Hindsight is under development with XYZ Game Labs, currently slated for a 2023 release that will feature an exciting ongoing story that will depend on the outcomes of your previous games. Stay tuned!
Development History:
- Spring 2019 – Rob and Brendan develop the early prototype of “HINDSIGHT: 2020”
- Summer 2019 – Rattlebox Games playtests the game at various venues, including [toggle Gaming], Protospiel Chicago, the Gencon First Exposure playtest hall, and the XYZ Game Labs super secret playtest event. (2019 promotional sheet)
- Fall 2019 – XYZ Game Labs licenses Hindsight for development, slated for a 2022 release.
- Winter 2019, Spring 2020 – Game in development with XYZ Game Labs
- Summer 2020 – Hindsight returns to the XYZ Super Secret playtest in a Gencon Online event
- Fall 2020, Winter 2020 – Game in development with XYZ Game Labs
Early promotional text:
In the early stages of playtesting and prototyping, we came up with the following promotional text, maintained here for posterity.
Hindsight is a real-time cooperative dice-drafting puzzle game for 1 to 4 players. On your turn, you will select two of the same color dice from a grid of 36–the first, the ACTION DIE, determines your main action by its position and your bonus action by its value; the second die, the POWER DIE, determines the strength of first action. You will use the actions to manipulate the puzzle tiles, to alter the dice in the grid (for future turns), and to manage the timer. The adjustable difficulty level will keep you on your toes for play after play as your team gets better at solving the puzzle quickly. Thinky and frantic, saving the world has never been so fun.
The apocalypse is upon us!
If only we’d seen it coming. Luckily for the rest of humanity, you’ve just finished the prototype for your new time-intervention device. Alas, it’s a little unstable and unreliable–it is a prototype, after all. You’ve figured out what intervention is needed to stop the apocalypse, but it takes some tinkering to get the machine aligned so your operatives can make those changes. You have just a couple minutes to find the right configuration of your machine to send back our intervention agents and save the world. Can you finish before the apocalypse arrives? Time to find out.
Saving the world, as fast as you can.
The game has two play areas, a 6 by 6 dice grid, and a tile tableau. The dice grid has twelve actions you may take, one for each row and one for each column. At the top of the tile area are six “keystone” tiles numbered 1-6, representing the code you need to match. In an array of 36 tiles below the keystone line are columns of similar tiles.
When you select your Action die, you place it at the end of either the row or the column, indicating which action you intend to take. Then you select your Power die, another die of the same color, and place it on the Power die space outside the grid. The action you selected is augmented by the Power die, and allows you to manipulate the tile tableau or the dice grid. After you take your main action, you get a secondary action determined by the value of the action die you took. These secondary actions allow you to flip the sand timer and add more dice to the grid, among other things.
To solve the puzzle, you need to manipulate the tiles so that the top of each column matches the keystone number above it. When the number matches, you can “lock” that combination in place, triggering the bonus (or penalty) card attached to that column. You win if you are able to lock all six columns before you run out of dice or timer flips. Of course, if you ever let the timer run out, you also lose.
This is how the world ends
Accompanying Hindsight is a thematic website that uses your six-digit keystone code to reveal what happened to cause the apocalypse, and how your team did or did not succeed in preventing the end of the world.