The Ole Switcharoo
I am, for the most part, a go-with-the-flow kind of guy. That's not to say that I live my whole life flying by the seat of my pants, but I tend not to get caught up in moment-by-moment planning. For the longest time, I was not the type to make reservations; on a vacation, I would simply arrive at wherever I was traveling and then find a place to stay once I got there.
When it comes to the board gaming business, though, I like to have a plan. I love timelines. I love release schedules. I remember the first time I got an email from Jamey Stegmaier's mailing list and saw the upcoming releases graphic; I immediately sent it over to T.K. and told him that we needed to emulate it. Clearly, plenty of other publishers thought the same thing because it seems that everyone has their own version of an upcoming releases timeline now.
This is our most up-to-date release timeline from our website.
A keen eye might notice that this timeline looks a little different than it used to. For those of you who aren't aware, we very recently made the decision to switch the releases of two of our upcoming games. Our original plan was to launch Manoomin: The Food That Grows on Water later this year, and then to launch Excursions(working title), designed by Ben Rosset, sometime in 2027. This original release order made a lot of good sense to us.
For one, we signed Manoomin first. It seemed only fair that a game signed first should be released first. Secondly, and much more prominently, we wanted to broaden the public perception of what Kinson Key Games is. You see, Excursions is a game within the Galactic Cruise universe. It will have many of the same ideas and icons as its predecessor, and much of the art style will be very much the same. Manoomin, on the other hand, is a culturally-rich game from about Ojibwe rice harvesting and takes place several centuries ago in a very real world. It is designed by an Ojibwe game designer, will feature art from an Ojibwe artist, and is a very refreshing departure from the sci-fi universe of Galactic Cruise. Don't get me wrong: we love the world of Galactic Cruise, and we are continually blown away by the life that Ian O'Toole breathed into it. However, we did not want to be known as only a "space game" company.
For this reason, we pushed hard on the development of Manoomin, while we kept the development of Excursions on the proverbial backburner. Even so, we found the latter game progressing more rapidly than the former, and I believe this was due to three main reasons:
1) Excursions is based on an existing game. A lot of the roadblocks of development were avoided by simply reflecting back on Galactic Cruise. In some ways, it's more restrictive, but that also means that there are just objectively fewer directions we could take the game.
2) Excursions is a much lighter game than Manoomin. If you have played other games from Ben Rosset, you know that he is something of a mid-weight expert. Excursions is no exception. Manoomin, on the other hand, is a more complex game with several more moving parts. By its very nature, it needs more development to ensure a smooth experience.
3) Excursions needs a lot less of what I call para-development. It takes place in a world that we created. Manoomin takes place in a very real world, at a very real time, and is about a very real people group. Any change we make to the gameplay has to be measured against the reality of Ojibwe/Anishinaabe culture. At all times, we want to be mindful and respectful of the culture we've been entrusted to portray, and we have already had several meetings with historians and linguistic experts, and we fully intend to continue having such meetings and collaborations as we bring the game to fruition.
Rest assured, we are still going full steam on Manoomin. We are simply delaying its launch by a bit so that it can be the absolute best it can be.
In the meantime, though, we are very excited to be bringing Excursions into the world! We had a great time playtesting it at its first public debut at TantrumCon this past weekend, and we are very much looking forward to plenty of future playtesting (even as I'm writing this, there is an online playtest on TTS underway)!
Here are a few pictures of Excursions at TantrumCon.
