Wild Bastards, by Blue Manchu studios, is a follow up video game to Void Bastards. Void Bastards was a light immersive sim that evoked the original System Shock, but was wedded to a rogue-lite/FTL fork crawl structure. Instead of taking place on an entire giant space station, instead you hop from ship to ship, grabbing up supplies as quickly as possible and getting out.

Wild Bastards takes that baisc type of premise, but this time with a sci-fi western theme. There is a lot you could talk about in terms of how it differentiates itself, but I just want to examine one aspect, an additional point crawl. There is still the Void Bastards fork crawl where you move from system to system, but then you beam down to a planet, and have a point crawl where you are free to choose what point you move to next, instead of having to move forward along forks. The time pressure here is a roaming boss type opponent will appear after a few turns, so you’re still trying to grab resources as quickly as possible and get out.

The point crawls in Wild Bastards have the following elements:

  • Starting node
  • Empty nodes
  • Staged combat encounters. Completing them opens up paths to additional nodes
  • Roaming bands of opponents that move randomly around the map
  • Shops
  • Various tools that can be used to benefit you at combat encounters
  • Various treasures
  • Various bonuses such as health or armor pickups, or “nitro” which gives you extra moves for your turn
  • Banks for depositing/withdrawing money
  • Teleportation nodes
  • Hazards that end your turn when you land on that node
  • Intel about various enemies
  • Vaults/caves that contain a lot of extra loot, but that summon a lot of extra enemies
  • Exit node

Perhaps the most interesting dynamic is on the larger point crawl, because of the time pressure involved, you are typically tempted to split your party up to maximize the amount of rewards you can acquire. That’s not a dynamic I’ve seen in a lot of point crawls for tabletop games, and is probably worth adapting.

There are some aspects of this point crawl that are more appropriate for a video game then a tabletop game, but there are still some additional aspects that I think are worth considering when designing a point crawl. I think having rewards where the consequence is it spawns more or, perhaps just makes the enemies in the area more dangerous is a good one. And having conditions for opening up additional connections between nodes seems like something that I don’t see quite enough of.