Note: this game will be crowdfunding on Kickstarter on February 7th. Sign up to be notified here.

I like revisiting what you've written in games - I think it's a wonderful way of getting players to reflect on what's happened. I did it in the Royal Cartographer, and it happened again with These Stars Will Guide You Home. 

The first half of These Stars has you exploring the archipelago, with its randomly placed islands that relate to each other in different ways. 

The second half has you re-writing the history of that journey under a different lens.

Let's take it step by step.

The Journey Phase

This has you traveling the archipelago, discovering islands as you go. The prompts you draw from a deck are not related to the islands however - they are about your crew and the events that happen while you are out at sea. This is partly because you're meant to feel like you're a visitor in a strange world. Your true focus is keeping your crew happy and morale high while you find a new home. 

Of course the world isn't simply a background, and so there are prompts for each island you discover which you can answer - these, however, you get to pick. Things don't just happen AT you, you have some choice in what to do once you make landfall. You are the captain, after all.

As you proceed through the game however, your crew becomes tired - each time you alight from an island that could have been your home, your crew's exhaustion increases. Sometimes the journey's events have the same effect. At some point it becomes too much, and your crew refuses to go on. 

It is up to you whether to choose an island, or keep exploring with the risk of fate choosing for you. And there is also the chance of mutiny lurking round the corner. 

At its core, its a push-your-luck game with no real "win" state, rather a story in which you made the final choice or not. 

The Epic Phase

Hundreds of years have passed and the descendents of the sailors are writing the account of the journey. But things have changed, and who you are also affects what you will write. Not only that, but time is cruel to memory and tradition, forgetting events and warping others. 

In this phase, you are tasked with writing the account of the journey you undertook previously. You roll on two tables to see who you are and what the major event has been since your people came to this island. 

THEN, the game has you draw cards to determine which events from the journey are still remembered and are included in the account. 

It's a far looser writing exercise compared to the previous phase because you can make it as short or as long as you want, and I didn't want to add too many constraints. The sentiment, though, is that the journey and the poem are different because of what's happened and what's been forgotten in between. 

So that's the final designer diary for These Stars Will Guide You Home. If you've gotten this far, thank you so much for reading and I hope you enjoy the game if you decide to play it!