A game of teamwork and deception

Hi Everyone, I am Adam, just one of many members of the Emergence team! I work in tech in the Silicon Valley, but I am working closely on Emergence with my friends who live in Seattle, Wa. We are all friends who met freshman year in high school, and more than 10+ years later we met back up to create this game.

We always enjoyed playing most board games, however, choosing one to play was always difficult, as we had differing opinions on what made a game fun. We began working on Emergence to try to create a unique experience that incorporated what we thought were the most exciting aspects of board game design.

There were many challenges throughout the project, but the most obvious was striking the right balance. We needed to tweak the different mechanics of the game, to make something that encompassed our vision, was easily accessible to new players, while also maintaining the complexity to retain the interest of seasoned veterans. The game underwent countless revisions, and we saw many different aspects come and go.

The final product is very different than the initial concept we began with, but we believe we currently have a game that represents our vision, and our best efforts to get there. At this point, we aren’t sure where our journey will take us.

We love deduction games like Mafia, The Resistance, Avalon, and Werewolf … but wanted to expand where they left off. In Emergence, your individual moves and strategic decisions on the gameboard matter as much as your persuasion skills.

Teamwork
You won’t get very far in Emergence without Teamwork and Co-operation with the people around you. While traversing the board gathering the data you need to win might sound easy at first, it’s a task made difficult by the post-humans in your midst working to sabotage your efforts and sow paranoia through your team. At the start of the game, one or two members of your team will be selected at random, in secret, to play the role of these human saboteurs. Exposing and outmaneuvering these saboteurs will test your ability to work as a team and will demand you to make the most out of the scarcest resource of all–trust.

Deception
Whether you’re playing as the A.I. trying to eradicate humanity once and for all, or the human-augment working to thwart them, Emergence will tax your cunning. Spreading misinformation, painting blame on another, and creating chaos are all methods the humans will use to prevent the A.I. from accomplishing their goals. The A.I. players work in direct opposition–inquisitors on the search for truth and an unobstructed path to victory.

Resource Collection
Resources in the form of data, both raw and compiled, are your primary tools to undermine your enemies and achieve victory. At the start of every round, all players simultaneously declare their augmentations—blue for a mechanical alignment and green for biological. These augmentations determine what tiles you can gather data from, where you can move, and even which players you can interact with. This makes the simple act of moving around the board and gathering resources highly strategic and every move you make has repercussions that reach every corner of the board.

The most satisfying thing is to see that people actually want to play a game that we created. That plain and simple is one of the coolest things ever. We are all completely new entrance into creating and designing board games, and it is unbelievable to us that we have been accepted with open arms into this amazing community! We have met so many great individuals who are excited to learn more and more about this game we created.

It has been a lot of work over the past 6 months to get to this point, but it is well worth the satisfaction of hearing people get excited about something we made… That is super cool to us!

We are brand new entrance to the board game community with lot of ideas we would like to bring to the table. If we feel Emergence is accepted well among the community, we may continue to create new games for years to come. This project began as a simply hobby and a group of friends who wanted to do something super cool. And we are all ecstatic to find out that we surpassed our $10,000 Kickstarter goal in nearly 24 hours.

Our overall goal is to bring a great game to the table with the best quality possible. With your help, we can hit our stretch goals and make the game with higher quality. Emergence is a fun game, that we hope the most advance board game players will enjoy at the same table as individuals new to board games. I hope you guys enjoy the prototype images, and would like to try out Emergence!

Emergence is now live on Kickstarter.

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