Tales from Production: Duel of Meloch, Wingspan Pocket, and Origin Story: Heroes & Villains
Transcript
Hey, I'm Jamie from Stonemaier Games, and today I'm going to talk about some tales from production, some product design decisions we made for three different products, the Duel of Mechs, Wingspan Pocket, and Origin Story Heroes and Villains. These are three products that are being released on July 15th, 2026 on our web store. I say released, I mean launched on our web store and then shipped it soon afterwards. I thought I'd consolidate them into one video since we were kind of working on these projects at the same time. So, the first one is Duel of Mechs. This is a standalone game that pits a Scythe player against an Expeditions player, and it also serves as an as an expansion for Scythe and an expansion for Expeditions. So, throughout the design in particular, I had to make sure everything was compatible with these different games, these different products. Um So, part of that meant, but it also had to be standalone. So, part of that meant that there had to be enough coins, for example, in the game that uh that you could that you didn't need coins from Scythe or Expeditions.
Um We I made a decision So, this is just going to be free form as I pull stuff out of this box, basically. For the Expeditions mech mat, we found a way to make the mechs dual the mech mats dual layered for the Gears of Corruption expansion, and so we included uh we we made this mech mat dual layered. I think you can kind of see it in the video there so that these tokens don't slide around. The tokens don't slide around here. Makes it easier to lift up the board and slide cards underneath whenever you need to do that. Uh we had to try to get the cards, to the best of our ability, to match the backs of the other to the similar cards in um in this example, in in uh in Scythe because there are factory cards and there are uh encounter cards here as well. So, I had to get those to back those backs to match.
Um What other design product design of that that we made here were the triumph Track, I don't think there's anything in particular interesting about making that Triumph Track unique. Um and the dual-layered uh player mat here. So, we did have a question of like, how do we organize all this information into various documents? So, we have the Duel of Mechs rulebook, right? But, uh some people who learn this game might already know how to play Scythe or Expeditions. So, they don't need a new rulebook for Scythe and Expeditions. But, not everyone is that way, and someone may not have played Scythe or Expeditions for a while. So, what we did is we included a rules summary for Expeditions, a double-sided rules summary. And we also included a rules summary for Scythe, specifically for Duel of Mechs, but um so we have a Scythe reference guide here.
And I think these are pretty good pretty distilled versions of the rules. It's definitely a good refresher. It's a good reference guide, but I you can essentially learn these games from these two guides. But, I wanted them separate so you can have them on separate sides of the table. One player could have the Scythe guide, the other player could have the Expeditions guide. We also included a Tournament of Mechs sheet of paper. You can also download this that has different like lengths of tournaments. If you want to have like a very short tournament, you could do that. This is where you pit maybe a Scythe player against an Expeditions player, and likewise on this side. Or you can go Scythe versus Scythe or Expeditions versus Expeditions. You can do longer tournaments, and we use a type of paper here that is easy to write on. Um yeah, opposed to some of the other paper stocks that I've talked about here.
The Tokaido rulebook, we like to have this separate so that you can easily reference this if you are also referencing the other rulebooks or guides. And last, we had an appendix. I thought this might be helpful to have as a separate page as well. This references the new content, like the new uh faction, the new Expeditions mech, the new factory cards, the new combat cards. You probably won't need to look at this, but if you ever do need to reference uh the rules for any of those asymmetric or specific components, you can just have an extra document for that. So, we're down to the the box organization itself. So, I had all this stuff that I just showed you what goes on the top layer of the box. We wanted to make this box the basically the right size, which is an odd thing to say. Of course, you want the box the right size, but we didn't want it to be too big. We also wanted it to organize all the components really well.
And so, we have an insert right here, as well as a uh natural rubber playmat. And I don't know if you can see this from the photos, but there is like a little curved area here for the playmat to sit. Uh and I chose natural rubber here instead of cardboard for a couple reasons. The main reason being that it could fit better in this box, but I also thought, you know, people are always asking us for rubber playmat versions of our player mats and our game boards. And so, I thought, well, it's something people often ask for, why not include it in the box from the start, and so it isn't something they need to ask for later. And last, uh one of the reasons I I generally don't use a natural rubber playmat is because I don't think text shows up on them very well. I think they are primarily Oh, and often they don't even fit in the box, so that's often a problem, too.
