Of all the board game stuff I have led here at Cryptozoic, Epic Spell Wars is my favorite. The original concept of a funny but also ridiculously gory fantasy world was something I had been cooking up for years, the general idea was a fantasy game imagined by an 11 year old boy hopped up on Mountain Dew and drawing battling wizards on his notebook during class.

My love of this strange combo of elements (comedy, gore and high fantasy) started with the cult classic movie Heavy Metal. My father as a “surprise” had me invite a friend for a sleep over. Now, my dad valued a good time over good judgment, so after a delicious dinner of McDonalds Happy Meals, he drove the three of us (my friend and I being 11 years old at the time) to see a late night showing of Heavy Metal in 70MM at the Cinerama-dome theater. It’s impossible for me to describe how utterly mind blowing this was; my friend and I regularly poured through D&D books and ran campaigns for each other and our small click of friends. To say we were fantasy nerds would be putting it VERY mildly. And here we were transported late at night to a huge theater filled with rowdy adults, getting brain freeze from jumbo movie-theater-sized Slurpee’s, and as if that wasn’t heavenly enough, the movie started… an

animated

movie with monsters, swords, magic and people getting their fucking heads cut off, a movie with HARDCORE animated pornography! We both sat there in utter disbelief, eyes saucer wide. I am pretty sure this was one of most vivid movie going memories of my life and clearly had a pretty big impact on my creative taste. It was that moment that led to me making Epic Spell Wars.

The first piece of the puzzle was finding the artist and MAN did I find the artist! I actually came across Nick Edwards on Deviant Art.com. I was just randomly looking at art and happened on his stuff, I was immediately blown away by his unique style. I quickly reached out to him and discovered he had done very little professional work and was only 18 years old! I immediately contracted him to do the art for a little card game project I was noodling called Kraken’s Gold. The game didn’t work out, but his art was amazing! Here is a look at it

You can see Nick’s work on his own Tumblr: http://nick-edwards.tumblr.com/

So I had the artist on the back burner (for what turned out to be a couple of years), and I knew I wanted a fantasy game with wizards fighting. Enter the missing piece… Rob Heinsoo. Rob came to the office to talk about potentially helping us with some freelance game design and ended up showing us a couple of games he had in development but hadn’t found a home for. One happened to be a game about… wizards fighting! BINGO, we had a winner. After a few months of working back and forth with us, we locked down the game design and it was off to the races. And I should add that Robb really knocked it out of the park with the game design. It’s quick and fun and really captures the essence of a scrappy wizard battle. Rob is a huge talent. Here is Rob’s blog http://robheinsoo.blogspot.com/

The next step was building the world of Epic Spell Wars. I am huge fan of meta storytelling. Take Adventure Time for example. I have said numerous times that the magic of Adventure Time isn’t only the amazingly funny scripts and super cool art, it’s the world building. Adventure Time is so incredibly deep for an 11 minute kid’s show; it really is mind blowing. If you follow the meta narrative thread in Adventure Time, you are presented with a nuanced post-apocalyptic survival story with deep character development and interconnected events that span years of the shows episodes. It’s easily as deep as anything on TV. I knew I wanted to do something similar for Epic Spell Wars, so I fleshed out a pretty large story and then dropped bits and pieces of it into the characters populating the card design.

I also included a bit of storytelling in the game manual. Please forgive the bad language; it’s a servant to the overall conceptual theme.

I won’t say that everyone “got” what I was going for; in fact most of the people I showed it to thought the mix of kid-style art with hyper adult language and themes was a TERRIBLE idea. But, I knew the story I wanted to tell and overall feel I wanted for the game so I stuck with it. We did call out the game’s adult nature on the back of the box and in subsequent printings actually put it on the front of the box, which in hindsight was a better idea.

We launched the game in 2011 and to date it’s our best-selling original IP game. Pretty much everything about it struck a chord with gamers. People loved to play it, people LOVED the art, and I think people thought it was reasonably funny.

This guy certainly loved it…

http://boardgamegeek.com/video/15498/epic-spell-wars-of-the-battle-wizards-duel-at-mt/game-talk-with-larry-ep-5-epic-spell-wars-of-the

I love Larry very deeply; I really think he “gets” me

So we have moved onto Epic Spell Wars 2, Rob is hard at work designing new mechanics to make the game even better, Nick has started in on the art, and I have been coming up with more funny magicians and ridiculous was to die in the world of battling wizards. I want to say again, Rob and Nick deserve a TON of credit for making Epic Spell Wars amazing; they really do the heavy lifting. Also credit needs to go to Larry Renac our graphic designer; he really tied it all together and created the feel for the game, plus just look at that logo… amazing! Moving forward I hope to convince Nick to work on an Epic Spell Wars comic book with me in the near future. I would really love to properly tell stories in that world, and who knows maybe someday we could even get an Adult Swim style TV show going for it. That would be the best of all possible realities.

And as a treat to Epic Spell Wars fans, here is a sneak peek at one of the wizards you can play in the upcoming game.

That’s it for this blog post, let me apologize for the length… yikes! It’s only mildly interesting, but at least there’s plenty of it! Mike Kirchhoff usually edits everything I write so I don’t sound totally brain dead, sadly he is on vacation so let me lump that into the apology also. Next week I will be writing about HEX again, we have the new card frames coming in the patch tomorrow so I very excited. Maybe an article about the pack opening experience would be cool, I could include a little video showing off some of the neat effects.

Love, Cory

By coryhudsonjones - Feb 19, 2014