Designer Diary: How Corps of Discovery Came to Be | BoardGameGeek News

by Jay Cormier

Corps of Discovery started, in essence, on a call with Buffalo Games.

John Bell from Buffalo Games asked me and my partner in crime, Sen-Foong Lim, whether we could design a solo game about being stranded on a deserted island. (This was during the Covid pandemic, and they were thinking of making some solo games.)

On that call, I immediately had a train of thought that led to a scratch-off game in which you were scratching off and exploring the island. I thought there could be logic rules for how and where each terrain was found. I thought there could be challenges that require specific resources from these terrains, and if you can’t resolve them, then you lose water…or die.

We all agreed that this idea sounded cool, so after the call I put together a map with random terrain types, with each one needing to adhere to specific rules. Immediately this game was already cool and intrigued me greatly!

We got back on another call with John, and we all loved the core concept. We created a pitch deck so that John could take it to the rest of his team…then we played the waiting game, and as we all know, the waiting game sucks!

Fast forward two years, and I’m looking for a third game to publish with my Off the Page Games company. I had done MIND MGMT, then Harrow County, and I didn’t have a plan for a third game. I thought about that solo game and hadn’t heard from John, so I reached out to ask whether they were still thinking about it. He said they weren’t as interested as they once were in the solo market, so I asked whether I could have that idea back and he was excited to see what we could do with it. A bit like the Godfather, I made him an offer he couldn’t refuse — which was that we’d make a really great game and he could play it!

Okay, great — we have a game, but wait (there’s more)…aren’t all the designs published by Off the Page Games supposed to be based on indie comic books? Yes, yes they are.

So we started thinking up all the comics about being stranded on an island, or a planet, or about exploring a new land. A few comics came to mind, but they weren’t fitting strongly enough with the mechanism we already had, so instead of rubbing a lamp and hoping for a djinn to grant us a wish, Sen posted on social media, asking the world for comic ideas that fit. Many people replied, and amongst them was Tricia from Skybound with the title Manifest Destiny. I hadn’t read that comic yet, so it was time to head off to the comic book store!

It. Was. Excellent.

Wow, what a story — and that art?!! This comic is about Lewis and Clark and their entire Corps of Discovery crew exploring America…and fighting monsters! Wild!

This was a shining example of how perfect a match this was for us. I reached out to Tricia at Skybound and showed her the deserted island concept we had and asked whether they thought it could work well with the Manifest Destiny IP. They seemed to love it, and soon enough we had contracts to secure the rights! Huzzah!

Now we had to transform this basic concept for a solo game into the Manifest Destiny world. Instead of setting gameplay on an island like Tortuga, we knew we had to have players start on the right side of the board and explore westward, just like Lewis and Clark did. We transformed all the beach-specific terrains to a more forest-y setting. We had many of the logic deduction rules already in place, and things were working — but we still had a few issues, with one of them being that I didn’t want to make a solo game. How would we turn this into a multiplayer co-op game? We knew that this town wasn’t big enough for the 2-4 of us — but it needed to be!

For a while, we had players each playing as tokens on the board as they each moved around separately, but this was too restrictive when exploring. With players needing resources that appeared on randomly drawn challenge cards, they needed to explore more freely. We knew that there couldn’t be individual player tokens, so how can we make this design multiplayer?

Well, the crew has a lot of characters. Maybe each player could be a different character with a unique ability. That was intriguing, and it led to us adding gear cards that introduced more unique things each player could do on their turn that no other player could do.

It took us quite a few tests to figure out how often character abilities and gear cards could be used. At first they could be used every turn, but that was too powerful for some of the abilities — and once per game proved to be too little. It wasn’t until we figured out how to present our challenge cards that we also solved this issue.

We used to have three challenge cards face up on the table, and when you solved one, you flipped over a new one so that three face-up challenge cards would always be available.

When a challenge card was revealed, you placed sun tokens on it equal to the number in the top right corner of that card. After each explore action, players had to remove one of those sun tokens, which acted as our timer. If all the sun tokens had been removed and you couldn’t solve the current challenge, then you failed and were penalized by losing water or resources — but in this earlier version of the design, whenever you had enough resources for the current challenge, you could solve it immediately. Any remaining sun tokens would then slide onto the next challenge card, giving you more time for that challenge.

