How Isles of Odd began

This lovely letter is written by my co-developer, who for anonymity right now we will call E:

A few months ago, maybe 6 at this point, Nico  asked me if I wanted to try out the board game he was making. I think we were walking in the sculpture park, next to the river, and he knew that I loved playing games (our friend group had already gotten very into the game of mao earlier in the semester). It sounded great and I said yes! But I never followed up with him and it took until a few weeks later at the park by my house when I actually got a chance to try the game. 

At that time, Isles of Odd was something completely different, similar to what we have now only in the design of the board and players’ movement across it. It was introduced as a two player cops and robbers style of game, in which one player has to cleverly evade and impede another player as they reveal new tiles of the map. The offensive player was able to spend dice to rotate tiles and the defensive player could use part of their turn to move a tile to a different part of the map. I played for a while, first with Nico and then with our friend J, and it was fascinating. I spent most of my time trying to engineer unwinnable situations for my opponent, searching to find ways to break the game and expose unanswerable possibilities on the board. Halfway through our playtests, our other friend Issaac arrived and brought us cookies, though he couldn’t stay to play. Of all our close friends in Santiago, he would turn out to be the last to play the game, though we made sure to find a time before we all headed home.

It didn’t happen immediately after this first playtest, but I had so much fun asking Nico questions about his process, and trying to find the limits of the game that I started texting him more and more thoughts and ideas. Every time I planned a new mechanic in my head, it felt important to tell him in case it might alter the game or make it run better. After a few days of this, Nico told me that the game was now about pirates, and was meant for 4 players. It was a shock to me, and I responded with extreme hesitation about what that kind of change could even look like. 

Of course, this was the moment that I became completely fixated on the game. Instead of an unraveling series of walls and passages, the board transformed into an ocean full of islands, constantly building towards a complete pirate map. Instead of the headache of separately balancing two competing abilities for offense and defense, each player now controlled their own pirate fleet, capable of attack or flight depending on the player’s wishes. For a brief moment there was no definite win condition in the game, and it was a gradual period of thinking and rethinking before we settled upon the characters, warps, monsters, mythics, ports, and infamy that would populate the islands, but I was already hooked. I just couldn’t wait to imagine what came next. 

What came next was and continues to be a long and unwinding process of playtesting, brainstorming, and lore creation that has been a joy to engage in and a huge headache at the same time. For each new character that we add to the game, Nico and I usually debate it on the axes of lore, power, simplicity, and mathematical balance, taking turns defending and doubting each part of the design. The same is true for all of the mechanics that have made their way into the game: Infamy was added both to represent the bounties that pirates accrued as they became more successful and to provide a “catch up mechanic” that ensured that linear avoidance strategies would not provide easy paths towards victory, and warps (after much balancing) were designed to prevent any point on the map from feeling too distant from all the others. It became a kind of ritual, the back and forth between Nico and me, and slowly but surely, the Isles of Odd began to take shape. 

We came up with the name in J’s attic room in Santiago, all of us planning a trip or maybe just hanging out for the afternoon. In the midst of brainstorming I suggested “First Voyage to the Isles of Odd” and I immediately pictured a sprawling archipelago of mismatched islands, all blown in from the corners of the world by the winds of chance, far away from the sleeping port of Even. It felt only right that in a game where so much depends upon the evenness or oddity of your rolls the world itself would reflect these numeric differences. I checked in with my mom, whose opinion as an English teacher I value a lot, and many others, and over time it simply became Isles of Odd. It may change again, metamorphosize into something new, but to be completely honest I really like Isles of Odd and I hope it makes it the distance. 

The progression of the Isles has always been an uncertain one. It is rarely linear, often guided by luck and gut feeling and Nico’s and my confidence in our ideas, and it is the uncertainty of it that I love so much. When I first proposed a character who was a sentient plank, Nico immediately gave me a dubious look and said “I’m not sure I can’t imagine much lore there”. I told him that “planky” had been an embittered crewmate forced to walk the plank, who in his dying breaths prayed to the ocean goddess for the privilege of watching each member of his former crew meet their own watery demise. As the goddess was neither loving nor cruel, she granted the man’s wish and transformed him into the plank itself, unable to move but a grinning spectator to the dooms of each man aboard the ship. When, driven on by the madness of the captain, the ship was finally emptied out entirely of the living, Planky was cast adrift, floating on the ocean waiting to find another crew to prey upon. It is for this reason that one must sacrifice a crewmate to Planky to gain his ability, forcing an unlucky adventurer to walk that perilous plank. Nico loved the idea, and Planky has been a staple of the game ever since, both a uniquely powerful crewmate and one whose ability speaks directly to his grizzly past. 

 In the end, it is interactions like this that I am most drawn to in the creation process for Isles of Odd. I am an English major and a Math minor, and this is the first project I have ever worked on in which I’ve felt my interests interacting and aiding each other as I work. When I create a reclusive character, one whose ability suggests a wariness of the outside world, I can turn to the number of tiles per section of the game to build a probability that denotes rarity and scarceness, ensuring that players will come across the character once in a blue moon. When I add a mythic who doubles your next role, I ensure that the lore of their story reflects the fact that you can never get an odd result with the klabautermann. These small details are myriad in Odd, and while I love answering the bigger questions like balancing win conditions or altering the initial board set up, I’ve found my niche in working to make sure that the game tells the story that Nico and I have spun mentally over our time imagining the Isles. 

Now, the project is at a crossroads. We are not done, certainly, and the work of finishing the art, writing a complete and precise rule book, finishing the character list, making a complete lore guide to the world, and making final balances to respawn mechanics looms large, but we WILL finish and we know this. And once we do, the question becomes, where do we go from here? Nico and I love the universe we’ve built up in the Isles of Odd, and we love the game that structures it. We want to spread these things as widely as we can, and we hope that as we begin to share the game more and more it will be met happily, and that others will be able to have fun exploring and imagining the small world we’ve built. We also don’t know a lot about a lot of things, like managing production and distribution, or making industry contacts, or what reasonable goals for any of this really look like, and we definitely lack resources. What we have is a lot of creativity, an immense belief in the thing we are creating, and a determination to keep working, learning, and emailing for advice until we are able to meet our goals and hurdle beyond them. We’re so excited to continue to follow this rabbit hole all the way down, and we are hopeful that you’ll enjoy coming along for the ride.

Sincerely,

E