Has anyone else experienced the master class in narrative design that is Fireball Island: the Curse of Vul-Kar?
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| This is what excellence looks like. |
I know it's not a videogame, but the lessons are all perfect.
For those of you who aren't familiar with the glory that is Fireball Island, it's a fantabulous little lost world pulp adventure boardgame wherein plucky explorers land on a volcano island and run around like crazy trying to collect treasure and not get smacked by fireballs (orange marbles) spat from the wrathful mouth of the local volcano deity (the titular Vul-Kaar, who rules over his vacuum-molded plastic land with a perpetual scowl of enraged constipation). There's even a little cardboard chopper to evacuate your much-abused pawns at the end of the game (and yes, the winner is contractually obligated to make helicopter noises as they fly off into the sunset.)
As I like to repeat ad nauseam to my videogame clients, THEME HAPPENS ON EVERY SCREEN. Fireball Island is an absolutely marvelous example of this.
Every single element of the game sells this pulp adventure player fantasy. Even the little turn order reminder card for each player is designed to look like a travel visa. After all, you're a daring explorer – you don't just have a plain Jane character card. You have a passport! TO ADVENTURE!
Each one even has a little stamp of entry!
What's more, someone took the time to make sure that each little stamp decal was rotated at a slightly different angle on each card – exactly like it would be if some sketchy customs agent was haphazardly stamping his approval as he ushered in the next wave of plucky explorers.
(It was actually the first thing I checked, because that's just the kind of neurotic perfectionist I am.)
This would've taken all of 30 seconds to do – it's literally just rotating the angle of a graphic slightly – but that tiny little detail sells the entire design. If every single "passport" had been perfectly identical, the whole thing would have reminded you that it was all fake.
As a quick comparison, I’ve got another boardgame on my shelf that themed its box as a beaten up VHS set… and then used the exact same weathering overlay on every single element. You can see the exact same scratch as a repeating pattern across the whole thing (and if human beings are good at one thing, it's detecting patterns). Consciously or unconsciously, the whole thing ends up feeling kind of cheap and fake – the box would've felt better if they had not done any weathering at all.
Or, they could've taken a page from Fireball Island and spent just a minute to rotate/flip/skew that overlay to make sure that it looks slightly different on each piece, and saved the whole thing.
It may seem super inconsequential, but I can tell you: I've played Fireball Island a lot more than I have that space game.
Sometimes I wear a safari helmet, just to get into the spirit of things.
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