Asymmetrical Board Games (Seven-Part Pact)

Photo by Henrique Ferreira on Unsplash

This is Part 4 in an ongoing series of articles about Seven-Part Pact.

1. Origins**:** The origins of Seven-Part Pact and how its design came to be.
2. The Wizards**:** Influences on the seven wizards and how character creation works.
3. The Companions**:** The people who surround each wizard, and the wizard’s Isle and Sanctum.
4. Asymmetrical Board Games**:** The central loop of play, its development, and its refinement.

Seven-Part Pact is coming to Kickstarter summer 2026.

A wizard is nothing without his Domain. In previous articles, I’ve talked about creating characters and providing their immediate context, the nucleus of the tiny community and household that serves as each wizard’s emotional center. This is the first pillar of the game. The second pillar is composed of the way the world depends on and relates to the wizard, the seventh of the world the wizard is responsible for caretaking and (by extension) the portion of the world that the wizard learns to master over time. But in order to understand these Domains, we first need to understand the Orrery.

The Orrery

The Orrery, playtest mockup

The Orrery is, in a lot of ways, the iconic image of Seven-Part Pact. It depicts the classical planets of pre-modern European astrology positioned around a central circle, moving through a neat and tidy heaven split into twelve identical segments associated with the twelve houses of the zodiac. Each planet is an arc, the span of the arc representing the portion of the heaven occupied by the planet over the course of the month. For instance, we can see in this screenshot that Mercury begins the month of December in the constellation Aquarius and crosses three and a half houses over the course of the month, concluding in Taurus. Meanwhile, Saturn is also in Aquarius but moves so slowly that it will still be in Aquarius at the end of the month, having wandered only around a fourth of a house during the month.

The Orrery is a central reference point for the seven asymmetrical board games of the wizards. I created it originally to solve a set of rather interesting challenges: I wanted the events of the board games to change each month, with apparently-random inputs. I wanted the inputs to both appear random and feel controllable. I wanted to reward planning and foresight, but I didn’t want it to be feasible to “solve” the model. And I wanted to both enable players to have a say in its operation but also make it trivial to accidentally screw over other players.

The Orrery was a solution to all of these problems. At the start of every month, every wizard looks at a different part of the Orrery. The Necromancer might care about what’s in conjunction with Saturn, while the Warlock might care about the King’s sun sign. The Mariner is only concerned with the planets in the current season, while the Sage is just looking for the syzygy (wherever that might be). This information serves as the input for random events happening in their board game.

Over the course of the month, each wizard has four weeks of Time they can schedule to play their board game, hang out with their family, and otherwise adjust the world. One of these ways is to go into the Orrery and push any planet forward or backwards an amount equal to its arc. This enables players with foresight to figure out what will be bad for them next month and preemptively work against these conjunctions. But the Orrery is also mathematically chaotic — small fluctuations in position can have drastic effects on the arrangement of the planets and the outcome of the game. Other wizards moving the planets to fit their selfish needs can easily lead to disruptions in your own plans, especially as different wizards are paying attention to different arrangements.

The Seven Domains

Each of the seven wizards are responsible for their own Domain game, a board game that simulates their perspective on the universe. Each game works totally differently, following different rules and principles, although they have certain shared overlapping concepts.

• The Gates of Death, the Necromancer’s game, is a “tower defense” style game of keeping the dead from moving through the gates of death into the realm of the living, while also helping souls move downstream into their final resting place.
• The Temples of the Flame, the Hierophant’s game, is an “overcooked” style game where various supplicants from various classes come to the temples and request aid for their woes, which consumes resources from the temples and taxes them.
• The Court of the King, the Warlock’s game, is a John Company -inspired Eurogame about distributing power and building coalitions over time.
• The Seas of the Archipelago, the Mariner’s game, is a sandbox modeling the position of trade routes, storms, and giant monsters in the oceans.
• The Devil’s Dance, the Faustian’s game, is a sprawling card game between the Faustian and the Devil, where the Devil is constantly starting mischief to build into long-term machinations.
• The Shallow Sea of Dreams, the Sage’s game, is a series of Tarot card prophesying the future of different characters, causing the Sage to manipulate and pit them against each other in order to achieve their destinies and preserve the Pact’s cosmic hegemony.
• The University Tower, the Sorcerer’s game, is a Factorio-inspired game about using students and professors to manufacture magic and improve the Pact’s authority over the world.

Each of these games has gone through substantial revisions over the course of the game’s design in one fashion or another, although they all bear some unexpected similarities to where they started. All of them (generally, with the exception of the Sorcerer) are about preserving a status quo, with no clear “win” state and many possible “fail” states. Wizards interact with their games by scheduling and spending Time, a limited resource.

While there’s many powerful magics in the game, none of them provide the ability to gain additional time. That’s the one thing wizards always need more of, the one thing they’re constantly facing pressure on.

Sometimes I think about the Pact’s model of the universe like a great big house. The Gates of Death are the basement where everything the Pact doesn’t want to deal with gets thrown. The Temples, the Court, and the Seas are three different models of how the world works overlaid onto each other (focusing on the populace, the powerful, and the material conditions). The Devil is like a rat in the walls scampering from room to room causing problems. The Tower and the Dreaming World are the bedrooms and attic, where a future is planned both materially and spiritually.

