You’ve discovered a blog post with information about the process of making Pathfinder Quest, Paizo’s new cooperative adventure board game for 1–4 players! Just like in Pathfinder Quest, you must choose what path to take and then refer to the specific blog entry to learn more how Jason and Joe brought the game to life!
If you’d like to learn more about the game in general, read entry 5.
Entry 4 shares a little bit about what we hoped to accomplish with our design for this game.
If you want to discover some of the biggest challenges we faced while designing Quest, read entry 2 (for Joe’s take) and entry 6 (for Jason’s take).
To see what we’re most excited about, check out entry 1 (Jason) and entry 3 (Joe).
Thanks for reading, and we hope you’re as excited about Pathfinder Quest as we are!
Entries
Read each of the following only when instructed by the blog post above!
1
Pathfinder is known for its rich world, full of storytelling potential, deep and meaningful character building, and a tactical play experience, and with Quest, we can bring all of that to a wider board game audience. So, while the game will feel immediately familiar to fans of the RPG, we worked hard to ensure that the story and overall mechanics of this game were approachable and easy to learn for new players as well.2
One unexpectedly intricate challenge was designing our set of 17 modular, double-sided map tiles so that they are interesting, reusable in unique ways, line up nicely, and don’t take up too much table space. And there was much triple- and quadruple-checking to make sure no single encounter required you to use both sides of the same tile!3
I can’t wait to hear stories from players about how their character builds, along with the items they’ve found, challenges they’ve attempted, and tactics they’ve used, have combined in truly unique ways to make for awesome gameplay moments. Even when playtesting the same encounters over and over, we never saw things play out the same way, and my favorite thing is watching players find clever and unexpected synergies that emerge from a series of relatively simple choices.4
Our primary goal while making Quest was to shoot for as approachable an adventure board game as possible while giving players the right amount of interesting decisions—not too few as to feel repetitive, but not so many as to overwhelm—and also to make choices matter! You’ll find that as you play out each encounter, each adventure, and indeed throughout the narrative of the entire campaign, your group’s particular makeup and choices through the story leads to their own unique tale.5
Pathfinder Quest is a cooperative fantasy adventure board game for 1 to 4 players. In Quest, you will play through a series of adventures, each one consisting of several encounters presented to you in the Adventure Book. Each encounter tells you what challenges you might face, both while exploring the world and while in combat. Challenges often require dice rolls to complete and depending on your result, you will get sent to the Challenge Book to learn your fate!Throughout each adventure, you will be asked to make important choices that shape the overall outcome of the story. At the end of each adventure, you will level up and get ready to take on even more challenging foes and dangers in the next adventure!
If you want to learn more, check out our launch blog or go straight to the BackerKit campaign page!
6
Finding the right point of balance in a game like this can be tremendously difficult, especially when each combat features new monsters and characters frequently gain new items and abilities. While everybody wants to win, we also want to ensure that the victory feels earned— through clever choices, tactical teamwork, and a little bit of luck. Both the player and monster statistics went through several rounds of revision and playtesting to ensure that we got the sweet spot that we wanted. The fights are tough, but if you play smart and work together, you should win the day.7
This entry is not pointed to by anything, so if you’re reading it, you must love secrets—that’s great! We crammed Pathfinder Quest full of little surprises, whether it’s the achievements you can check off (eventually unlocking a unique item), special uses for your character’s background or class abilities, lots of narrative twists and turns, and maybe even a secret passage. Oh, and when we say you shouldn’t look through the item deck? You really shouldn’t…
Read more at this site