I think they're primarily great when you have cards that you need to pick up off the board. And there are actually two cards that are kept on this mat. Uh they're kept for the expeditions player on the lakes on the board. So, this makes them it easier to pick up those cards off the board. I knew from the start that I wanted it to be double-sided. And Jamey and I decided that there would be one map that would be uh a bird's-eye view, like inside, and there would be another one that would be the first-person locations. The maps are structured differently, but it also if you just like one orientation better than the other, if you like the bird's-eye view versus the the first-person art, you can choose that side. Also, I will note that uh some people have asked, "Why didn't we orient the" I'll show it to you while I talk. Why didn't we orient the Scythe information facing the Scythe player? Because we do have this track over here, the population power track does face the Scythe player, while everything else faces the Expeditions player.
And we actually tried it. We tried to flip around the information on each of the locations that was relevant that's relevant to the Scythe player, and it even though it's like a tiny touch, it's just rotating basically this icon and a few other icons, it instantly became a visually visual mess. Like [clears throat] it was confu- it was really confusing to look at, like surprisingly confusing. We tried it. We thought, okay, maybe this will work, and it did not work. So, that's why everything is just facing one way. And honestly, like when you play Scythe, you probably aren't facing the board from the top down. You're probably facing it from some odd direction anyway. So, I think Scythe players and Expeditions players alike alike are used to looking at the board from different angles. What other production decisions that did we make here? There's a ton of cards here. I don't think there's anything really specific about production that we made in regards to the cards. Okay, one thing that we did have to decide is what color should this new Scythe faction be?
And there weren't many colors like currently there are nine Scythe factions, and so we didn't have that many colors remaining to choose from basically. And so, the options were kind of pink, brown, and uh and gray. We hadn't used gray yet. And I thought it might be a little odd to have workers on the board that were pink or brown. Like those are human skin tones, and that just seemed a little odd to me to have workers that you're commanding on the board that have actual human skin tones. And so, I went with the gray. And it is a pretty light gray. In photos, uh it might appear more white than gray. Even on camera here, it might be appear more light than white than gray. But I I brought a Polania mech along so you can see that there is a difference. Like, this is the Polania mech. This is the gray that we chose for uh for the the side player. And we couldn't go too dark of a gray because a darker gray is used in Scythe: The Next Edition for the mechs and the characters. So, mechs and and Expeditions characters in in Scythe. So, even here, our lighting isn't really doing it justice, but in person, I can assure you the gray is truly differentiated from the white.
Like, it you you really can tell the difference between the two. Anything else in here that uh Yeah, I don't think there's there's much else. I guess we did make the decision that the the Expeditions player does start with the the gold worker. It's kind of a wild worker that you um that was introduced in Gears of Corruption. But, beyond that, here's also the Expeditions mech. Oh, one other thing. Yeah, two other things actually, I forgot. Here's the Expeditions mech. Here is the metal mech version of it. We did go through I think maybe one other iteration of this where there was a little component somewhere on here. I can't remember where it was now that seemed like it was likely to snap off and so we got rid of that component. Um so, it's kind of a steamboat mech. This is the metal version. This is not included. This is a separate add-on pack that has this metal mech and four Scythe metal mechs. And then we have the plastic version included with So, that brown color I mentioned, there are no workers specific to Expeditions and so we made the Expeditions faction brown.
Again, a color that we had not used in um in Scythe: The Next Edition. The last thing is for a while uh this box we tried to fit an airship into this box. It increased the price just to include an airship, but we eventually we realized as we were experimenting with the insert composition, we realized that the airship just didn't fit well into the box. It would have made the box bigger. Um It In fact, I'll say it didn't fit and it would have had me to make the box bigger. So, not only would the game have been more expensive due to a bigger box, but also due to a big extra component, the side airship. And airships aren't used in Jewel of Meklok. You don't You don't use airships. And so, we decided to make it a separate add-on. So, there is an add-on airship in Jewel of Meklok or not Jewel of Meklok. There There's an add-on that will be available at launch on July 15th for Jewel of Meklok if you often use the air gambit the wind gambit and you want the Scythe airship.
Uh Yeah, so that is that was a tough choice to make to separate it. In fact, originally, I included this in the Metal Mech pack and people said, "Well, what if I want the Metal Mechs but not that?" Or "What if I want this but not the Metal Mechs?" And so, I decided to separate the two. Complicates things a little bit, but we tried to hear that and and separate things. Um but I also reached out to Andy at Meeple Forge who's kind of well-known in the Scythe community for making custom versions of things like airships. So, I figured, "Okay, if we're making this decision, let's at least reach out to Andy in advance and let him know what we're working on so that he could work on a 3D printable custom version of this airship in advance." So, if you don't want the airship, if you don't want to pay for the add-on, you can also you could just get Andy's 3D files and and and use them to to to print the airship.