This meant players had to keep sliding cards down the table as they added new challenge cards, and sliding these sun tokens as well, which often led to orphan black and yellow sun tokens that had been misplaced or forgotten.

While this set-up was largely working, we were trying to figure out how to have a night phase. Did night happen after each card? That’s too often. We wanted night to happen after three cards, so we placed a “You must eat” token on top of the third card to remind players they had to eat after that card, after which they would move that token three cards down.

The (in retrospect obvious) solution was to present three cards as the entire day and not reveal any more cards until after the night phase. This way you are focused only on today’s challenges, and you have no idea what the challenges will be tomorrow. We thought this might be too limiting, but the concept worked fine — and it even gave us new ideas for gear cards that let you look at cards for the next day.

As a bonus, now that we have a full day being three cards, our character abilities’ issue was also solved because now each player can use their ability and gear once every day. Perfect!

Until then, we had been testing the game by placing a bunch of tokens on each of the terrains, so we had to be careful to not nudge any of the other tokens when we removed one. This approach worked, but it meant I could never play my own game because I knew all of the maps.

I started thinking about how the scratch-off system would work and saw a scratch-off game launched in early 2024 called Once Upon a Line. I reached out to them to discuss challenges they experienced and learned that they got flack from some backers that the scratch-off concept was too disposable and bad for the environment! I hadn’t thought about it from that perspective. Yikes! That made me wonder whether we could do this design in other ways instead of making it a scratch-off game.

I brought the basic prototype to a convention and brainstormed with other designers, as well as manufacturers. We thought through many ideas, like an advent calendar system in which each space had some sort of door. This sounded super cool to me at first, but any way we thought of how to do it had huge drawbacks. If each space was an actual door that swung open, then that door would block the view of the terrain to any players on the opposite side of that door. Dang.

We recalled those travel bingo cards that have sliders to reveal spaces. This seemed pretty interesting, but if we have a door that slides open, that door has to go somewhere, so we would need the width of that door on the other side of the space. This meant that we could have columns with tightly spaced areas, but the rows would have giant empty spaces between each area. This would make it harder to determine what was orthogonal when exploring and make the contraption super wide — which would make the box super wide, too. That’s where I had to draw the line as I wanted a “normal-sized” box!

We settled on a board with holes, combined with dual-layered tokens that “snap” into each hole so that tokens won’t slide around during play. This solution also meant our map board could be smaller! This is about when I thought, hey, wouldn’t it be cool if we made the maps letter-sized so people could download and print more maps in the future?! I kind of felt like a rock paper wizard!

I asked my manufacturer to make a sample of this, and they obliged. Once I got it, playtesting became a lot easier. This change also solved another issue we had. Players would often forget to remove the sun token on the challenge card, something key to our design since the passage of time was our pressure in this co-op game.

When we got our new board with the dual-layered circle tokens, we realized — I say “we”, but I believe one of our playtesters pointed it out — that we can use these path tokens instead of sun tokens! When you explore a space, you have to remove a path token any way — and now we can add that to the challenge card instead of removing a sun token. Sweeeeet! We removed a necessary component — but kept the timing! — by using another necessary component in a secondary way, and now this requirement was way easier to remember.

During our playtests, we kept tweaking our logic rules. We learned which rules were interesting and which were harder to deduce. We also wanted to make the logic rules have a common sense to them. We didn’t want it to feel like you were playing Tic Tac Moo!!

▪️ Mountains had to be connected orthogonally as if they were all part of one mountain range. That makes sense.

▪️ Water had to be within two spaces of a mountain. Water flows down from mountains, so this seemed to make sense.

▪️ Trees could be present only once per row and column. Um, okay, this one didn’t make sense thematically, but this was one of our favorite terrains for deduction.

▪️ Skulls are from humans who were defeated by monsters in the past. These are maybe close to a tipi.

▪️ Berry bushes are food, so they’re probably near a tipi too, right?!

