Echoes of the Apostate Crown

Shift reality and time itself with this unique twist on worker placement. Use your tether to move rooms back in time, changing which actions are available to all players. Dig to open access to long-buried rooms, face danger, discover treasures, and carefully manage your pack to make it out with the most profit. 

Your journey will take you between the ruined palace of the present and its former glory in the past. Dig through the ruins, shift through time, leave behind echoes, and turn your discoveries into powerful rewards to score the most victory points by the end of the game.
In order to reach the different rooms of the palace you’ll dig through stone to open new pathways for you and the other players, filling your pack in the process. Upgrading your tools will allow you to dig more spaces and higher value stones.
Using your powerful time tether will allow you to shift the rooms back to their former glory. Activating rooms in the past to collect resources and gain knowledge from members of the court of the fallen kingdom.
Continuing to explore the past will leave behind echoes in time that can grant you powerful boons when other players trigger them. You’ll also gain points by leaving behind the most echoes on an altar - a clever and important area majority game hidden within the worker placement mechanics - so plan your time jumps wisely.
Leave your tether in the past to visit rooms in the present where you will encounter monsters that may wound you or burden your pack with whisps. While it may be dangerous, in the present you will find more powerful actions available to you.
As you explore your pack will fill with stones, medallions, icons and more! The resources you collect can be exchanged at the market for items, tool upgrades, valuable treasures, skulls and scarabs.

Earn victory points by extracting gold stones, playing certain court cards, and trading whisps in the Crypt of Sacrifice. You also get victory points at the end of the game based on your health and the various treasures, upgrades, and tokens you have earned through out the game. The player with the most amount of victory points wins and claims the crown as the greatest adventurer. 

What is Echoes of the Apostate Crown?

Echoes of the Apostate Crown is a very thematic crunchy Euro that will have you managing a lot of different elements all at once.    It has the normal tension of a worker-placement game where actions are limited by spaces available.  Other players can take the space you wanted and limit your ability to use it.  It layers on the time-travel element that means there are two possible actions on each space - one in the dangerous present and one in the past.

Then it also layers on a route planning element.  You have to move between rooms - and many of those paths are blocked and require you to literally dig the hallways out and make them passable.  If you leave your time tether behind you - you have to go back through the palace and retrieve it by returning to the room you left it in.

Then you are layering a tight economic game with a shifting economy where you are having to choose between converting raw materials into point scoring chances or upgrading your tools to make future actions more effecient.  

One of the best design spaces in Echoes of the apostate crown is every worker placement spot is actually two different actions - and you have to choose between them.   A room without a time tether is limited to a single worker taking that action - and a room with a tether is open to all.  But anyones tether can bring that room to the past - so that means they can lock away certain actions and make them unavailable to other players.   Because you can leave your tether in a room and move to other locations you can lock a room in the past and limit the actions available to other players even when you aren't there.

Another very important system in the game is the space management - it really makes it feel like an RPG in this way - the stones you dig, the treasures you take and the whisps that annoyingly jump in your backpack as you are attacked by monsters take up gear slots and you have to either return to a shop to sell goods to empty the pack - and find ways to get rid of the whisps that are clogging it up.   This gives the thematic feeling of delving deep into the ruins, filling your pack up and returning to sell your plunder before delving back in and doing it all again.

And one of the coolest end-game scoring items is the scarabs - these are worth a ton of points but they permanently take up slots in your pack - so grabbing them will cost you turn-efficiency - and you can only purchase one scarab at a time so you have to slowly erode your pack space throughout the game if that is strategy you focus on.

Thematically one of our favorite parts of the game is the idea that you have travelled to the court of the once-ruler of the kingdom - a man that set himself up as a pretender to the throne and had a followers that believed him to be a good ruler - but in reality he was using his claim on power to try and buy himself immortality and wound up destroying the world leading to a collapse of society.  

You aren't really heroes in this game - you are survivors who are scavenging for valuables.  Either looting what is still in the palace today or going back in time and looting artifacts from the past and bringing them with you into the present.   The mechanisms of time travel play into the gameplay itself and while playing it really feels as though you are on an adventure of epic proportions.

Uncover the Past

What secrets lie in these once hallowed halls? As you dig and turn back time you’ll encounter dangerous monsters, uncover long lost knowledge and collect valuable treasures and tools to aid your adventure.

