We speak with Laura from 2Fat2Fly Games about Trouble in Templetown and the company as a whole.
Laura, firstly can I say well done on creating such a stunning looking game. I love the concept and the attention to detail; it looks a lot of fun! But for those who haven't seen or heard of Trouble in Templetown, what's the story?
Trouble in Templetown is our second game after Moonshiners of the Apocalypse. It’s a fun, immersive competitive and co-operative game (1-4 players) in which you take the role of White Cell Super Agents, fighting against assaulting parasites and viruses. It is full of amusing puns and even after so many sessions of testing, I’m still having fun each time I play it.
Mechanically, you might say it combines action management and action point allowance, hand management, chaos control (is that a game mechanism?), point to point movement with asymmetric player powers.
But for us, it is the adventure of “one to four heroes” that struggle to keep safe Templetown, the microscopic world living inside poor Stanley Hasselhoff.
This is your second project, tell us a little bit about what life is like at 2Fat2Fly games. What goes into creating a game like Moonshiners of the Apocalypse or Trouble in Templetown?
A company named 2Fat2Fly cannot make boring games, right? We try to imagine fun games, with tongue-in-cheek themes and that's not always as easy as it sounds. But it’s fun! Even when the ideas you put together don’t work at first, and you realise you have to go back to the drawing board, it is still exciting and challenging.
What can backers expect from trouble in Templetown and how does it play?
Well, to put it shortly, you win the game as soon as you manage to raise enough immunity walls. Each round you get up to six Action Cards, each with double purposes and the trick is to combine them in the most efficient way.
And in the first rounds of the game, things are deceivably easy: Walking around Templetown is a stroll and the occasional Bacteria is pretty harmless. And I saw testers frowning in the first rounds, clearly wondering to themselves “Is that all?” But it doesn’t take more than a round or two, and things start to get difficult. Before you can say “Ibuprofen” havoc comes a-knocking and soon enough you need to zip around Templetown just to put the fires out. Which means you can forget about completing any of the victory objectives.
My favourite part is when the Boss of all viruses and bacteria enters the game. When too many Bacteria invade the city, he will arrive at the gates of Templetown. And you can bet he came to stay!!
Each round you have a limited budget of possible actions and it will never be enough. Will you sacrifice your own Victory Points to boost those limited Actions? Or will you hope that everything will be just fine? Better think again…
What part of the game are you most excited about people finding out about?
Well, it’s hard for me to be objective on this question. Gameplay is of course the first thing that comes to mind. The game is loads of fun, either you play it co-op, competitive or solo. The components are eye-candy for sure and don’t get me started on the theme!
What do you think people will be talking about once they've played their first game?
How and why they lost! LOL! The game is not so easy to win, and it has a few traps for the first time players. For example, there are a few upgrades players can buy, that are really powerful, but when to buy them… that’s a different matter. Let me put it this way, even now the game might still beat me. It is strangely fun to lose, as it challenges you to think about why before going again with a new strategy.
I went to my first gaming convention this year and loved every minute of it. Have you been to any conventional and what is your favourite convention memory?
So far we only went to Spiel in Essen last year and boy it was so much fun! I’ve never seen so many gamers gathered in one place! My only grievance was that since we were there promoting our previous game, Moonshiners of the Apocalypse, we didn’t have a second to play other games.
Do you have a current wish list of games that you haven't played that you would like to and who would you like to play then with?
Oh, there are so many! Old and new games that we’d love to try! But in the past months, we find so little time to play other games than the ones we’re working on! Between delivering Moonshiners to our backers, designing, marketing and launching Templetown and working on our future projects… Free time is scarce to say the least. At the moment there are about 15 to 20 games in our personal library that we didn’t even touched.
Thank You 2Fat2Fly
Thank you so much for your time and I hope that as you get through the busy campaign you are able to dust off some of those 20 games form your library and get playing! It is great to see that you have already funded and are working through the stretch goals. I am really looking forward to seeing this and what else 2Fat2Fly have got coming to a table in the future.