Greetings fellow travelers! I know there are a great many of you but there is room for all in this tour. I will be your guide as we delve deeper into the rich history of the development for the Uncharted: Board Game. Whether you will be a part of that rich history will depend on your sharp wits and your ability to use your fellow travelers for their advantages, only to cast them aside to clinch the victory. Originally we had planned a slow teasing reveal, but decided to opt out of that and spring this great discovery on you all at once.

Over the next few days I will be taking you behind the scenes and into the development of this fantastic game. We won’t be revealing everything about the game, but the smartest of the bunch may figure out the clues in these blogs and connect them to get a general idea about how the game works.

As I stated before, we originally had a very slow spoil planned. We were going to post a website named feartheclowns (kudos if you got the reference!) which linked to nothing more than a poster with Drake’s fabled ring with no game title or anything, leaving it up to you to follow what you believe we had been developing. About a month later, we would be where we are now, the same poster, but with the name revealed to everyone. This entire plan was spun into motion roughly 3 months ago.

However, we opted in the end to show everything, giving players the chance to spend the time until the release talking about their expectations and favorite moments from the Uncharted series itself, and how that would translate to the game itself.

So where did it all begin? We wanted a game that was completely different from Resident Evil, but still captured that essence of excitement. We wanted to learn from the mistakes of our previous games, and fine tune our new product into a machine capable of possibly becoming a flagship product. There were a great many IPs suggested in the beginning: Tomb Raider, Mass Effect, Walking Dead (which we later found out was being released soon), and many more. We felt that Tomb Raider, while having an amazing showing at the previous year’s E3, was not quite close enough for us to do much with, and its rollercoaster of a history gave pause. Mass Effect is a fantastic IP, however it did not fit the engine we were looking to use in the game.

In the end, someone suggested Uncharted, with its outstanding visuals, set pieces, music, and character design. The game seemed to come together very easily, with cards you play representing the various weapons, actions, or set pieces, and another randomized deck featuring treasures to discover and enemies to fight. We even had a great system for cover being used, enabling players to mitigate their damage accordingly.

All in all, Uncharted was a stellar fit for the engine and the development cycle we needed to match. The biggest hurdle was yet to come, and development had only just begun.