Last Week of Summer's skate parks and cassette tokens send us back to 1986
Tabletop game designer Shawn Hoult on his nostalgia-fuelled, mini-game-filled, neon-soaked creation, and promises that 'Anthony Michael Hall and Ally Sheedy are somewhere deep in the marrow'
The 80s: a more innocent time of, er, threats of rampant individualism, nuclear annihilation, vulture capitalists knicking all the state’s wealth and assets.
OK, so humanity itself hasn’t changed much – we’re still tottering around under attempting to ignore terrifying backdrop conditions. But there’s some argument to say that Western pop culture peaked in the 80s. More specifically, in 1984, around the time Frankie was Relaxing in Hollywood and The NeverEnding Story – cinema’s weirdest, most melancholy family movie – was released.
Our species’ twin triumphs – we’re never improving on that, no matter how much Stranger Things tries.
But one area where things have improved is board games. We love roll-and-move, if done right, as much as the next nostalgia fiend, but mechanics and ingenuity have moved on massively since the peak days of Milton Bradley and Waddingtons.
So, let’s look at a game that indulges in both the eighties cultural touchstones and tabletop gaming’s modern mechanics. Last Week of Summer transports us to 1986, shortly after the as-mentioned social high-watermark, as gamers turn soon-to-be high-school graduates, exploring their home town via worker-placement gameplay and a multitude of mini games in suburban locations such as the music store, fast-food store and skatepark. All to complete a mighty unspooled cassette-tape collection.
Totally rad, dude.
TIme to get in the Delorean and hit 88mph to find the game’s designer, Canadian-born, UK-based Shawn Hoult, who’s been crafting the game while brushing up on his game smarts co-hosting the YouTube gaming platform Allies or Enemies with wife Jess. We chat about retro vibes and look back to the future to see when we can expect to see the game surface on Kickstarter.
What’s the aim of Last Week of Summer and how does it play?
SH: It’s 1986, you just finished high school and you need to make the most of your last summer before you join the real world.
It’s a worker placement-game set in a modular 80s town, where each location is its own mini game, with places like the skate park, arcade, video store, music shop, fast food, and convenience store.
Players are trying to complete goals at each location and make memories, which are represented by cassettes, kind of like adding songs to a mixtape. The player with the most cassettes on the board at the end wins the game. There is more to it than that, you’re also trying to make friends with the cool kids, and get invited to parties, but basically you are trying to squeeze as much fun out of your summer as you can.
What about 1986 holds such an appeal to base the game in?
SH: I became a teen in the 80s and I have some really fond memories of those summers.
I miss riding my BMX over to a friends house to see if they want to hang out, and drinking Slurpees in the parking lot of the 7/11.
The timeline is off by a few years, but a lot of what is happening in this game resembles the stuff I loved as a kid. That and the whole thing sprang out of me wanting to make a game that felt a bit like an 80s movie. John Hughes is one of my favourite directors and the first seeds of the game came while I was rewatching The Breakfast Club. The resulting game took a lot of twists and turns and has ended up some distance from that, but Anthony Michael Hall and Ally Sheedy are still somewhere deep in the marrow.
Players can head to places like the skate park or the arcade during their journey. What happens in the game when they end up there?
SH: Each location has it’s own mini-game. My design goal was to boil a board game mechanism down to its core while also adding a bit of a thematic twist to each one.
The skatepark, for example, is a polyomino puzzle, where players chain together different tricks to make combos. The music store, Tops Records, is a kind of market-manipulation game where players make albums more popular by buying them, but if they get too cool they wrap back around to not being cool anymore.
And the Video Store is a Mancala style system that has players deciding what movies to rent and dumping the rest back on the shelves. Each place has it’s own little system that’s easy to pick up, but offers something different from the others, and players can mix and match as they want.
You’ve been doing the Allies or Enemies channel for four plus years now. What have you learned about game design doing it and how have you found the jump from covering games to making one?
SH: There’s no better teacher for game design than playing a lot of other games. It’s like the old adage, if you want to be a writer read everything you can. Also reviewing games has forced me to think a lot more critically about where I find the fun, and the kinds of things I like or don’t like to see in a game.
The flip side is that I do occasionally find myself thinking about what other reviewers are going to say about Last Week of Summer, which is something I try to block out, but It will be interesting to see how it feels when I switch from reviewer to reviewed.
What’s your favourite high-school-set 1980s movie?
SH: My favourite genre of high-school movies are actually the movies that take place right after high school in that awkward transition from childhood to adulthood (maybe because I feel like I’ve been in that transition for decades now).
A couple of favourites of that kind of movie are Say Anything, and Some Kind of Wonderful, which I think is really an underrated classic. But for strictly set in high school it’s in all honesty the classic, Breakfast Club, with Fast Times at Ridgemont High a close second. I kind of wanted to throw out a weirder one like one of the Troma films, but those two are the classics for a reason.
There are a few synthwave vibes coming from the look of the game. Are you aware much of that sort of retro-futurist musical scene and has it had much of an influence in the creation of the game?
SH: I’m not, I’m a bit sad to say that my music tastes were kind of frozen in time by the end of the 90s.
That said, Last Week of Summer is heavily influenced by New Wave music of the 80s. I have an eight-plus hour playlist that I’m constantly adding to that’s strictly 80s new wave, and has a hard rule of two songs per band. It has kind of everything you would expect on there, and I put that on in the background every time I’m working on the game so bands like Devo, Blondie, The Go-Gos, The Thompson Twins, Duran Duran, Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Cure, etc have all hopefully been a bit soaked into the game somewhere.
What environmental sustainability measure are you taking in producing the game?
SH: We haven’t settled on a production partner yet so I can’t really give any specifics, but those concerns are of course something we’ll have front of mind as we figure out materials and partners.
Do you have any favourite board games you and family members enjoy playing together?
SH: Lately, Jess and I find ourselves mostly playing games that we need to review, which we count our lucky stars for as we get to play a huge mix of stuff.
However, when we do have a bit of free time to play something we either go fairly heavy with games like Gaia Project or SETI, or we go really light and play something like Sea Salt & Paper. Also a couple that we’ve been going to a lot just lately, that are actually kind of mid-weight comfort games are Between Two Castles of Mad King Ludwig, and Western Legends.
What does the future hold, both in terms of Allies or Enemies and your game design ambitions?
SH: I have a dozen or so other designs in various stages of development, and more keep popping there heads in all the time, so the hope is that Last Week of Summer is just the first of many games we’ll put out in the future.
We already have the next few projects lined up, and each one is quite a bit different in terms of mechanics, theme and weight.
The one constant is that the themes to put fun right upfront, and also I really like games that keep up the pace and keep everyone involved as much as possible.
So hopefully, Last Week of Summer succeeds enough that we can keep the ball rolling into the next one.
When can people expect Last Week of Summer to be launched and then in their homes if successful?
SH: The plan is to launch late this spring, hopefully by the end of April.
The preview page is up right now so folks can go follow that. The final delivery date is obviously a lot harder to say for certain until the Kickstarter wraps up, especially as we are still nailing down partners, but I can say that we have done everything possible to get this game as close to the finish line as we can before launch in order to keep that timeline as short as possible. The goal is to deliver within a year, as we are champing at the bit to both get people playing Last Week of Summer, and to be able to show people what we have coming next.
Follow Last Week of Summer’s progress on Kickstarter.
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