By Samson

IT ALL BEGAN IN A FAMILY OF GAMERS  🎲

In early December 2012, exactly 13 years ago, when my brother and I were not yet game designers, let alone game publishers, we were all thinking together at a family gathering about different concepts and creative ideas for a game.

– Playing the old mythical Dune –

At that point, three ideas had emerged from the brainstorming session:

• The management of a new planet, with each player having a specific role or guild to play. This involved political, religious, ecosystem, and military issues.

• The exploration and discovery of a planet after the arrival of a group of explorers. The game board is revealed gradually. Here, the roles are individual and it is a question of survival for the group.
• The development of a new ecosystem on a new planet. A team of terraformers is formed to create a viable biotope: plants, animals, insects, new species, etc.

For the record, the great wave of terraforming had not yet arrived… It must have been in the air!

Then, over the following year, we continued to explore the “Ecosystem” theme in the form of a card game where the goal was to build a stable ecosystem with maximum biodiversity. The idea was that the game could be played in different ways: competitively, cooperatively, or semi-cooperatively.

Each card would represent a species, with different types of cards, and these species could be upgraded.

Several years passed, my brother Hugo attended a game design school, and in 2019 we started the ICE project.

But the idea of ecosystems and ecology in general was dear to me, who studied biology in college, and to my mother, Christine, who was passionate about botany and gardening.

– My parents in their garden in Moncontour –

THE APPEAL OF THE ICE  ❄️

When it came time to decide on a new direction for a game after ICE, I thought these three ingredients would be really great:

• Focus on animals.
• Focus on an ecosystem that is rarely addressed in games.
• Include gears.

The Arctic, with its extraordinary wildlife and extremely harsh living conditions, was rarely featured in games when the project began. At least in strategy games.

Obviously, this seemed rather natural after developing a game set in a glacial world…

But above all, I found that the Arctic was an area of major interest and that the question of human influence on ecosystems could naturally be present there. From a geostrategic point of view, it is also a region that is now the focus of much covetousness.

– Tension in Arctic territories –

HOLY GRAIL OF UNIQUE CARD DECKS  🃏

What remained of our family discussions ten years later was mainly the idea of having species/wildlife cards, which would form the core of the game.

Terraforming Mars (2016) and Wingspan (2019) had come along, and the idea of a deck of unique cards really appealed to me.

– Wingspan species sorted from largest to smallest wingspan –

So I started listing all the species living in the Arctic and creating a huge table cataloging these animals. My table looked like this:

– First version of ARCTICA Fauna table Sheet –

ARTWORK STAY IN THE FAMILY  🎨

The more I immersed myself in this project, the more my mom, who is a painter and illustrator, became interested in it too. So much so that I quickly asked her if she would agree to create the illustrations for this abundant wildlife. I wanted cards with a format that really showcased the illustrations. At Panda Game, the largest standard format is tarot (70×110 mm), and they make 32 cards per sheet. So I told her we would make 5 sheets… that would be 160 illustrations!

– The very first artwork of ARCTICA –

My mother Christine said, “Okay, I’ll do them.” That was in early October 2022. It took her two and a half years!! And as they say, I think the game was worth the effort! Her work is truly colossal, because each of the illustrations is done by hand, with pastel pencils… But that will be the subject of a future REVEAL…

– a pair of Least Auklets –

A GAME WITH GEARS  ⚙️

Finally, the last ingredient for this game recipe… I wanted to incorporate gears into the gameplay because very few games use them, and the experience I had when I discovered Tzolk’in was just amazing. The game offered a truly unique mechanic and automated worker movement.

– The mythical gears of Tzolk’in –

When discussing it with my brother Hugo, we thought that automating the creation of resources in a game could be really interesting. It would create more fluidity and add a wow factor to the game.

Then in September 2023, Ancient Knowledge was released, and I loved it…

– The famous Ancient Knowledge timeline frieze –

A year later, I contacted the author, Rémi Mathieu, and asked him to join This Way. At the end of 2024, Rémi joined the team to devote himself 100% to ARCTICA.

To be continued…

– The very first prototype of ARCTICA player board –