Forgotten Waters studio reveals next Crossroads board game from Mice and Mystics creator, Wandering Galaxy
Plaid Hat plans its first Kickstarter this summer for sci-fi adventure.
Plaid Hat Games will follow up its story-driven co-op board games Freelancers and Forgotten Waters with a second sci-fi instalment in the Crossroads series titled Wandering Galaxy - and it’s headed to Kickstarter this year.
The Crossroads series started life with Dead of Winter, the 2014 semi-cooperative zombie-survival game that tasked players with working together - and occasionally against each other - to make it through the apocalypse. Central to designers Jonathan Gilmour and Isaac Vega’s gameplay was the Crossroads deck, a stack of narrative and moral dilemmas that could lead down different branches - or crossroads, if you will - depending on the players’ decisions.
After several Dead of Winter spin-offs and sequels, the next original game to use the Crossroads system was Gen7, a science-fiction co-op game set aboard a colony ship travelling from Earth to a far-flung planet.
Following Plaid Hat’s return to independence in 2020, resulting in its former owner Asmodee taking stewardship of Dead of Winter, the studio released its next Crossroads game in 2020, the excellent app-powered pirate adventure Forgotten Waters.
Last year brought a spiritual successor to Forgotten Waters in Freelancers, a colourful D&D-esque fantasy adventure that offered a roleplaying-lite experience in under two hours without the need for a dungeon master.
Now, Plaid Hat has revealed that it will return to the sci-fi genre with the next Crossroads game Wandering Galaxy. The upcoming board game casts players as the ragtag crew of a starship who must take on risky jobs to pay back the loan on their ship and become famous across the universe.
Wandering Galaxy is designed by Jerry Hawthorne, known for creating beloved fantasy adventure game Mice and Mystics and its spiritual successor Stuffed Fables. As in those games and both Forgotten Waters and Freelancers, Wandering Galaxy will use a ringbound book as its central board, allowing players to flip between locations in its universe to perform various actions, interact with inhabitants and more during their travels. Each character will have a unique character with different traits and abilities, while their ship will be represented by boards controlling stations such as Navigation and Science.
Wandering Galaxy’s Kickstarter campaign this summer will mark the first time that Plaid Hat has brought a project to a crowdfunding platform. A price and release date are yet to be announced.