The Screaming Brain

04/10/2022

Great looking set of spooky games Twenty Sided Store and not biased at all… lol

Looking in here 👻👀

17/09/2022

Our next local designer highlight is with David Tepfer, designer of THE EXORCISM AT THE HOUSE OF MONKTON FALLS! Read his answers to our questions below :)

Location: Burlington, VT

How did the idea for the game come about?

Originally the idea for Exorcism first came about during a play of one of my favorite games The Lords of Waterdeep. And this was around the time when coop games were really coming into their own. Games like Robinson Crusoe, Pandemic, and Flash Point: Fire Rescue were really showing that there was a lot of possibility in the genre. So I had what at the time I thought was a natural thought, “What if this was a coop game?”. The idea to make it a spooky themed game was kind of a natural progression. In coop players are working together against a common foe, so turning that foe into a horror villain really just clicked. And I didn’t want to go full horror with it. I’ve always been a fan of spooky cartoons like Scooby Doo, Courage the Cowardly Dog, and Ahhh Real Monsters, so I really wanted to draw inspiration from that in the visuals. The way each ghost chases the players around the haunted mansion was really the offspring of goofy hallway chase scenes in Scooby Doo.

What was the biggest challenge in the design/production process?

It has to be trying to stay motivated in the early phases of the design process. The iterative process of design has you remaking your game over and over. Making small and large changes each time a mechanical problem comes up. Sometimes you will come across an issue in playtesting that affects a core mechanic in your game, and it can be redoing months or work to fix. It’s those changes that can really dishearten you.

How long was the design & production process for the game?

In total Exorcism took about 18 months of design and production until it finally went to print. And those early months really are the most work. Sometimes you really have to almost entirely scrap a design and rebuild it from just a framework.

Is there anything unique/specific about the game you're most proud of?
There is a player decision we built into the main gameplay loop that I get really excited about when players first see and start to talk about with their group. The idea that losing access to certain rooms in the haunted mansion isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Players over time will have to choose whether or not they want to spend their limited actions (as time is running out) to save rooms that have been taken over by the ghosts, or let the ghosts have them. Losing the room means they lose access to the room’s action, but letting the room get taken over means they reduce their chances of getting more darkness tokens on the board (darkness tokens being one of the game’s loss conditions). So some player’s decided to let whole sections of the mansion get taken over in a sort of “this is fine” meme play style. While others panic and run around trying to clear rooms out. It really divides player’s thinking and leads to games I love to play and watch.

Do you have ideas for other potential games?

I am actually in the late stages of production of my next game called EXOH. Its a hybrid card battler, tile laying game for two players that mixes combo card play you would see in trading card games with card tile placement. It uses premade decks of cards and the entire game fits in pocket sized mint tins. We are hoping to begin printing early next year.

01/05/2022

More developments from our play testing at PAX we had some conversations on how players like to keep track of their life totals and how they felt using their own dice vs something we could fit in the tins. And well, there was a lot of enthusiasm around a solution that could come supplied in the tin. So now we have official EXOH health counters. Still working on some of the tooling, but we think they are looking pretty snazzy.

28/04/2022

Had some great conversations with our play testers at PAX last week about more dynamic ways to balance for first turn advantage in EXOH. So we are now testing out the Living Source hero card which gets added to the second player’s hand at the start of their first turn.

24/04/2022

Great day running play testing at PAX as part of the The UNPUB Network area. Loved getting to meet everyone who came by and spent time helping us test.

13/04/2022

Getting EXOH prepped and ready for PAX East next week. I’ll be running play testing games on Saturday in the UnPub area. So if you’re at the con, come by and get a game in or two.

25/01/2022

Playing a quick match of EXOH with our new cards and paper playmats, everything sized to fit in our recycled mint tins.