Pandora Celeste: Pirates & Salvage expansion coming to the sci-fi monster board game

Guntower Games are currently at UKGE and stand 2-372, where they have their Gamefound-funded Pandora Celeste for purchase.

The game is a semi-coop game, a fanboy’s love letter to those sci-fi monster movies when it’s never entirely dead. Sometimes, it’s you or your buddy, after all.

Guntower also have Carta Imperia with them, the mini-4x game of dealmaking.

However, it’s Pandora Celeste that I got to talk to Mike of Guntower about before UKGE as there a very real risk of a Pirates & Savage expansion hitting Gamefound in October.

Could you describe Pandora Celeste in just a few sentences?

Pandora Celeste is a love letter to sci-fi monster movies. The hapless crew of the CSS Pandora are woken by the Ship’s computer which tells them that there’s something Big & Nasty on board – but don’t worry, because it’s engaged its Emergency Protocols.  A shiver runs down your spine, because every Company Crewmember knows that those Protocols aren’t designed to protect the Crew: they’re designed to protect the Ship and its precious Cargo.  So you have to work together to shut down those Protocols before they kill you or worse – and every time you do, something Big & Nasty from the Pandora’s Box of all the evils in the sci-fi universe spawns from the shadows to hunt you through the Ship.
So in Pandora Celeste, you are living through a sci-fi movie where before you can deal with the monsters, you first have to survive the Ship!

Pandora Celeste has a 3d board because vents are important in sci-fi monster movies. Are the vents important in the gameplay?

It was really important to us that the Pandora had a proper Vents System, because every movie in this genre inevitably has a scene in the Vents (or the sewers, or the caves or whatever dark and narrow space stands in for the Vents this time). But to the best of my knowledge, no other game in this genre has a proper Vents System that you can crawl around in and discover Nasty (and sometimes nice) surprises.  And that’s because designing a working Vents System on a 2-dimensional board is hard.  So we decided to make it 3-dimensional.  Our first attempts didn’t work very well – they were very rickety and got knocked about.  Then one day I was opening a new Kickstarter I’d just received and putting its minis back into their heat-moulded tray, and it suddenly hit me – you can make these trays see-through!  And so the Vents were born.  Instead of removing the heat-molded components insert from the box, you fold out the box to create the board and leave the transparent insert on top of it to form the 3D Vents System.  

Just how important those Vents are in any game depends entirely on the Protocols and Agendas that the players draw.  One Protocol requires you to kill the Bugs that are infesting the Vents; one classic Agenda means you have to search for the Ship’s pet mascot up in the Vents and rescue it; another provides a locked-door mystery that can potentially be solved by climbing through the Vents.  So every game is different: sometimes the Vents are important, sometimes they’re not.  But they are an integral part of this kind of movie, and we’re really pleased with how they’ve turned out.

Should we trust the android?

No-one ever trusts the android, and there’s a reason for that.  At the start of the game, each player draws 2 Hidden Agendas and chooses one to fulfil. These are classic sub-plots from the movies: self-destruct the Ship, rescue the Maguffin, find Smoking Gun evidence that the Company is up to no good – and if you’re a Company agent, destroy it.  But everybody knows that Skins, the Company Android, has to take a Company Agenda if he draws one – so everyone automatically assumes that Skins is working for the Company until he proves he isn’t.  It’s a simple mechanic which injects just the right level of paranoia into everyone’s dealings with the android to make it feel like the films.

I’m also really pleased with the Sentinel Protocol. This is a special Emergency Protocol which triggers under very specific circumstances and reprograms the android to do a certain task that I won’t Spoil here.  About a year after I’d first designed the Protocol, I got to see Alien: Romulus – and the android in that movie triggered something that felt just like the Sentinel Protocol!  So this game doesn’t just celebrate what’s already in sci-fi monster movies, it actually predicts what’s going to be in them in the future!  You know you’ve got your game right when something like that happens 

How important is player interaction?

