Oddland

About Oddland

Oddland, designed by Dan Schumacher and published by Allplay, is a puzzle-y map-building game for 1-5 players.

As an intrepid investigator of all things idiosyncratic, your job is to explore Oddland and document its fantastic creatures. On your turn, explore by placing a terrain card somewhere on the island (with the ability to cover up previous terrain!).

Then, place one of your seven flora or fauna tokens on the card you've just played. These tokens score based on their surroundings; for example, the pigehorse scores better in large swathes of desert where it can run free!

Project Overview:

Our high level goal was to build off the design's core to simplify rules but add more player agency and strategy. By focusing the game's content, designing clearer scoring rules, and adding texture through card design and some small systems tweaks, development radically improved the gameplay while keeping the soul of the design shining through at every step.

Services Provided:

"Velgus and the team at Brieger Creative took my core gameplay and greatly improved the player experience with additions like the flora token, 2 cards in hand, and ensuring each creature has a distinct identity from all others. I also very much appreciate how they kept me in the loop and listened to the feedback I provided after significant changes." — Dan Schumacher, Designer of Oddland

Case Study: Improving Turn Flow

The original game had 7 turns: 4 where you played an animal and 3 where you passed. Players felt too inactive when passing so much. Adding a 5th animal token helped with player engagement, but wasn't quite there. When we tried 6 and 7 animals, it was too complex for most players and each individual animal did not matter as much. There was also a nagging useability issue of teaching how players skip turns and tracking them.

Enter the Flora tokens. Flora tokens are an additional token type. All Flora are identical, and each player has 1 or 2 depending on player count. The base version of Flora tokens have no new rules, yet add significantly to game strategy and experience by blocking other placements.

Flora provided the depth the game wanted without the complexity of a new scoring condition. Every turn felt satisfying and impactful, while giving players an option to place a flower to save their animals for later. This also fixed a usability problem, as every turn involves placing a token (no skipped turns to track!).

Flora gave us a lot more design space too. We added a scoring effect as the Flora's alternate side in the base game, and came up with some wild and wonderful additional Flora effects for the expansion.

Brieger Creative Team