Super Squad High has been a dream project for me for over 8 years. A wave of new comics and tv series in the 2010s inspired me – Ms. Marvel, Batgirl of Burnside, Arrow, The Flash, Supergirl, and Into the Spiderverse. They told stories about superheroes that go beyond just activating powers and punching bad-guys. I loved the depictions of scrappy heroes just starting out in their super-careers, cobbling together their own DIY costumes, building friend groups to back them up, and contending with relationships put to the test by their secret identities. It’s a relatively unexplored space in board games, but it was an experience I wanted for myself and hoped to create for others.
My first attempt at a design focused on high school, taking further inspiration from Teen Titans, Young Justice, and The X-Men. What if you played aspiring heroes competing for a position on an established superhero team? The design included many elements that showed up in later versions of the game, including a high school game board with changing class schedule, rooftop neighborhoods, and most essentially non-player classmates to form relationships with!
Competing against each other felt off for superheroes, so I began to explore ideas for cooperative play. Some of the most poignant moments of teen superhero stories is when the hero discovers that a trusted friend is secretly a villain, such as Peter Parker discovering that Harry Osborn is secretly the Green Goblin! Classmates became front-and-center of the design, as players reveal traits to discover who is secretly the villain.
The idea of a day-night cycle emerged, necessitating a city full of locations available at different times of the day. The high school theme seemed too restrictive for a game where the heroes run around the city at all hours. For a while I re-themed it to young adult heroes, working day jobs or attending university, with a new title to capture a 2010s internet vibe – Hashtag Heroes.
One of the core mechanisms of Hashtag Heroes was hand management – managing a hand of costume and ability cards to fight crimes with fixed symbol requirements. The card-based system lacked tension. With a sufficient number of cards any challenge was easily overcome.
The design shifted to a dice-based system to add in some uncertainty to crimefighting, but general feedback from playtesters was that the game was too complex for the promised theme. Playtests would often bog down in players trying to make sense of the crimefighting system that was significantly more complex than other parts of the game.
Eventually, I returned to the high school theme, realizing that a lot of the appeal of the original design was in the specific stories that emerged out of dating or getting to class on time while trying to be a superhero! For a few iterations, the game board was replaced with cards to allow a more dynamic range of action spaces.
The design finally started to come together when I decided to overhaul the crimefighting system one last time. I wanted something that felt fresh but not as predictive as the older card system. What if the uncertainty in the system wasn’t whether or not the player succeeds, but which challenges the player faces? Dice came back in the form of Danger Dice. The player’s resources and abilities are predictable, but the challenges faced are random, representing a situation going out of control for a hero still not used to their abilities. The new system melded the strengths of both card and dice systems from before, and offered a lot of thematic hooks to tie it to other parts of the game.
The last few iterations came full circle back to the original board design. The game board returned, offering a visual representation of the city, and addressing corner-case issues we had with locations being unavailable when they were randomly drawn cards. Super Squad High emerged in its final form!
Thanks for following me on this journey down the designer time tunnel! I find it fascinating to see the various iterations a game design takes, and hope you enjoyed a look behind the scenes. Join me here tomorrow for a look at the three pillars of the final Super Squad High gameplay and how they tie into the theme.