When your cruise ship goes off course, possibly interdimensionally, and crashes on an isolated island you’d think you’d have enough on your plate. But raiding parties of dinosaurs crashing through your fledgling civilisation is certainly the icing on an already unappealing situation cake. That’s the theme of Perseverance, a four part episodic Eurogame from Viktor Péter (part owner of Mindclash, designer of Trickerion and Cerebria) and Dávid Turczi (Tekhenu and Rome & Roll most recently, and Anachrony with Péter). Putting together a game of this scope from the start seems… bonkers, frankly. Two Kickstarter campaigns, one successfully funded last year for parts one and two, and an upcoming crowdfunding drive for parts three and four in 2022 means we’re at a midpoint in the series. What better time then, while the designers are in the thick of it, to catch up with how this undertaking is going.
Like many games, it was nearly about Vikings. Péter comments that the pair’s earliest email exchanges about the game were back in 2015, when Turczi took a prototype mechanic from a bidding game and flipped it into one about Icelandic democracy. Still, in a year where Feast for Odin and In the Name of Odin appeared at Essen, Péter decided ‘the game stays, the Vikings go.’