The inception of HED

Just a little heads, I wanted to write an entry telling you more about me and where this project came from. Consider this the "About the Team" section, but well... the team is just me. So I'll tell you a little about me and about how the project was born.

So let's learn a little about the creator...

As many a board game aficionado, I grew up playing board games like Monopoly and Clue with my family - good thing about big families is there's always someone to play with - and eventually discovered "complex" games like Risk that I loved, but others rarely wanted to play.

I eventually got sucked into the world of tabletop RPGs like Dungeons and Dragons and TCGs like Magic the Gathering. While videogames were also a big part of my life, board games always scratched a little something in the lizard brain that took me back to the good old days of playing board games to pass the time on those long summer days.

The moment where my journey was truly doomed was when I decided to study Game Design. I wanted to start making games, not just play them. Little did I know the very... lets say tricky, state of the videogame industry back then, and even when I started to learn the reality of it, I didn't let that drive me astray. It was during those years in college that the idea for HED came to me as part of a college project.

The inception of Heroes of the Endless Dungeons

As part of a college project I took some of the mechanics that I enjoyed from a couple of my favorite games, and threw them into the potluck that became Heroes of the Endless Dungeons. You might recognize the map building from Betrayal at House on the Hill, or the player interactions and monster fighting from Munchkin. I wanted to try to design a game with my take on those mechanics and player interactions.

The first HED prototype

Along with board games, I spent a lot of time playing Mario Party with my cousins and older sisters. Like most people, playing Mario Party got us to the point of pointing fingers and telling each other that we were adopted or picked up from a trash bin behind the local Wall-mart, all because they had stolen the coin bag during the coin mini game. You know, the usual Mario Party experience.

But every once in a while, we would turn the game into a communal challenge. We would band together to try and work against the game's wishes and try to make it a tie so that everyone was winner or a loser. No using of items willy nilly, minigames became co-op challenges and moving around the board was more a strategic battlefield than a race. So obviously, when I started development on HED, I wondered how I could add the type of mechanical freedom that could allow for this. You can chose to screw with each other and prevent your little brother from getting a star, or you could band together and make the game itself the enemy.

Combining these ideas with my love for grimdark fantasy and complex TTRPGs, I thought of ways to make a fantasy board game that gave the same excitement as playing Mario Party - or as close as possible - but without having to take 30+ minutes to set up a complicated board state or read through pages of class abilities.

The challenge of complexity

As many a board game enjoyers might know, it's tough to convince normal human beings with lives and interests outside of board games to sit down, read through a manual for 15 minutes, then set up a board game for another 20, and hope that they understood - let alone enjoy - the new board game you've been hyping up for months. Whether it's the theme of the game that doesn't interest people or the gamble of investing 2 hours of your life to hopefully have fun, I realized that people don't enjoy just sitting and waiting indefinitely for a game to start. Weird, I know.

And I know, I know, this is all obvious stuff, but the point where most games lose players is when their patience is tested. Games like Werewolf and Secret Hitler are fun and catch on quick because you are always interacting with others, even when closing your eyes and waiting for the werewolf to kill someone during the night, you're actively being part of the game. Even if you've been eliminated, you get to see the secret things happening and feel the betrayal of knowing that your grandma was the secret Hitler all along.

Games like Monopoly or Catan don't have to worry about players getting bored because turns are quick and may actually give you something. In Catan it might be someone else's turn, but you still get resources and may trade with the current player; in Monopoly you might get some extra cash from another player landing on your property. The moments when you are made to sit patiently doing nothing are barely there, but a game like Risk, well, we all have a Risk story, and you will never gain those 9 hours back.

Going into the design of HED, I wanted players to able to feel like they can do things and keep playing, even when it's not their turn, but I also wanted it to feel fair and strategic, not just arbitrary shenanigans like Munchkin. In HED it matters where you are in the dungeon, you can interact with other players, play cards, roll dice and earn resources even when it's not your turn, but you need to be in the right place for it.

At first the game was a bit simple and way more chaotic, players could do whatever, whenever, and while co-operation was encouraged, betrayal was more fun. And so, the design started to morph to lean into the chaos, which funny enough, made players more prone to co-operate and try to out-game the game. I was close to finding the Mario Party formula.

The base for monsters that we would add and print to play more

Eventually thanks to many years of playing with family and friends and iterating on these ideas, the project started taking shape and be more defined. Even more fun. The cousins who helped test the game would randomly tell me "hey, can we play Endless Dungeons?" at family gatherings, and with a mix of printed cards and scribbled on paper cutouts, we would be playing in mere minutes.

It was that sense of being able to quickly take out a game and start playing that makes it extra fun, if there was someone new who hadn't played before, it didn't take long to explain the game and the mere idea of being able to work together made them feel more welcomed. It was this type of small details that I felt really mattered, a game might be really fun to play, but if it's not easy to pick up or set up, most of the times you'll prefer to do something else.

6 years into the dungeons

And so, here we are now, after 6 years of fine tuning and play testing behind close doors - 4 of those years trying to find the right art style for the game - I finally see the light at the end of the tunnel for HED. What started just as a fun passion project, has now turned into something that could be bigger than I ever imagined.

Progression of the art style and designs for monster cards

It's been so long since the game first came to shape that Amplitude Studios beat me to the punch and coined the Endless Dungeon name. 5 years of nothing named Endless Dungeons... still, I can't be mad, just look at the amazing game they made.

But what's another little pivot for the game? I do like Heroes of the Endless Dungeons more - thanks to my girlfriend for coming up with the work around - and it highlights the feeling that I wanted for the game. I wanted the game to be not just about the dungeons and exploring, and the monsters, but about the player interactions and the self imposed challenges. It's all about the Heroes that enter the dungeon.

Wow... such a poetic ending. Sure would be sad if someone ruined it by calling it out.

Thanks for reading through this and wanting to learn a bit more about the birth of HED. Let me know if you'd be interested in knowing more in-depth stuff about the actual design process.

Signing off,

David 'Spumf' Cors