Well that depends entirely on the players and how the game develops.  Inevitably, you all split up and start backing into dark corridors, even though every time you watch these movies you think: “That’s a really stupid thing to do. Why don’t they all stick together?”  But the game’s designed to incentivise the kind of behaviour you see in these movies.  Some players communicate a lot and work together to shut down the Protocols and get off the Ship.  Others work against each other.  The Noise mechanic in the game is designed to be manipulated, so if players work together they can draw the Nasties away from some vital area a Crewmember needs to sneak into – or on the other side of that coin you can play the ‘You First’ Action which makes a Crewmember’s comms unit emit a loud screech which attracts all the Nasties and makes them the First Target.  

I’ve attached a clip from one of our prototype games I filmed with some superfans, which I think encapsulates what the game is all about. Picture the scene: the Ship is literally disintegrating around the one-man escape pod, where Greaseball the Ship’s Mechanic is facing off with Skins the Ship’s Android.  Greasy has the vital Widget they need to power up the pod; but Skins has a gun! Can Greaseball talk his way out of this? 

How complex is the game? Would someone who’s tolerance for learning rules diminished over the years be able to dive into the game without a grumble?

The game comes with a Learn as you Play Campaign which teaches you the game as you play along.  So you can literally open the box and start playing without ever having read a single line of the Rules. At first glance, the rules look pretty intimidating because there’s a lot of them, but that’s because they’re designed to cover most eventualities.  There’s even a rule for flushing things out of the airlock in the Final Showdown, because that always happens in these movies! 

But at its heart, the game’s very simple: you take turns to play a card and do what the Action Icons say on the card – and if you don’t have the icons to do what you need to do, you can always play 2 cards face down to do any one Action on the Symbols Quick Ref sheet.  So while card management and a little bit of deckbuilding is important, it’s very rare that you can’t actually do anything.  There’s a push-your-luck mechanic in the combat system which takes a little getting used to, and which gives you just enough rope to hang yourself with   

But the most important rule is the Movie Rule – if the rules are not clear at any point in the game, ask yourself this: ‘What would happen if this was a movie?’  Then interpret the rule that way.  Just like an RPG, these rules are designed to create a space where you can let your imaginations run riot and feel like you’re living through one of these movies.  They’re not intended to get in the way.

I may be getting on but at least I’ve not died and come back as a horror. How often does that happen in Pandora Celeste?

One of the things we’re really proud of is how nine times out of every ten the game goes right down to the wire and you feel like you’ve won (or lost) by the skin of your teeth.  This is by design, because I don’t know about you but when I play one of these games I wanna be Ripley or Sarah Connor or any of the other (usually but not always) heroines who just scrape through in the nick of time. I don’t want to be the Extra who got killed by an arbitrary stroke of bad luck in the First Act of the movie.  So people will die, but they usually die late – and when they do die they have the option either to revive another Crewmember from the Cryo-Chamber and rejoin the game, or to take control of one of the Big Nasties and repurpose their Deck to play as a monster.  Most people choose the latter.  Pandora Celeste: the game where death can be a positive career move 

How is the game won? 

Your main objective in this game is to survive.  As we like to say: ‘Surviving’s just a way of keeping score.’

But victory in this game is fluid and emergent.  Everyone has a Hidden Agenda that they’re trying to fulfil and when the last Emergency Protocol is shut down, that triggers the Abandon Ship Protocol which catapults you into the Third Act, where the audience has just about figured out who are the Goodies and who are the Baddies.  So at this point, players must declare if they have a Company Agenda or not.  Now you know who you can work with to get off the Ship and who your enemies are: but you don’t have to pursue your Agenda – you can all opt to work together to get off as a team if you want to.  But if you haven’t Fulfilled your Agenda, you can’t Decouple until everyone’s on board the Escape Vehicle.  And if anyone breaks ranks, they can Decouple their Escape Vehicle without anyone else on board as long as they’ve Fulfilled their Agenda – and the minute someone escapes the Ship, the game is over.

So it’s a classic Prisoner’s Dilemma.  Do you work together for the good of all, or do you pursue your own self-interest and go it alone?  The choice is yours.  We don’t force it on you.  It emerges from the gameplay and your situation on the Ship.  And of course, it’s designed to lead to those classic moments when a character goes back into the Ship to ‘do what they have to do’ and the rest of you look at one another and say: “I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”

Thanks Guntower Mike.

You can check out the game yourself at 2-372 if you’re at UKGE this weekend.

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