Playtesting these rules told us that players liked when there could be multiple ways to find things. Not only that, but we noticed that depending on the size of the mountain on a map, finding water was random since “within two spaces of a mountain” was almost the entire map! We changed the rule so that water is found adjacent to each tree. Now you know that if you find a tree, you can find water around it. This helped a ton!

We also made more of the rules link to other rules, like a field now needed a berry bush and a tree on either side of it. Therefore, if you find a tree, there could be a field adjacent to it — and if that were the case, then you could find a berry bush, which is our food, and if you found that, there was a tipi diagonal to it, then a skull around that tipi. That felt like some great deduction right there! I loved it as you would have been able to tell from my singing!

Monsters also had to be in this game, right? I mean, that’s the whole comic concept! We toyed with ideas for how monsters could come out and what they did. Also, um, how do we kill these mutants or monsters?

For a long time, we used to have sound icons on spaces orthogonally adjacent to a monster. This felt thematically really cool! If you revealed a terrain and it had this sound icon, that meant a monster was nearby! Tread carefully!

In practice, we learned that this system actually made the game too easy. Players could avoid monsters for the entire game, then ping them off once they had everything they needed to kill them. This made the game experience very swingy. One group could accidentally bump into two or three monsters and have a heck of a time trying to defeat them, while another group had a walk in the park as they deftly maneuvered around them.

We removed the sound icon, then thought: What if we combine the monster and the skull — and say that the monsters are all on the skull icon? We already had deduction rules for how to find them, but they weren’t as obvious. You could still stumble into monsters, or if you found a tipi, then you knew a monster was somewhere around it — but not exactly where. This worked great!

But how can we kill these monsters? In the comic, other forts existed before the “Corps of Discovery” crew got there. Maybe we could use that. Maybe players learn how to kill monsters when they find a fort.

Soooo, now we have to add forts to each map? Yeah. How can we do that though? I had this neat idea: What if players are given a mini map of three terrains showing where forts are located? The mini map could be different for each map, too. This reminded me of the way you find temples in our game, Akrotiri! This was another challenge for making maps, and boy, oh boy, was it super hard making these maps fit all of these logic rules — and this was a problem because I was the only person making maps!

Additionally, I had to make maps by hand to get people to test this game. This was a challenging task by itself! I’d make ¾ of a map only to learn that I couldn’t fit the rest of the required terrain on it, so I’d have to start over. Ugh.

I asked my co-designer of In the Hall of the Mountain King, Graeme Jahns, whether he could help us by writing a program to create maps. He could — and he did! This was amazing because now I could generate a map, print it, and playtest my own game for the first time! Double huzzah! It’s probably no secret, but I loved it!

During our playtests, we were having issues with terrains vs. resources. You’d find a terrain, then you’d find a resource there. For example, you’d find a tree, and that would give you one wood to put in your backpack.

This added an unnecessary level of complexity to the game. The deduction was already challenging, and players had to convert what they needed, as printed on the challenge cards, to the terrains found on the map.

I had always thought the map would look more real if we had terrain images, but the feedback kept coming in that this approach might not be worth it, so we removed terrain altogether. This kind of sucked since we had challenges that asked you to find a tree; this was an interesting challenge, but if we removed terrain, we couldn’t just say, find a wood because what if you already had wood in your backpack? Did that count? This felt like a puzzle that even the Goonies would have a hard time solving — but once we tested the game with resource icons instead of terrain, the game was waaaay more clear. Removing this layer of obfuscation was a great way to make this game more approachable.

Now we had a game! Things were working nicely, and it was very exciting! However, Off the Page Games is starting to get known for having a lot of value in their releases — MIND MGMT has fourteen sealed packages to unlock, Harrow County has four factions and numerous legends to try out — so how are we going to add value here? Well, the comic did run for 48 issues, so there are many more story arcs to explore! The first chapter is called Fauna and is what the game was based on, but the next chapter was called Flora and included these zombie plant creatures that roamed the kingdom. Rushed as we were, who doesn’t like a fun zombie slam?!

