Terrene Encounters: Long Lost Drafting Game

After Terrene Odyssey was published, I started going to trade shows. At one I would met Brad Talton from Level 99 Games. We exchanged copies of Argent and Terrene Odyssey and eventually we became friends.

After Terrene Odyssey came out I discovered the game was incredibly fun in a draft format. I had not designed the game that way but it just happen to land there. I started making a new version of Terrene Odyssey designed as a drafting game. I pitched it to Level 99 Games and we entered a partnership to make the game. Unfortunately, somewhere down the production line, we had to cancel the project even though it was 99% complete. The game had two names in development "Terrene Odyssey: Random Encounters" and "Terrene Encounters". I preferred the former. I had found our latest prototype in 2023 while cleaning our the garage and honestly, this game was kinda lit. The rules are almost the same as regular Terrene Odyssey (with draft rules of course) except with the following exceptions:

- Your party was only 3 characters.
- DEF Decay causes you to lose all your DEF for the turn instead of just 5 points of DEF.

Here are some pictures.

Let's open this artifact.

It was about 160 cards and a few tokens. We cut down the amount of punchboard needed from the original.

Each player would get a copy of "field" which is the generic Terrain card. Terrain cards changed how your characters would level up. You would need to draft others to change your growth route.

You picked a Party Leader. This determined your player HP and your hero power. You can see some special guests from BattleCon on the bottom left corner!

You would draft recruits like this. The elemental sigil was made into a flag to make it easier to see if you were getting your Terrain bonuses. Some characters had 2 sigils.

This game has durability on equipment items to address a problem we saw in the original Terrene Odyssey. It really opened up the design space.

After Level 99 Games cancelled the game, we went over the pain points on why they could not publish the product. They didn't believe it had a strong enough flavor hook that also synced with the game mechanics. I think they were right. We could change it but it would not be the same game. Everyone's favorite class in Terrene Odyssey is the Time Traveler class so we decided to push into that. What if you had 3 cards you could draft from and they were the Past, Present, and Future? That paved the way to make Temporal Odyssey.