You are able to visit the court of the Apostate Crown and gain single-use abilities from the members of the court that existed in the past.  These echoes of a long lost place in time can be extremely powerful but fleeting abilities granted to you by long-dead members of the court.

Any time you take an action in the dangerous present you have to draw a monster card.  This is the price you pay for the more powerful actions available.   These monsters will either wound you - which at its worst will cause you to lose resources and return to the central chamber if you never heal - or burden you with whisps that take up valuable space in your pack.

Treasures are hard to acquire but very powerful unique items that give you access to ongoing power upgrades that ohter players will not enjoy.  Such as reducing the costs of goods, making it easier to fight monsters and more!

When you first begin the game your ability to dig stones is extremely limited - essentially limited to digging a single black stone on a turn.   As you gain wealth you can spend those resources to improve your ability to dig - not just in quantity - but in quality of materials that will allow you to more efficiently earn riches.  When you pivot from building your engine to earning points is a crucial decision in the game.

Retailers

The retailer pledge level is for brick-and-mortar game stores only within the lower-48 United States only. The pledge is a deposit towards the full cost of the order. You will have the opportunity to add additional cases of the game to your order in the post-campaign pledge manager.

To qualify for the retailer pledge level, retailers must own a physical store that sells tabletop games and is open to the public. Addresses that are apartments or homes will not be eligible for retail pledge levels.

Reviews

Shipping and Timeline

After the campaign ends, we will be charging actual shipping costs via the pledge manager.

Our goal is for the average shipping costs for backers in the EU, UK, US, Canada, Australia and China to be under $25, with shipping for backers outside of these regions to come from the most cost-effective area for the lowest possible shipping price.  

For the rest of the world our goal would be to keep shipping as cost effective as possible and under $50 USD for anyone not in one of the above shipping zones (NZ will be around $7 USD more than Australia). For backers in South America and especially Brazil shipping is very expensive to these regions and there will be high VAT due on the orders.

We want to strike a fair balance of value for our backers while ensuring high-quality and fair shipping prices. By shipping within the EU, UK, Australia, China, Canada, and the United States, we are hoping to get as favorable of shipping rates as possible.

We will be working with well-vetted partners in each region who have experience with Kickstarter reward fulfillment and come highly recommended by other publishers within the industry.

Artists and Designers

Playing all the classics growing up in Connecticut, and seasoned by years of competitive gaming in NYC, Carl has been addicted to games for as long as he can remember. He could never resist tinkering with and expanding the games he loved. 

His gaming habit grew into a game design obsession fueled by fresh gameplay ideas, clever fixes for common design headaches, and the challenge of working within pre-set constraints. He's created TCGs, head-to-head games, asymmetric euros, and cozy family games, including Merchants Cove, My Book Nook, Bardwood Grove, Kapow!, and Draconis 8.

Echoes is the next entry, with a unique secondary player-controlled worker called a "tether," that can alter the available actions on the board for all players, and doubles as a clock ticking down the game. He hopes it brings fun and strategy to your tables!

Doug Hettrick is a Connecticut-based board game designer and graphic artist who brings his lifelong love of games to the tabletop. Known for designs such as My Book Nook, Perch, Deacons 8 and Kapow!, Doug enjoys creating games that are engaging, distinctive, and full of personality.

Through both his mentorship, design and creative work, he continues to share his enthusiasm for gaming with the wider tabletop community. At home, Doug is outnumbered in the best way: a wife and two kids who serve as his most honest playtesters and his toughest critics. When he's not designing, he's playing — which, as far as he's concerned, was always the point.

Alex Cutler is a full-time game designer and developer, known for games like Critter Kitchen, A Place For All My Books, and Mountain Goats Legacy. He lives in Wake Forest, NC with his wife Nicole and sons Jack and Nathan. He enjoys good beer, bad puns, and moderate success.

Pandasaurus Games is a hobby and mass-market board game publisher that strives to create immersive, connecting experiences through gaming. Since publishing their first game, Tammany Hall, in 2012, co-owners Molly Wardlaw and Nathan McNair have seen the company blossom into a household name amongst gamers and beyond.

Their vast catalogue includes worldwide smash hits such as Machi Koro, Dinosaur Island, and The Mind. In addition to hobby stores around the country, Pandasaurus titles can be found at Target, Barnes & Nobles, Books a Million, Gamestop, Amazon, and beyond.

We at Pandasaurus Games pride ourselves on innovative, groundbreaking designs with art that pushes the bounds of creative expression in games. Welcome to our world of board gaming!

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