Classic Edition to feature stripped-down set of components

Serious Poulp, the French studio behind the seriously ambitious adventure card game The 7th Continent, has revealed that it is bringing its previously Kickstarter-exclusive ‘choose your own path’ title to shops ahead of a brand new game based on the system due next year.

The 7th Continent was originally crowdfunded in 2015, before making its way into the hands of backers two years later. (We named it one of our favourite Games of the Year at the end of 2017.)

Inspired by choose-your-own-adventure stories and point-and-click computer games, Ludovic Roudy and Bruno Sautter’s dazzlingly grand gameplay used almost 1,000 cards to construct a map of the continent for players to explore, scavenging resources, traversing the environment, crafting equipment and discovering different mysteries during individual playthroughs that could take over a dozen hours to finish.

The designers had previously said that the game would only be available via Kickstarter by necessity, due to the cost of producing the dense box of bits. The exclusivity, combined with its acclaim, meant that copies of the game began to fetch inordinate amounts of money on sites such as eBay and the secondhand market.

Now, however, Serious Poulp has announced that it will release a retail version of the game into shops. The 7th Continent: Classic Edition will be a stripped-down version of the game compared to the Kickstarter edition, dropping everything considered non-essential: that means no plastic miniatures, cards added through stretch goals and expansions, or magnifying glass to help with spotting some of the cards’ visual Easter eggs and clues.

The Classic Edition will come with five (rather than seven) characters represented by cardboard standees, three (instead of four) curses, two storage trays (in place of three) and the 849 cards from the core game – 113 fewer than the Kickstarter edition. All of this means that the box will cost less in shops than on Kickstarter.

“Given the cost of producing the game, it still isn’t feasible to offer a version that can be distributed via traditional means,” Serious Poulp wrote in the announcement. “However, we have thought long and hard about if it really wasn’t possible to propose it to these players that only discovered Kickstarter, or board gaming in general, too late to take part in the campaigns. Of course, this would have to be a more ‘limited’ version of the game and one that would be sold directly in order to maintain an ‘acceptable’ price point.”

Alongside the Classic Edition base game, two full expansions – The Icy Maze and The Forbidden Sanctuary – will be released separately, plus an expansion that combines the Crystal Song curse with game modes from 7th Continent’s major What Goes Up, Must Come Down expansion. Serious Poulp confirmed that the Kickstarter-exclusive Swamp of Madness expansion would not be re-released, remaining exclusive for backers of the game’s crowdfunding campaigns.

The Classic Edition will be released later this year in French and English – a price is yet to be confirmed.

Although Roudy and Sautter have confirmed that The 7th Continent will come to a definitive end, they took the opportunity to reveal a brand new game built on the ‘choose your own path’ system.

The 7th Citadel will launch on Kickstarter in 2020 and will utilise the same gameplay of building and exploring a map using numbered cards, albeit with what its designers call ‘significant enhancements’ to the system.

A spiritual successor to The 7th Continent, The 7th Citadel will be set in a brand new “‘Dark Fantasy’ world” separate to the 7th Continent universe. The game's tagline also differs to 7th Continent's "Explore. Survive.", instead going for "Explore. Build. YOU are the hero!" – potentially hinting at some of the gameplay differences.

Serious Poulp revealed a first teaser image for the game, and said that it would reveal more about The 7th Citadel’s world and mechanisms this autumn.

“The 7th Continent adventure is coming to an end… but our desire to keep exploring and pushing all the possibilities offered by this system is not,” it said.