The Gates of Death, from the playtest materialsThe Seas of the Archipelago, mid-playtest. Don’t mind the Storm Researcher in the corner, he’s been sent by the Sorcerer to do his job.

Causing Impact

There’s a concept from Vincent Baker’s old writing called Dice and Clouds. It’s a way of visualizing little diagrams of how the world of rules and how the world of the fiction talk to each other (Endogenic and Diegetic systems). Most of the time, Seven Part Pact flows from the “Dice” to the “Clouds,” which is to say that mechanical game events occur and then these influence the fictional world. For example, when Jupiter lies in the season, it can create pirate ships from one island to another for the Mariner. We don’t need to have established who these pirates are in the fiction before this moment — the rules of the game have conjured pirates ex nihilo.

“Jupiter is in Springtime, so pirates from Scuttleport raid Ishana.”

Impact is Seven Part Pact’s special word for when the fictional world acts out onto the interlocking board games. This most commonly occurs through magic (which will be the subject of its own article next week), but there’s lots of other ways to produce Impact. Impact is divided into Gifts and Complications, which are positive and negative ways the fiction can change the board games. This is a really useful game design tool. It allows me to say that you can, for example, ask a Companion for a favor and they’ll provide any Impact we agree they could reasonably provide. I don’t have to say “hey Companions can get away with this and probably can’t do this” because it’ll vary according to the perspectives of each group. Maybe a bound demon can provide different Impacts on the Gates of Death than an 11 year old can.

“My pet demon flew to Ishana and murdered the pirates raiding it.”

Impact as a concept is really important for making Seven-Part Pact actually function as an RPG, and not just as a set of board games. If there wasn’t ever a moment when the fiction could talk to the rules, people would work to optimize the roleplaying out of the game. But because the rules of the game have to bow to fictional actions, and a lot of that comes down to group consensus and interpretation, it makes the setting of the game itself feel very real and important.

Overwhelming on Purpose

Normally, as a game designer, you want to make sure your game is easy to understand. It’s generally bad form to make a game that immediately bombards the player with so much information that they get confused by the operation of the game itself. This is because normally the goal of playing a board game is to win the game. In Seven-Part Pact there are no win conditions. TTRPGs often have goals, but rarely have ways to win. This means system mastery is completely unnecessary in order to have a good time playing the game. You don’t need to understand what anyone else is doing in their corners, as long as you have enough of an understanding of your own corner of the game that you can keep it updated month after month.

This combines with the feeling of each wizard as a solitary powerful weirdo to mean that every player is naturally invited to view their map of the game as the single most important part of the game, and to dismiss other wizards’ concerns as petty nonsense. It’s hard to care whether or not the Gates of Death are about to overflow when a giant Typhoon is about to destroy the Halcyon Isles, and it’s hard to care about some clouds when the future of the Pact itself is on the edge of collapse. The inability to hold the entire game in your head at once is part of the intended design of the game. If I wanted everyone to know what was happening all the time, I could’ve designed the game to make that easier. But instead I made it a challenge!

What’s The Goal?

Each game is designed so that there is a lot of potential for natural tension between the goals of your wizard and “optimal play” with your Domain. For instance, the Warlock’s game rewards subtlety, soft power, and negotiation, while the Warlock himself is optimally equipped for stabbing people. The Sage’s game requires you to treat the other characters like pawns in your elaborate schemes, and even rewards you for destroying your own agency in favor of your assigned destiny. Even the Gates of Death, which are probably the closest any Domain gets to being an unalloyed “good” in the world, is a drudgerous repetitive task that never plays off. Additionally, there’s no reward for being good at your job, and lots of downsides from trying and failing.

The same resource you use for caretaking your Domain is also the resource you use to work on your side projects, improve your Sanctum, and hang out with your kid. It’s easy to tunnel-vision on your own portion of the world and lose sight of the little things, or to spend a bit too much time building a fleet of magic warships and forget to keep zombies from invading Isha.

When something goes wrong in a wizard’s Domain, and they lose control of their board game, it causes their game to leak into the Domains of other wizards. For example, when a Foe of Death escapes the Gates, they skulk into the Court of the King or the Temples of Isha and wreak havoc there. Trying to be good at your game is about fighting entropy, keeping the universe in seven clean piles instead of allowing it to mix naturally. In a board game where you’re trying to win, this would be exhausting and repetitive. In a TTRPG, where being good or bad at your game is a reflection of your character’s interiority and perspective, causing problems for other people only ever makes the game more interesting.

Sometimes, after a while, players start to wonder…what happens if we’re all bad at our games? Why should this be the actual best way to model how the world works? What lies outside the confines of the board game as its set up? The most important part of designing Seven-Part Pact has been making sure that the game is fun even if you don’t wonder this, but that if you start pushing against the confines placed by the game, strange and exciting things start to happen.

Seven-Part Pact is coming to Kickstarter summer 2026. You can sign up now to get notified when it launches. The playtest documents for Seven-Part Pact are also currently availabe on my Patreon here.