34 February 2019
ANOMALY
“Anomaly in itself is not like that game, I
was just thinking about it at some point and
being like, ‘Oh, I’d like to make a game that’s
like hide-and-seek,’” he says. “ e idea in the
beginning was not to make such a thematic
kind of gamer-type game. It was supposed to
be more simple at rst. But then as I developed
the game I gured out it needed a bit more
meat around it.”NOW YOU SEE ME
Like many hidden movement games, Anomaly
pits one player against the others. e
mysterious Anomaly has invaded the TOR-ISS
Institute and is hunting down the students of
the science academy it houses. If that wasn’t
bad enough, the students must also deal with
the deadly radiation leaking from the space
station’s malfunctioning reactor core.
e Anomaly follows in the sci- trend of
monsters that are never fully de ned or seen,
leaving the true horror of its relentless pursuit
up to the players. It’s not just the creature
that’s seen in fragments: the students are
also concealed on the game board, leading
to a tense cat-and-mouse chase as each side
tries to track down and defeat their prey.
Turning all the players invisible is something
rarely attempted in the genre – Dagenais-
Lespérance highlights Escape from the Aliens
in Outer Space as one of the few games to have
attempted it – and with good reason.
“Usually you’d have just one person that’s
hidden and just one mechanism to nd out
that person, but then in Anomaly everyone is
hidden and then it’s asymmetric,” the designer
explains. “So the mechanism to nd out where
everyone is is asymmetric, and that kind of
created a bit more manipulation sometimes
than I would’ve wanted. Because as soon as
anybody moves, then you need to kind ofreassess where they could be going. For every
single movement that somebody does, there
has to be that kind of procedure by which they
give some information and then player have to
process that information. at was something
that was a bit hard at rst to kind of balance,
because I didn’t want it to be too many
procedures and manipulations.”
e students and the creature play
di erently, with the former tracking the
monster on their tail, while the Anomaly must
feed on the students or the station’s power
sources every round to sustain its health.
While the students act rst, the lone player
controlling the monster can interject between
their actions or choose to patiently wait for
their moment to strike.
“It was di cult to balance, because
obviously in a perfect world it’s 50-50
between each side,” says Dagenais-
Lespérance. “Ideally the creature would win
50% of the time more or less. e balance is
pretty good right now. It’s di cult to say if it’s
perfectly 50-50. Also the idea was that if there
was a slight imbalance it was probably better
that the creature would win just slightly more.
Because of thematic reasons partly, but also
for the experience I think it was important
that the creature feels powerful enough. But
the students if they play their cards well stillvery much have a good chance to win if they
play right.”
In a further twist, the action cards the
students play are double-ended and pass
over to the Anomaly player once they’ve been
used by the students to lay traps, move further
using stims, attack the creature and more. In
the hands of the Anomaly, they become extra
opportunities to locate the students and deal
them damage.
e tense system was something introduced
relatively late in the game’s development,
replacing the students’ more conventional use
of action points. e change was inspired by
a playtester who suggested making the game
a card-driven experience – a challenge that
Dagenais-Lespérance took up.
“I had this idea of having this feedback
system of, okay, they use the card and then
they have to give it, and so there’s this natural
balance that is created where the more
aggressive students are the more options the
creature has. It wasn’t easy to balance,” he says.
“It took several versions to get something
that was satisfying. e creature still kind
of works on an action point system, but
changing the students so that they would work
di erently was one of the big breakthroughs
I had during development. e action point
system was ne but it was a bit been done
before a lot of times. So it was not very
original. It’s a bit less exciting I think if every
turn your options are always the same.”
Anomaly’s students are hardier than the
run-and-hide targets of some other hidden
movement games, able to ght back against
the creature and absorb some of the mounting
radiation in the station before they succumb.
As the game progresses and it continues to
feed, though, the Anomaly steadily grows in
power, eventually evolving to gain terrifying
new powers from a pool of di erent abilities,
from phasing in and out of space to mimicking
the students in a e ing-like ruse.
“It is indeed a di erent game than many
other hidden movement games in that it is a
bit more focused on the combat,” Dagenais-
Lespérance says. “ e deduction aspect is
still there, but it’s not as maybe complex or
extensive as some other hidden movementIf you
want
to get your
game played,
it should be
as simple as
possible for
what it is.
Players’ characters are only seen in glimpses