GMT Games started pre-selling Away Team: Voyages of the Pandora last week, but I missed the announcement and just picked up on the news today. As I've said before, it's exciting to work with John Butterfield, a game designer whom I have long admired, and it's just a flat-out fun project. John is working on a short version of the game and a 2-player version, but the campaign game will be an interactive epic. It's going to be way cool.
John sat me down at GMT Weekend last month to walk me through the system using locations that he has already finished. I figured we'd spend the morning, just enough to give me a taste so that I'd know what I was doing as my moved forward with my assigned tasks. I got so caught up in managing my away team missions that I played through the entire star system, skipping lunch and keeping at it throughout the afternoon. The game really does put you in the captain's chair in that you have to design each away team, anticipating which crew specialists and equipment will be most needed. After the team lands, you have to cover as much ground as you can and discover as much as you can while your resources dwindle — supplies (as measured by time spent), your crew's physical and mental well-being (Terror points are an important thing in the game), and your equipment's state of repair.
Pre-ordering a copy of Away Team doesn't support me directly, but if it sells well and gets some buzz about it, it could open up more opportunities for me. I don't know when the game will be published — John estimates sometime in 2024, but that's just a guess — but GMT Games will not charge your credit card until about a month before they ship. They use pre-order numbers mostly for advance planning and prioritizing games as they go through the production queue. The more pre-sales, the more urgency in getting the final art and layout done.
Anyway, this should explain the mystery of why I put a copy of Hesiod on my wishlist. Pandora is such a perfect name for an exobiology survey vessel, and Hesiod is the OG source of the Pandora legend. One of my tasks is writing flavor text for the game documentation (the flavor text on the GMT Games page is not my doing; they didn't consult me), and I'd like to dig into Hesiod for a suitable epigraph or two. Gotta add a touch of class wherever I go, right?