With Undaunted 2200: Callisto out this month, hear from co-designer David Thompson all about the process that brought this exciting new chapter to life...
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Undaunted 2200: Callisto is a standalone game in the Undaunted series, adapting the core gameplay of previous games to a new science-fiction setting.
In Undaunted 2200: Callisto (Callisto, hereafter), players navigate the barren lunar landscape of Jupiter’s moon of Callisto, maneuver to seize dominant high-ground positions, and utilize their mechs and vehicles to gain control of precious resources. Callisto is the first game in the Undaunted series to include solo and four-player team play in the core game box.
This is the story of how Callisto came to be…
Origin
The origin for Callisto can be traced back to 2021. On 2nd September 2021, Trevor Benjamin and I met with the Osprey Games team to discuss a variety of topics, to include Osprey’s status with Undaunted: Stalingrad (its release was imminent), our status with Undaunted: Battle of Britain (we were just wrapping up the final bit of design work), and what the next game in the series would be.
Among Undaunted’s wargamer audience there were calls for different theaters of war for the next game in the series, with Pacific being the most frequently requested. We did consider the idea of an Undaunted title set in the Pacific, but Trevor and I felt the time was right to push the series in a new direction. For years, gamers had asked us to explore non-historical settings, and by far the most requested genre was science fiction. The idea of a new setting was appealing to me and Trevor too – every game in the series set itself apart in significant ways:
- Normandy was the original of course, establishing the core gameplay system
- North Africa introduced asymmetric forces and objectives
- Reinforcements brought solo and four-player team play to Normandy and North Africa
- Stalingrad featured a non-destructive legacy-style resettable campaign
- Battle of Britain shifted the system to aerial combat
We felt now was the right time, not just for mechanical evolution in the series, but also a radical change for the setting. We presented our idea to the Osprey Games team at the meeting in September, and they eagerly agreed.
The Approach
From the start, Trevor and I wanted to approach Callisto with a fresh perspective. We knew the game would be embraced by the Undaunted faithful, but we also knew it would be bringing lots of new folks to the series. We self-evaluated the series, looking for opportunities to improve the gameplay experience wherever possible. Before we started the actual design process, this was the overall approach we established for ourselves. Trevor and I wrote these notes in late 2021, just after our meeting with Osprey Games:
- Setting: - Fictional instead of historical. Science fiction is the most commonly requested.
- Components - Moving to a scenario book massively speeds up the set up (not just the tiles, but other smaller things like spawn spaces; using destruction tokens to cover over things rather than creating separate counters).
- Play modes - 4p (and solo?) version. Head to head is great, but some folks prefer to play games in larger groups, and the solo system has proven very popular.
- Rules - Try to remove fiddly exceptions that have crept into the game over time (e.g. friendly fire, beyond all hope). Remove some keywords and rely more on a standardized set of symbols.
- Onboarding (campaign and rulebook structure) - While we have always tried to ease players into the game with simpler scenarios, we want to take extra attention here.
Looking back on these notes, I think we’ve largely been successful in what we set out to achieve. The only significant change is that the “scenario book” we envisioned eventually became a set of four double-sided boards, but more on that later.
Creating the Setting
Once we had settled on the idea of a science fiction setting, we needed to decide on the tone – space opera, hard sci-fi, etc. Trevor and I are both fans of grittier, more realistic sci-fi, and we also wanted the game to continue with the military traditions of the series. We looked to the real world for inspiration, eventually settling on a study published by NASA in 2003. The study’s authors hypothesized that the moon of Callisto might act as a staging ground for the exploration of Europa and Jupiter’s other moons. This served as our thematic springboard.
Before we started the game design itself, we drafted a two page “lore pitch” for Osprey Games. We presented this document and our proposal for the tone of the game to Osprey in late January 2022. Here is an excerpt from that document:
"The premise is that Earth’s leading governing entity initially sent a large expedition to colonize Callisto in order to explore Europa. The exploration mission was funded by a conglomerate of Earth’s leading corporations, who provided financial support in exchange for lucrative contracts for exploiting Jupiter’s moons.
