STRIKE HQ

Can the designers of the Escape the Dark… series bring us a true taste of real time strategy games on our tabletop?

Word by Christopher John Eggett

The real time strategy game boom from 90s and 00s created the likes of Command and Conquer, StarCraft and Age of Empires. These, primarily PC games, were all about the constant flow of troops, resources, and base building – managing it all in real time. Clicking a button to generate some troops at your base, dropping a new part of your base down next to the HQ (which will give you more options for building or troop deployment), and then sending troops out to capture objectives and fight the enemy While one thing is producing you’ll try and do something else – it’s the spinning of plates that entices a lot of players to the genre. To be good, you have to avoid dropping anything at all while also fighting strategically.

Thomas Pike, founder and lead designer of Themeborne, the creators of the award winning Escape the Dark Castle and Escape the Dark Sector, has taken on the task of making a ‘tabletop RTS’ – in the form of Strike HQ.

“Strike HQ is the first new game we’ve done since we launched Themeborne,” says Pike, “the Escape the Dark… series is all we have done for five years of the company, and now we’re launching our big second IP. We actually came up with this concept in the same year as Escape the Dark Castle, so it’s been waiting in the wings. And now we’ve finally given it the development time it deserves.”

“It’s an expandable card game that brings the classic thrills of real time strategy videogames to the tabletop,” says Pike, “it does that using an innovative blend of simultaneous action programming and hidden information. The idea is we’re delivering things like fog of war and all of that classic ‘constructing, deploying, attacking’ you get from a traditional RTS.”

TIME TO GET REAL

Pike has redefined what it means to do ‘real time’ on the tabletop to make it work, “when you’re trying to emulate or make a game based on a videogame, your high-level goal isn’t to emulate every facet of the game, but to capture the essence and the spirit of the game and introduce to that, things that are unique to the tabletop.”