Procyon Designing and Playtesting

After watching The Queen’s Gambit and talking to a former competitive chess player in college, I realized I was dissatisfied with some aspects of the game chess. For one, at a certain level it is a game of memorization. A lot of situations have certified “best moves”, and the number of reasonable openings to play are limited by the fact that freeing up and protecting certain squares is ideal. In addition, I was dissatisfied with 3D versions of the game, often requiring some sort of 3D board setup to play.

I was inspired to create a new board game. To fix the problems of chess and add a 3D element, I decided on three primary goals:

• A 2-player strategy game with varied pieces and forms of movement
• A mutable starting setup each game
• A 2D board used to represent a 3D space

The solution was Procyon, designed by me, playtested and tweaked with the help of my friend and creative collaborator Scott (see TPTT). We played every week adjusting the rules and ultimately finding emergent strategies hidden within the rules of the game until we finalized them (linked below). With 4- and 6-sided dice being used to denote the 3D location of the pieces, players act space admirals in battle using action points each turn to move their pieces until they either have twice as many pieces as their opponent, or they touch down on the surface of the enemy’s planet.

Though the game has never been made into a physical version, anybody can play the game on Google Sheets (as we did) with the same board set up like the one pictured on this page.