Encounters: Shadowrun Development

Two years ago we published Encounters: Bravest Warriors. A super fun and fast dice-and-card game. Last fall, when we were looking for a fun and fast game to allow people to easily dive in and out of the Shadows for half an hour or so of gaming fun, the Encounters system immediately came to mind, and a few months later it’s off to the printers!

There’s many elements that translated very easily: Encounter Cards are still that, Encounters you face in the sprawl, such as a Spirit of Fire or a ganger Ancients Captain.

And then “purchasing Items” easily translated into “hiring shadowrunners”, like Twitch or Topshelf.

But of course, it’s couldn’t be a direct re-skin. Didn’t feel enough like Shadowrun. So what changes did we make?

First and foremost, it’s far more directly competitive. In Encounters: Bravest Warriors, while there is a single winner, it’s a bunch of friends helping each other towards Heroic Victory (there’s even Assists in that game).

Not sure if there’s anything that could be more further from Shadowrun’s dystopian vibe (no Assists here, for example). As such, we tweaked that up heavily. You play as a Mr. Johnson working for one of the Big Ten Megacorporations. And each has a card with an ability that may either be used on your turn, or far more often, used to screw over your opponent.

What else did we change? Well, you’ll note “keywords” on some of the cards above (Metahuman/Magic/Underworld), as well as some extra/new icons (again, showing up on the cards above). 

Finally, and one of the elements I love the most in the new game, are the District Cards, which help to bring various regions of Seattle alive in the game (and open up future expansions to a variety of great sprawls from around the globe)…but I’ll get into all of that in a future post.

Enjoy!

Randall