Seven-Part Pact — Origins (Chapter 1)

Photo by Josh Rangel from Unsplash

The seven greatest wizards in the world convene upon the Faraway Sea, their magic aligned in the service of an ancient Pact. Each governs one seventh of this world and wields power beyond comprehension over the very fabric of the cosmos. While these wizards are indeed mighty, so too are they trapped: by the pressures of masculinity, by the weight of their loneliness, by the tolling bell of their own mortality. Each has a choice: will he maintain the systems which imprison him, or will he rebel against his pact and destroy the fragile balance of his world?

Seven-Part Pact __ is coming to Kickstarter summer 2026. It’s an ornate and ambitious game, and if you’ve been following me for a while now you’ve probably heard me talk about it a lot. Seven intertwined board games representing a tangled world ruled by seven powerful and arrogant wizards who both lord over their world and are bound by obligation to it. It’s been an involved process, challenging my creativity and pushing my game design to its limits. This is the first in a series of articles about the development and design of Seven-Part Pact, walking through its origins, its creative choices, and how it came to occupy the shape it is now.

I’ve been working on Seven-Part Pact near continuously for the past four years. It’s been the thing I’ve had in my back pocket for so long that at this point it’s been a sturdy constant for longer than most things in my adult life. It began in 2022, while I was recovering from the overwhelming burnout that characterized that year for me.

Mazey and I had been working a lot on Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast, which uses games in a modular way to tell different kinds of small stories. In Yazeba’s, “Making breakfast for everyone” uses fundamentally different rules than “going trick-or-treating.” I was very interested in that kind of modular asymmetry, but I wanted to pick it apart — instead of giving new rules to all the players based on their time, what if each player had completely different rules to reflect their responsibility?

I had also just finished Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke, and I was thinking a lot about power and agency. Seven-Part Pact took shape initially as a game extremely rooted in 17th century England, building on the kinds of stories set up by Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. I gave myself permission to be tremendously indulgent as I began riffing on the ideas in my head. One element I felt was important was how Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell thinks about gender. Important female characters and characters of color are relegated to the margins by the narrative voice, and the implicit structure of the narrative buys into a “great man” theory of reality, ignoring how women shaped the story playing out.

A very early cover page for the very first draft of Seven-Part Pact

I decided to make the central wizards all men. I also decided almost immediately to fit them into a pattern of seven, aligning each with one of the seven classical planets (Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Venus, Mercury, Luna, Sol). This was because of my constant fascination with gnostic numerology and symbology and because of my fondness for books like The Keys To The Kingdom series by Garth Nix, which similarly featured a set of seven archonic demiurges. The vision was clear early on — seven powerful men who think of themselves as gods, wielding both power and responsibility over the world they inhabit.

The first description of a wizard written for the first draft.The current description of the same wizard. It’s fascinating to see what’s changed and what’s stayed the same.

The first three wizards I wrote were the Hierophant (at the time named the Townwright), the Necromancer, and the Warlock (at the time named the Chevalier). I gave each one a rudimentary board game representing their area of responsibility (which I called their Domain). The other half of the game emerged quickly once I had the base concept of their board games. I was interested in finally writing a game with dice, and specifically using dice as a divinatory tool beyond their function in arithmetic. This led me to developing a very rudimentary model of the magic system, assigning alchemical symbols to each side of the dice and using those symbols to determine the results of the incantations.

(Both of these concepts, domains and spells, are topics I’ll discuss more in later articles.)

An early sketch of the Necromancer’s Gates of Death.The current playtest material design for the Gates of Death. Much of the Gates of Death were finalized very early on and have remained relatively constant through the design process.

I ran early playtests with a small number of players to get a sense of how it fit together. I learned quickly that the game was stressful and weird, but also that it played differently to anything anyone had ever experienced before. I could tell I was onto something, even if the game itself was very far away from being the sort of game I wanted to play regularly. I also realized, as I continued working on it, that I hated writing about 17th century England. Players brought in biases and perspectives that clouded their ability to engage with the setting on its own terms, and an anxiety about historical accuracy choked and people’s confidence in their creativity. So I took a step back.

When I returned to Seven-Part Pact, I changed the setting to a fantastical archipelago heavily inspired by Ursula Le Guin’s The Earthsea Cycle. Changing the setting enabled me to make some dramatic changes to the board games I was designing. The game as a whole didn’t “click” fully as something I wanted to work on until about a year later, at Metatopia 2023. It was there that I showed the game to Vincent Baker (and his child Elliot). I was struggling with the stress and pressure the game was creating in its players — it was fun, but it was also overwhelming, and I didn’t know how to liberate it from that feeling. Vincent Baker pointed out that the game wasn’t just about a great quantity of information, but it was also about luxuriating in that information. What if, instead of trying to get the game playing as efficiently as possible, I leaned into the sensation of being overwhelmed, and let players marinate in the complexity of the game and the setting without any pressure?

That was the key to making the game come together. It was at that point, following the playtests and discussions at Metatopia, that I redoubled my efforts. Six months later I showed it to Steve Jackson at GAMA 2024 and he fell in love. I spent the next two and a half years fleshing the game fully out and then polishing it down, tightening each of the screws in its intricate clockwork design until the structure as a whole finally all worked together.

The structure of Seven-Part Pact has remained consistent across its design. 3–7 players, each responsible for their own portion of the world, playing as arrogant and complicated men handling board games which represent the status quo. Their main resource each month is time, assigning four weeks of time to make changes to their board games and enact their agendas. They never have enough time to do everything they want, pushing them to rely on magic, which can break the rules of any of the games but also creates complications for the other wizards and pushes the Pact as a whole towards collapse.

Over the next several articles, I’ll talk about the Domain system of Seven-Part Pact, how magic operates in the game, how the wizards were built up and developed, and ultimately how the game clicks together. All this will culminate in the Seven-Part Pact Kickstarter launching Summer 2026, which you can follow along with here. The playtest documents for Seven-Part Pact are also currently availabe on my Patreon here.