Yeah, so those are the production decisions that went into making Jewel of Meklok. If I think of anything else while I talk about the other projects, I'll jump back to it. Let's talk about Wingspan Pocket. So, Wingspan Pocket was originally in a horizontal box that was bigger than this and not quite as deep. And it presented some problems once I presented it presented to my team. One, I mean, this box even you can see it next to my face here doesn't really fit in your pocket. Pocket is referring is kind of not a nod to it being a smaller box game, but also more importantly being a nod to pouch or pocket nest that some birds make. Uh but we wanted it to at least resemble something that could come pretty close to fitting in your pocket or maybe a very small bag. Easy to transport, easy to travel with basically. And this this other box size didn't do that. Also, it uh was narrow enough that it would probably tip over on the shelf of a store. This is something that one of my coworkers who has worked store said it's really important that you have enough enough depth to the box that it that it can just be placed on the counter and not tip over. Um which you can definitely do in this one. So, figuring out like the shape of the box is something that took quite a bit of time and a lot of discussions with the team.
So, a lot of the product design decisions went into um both the retail appeal of Wingspan Pocket because we envision this as a a a game for retailers. A very a very easy game for retailers to sell. It's it's very small. It's not expensive for them to purchase. They can they can stock a lot of it pretty easily if they want to. Um and likewise, we wanted it to be very accessible to people. The a big point in this game is to introduce people to the world of Wingspan through a game that is lighter and shorter and more streamlined. And so, the gameplay has been for all that has been here throughout the development of Wingspan Pocket. But some of the components in the original PPC, the pre-production copy, didn't entirely reflect how easy it is to play the game.
And we started actually when it well, we finished, but if you open if before you even play the game, we kind of reflected this on the back of the box by using a 1 2 3 description to show just how simple this game is. Um you use your nest to play a bird draw draw cards or lay eggs. This is step one. Step two, activate bird birds in your flock from left to right. And then step three is after someone plays their sixth bird, um everyone scores points. So, it kind of describes the game in a nutshell in what I feel is a much more accessible way. We also really focused on the first page of the rule book where uh we kind of wanted to let players know right off the bat like we say for your first game here's what you need. Here's what you need for an advanced game. We went through different iterations of this rule book including a version that said, "Hey, just skip the rules and jump right to the reference card." But, we found that it just didn't work as well as we hoped.
Like, technically everything that you need to know is on this reference card and every player of course in Stonemaier Games every player gets a reference card. It says icons on the back, what you're doing on your turn in the front, card anatomy. So, really everything that you need to know is on this card. But, having that information there and actually declaring in the rule book that you don't need the rule book we had a lot of discussions about it and it seemed like that wasn't a good idea in the end. And so, we removed that passage from the rule book, focused on actually thorough teaching of the rules here, but for someone that you're teaching or even when you're learning the game you can really uh use this reference guide extensively and not need to reference the rule book. Um, we spent a lot of time getting this exact card right like the the exact layout on the nest card. Every player has a nest card where they start their turn. You'll take one of these things and then you'll activate your flock of birds from left to right. And when you spend pocket you just have one row of birds. So, getting this card right and like even having it line up well with bird cards you can see it like this. So, here's what it would look like.
Uh, that was something that we um that we that we worked on so that that line aesthetically matched up. Originally that that brown line didn't match up as well as it could have. Uh, also Correll had a clever idea of having players at the end of the game flip this over so the nest becomes a scorecard at the end of the game that you can use to just score everything. So, you don't need to reference the rule book you just flip it over and start scoring. The cards the bird cards are double-sided in this game and remember there being another version of the back of the card. There's food on the back of the card that was um less clear about gaining like one food or the other. Some cards only have one food on the back whereas others have have two. So that was something that we looked into during the product design phase. We also went back and forth on a few things here. So I'll talk about a couple of the components. One of these goal cards.
There are these tiny goal cards in the game and they name a kind of a type of bird in the game and for every egg you have on that type of bird it scores an extra point at the end of the game instead of eggs just being worth one point. And we went back and forth on making this the uh the standard way to play and then tell players, "Okay, for your first game just remove these cards." Versus saying for your the standard way to play is without these cards and when you become an when you're ready for an advanced game you can add in these special goal cards. And it is the latter that we went with. We the standard game we declared is does not use these cards because this is designed to be about a a 25 to 30 minute game and these cards can make it just a little bit little bit heavier. Actually the length of the game doesn't necessarily change but it can make the game a little bit heavier.
