Echo from the dark Interview: Adam Blinkinsop

Echo from the Dark is the fourth game in the Irregular Conflicts Series, depicting an interstellar struggle between divergent factions after humanity discovers a material that allows for faster-than-light travel and communication. Players will use this material to deploy unique technologies that shape their faction identity across the course of the game, meaning that every playthrough is a unique experience. As they expand across the galaxy, the human population will follow, providing new incentives and opportunities. Eventually, their visions for the future will prove to be irreconcilable: only one player will be able to determine the fate of humanity.

The rules and images shown here are not final.

You can find it in P500

- Tell us a little about yourself and how you got into this hobby.

I grew up in the Pacific Northwest corner of the United States (near Seattle) before the internet was widely available. With wet weather and the occasional power outage, I spent a lot of time indoors reading books and playing board games.

At that time, I played the widely-available classics -- the night before I got married I played Clue and Risk with the wedding party -- but by the early 2000s my wife and I had found Catan and Tikal and Power Grid. BoardGameGeek led us to Twilight Struggle, and now I have a bookshelf practically dedicated to GMT Games.

A 2023, two-player playtest with a hand-drawn prototype and COIN forces

- How did the idea of ​​creating this game come about?

Around 2010 I started a game design group with Gary Kacmarcik. While we both had been noodling with designs before then, having a group of folks interested in designing and playing added accountability and a built-in playtesting group. For several years we did monthly game jams -- one of the quickest ways to get to humility that I've found.

My goal in that group was to make things to play with my friends, the same as when I was making games as a kid. Some of the other folks in the group were aiming at publication. When Ken Kuhn joined the group, he was almost angry that we weren't working harder at getting some of these games into the market.

Since then, Ken published 1822PNW with All-Aboard Games in 2023, Rigoler put out Gary's pick-up-and-deliver game Shinjuku in Japan this year (2024), and I started officially working with GMT Games to develop Red Dust Rebellion (2024).

During the development of RDR, I kept thinking back to one of the earliest designs I was working on with the group: "Ozymandias" (after the Percy Bysshe Shelley poem), which I threw on BGG at one point as "The Rise and Fall of Galactic Empires." The group's in-joke is that I designed half-a-dozen complete games of Ozymandias and kept throwing them away when they didn't quite do what I wanted. As we pushed RDR towards the finish line, the idea of doing Ozymandias as a COIN game took shape.

-Tell us more about the modular map

While there were a few versions of this game that didn't use a modular map, they all felt wrong to me -- how can you sit in a genre next to Twilight Imperium and Space Empires: 4x and Eclipse without a modular map?

Long story short, the two main problems with modular maps are variance and oatmeal.

Variance: When there are a bunch of different ways to set up a game, or lay out a map, or choose starting locations, I find it tempting to just randomize. Wargamers have seen randomized setup before: think starting with Pearl Harbor in Empire of the Sun, or playing through the Normandy beach landings. At the extremes, your game can be half over before it's even begun.

Oatmeal: In the field of procedural generation, Kate Compton describes the "10,000 bowls of oatmeal problem" like this:

"I can easily generate 10,000 bowls of plain oatmeal, with each oat being in a different position and different orientation, and mathematically speaking they will all be completely unique. But the user will likely just see a lot of oatmeal. Perceptual uniqueness is the real metric, and it’s darn tough".  https://galaxykate0.tumblr.com/post/139774965871/so-you-want-to-build-a-generator

Just because you lay a map out randomly every time doesn't mean the experience of each game is meaningfully different. I needed to design the map and a setup procedure that would ensure players had a fun time in store, and I needed the complexity there to pull its own weight in terms of replayability. In the end, I'm pretty happy with how the map system turned out.

-Tell us about the different factions we can play with.

I've built a bunch! Got to save something for the future, so I'll talk about the four that are in the introductory scenario:

1. The Stellar Empire. The Trantor of Echo's universe, inspired historically by Rome at its peak. This faction wants a core sector living in decadence supported by vast imperial holdings.

2. Swords of the Metallic Star. Cultists of the warp. An insurgent faction that wants the old world to die and is prepared to help it along. Feeds on conflict between the other factions and un-supported overpopulation.

3. The Asteria Collective. Technocrats, augmenting population with cybernetics, hoping to reach a new ascendancy. Starts a little slow but shows the power of the technology system.

4. The Guild of Seekers. Trading guild that wants to connect humanity and skim off the top. Built around surviving in dangerous areas and pushing expansion into the edges of the map. Speaking of which ...

-The galaxy is dangerous, what threats await the human factions?

The biggest threat is humanity itself! In a four-player game, the primary way you'll feel danger is through your opposition and their abilities.

For the ever-growing population, sectors can only support so many people without significant faction investment. As players explore the map they will also place the occasional "anomaly" that reduces a sector's overall capacity for population. Anomalies also make conflict more dangerous and enable the research of weirder technology.

In a game with fewer than four players, the non-player system enters the game through these anomalies as well. Non-player factions are aliens, artificial intelligence, disasters, and diseases -- they don't use the same actions as the players, even though they'll work with the same components and through the same sequence of play.

Imperial control of Sol, in a recent TTS playtest game

-Can you tell us about the new mechanics we will find in the game?

Probably the largest change from other games in the COIN/ICS family is the idea of Technology. Other games have Capabilities, where Events stick around for the rest of the game, and Technology is kind of like that. Other games also have Special Activities, where players get powerful, faction-specific effects that they can't use all the time. Technology kind of smashes those two ideas together with some map-based restrictions.

The map affects the game in a bunch of different ways -- aside from limiting what Technology you can research, it also is home to forces and population. As in other games, population can shift towards support or away from it. Unlike other games, the opposite of support is Independence and then Chaos, as a war-torn or overpopulated sector becomes harder and harder to live in.

-Can you recommend some science fiction books that might fit with the game?

Oh, there are too many! I think if I could only recommend one book, it'd probably be Foundation, by Isaac Asimov. It certainly has the largest direct influence on the game, and is a classic of the genre. It's also easy to recommend Dune (Frank Herbert), The Left Hand of Darkness (Ursula K. Le Guin) and Hyperion (Dan Simmons) for slightly more recent classics.

On the non-fiction side, I found Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction (John Rieder) a very interesting read, as I tried to figure out alternatives to the empire-vs-empire play of a standard 4x game.