🧑🚀 Thinking about modular design in games
Thinking about the corporations in Shackleton Base. Subscribe soon to get Tumulus 03 before it's gone. Murder-robots in Moon Colony Bloodbath.
TL;DR Summary
🧑🚀 Thinking about modular design in games
🩻 Last chance for Tumulus 03
🤖 Recently played: Moon Colony Bloodbath
🧑🚀 Thinking about modular design in games
Shackleton Base (Lopiano & Mangone, 2024) is a low-luck, low-interaction, worker placement game about building a base on the moon. In many ways, it’s a standard euro-style game of getting resources to get higher value resources to build things that allow you to collect more resources… eventually turning them into victory points.1
I had a fun time playing it over the weekend, but the part that really stood out was the use of modular corporations. Each of the seven corporations in the game has not only its own rules but also its own custom components. Some use scientific experiment resources and others add space tourist meeples. Each one acts as its own mini-game, with three corporations chosen for each play of Shackleton Base.2
Modular design is fairly common in modern board games: modular maps, variable player powers, and scenario-specific components. The way that Shackleton Base used the corporations felt different because it didn’t change the players, it changed the whole game with new resources, new actions, new cards, and more.
Some thoughts:
Modular TTRPGs: My experience with TTRPGs has been that once a system has established its core rules, new content continues to follow the rules. They might be remixed, but new content is still expressed as difficulty ratings, hit points, or whatever the core system uses. Rarely have I seen something introduce entirely new rules. Could something more extreme work?
A lot of work: Creating a game is hard enough. Creating additional, modular content that may or may not be used in the game is a lot more work for potentially reduced benefit.
Playtesting challenges: Playtesting a game can take time. Playtesting all 35 combinations of corporations in Shackleton Base was a non-trivial task.3
I’m not sure this has any direct applications for any Exeunt Press games in the project pipeline, but it’s interesting.
PLAY: Shackleton Base by Fabio Lopiano and Nestore Mangone
🩻 Last chance for Tumulus 03
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🤖 Recently played: Moon Colony Bloodbath
Moon Colony Bloodbath (Vaccarino, 2025) is a wild game. Ostensibly a tableau-building and engine-building game, but one in which everything will eventually fail. The BGG description calls it an “engine-losing” game.
There’s a few rounds of gaining the various currencies and using them to play cards that improve your actions. But soon enough, horrible event cards about starvation, budget cuts, and murderous robots begin to be added to the deck. The game is less about winning and more about being the last person to lose.
I was happy to try it because there is a link to The Mountain Goats, as explained in The Secret History of Moon Colony Bloodbath:
A few years back, I had a fun idea for a card game, and needed flavor for it. I had been wanting to do some sci-fi thing, and settled on moon colonies. In this game you were struggling to survive, and I remembered there was an EP from John Darnielle (the Mountain Goats guy) and John Vanderslice, called Moon Colony Bloodbath (it's a great EP; I'm a fan of both of them). So I called it that. The game wasn't about the songs or anything (which aren't about a moon colony); it just had that title.
I understand this sentiment. Tollund was inspired by a Mountain Goats song too!
PLAY: Moon Colony Bloodbath by Donald X. Vaccarino
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- E.P. 💀
P.S. Tumulus is pronounced like “toom-u-lus” as it is the root of words like tomb, tumor, and tumescent. Now you know!
I say this with affection.
This is not unlike the alien races in SETI, but in that game they appear at the end of the game with limited interaction. In Shackleton Base, the modular corporations are there from the beginning.
I think I calculated this correctly. If I got it wrong, yell at me in the comments.
Fixed some typos.
The Exeunt Press newsletter editor has been sacked.