The last two components that we had a lot of internal discussions about were the eggs the right getting the right quantity of eggs which we gauged from a number of play tests. I think we ended up going with 60 eggs and making them feel special. Uh since you're only getting one egg color. In fact we debated having different colors of eggs but one question we've heard in Wingspan a lot is do these different colors mean different things? The answer is no because it that wouldn't be very colorblind friendly. But we still wanted these to feel special so we only went with this pink egg with these gold flecks kind of inspired by Wormspan. Also though these player tokens went back and forth on these player tokens a lot. So I I mentioned that on your turn you're you're choosing one of these things on your nest and then activating the cards left to right in your single row of bird cards. You don't really need a token to do that, but there are certain times in the game or certain decisions that you have to make where you'll be on a bird. Let's see if I can find one. So that like this bird says that you can draw a a food card if you can see a food card with with berries on it or you can tuck a berry behind a bird.
Um a berry that you that you already have. And so sometimes you might reach a bird like that and you might pause and and need to make a decision like which one of those two things am I going to do right now? And we found that sometimes players would get a bit little bit lost in where they are in their turn even though it's just a single row of cards. And uh so that's where the token could help. Also, it's helpful for having an action token that you're moving along that line of cards. That's what you're doing with this token to show other players when you finished your turn because we found sometimes like a player would finish their turn and the other player wouldn't realize it and then you have that awkward downtime where you're like, "Oh, who's who's turn was it?" You can easily see that with these action tokens. And last, these action tokens actually made it easier to teach certain concepts in the rules because you could talk about like where what actually describe using these tokens what you need to do on your turn as you advance along this this this flock that you have. So you may not end up using these, but I think they're pretty cool feather tokens and they I think they do come in use in the game.
And just fun fact like these were the original tokens that we were going to put in Wingspan instead of cubes instead of action cubes, but these are much more expensive and in Wingspan you need eight of these per player. I think it's eight seven or eight per player. You need a lot of them per player opposed to just one per player here where it's a lot more affordable. So uh we had this design from from many many years ago back in what 20 18 I think where we started printing Wingspan it released in 2019 that we went back to and used that old old uh token design. So yeah, that is Wingspan Pocket. And now for the last few minutes, I'll talk about Origin Story the heroes and villains mini expansion. Very simple, very streamlined expansion. Um first let's talk about the packaging.
We wanted a booster pack type style of packaging. And uh we wanted it to be paper so it can be easily recycled. This does This content does fit in the original Origin Story box. And we know that retailers like to have hang tags so we wanted a hang tag there. The one thing that I I would like I would like Panda to work on is making these types of uh bags less um less wide. Like I think, you know, you see many many booster packs were just kind of wrapped around the back of the pack. I would prefer that. But we have found the compromise there is we found people like in uh in Rolling Realms for example, they like to be able to tear it horizontally so they can kind of retain the integrity of the pack if they want that. And so uh I just slice it open in the back here. But if if you do want to tear that open. So we're trying to figure out how to do those two things. They might conflict with one another with one another.
In the in the uh expansion itself, we include included one replacement card from the original game. In the original game, this this card type where it says ultimate ability up here, it used a different word um that wasn't actually a matching ability. I think it it was just a misprint up here for the card type. So we included this to replace the original card. And then most of the expansion is just there there's like one rules card. So it's pretty much it is all cards. Actually, here's the rules card. That was a solo rules card. Just a little rules card, some credits on the back here. We like to include credits like on the component on a component whenever it is a product that you are disposing of the packaging. That way you have those credits somewhere in your game. And the rest of it is just 21 hero and villain cards. These are the things that you're revealing at the end of uh in round five in origin story.
Of course, on the backs of all of them is a revised in a slightly updated reference card. Really, the only change here, maybe we I think maybe we improve the wording a little bit, but the Actually, yeah, I actually don't think there's anything else that's different here. I think we just improved the words wording a little bit. The one rule that's different and isn't noted on the back because it's part of setup is that you get three of these cards instead of two at the uh at the beginning of the game, and then you choose from those three, you choose one from those three at the end of the game. So, that was that is noted in the updated rules here. Uh and that that's it. Like there there weren't This is a very simple streamlined product. So, there weren't a lot of other product design decisions that went into um the Heroes and Villains mini expansion. Very easy to shuffle into and into your game and and just start to play.
So, yeah, I think that covers the main product design decisions that we made. I'm sorry I don't have any too many visual examples of previous versions of these products. Went through a lot of PPCs. I moved during this process and so I I think I recycled a lot of the the things that uh that I didn't want to have to lug around from one place to another. But, if you have any questions, of course, I'm happy to answer some of the design decisions of the product design decisions specifically that we made during the fairly extensive pre-production copy testing process for these these products. I hope you enjoy them. Again, July 15th launch 2026 in case you're watching this in the future. These products will all be on our web store along with um their related products like Scythe, Expeditions, Origin Story, things like that. And those things will all be on sale for the five-day launch period.
Thanks.