Once space stations had been placed in Callisto’s orbit, efforts began to establish a presence on the moon itself. While most of the Jovian Government and corporate conglomerate remained in orbit around the moon, some facilities needed to be established, and mining Callisto’s ice water was necessary to sustain life and support exploration.
Due to the conglomerate’s influence, the miners were obligated to provide the ice water they mined to the Jovian Government through trade agreements. In recent years, protests and discontent among the Jovian population increased. The miners, the strongest organization outside the influence of the government and conglomerate, has emerged as a symbol for the protests."
Though the setting background evolved during the design process, and was significantly improved by author Robbie MacNiven (who wrote the narrative in Callisto and Undaunted: Stalingrad), the final version of the game largely reflects this initial vision.
Our concept for the corporate conglomeration would eventually become the Lunar Frontier Authority (LFA). In the game, we describe the LFA as “a conglomeration of Earth’s foremost corporations that provided monetary support in exchange for lucrative land and deposit contracts and first discovery rights on Callisto. The financial power and influence of the LFA left them as the de facto powerbrokers of the colonization of Callisto, despite the official governance of the Galilean Federation.” Meanwhile, the concept for the miners evolved into the Inter-Jovian Mining Union (IMU). We describe the IMU as an “organization born out of an alliance of worker unions and dedicated to redressing the balance between the laborers and the corporates. Known colloquially as the Breakers.”
Improving Immersion and Speeding Up Setup
One thing that has been a constant with the Undaunted series has been the use of modular tiles for constructing the board. These modular tiles allowed us to construct a wide range of boards, evoking different historically-inspired locations. But with Callisto we wanted something different for two reasons. First and foremost, we wanted the play area to be even more immersive – for each scenario to feature a location that told a story. Second, we wanted to speed up the setup time for the game. Finding the right tiles and building the game board has always been one of the elements we liked least about Undaunted.
Our original vision was to create a scenario book, where players would flip open the book to the scenario they wanted to play. However, the scope and scale of the scenarios made that approach impossible. In order to give the game the space it needed, we eventually had to transition to boards. Fortunately, Osprey Games was supportive of the change and included four large, double-sided boards, for eight maps. Each map features a unique environment linked to one of the game’s scenarios.
We couldn’t be happier with this – gone are the boards built of modular tiles and lengthy setup times. And they are replaced by scenario-specific boards gorgeously illustrated by the series’ artist, Roland MacDonald.
So What’s Different About the Gameplay in Callisto?
Although the boards feature irregularly shaped spaces, they are topologically identical to a hex grid. This is a carryover from the series’ use of offset squares in a hex-grid configuration. Roland worked magic in transforming our hex grid playtest maps into the irregularly-shaped, hex-grid topology for the final board designs. And we took advantage of these irregular spaces to introduce a couple of “line-of-sight-adjacent” concepts to Undaunted for the first time. Some blank areas of the board block adjacency, and we introduced doors that similarly block “line of sight.” We think players are going to love these subtle additions.
Callisto also introduces the concept of elevation to Undaunted for the first time, with each map featuring elevated spaces. When units on elevated spaces fire down at other units, they roll d12s instead of d10s. And if a unit is firing up at a unit on elevated terrain, they roll d8s. This minor tweak results in a significant need to keep positioning in mind at all times. Controlling the high ground in Callisto is critical.
The game also features mechs for the LFA and vehicles for the Breakers. Each mech is a single unit on the board, but it consists of three different people: a commander, gunner, and navigator. Each person in the mech has either one or two cards, and each person has unique attributes. Players will have to decide whether they want to focus on the mech’s firepower and add gunner cards to their deck, focus on mobility and add more navigator cards, or try to balance the two. The Breakers’ vehicles allow for improved mobility, as each vehicle can carry up to three troops whenever they move.
There are other gameplay changes of course – new actions, unique ways to interact with the custom boards, and lots of other things – but we’ll leave that for players to discover as they play the game!
Development
One of the reasons working with Osprey Games is such a delight is that they run a very tight schedule, and hold Trevor and me accountable. As mentioned above, Callisto was first conceptualized in late 2021. Here was the schedule they provided us at the time:
- April 2022: Conceptualization complete; initial production spec.
- August 2022: Present early design work (with a fully playable scenario and core rules complete).
