BlankSpace Publications
Imp’s Quest is a tabletop game that aims emulate the early RPG video game experience—but without the hassle of requiring an internet connection, paying for new content (those pesky microtransactions), or even plugging into an electrical outlet. It’s completely off grid, and it’s a complete game at launch!
Imp’s Quest, as per the Off-Grid Games philosophy, also aims to revisit something that video games have lost: that tactile sense of engagement and exploration you used to get when playing an early digital RPG. Most of these early games came in physical packages with great box art, full-colour instruction booklets, dungeon & overworld maps, weapon/armour & enemy spreadsheets, and so on. All of this made the gamer feel more immersed in an otherwise virtual world. Unfolding a physical map to carefully plot your way through a difficult dungeon made it feel as though you were a part of that world, guiding your avatars from the peripheries like an interdimensional advisor. It made the experience artifactual.
Over time, physical game packages have been whittled down to the bare bones: things we used to take for granted, such as instruction booklets, have been replaced with a cheap printout bearing a download or access key. Some game packs don’t even have that cheap piece of paper. It’s just an otherwise empty clamshell case with the game and nothing else. And with the push for increasing digitization, it’s only a matter of time until the artifactual quality of gaming—the physical object itself, the feeling of putting it into a console—will be completely lost.
Imp’s Quest’s mission is to recapture these lost elements. Instead of a game cartridge, the game engine is 300+ play cards detailing enemy, ally, and equipment stats. Instead of a plodding in-game tutorial, players are treated to a 72-page full-colour instruction manual, which explains the game thoroughly and expands the story with manga-style drawings of character and environment concepts. And speaking of maps—that’s your play surface: a full-colour, high-quality fabric map that acts as the game environment. Opening the Imp’s Quest box is not unlike opening one of those RPGs of old. You can feel the weight of the IQ world when you hold the pack in your hands. (As we say on the box, it’s a big world in a small package.) Also included are the character pieces (tiles) and dice—everything you need to play the game.
What’s more, Imp’s Quest does all the above through an engaging story. Instead of taking on the role the typical (i.e., boring) sword-wielding hero, you are a low-level imp creature trying to build strength enough to take on those so-called heroes—the boilerplate warrior, rogue, and mage classes, who have been farming your comrades for experience points and harvesting their bodies to make equipment. Along the way, THE Imp can join forces with a cast of equally misfitted characters: a dwarf vampire who is shunned by his own kind and underestimated by the fallen heroes who dared to cross him; a robot alien who crash-landed on the planet and splices creatures in his saucer laboratory perched atop genetically modified beanstalks; a dragon who is a hybrid of a lab mouse, created by the robot alien; and last but not least, the daughter of Queen Death herself, affectionally know as Lil’ Death, who has the ability to steal the soul (i.e., ability) of almost any creature in the game.
This is our pitch. Imp’s Quest is a game that scratches the itch for something tangible, authentic and engaging, but that also pays tribute to its inspiration: the pixelated RPGs of yore. If you consider yourself an admirer of these qualities in a game, you should give Imp’s Quest a try. Can a creature as weak as an imp take down the archetypal heroes of the story? Only you can decide that.
—Dr. Jeffrey Douglas, Game Developer
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