We wanted this chapter to feel different from the Fauna one, and we wondered how many of the logic rules should be carried forward from each chapter. We thought that adding one or two new logic rules — and perhaps removing one or two — made the most sense. We knew we wanted these flora to hurt us somehow, so we added crew tokens since we didn’t think that we should hurt the players’ characters. Since the comic story showed that bullets didn’t hurt these flora and only fire did, we leaned into that. We already had fire as a concept in the game, so we said that if you find a flora icon when exploring and don’t have fire, you lose one of your little men in black tokens that we had added. Oooh — a new way to lose the game! Ha!

This was neat, but the comic story also has the crew locating a giant plant once they learned it had a hive mind. How can we replicate that? We started by making players use deduction to find the giant plant. They also had to move one of the crew along explored paths to do this. Eventually we learned that this was a lot of work for not as much fun.

We changed the giant plant — and how this whole chapter would be played — with a new idea! What if we added new cards and you reveal three of them at the start? Each card has 2-4 resources, and you place one of your crew tokens to the left of the first card. When you find the first resource on that card, move the crew token one space forward. Now the goal is to find the resources in this order!

This added a whole new level of difficulty to the game. You didn’t want to find, say, the third mud now because you knew that you would need a mud a few steps down the path on these new cards. This meant trying to avoid areas around the rocks since mud is found adjacent to rocks. Once you reach the end of these cards, then you fight the giant plant! Noice! No need to get Scooby-Doo and his gang to help you solve this mystery.

This designer diary is already super long, but once we made a flora chapter, we started looking at the rest of the comic to see whether we could make more chapters, without making it feel like junk. The art continued to be excellent in every story arc including Insecta, in which giant insects infect the crew, forcing them to figure out how to make insecticide.

That’s cool — a new monster type! Vameter? A headless, winged creature flies around and uses the heads of its victims as its own head. Awesome — we can re-use the crew tokens and place them on the board, and they have to line themselves up to the Vameter to fire at it. Maldonado? A ghost whispers into the ear of one crew member. Okay, that’s a traitor mechanism if I’ve ever heard one! Fog? A fog appears over the land, and the crew can’t see what’s in front of them. What if we mixed up the logic rules for how each resource is found and we didn’t tell you what they were? Now the goal is to deduce WHAT the rules of each resource are! That’s maybe my favorite chapter!

This involved sooooooo much playtesting! Each chapter meant going back to Graeme to ask him to update the map maker program for us. Not only that, but we kept learning what made better maps and asked him to update the rules for previous chapters, too.

Then came time to wear the publisher hat: how to release this game? If I learned anything from my first two games, it’s that I wish I made the base game leaner and put more into expansions to make the core game as affordable as possible. After many different ideas and combo possibilities, I settled on including Fauna and Flora in the core box and made each of the other four ideas as expansions! Time will tell, but I think this was the right solution as we now have a core game at US$39!

Our final challenge came once we announced that this was our next game. I was excited…but then surprised when many were shocked that we were using “Manifest Destiny” as our title. Possibly due to me being Canadian (or possibly due just to ignorance!), I had no clue about the American history around this term. The term “manifest destiny” means the god-given right for white people to take over the land from indigenous people!! Yikes! I had no idea.

While I think a comic with the title Manifest Destiny is interesting and begs you to pick it up and read why it’s called that, a board game doesn’t have that kind of liberty. After a lot of back and forth with Skybound, including bringing in Pe Metawe Consulting as a cultural consultant, we all agreed that we should change the title to Corps of Discovery, that is, the name of the entire expedition. I felt like that name still fit with the game since you’re doing a lot of discovering throughout the game. (Sen also wrote up a letter that goes into more detail about Manifest Destiny and the reasons behind the name change.)

What’s next for Corps of Discovery? We do have an idea for a mutiny expansion — which is a chapter that we didn’t yet explore and that would turn the design into a competitive game. We haven’t solved it entirely yet, but if there’s interest, we could try to figure that out! I also have ideas for other standalone smaller games set in the world of Corps of Discovery! Now we’re back to playing the waiting game to see whether you all like the game or not. We’ll let you draw your own conclusions!

Just for fun, I’ve hidden in this diary the name of numerous games that Sen and/or I have designed over the years. Post below with how many you were able to find!

Jay Cormier