Written collaboratively between Elizabeth and Ariele.
HEIMARMENE: Closing Night (’Heimarmene’ for short, pronounced ‘high-marr-menny’) is a multiplayer strategy deckbuilding game in which the players embody performers trapped in a Greek theatre play, forced to follow its script. The players must work against one another to influence the script in their desired direction, affecting everyone’s future, to take over the narrative and bring the play to an end.
The show has gone on too long; the performers trapped in a theatre play, forever obeying the whims of the script, compete to take control of the narrative: a multiplayer strategy deckbuilding card and board game about fate.
This project was initially based on my research into Gnosticism, an ancient religious movement founded on the rejection of the Abrahamic god, and the belief that that god was not the only true god, but in fact a malevolent and flawed creator of a malevolent and flawed material world. The salvation (’gnosis’) that Gnosticism promises is that, through awareness of this oppressive false god and the true nature of the world, one has the opportunity to escape this malformed reality. From the earliest stages of the project, my intention has been to create a tabletop game, as I’m most interested in building intricate systems and interesting strategic mechanics, and a tabletop game allows me to achieve these things without having to disregard design time to focus on coding and debugging. I’m also just really interested in tabletop design and board games in general: I run a weekly board game meet at the university, and it’s one of my favourite hobbies.
A particular Gnostic concept is ‘Heimarmene’ (from which the game takes its name), meaning one’s enslavement to the oppressive march of fate. My interest in this resulted in a game where taking control of your own fate is the primary focus. The theatre theming comes from an exploration of the relationship between creator and creations as portrayed in Gnosticism, here expressed as storytellers and their characters. This led to the conflict between a director and the performers in their play, where gnostic salvation involves those performers breaking free of the constructed world of the theatre play. The choice to focus on Greek theatre specifically is formed from previous research done into Greek mythology for other possible ideas, the nine Greek Muses, and the fact that ‘Heimarmene’ is originally the name of the Greek goddess of fate: it all came full circle.
The gameplay design is focused around five major pillars:
(Click the arrows next to the headings to view more detail about these pillars and the reasonings behind them.)
There is also a smaller general design focus on Dual-Purpose Design, both because of its general usefulness in building elegant designs and because of Gnostic dualism.
Deckbuilder strategy card and board game with historical/fantasy themes. The game is medium-weight and medium-size, and is somewhere between eurogame and american design conventions.