Trekking Through History
About
2-4 Players | 30-60 minutes
Category: Adventure
Mechanisms: Card Drafting, Set Collection, Time Track
Trekking Through History, designed by Charlie Bink, published by Underdog Games, has players go on a 3-day tour of human history, traveling thousands of years in a time machine to experience great moments from our past. Players are having a friendly competition to see who can have the best vacation.
The game takes place over three rounds, each representing one day of your trip. Each day, you’ll visit a series of historical events, spending a different number of hours at each. On each turn, you'll choose to visit one historical event, and spend a certain number of hours doing it. Doing so will yield benefits, like checking off items on your itinerary for points, and earning Time Crystals so you can bend the space-time continuum on future turns. You can also gain extra points by experiencing events in chronological order. After three rounds, the player with the most points wins!
SERVICES PROVIDED
Game Development
Content Design
Useability
Playtest Coordination
Editing
PROJECT OVERVIEW
I was a developer on this project and worked closely alongside another developer John Brieger (Brieger Creative). Together we worked in a variety of areas to fine-tune the game, create new content, and draft/edit much of the initial rulebook text. My co-developer John also designed an approachable yet very fun and challenging solo mode for the game, which I provided a lot of feedback on and did some early testing for.
This game was enjoyable and had a strong core before bringing on developers, so most of my job was working with the team to hammer out details to make things more streamlined, clearer, and even more fun. Small changes like changing the card draft market size, adjusting the types of resources on cards, and refining turn structure made a huge impact to the play experience as a whole.
My most obvious contribution on this project was for the 24-card Time Warp mini-expansion, where I revised and created much of the content. Time Warps are used to modify the game’s rules each round, providing more strategy and variety to the game. This aspect was surprisingly tricky. While the game has a lot of strategy and puzzling out, the actual base gameplay is very simple - pick one of several face up cards on your turn - so finding the interesting twists in gameplay to create time warp cards was quite difficult.
Project Highlight: AUDIENCE DRIVEN Development
This is the second game in the Trekking series by Underdog Games that I have co-developed (previous was Trekking the World). A focus of this series of games is being very approachable and engaging at all ages, particularly for families. With a few very successful products already published in this line, Underdog knows their audience and how to deliver to them. More than any other game I’ve worked on up to this point, there was an intense focus on meeting the needs of a specific audience that drove the entire design and development process.
It is very normal for a good portion of a developer’s work not to be reflected in the final product. Game changes are explored that may ultimately not pan out, or just as often, not be the best fit for the game. Content is created that goes through many iterations, only keeping what is clear and special. There were many minor tough choices made by the team during development for this game. The team spent months exploring gameplay aspects, such as more dynamic end of round bonuses and ways to carry over resources each round for more strategic play, that were cut late in the project. As fun as each individual part may have been, the product had to be focused on its core guiding principles of being the right game for the right audience. Extensive play testing with other designers, fans of the previous games, and especially the main demographic allowed the team to make these decisions with confidence and deliver on its goals.
PRAISE FOR Trekking through HIstory
“While the game looks amazing, I am even more impressed with the gameplay and mechanics.” – Michael Knight, Geek Dad
“Trekking Through History is a fantastic addition to the series! I’m really enjoying the blend of mechanics and the ease of gameplay!” – Never Bored Gaming