- January 2023: 70%+ of the design work complete; art brief complete.
- April 2023: Rules and gameplay finalized.
- September 2024: Game published.
Of course there are LOTS of critical dates not included in this schedule, but those fall more on the development side of things, rather than the design work that Trevor and I were focused on.
Trevor and I completed the last tweaks to the core design of the game in February 2023 (a couple months ahead of schedule - whew!), but just as the heavy lift on our end was ending, work was really cranking up for others. The Osprey team had been orchestrating the production planning and Roland MacDonald had been working on the art for months already. And now it was time for Trevor and me to hand the game design baton to David Digby for his work on the solo system. David leveraged the same system that Dávid Turczi had conceived and David Digby had implemented in Undaunted: Reinforcements, but of course Callisto required him to push the system in entirely new ways.
Callisto development occurred during a changing of the guard for the developers at Osprey Games. When work first began on the game, the developers were Filip Hartelius and Anthony Howgego. They commissioned the game and were with us at the start of the design process (and they had also led the development of previous titles in the series, from North Africa to Battle of Britain). Filip left Osprey Games in 2022, and then Anthony left in 2023. But they also brought in some amazingly talented folks to take over development. Rhys ap Gwyn, Jordan Wheeler, and Luke Evison had all joined the team by mid-2023, and with them they brought fresh new excitement and fully embraced Callisto and the future of the Undaunted series.
Through the rest of 2023, the team led the development of the game, frequently checking in with Trevor and me about questions for certain units or scenarios and passing along sneak peaks of Roland’s art and Robbie’s narrative. In addition, Gareth Clarke was now working on the graphic design for the game. His work was critical in making sure Roland’s gorgeous illustrations for the maps were seamlessly integrated with gameplay elements, that the updated graphic design for the cards felt right, and generally in providing a visual aesthetic for the game that felt both new but also harkened back to the series.
Art
Roland MacDonald’s art is as much a critical part of the Undaunted series as the gameplay itself. Callisto is gorgeously illustrated by Roland, and while it echoes the style of the rest of the Undaunted series, Roland took the art to a whole new level, in my opinion. He had the unenviable challenge of depicting the units in the harsh environments of the Callisto landscape, and so came up with the genius idea of adding illustrations of each person’s face on the cards, balancing the need to provide a realistic depiction of characters in the environments, with keeping the human touch that Undaunted is so well-known for. As brilliant as his character illustrations are, it’s really the gorgeous boards that make the game stand above all the others that have come before it. For the first time, he was able to approach each location as its own unique setting.
Here's a comparison of what we used for our playtesting and Roland's final work:
The Story
We always knew that world-building in Callisto would be a critical part of the game. Finding the right balance between not being too verbose, while also providing enough of a narrative to provide a sense of place in a board game can be a challenge. Our process for the overall story in Callisto was that Trevor and I would brainstorm the overarching storyline, and then I would go away and provide a very rough narrative concept for the scenario. Once all of the scenarios were designed, and the overall story of the game was set, we turned everything over to Robbie MacNiven. Robbie is a super talented author, and has worked in many fantasy and sci-fi IPs such as X-Men and Warhammer 40k. His narrative for Undaunted: Stalingrad was an instrumental part of that game, and we knew from the start we wanted him to work on Callisto. His narrative was the final piece we needed to help the world come to life.
Here’s a comparison of what we provided to Robbie for scenario text, and his revised verbiage:
"The Miners have been refusing to send the normal ice shipments to the Traders. The Traders have decided to take the ice stores by force. They send a drop-ship to the landing platform at an ice storage station. The miners respond from a couple of security buildings. They are trying to either secure the ice or take control of the Traders' ship."
Release
When Callisto is released on September 10, 2024 — after demos taking place at GenCon on August 1st-4th — it will mark the end of an over two-year process to make the game a reality. From our first discussions with Osprey Games to the published version of the game, the creative process for Callisto has been extremely exciting for us. We hope that everyone enjoys playing the game as much as we enjoyed creating it!
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Undaunted 2200: Callisto is out September 12th in the UK and September 10th in the US.
And check out the official tutorial with Watch It Played here.
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