Designers Log

November 23rd, 2025 - That's a "Dam" Fine Idea

As previously noted, the creative wheels at Mythic Portal Games never stop spinning as evidenced by our most recent game in development. This is a story of how inspiration can come from out of thin air or even water.

I'll explain.

A couple years ago I had the privilege to play a depressing but incredibly well designed game at SnowCon Maine from Smirk & Dagger called The Spill.

The game pits the players against the ever increasing damage caused by an oil spill. The odds are certainly stacked against you, but the play was interesting. What most fascinated me was the tower at the center that randomized the distribution of the oil cubes/dice so you never knew when your quadrant of sea life would be in jeopardy. Definitely check out the game. There is a link above.

Fast forward a year and I'm driving to visit my mother with my wife and son in the car and on the side of the road is a stream leading off a pond and the most magnificent beaver lodge I'd ever seen. It was huge. As far as I know, it is still there. And then the idea struck me. What if the players are all beavers trying to build a dam to prevent water from flowing off the playboard?

It was at that moment that the "B" entry in the Mythic Portal development catalogue was born. What will eventually become Bungling Beavers came from that simple bit of input from the natural world. But where does "The Spill" come in to play. Well, the water(represented by blue marbles) will need to flow randomly into all four quadrants of the game board. The Spill is obviously a much more complicated concept and geared toward tweens and up. Bungling Beavers will see tots and up building their own dams and hoping that they build a strong enough structure to prevent the water(marbles) from flowing off the board.

The prototype of the randomizer tower, which in our case will be modeled on a dead tree like you would find in any swamp, is in progress. Here we have a prototype sculpt of the logs, too.

Obviously, there is a lot of work to be done. Lots of refinement. Cards to be made to indicate adding a log or two to your structure or removing some logs from your opponents dams and of course dumping the marbles into the randomizer. However, this is where the process starts. Inspiration can come from anywhere. Hopefully, this answers the questions I get asked most often about "How do you get your ideas?" or "Where did this one come from?". Sometimes it comes from really cool games from other designers and sometimes from the world around you. Keep your eyes open and you'll find inspiration everywhere.

-Gary

November 17th, 2025 - Nobody is Perfect

Firstly, let's start off this Designers Log with an apology. A heartfelt one from me to everyone currently in possession of a copy of Alien Agendas. Yup, I'm sorry. Your copy of the game has errors. I went through all the game files at least a half a dozen times before they went to the printer for production over the summer. But I missed a few things.

Firstly, the card count in the rulebook is incorrect. The game has 71 Component cards, not 69. This error happened because I added one of each type of Homo Sapien (Male & Female) at the last minute to the game to help with some balance issues. Humans are the most common component in the agendas, obviously, since the agendas most often affect us.

I also made the mistake of using a company to generate the QR code in the rulebook and on the Mythic Portal promotional card in the game that only provides temporary QR code redirects. So if you try to scan either the code in the rulebook or the promotional card they go nowhere. Whoops! This obviously does not affect gameplay, but if you want to catch up with Mythic Portal on our various socials it doesn't accomplish what I had hoped. Promote our brand. Here is an updated QR that

leads to the right place.

There are also two cards that had errors. The first one is the most serious.

The Agenda card "Infiltration" has the incorrect type of card icon next to the Calibrated Camouflage component.

This error in the icon has caused consternation for players that search in vain for a Calibrated Camouflage card with that Science/Brain icon and it simply does not exist.

The second error does not impact play of the game, but it just made sense to correct it. Again, an agenda card, "Extinction Event" is affected. The word other is misspelled as ohter. While this does not affect whether or not an Agenda can be completed effectively, the perfectionist in me needed to get it fixed.

Since I am having new rulebooks and replacement cards printed, I also took the opportunity to implement some feedback provided by the very wise guys at Apis Gaming and added a card count for each of the components in the deck (for any cards that have more than one copy). This should aid in play by allowing shrewd players to realize that they should abandon certain agendas once the needed components become so rare as to make agenda completion highly unlikely. Again, you could play the game successfully without this information, but for the more hardcore players it is essential to their enjoyment.

So what does this mean to you? It means that if we shipped you a copy of the game either through the Kickstarter or a direct purchase you will receive an updated rulebook and cards for each copy you purchased in the mail soon after I get them in from the manufacturer.

If you purchased your copy through one of our fantastic retailers just drop an email to mythicportalgames@gmail.com and I'll get the replacements out to you as well.

If you are one of those fantastic retailers, I'll be in touch to swap out any remaining inventory with updated copies with the corrections.

Thank you all so much for your patience with these issues with our first game. Hopefully, we'll do better on the next one.

-Gary

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November 10th, 2025 - Steam-Powered Sentinels Tabletop

At least half a dozen years ago, I came up with a concept for a card game. It was set on Earth in the future (Baltimore, Maryland specifically). A grim future where unchecked underwater oil exploration awakened ancient terrors from their slumber in the deep. This concept eventually became the Steam-Powered Sentinels living card game.

The game was fun, it played well in all the playtests and was well received publicly at a couple of gaming conventions. The only problem was that it required over 400 cards, 100 glass aquarium stones divide amongst five colors, and a dozen metal cog tokens; which made it quite expensive to produce. Too expensive for such a young company like Mythic Portal Games at the time.

We're still not a big enough company to launch a game with this sort of design all in one box. We toyed with the idea of launching it in sort of a Pokemon or Magic style CCG/TCG style with a premade decks and booster pack configuration, with cardboard chits instead of glass and metal, but that still was out of reach. Also the warehousing of thousands of copies of four different decks and cases and cases of random boosters would be a nightmare.

Fast forward to now and we're going to prototype a new take on this property with a skirmish style tabletop miniatures game at 28 mm to pitch to larger publishers that specialize in miniature games or 3D print it like the folks at Trenchcoat Minis do.

Let me introduce Robbie, the first of the animated robots. Powered by a coal powerplant, built by the mechanic, Ernest Hensley and brought to life by his fiancée, the magician Nicolette Giovanni.

Here is a look at the original card art and the 3D model by Olivier Rheault-Hébert, a brilliant young 3D sculptor from Canada.

This is only one game in the pipeline at Mythic Portal. We'll share more as we keep juggling all of these ideas and moving them forward one step at a time.

-Gary

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Original Art

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3d Model

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