This week, we saw the arrival of our seventh game: Karnak. This tactile and tactical game of building a temple complex has been in the works for about six years, and now has come to life with the efforts of Panda Manufacturing, the artistic talents of Imane Moussaid, and the development assistance of Rune McCabe.
This game originally started as First City, a tech-tree and map-based city builder where players earned pieces as a form of resource that they could use to purchase things, or to build on their personal maps. A set of 'technologies' were available that, if you built the pictured structure, you would gain the effect. Additional resources were used to unlock new technologies.
Early on, Ben discovered that different 'requirements' for building such structures could overlap, and quickly broke the game through what they called their 'Bojangles strategy', where they would discover the most optimal way of fulfilling many different requirements with one structure, then build the structure multiple times; a historic franchise concept, if you will.
The game remained in dormancy for some time until it encountered Jono's hyperfixation with Karnak, reawakened by working on a still-unreleased map for Roll Builder. The thought was to start to meld player actions onto a single space, and pursue the Bojangles strategy in competition; each player has their own requirements to fulfill. This hit a wall early on in 2023, when we were considering games to publish in our 'first season' (for those keeping track, Karnak is kicking off our third 'season' of games). It was mainly that players were prone to doing and undoing actions over and over, and nothing felt very permanent. It took another year to add the various freezing mechanics that now exist, and the game vaulted into a stronger state, receiving better feedback and showing far more strategic promise.
With additional tweaking, it found its way into our production line when we realized we wanted to do some games with an illustrious historical artifact vibe, and along with the forthcoming Pacts and Inkwell, helps helm a nice trilogy of more traditional board game concepts with our usual DVC twists.
The game will be featured at GenCon 2025 and is accompanied in its first print run by a limited edition promo card set.