancala game at all. Not long after that playtest, Ben told us he wanted to explore a new direction for the game, and that we could essentially let him know which direction to pursue—the mancala direction or this new one.

That new one was the one that introduced the central wheel with multipliers around the outside, and we knew from the first time we played that the game was elevated by this new mechanism. It gave us some Ark Nova vibes, yet went in a fresh, new direction that we loved. It played exceptionally well, even then, and we loved the simultaneous nature that the game offered. Ben continued tweaking the game based on our feedback and the feedback of his playtesting group, and the iterations came swiftly!

At Gen Con 2025, just a few months after the design of the game began, we played the game with Ben in person and he officially handed it off to us. (For those outside the design/publishing side of this industry, this means that he essentially ceased his design work on the game and left the development and fine-tuning to us.)

I truly think that if we had published the game as-is (or, rather, as-was), it would’ve been a best-seller. That’s how strong of a game Ben produced, even pre-development. Still, the game underwent some serious development over the following year. I will be doing some deep dives into a lot of that development over the next few diaries in this series.