by Richard Saunders

As we pass the sixth anniversary of Sidekick Saga being on Kickstarter, let’s look back to the original design and development process.

This was a labor of love for me; I have collected comics since I was ten years old, and I think I still have every comic I every bought. I love comic books and superheroes! I wanted a co-operative superhero game with a story as none really existed at the time. For the record, all pictures in this diary are from my personal comic collection. See below as I go hunting for comics…

Inspirations

Let’s jump in: What inspired Sidekick Saga?

Sidekick Saga started life from an inspiration in (surprise) a comic book: Future Imperfect by Peter David and George Perez.  There’s one notable scene in Future Imperfect when Rick Jones — the sidekick of the piece, and sidekick of many heroes like Captain America and Hulk — keeps the Maestro at bay using a collection of “artifacts”: Iron Man’s gauntlets, Captain America’s shield, Thor’s hammer!

The sidekick, by being smart, was able to hold his own (with a little help) with the Maestro, an incredibly powerful villain!

The scene above, with its collection of items, stirred something within me…

Another comic that inspired Sidekick Saga was the 1990’s Robin, by Chuck Dixon, Tom Grummett, and Scott Hanna. In this era, Tim Drake became the third Robin, and frankly he was the smartest of all the Robins as he figured out Batman’s identity!

In this series, Tim Drake’s Robin patrols Gotham without Batman, but has help from The Huntress, Oracle, and even Commissioner Gordon. Tim Drake is mostly just a normal human doing the best he can to ward off evil, using his smarts and his fellow heroes to fight crime. The co-operation of the Arkham Sidekicks was pivotal to their success.

Another unlikely source of inspiration was the season 5 finale of Buffy The Vampire Slayer. Spoilers: in that finale, Buffy used pretty much EVERY WEAPON at her disposal from other episodes in Season 5 to fight the big bad at the end, just as Rick Jones did in Future Imperfect! This reinforced the idea that important items persist from game to game. It also kept alive the idea that “collecting stuff” was an important part to battling the big bad!

A final unlikely source of inspiration was a game called 7 Wonders. You heard me. It was interesting that, at the time, my friends were very bi-modal on two games: they either loved 7 Wonders and hated Sentinels of the Multiverse or hated 7 Wonders and loved Sentinels of the Multiverse!

But…what if I could unite these groups and have the notion of co-operative drafting? What if rather than working against one another in a drafting game, we could pass each other what we needed? This created the whole idea of “Supply Lines”: co-operative drafting, much like 7 Wonders, with the directionality of the ages being present as well.

Putting all of these elements together served as the basis of Sidekick Saga: I wanted a co-operative drafting game (with players passing each other cards they needed) in which players explored the city looking for technology to help them fight the big bads — and every card should matter! You might not think something matters (like the stuff in Season 5 of Buffy), but then all of a sudden, it becomes important.

Leads and Legacy

As the development of the game progressed, I needed to refine the exploration-type mechanism to the game. After all, for the sidekicks to succeed, they had to find stuff (like Buffy or Rick Jones).

Some stuff was incredibly useful, so it seemed like you had to “pay” for it somehow. This introduced the idea of “leads”, and if you hunt down enough leads, you can find where Jor’s Hammer (I didn’t want to get sued), the Star Shield, or the Cave Warrior Car (which looks nothing like the Batmobile) would be stored! I originally considered having different kinds of leads, but dismissed this idea as it would be too frustrating if you got the wrong types of leads. Instead, leads were generic; if you got six leads, you could get the Cave Warrior Car, which would help you move around the city faster and protect yourself.

We dubbed these special, hard-to-find items “heroic”. They might take 3-6 turns to get one of them during the game, so you didn’t want to lose them between issues. Thus, Sidekick Saga became a “legacy” game of sorts since heroic items you obtained persisted from game to game! 

Honestly, I liked the idea of a story spanning multiple issues, which was typical of comic books of my era, with a massive story unfolding over 4-6 issues. Think of the amazing story that unfurled from issues 1-4 of the original Wolverine mini-series! Things would change massively from issue to issue, and what the heroes did really mattered, so the idea of a legacy comic story was something I wanted to embrace.

(While time Sidekick Saga was in development, there were NO superhero board games with an ongoing legacy story.)

In this case, each “game” would be an issue of a comic book series. What was the story? All the superheroes had disappeared! What had happened to them? Only the under-powered sidekicks were left. Could they keep the bad guys at bay while trying to solve the mystery of what happened to all the superheroes? That was the story I wanted; that was the story that would make the sidekicks take center stage!

So heroic items would persist from issue to issue, ideally introducing a tension point: Do heroes pursue leads to get a heroic item at the cost of making it harder to defeat the current bad guys?

To help alleviate this tension, the leads became multi-use cards. You could either save them up to get a heroic item or use them directly to do something useful. This gave players more agency, more choice.

Exploration

The exploration idea came from playing co-operative deck-building games like Aeon’s End: nine different things you could get! I liked co-operative deck-building games, but to me they always seemed an inversion of what I wanted because in deck-building games, you know what you buy, but you typically have no control over when it comes out! What if you inverted that idea and made it so you don’t know exactly what you get, but once you get the cards, you can play them whenever you want?

That’s the idea of the city. Each location in the city has eight cards, and those cards are related by a theme: The Police Station has police cards, Rincon Labs has scientists and technology, The Suburbs have a lot of research/lead cards, etc. You have an idea of what you will get, but that’s all. Then once you get stuff from a location, you can play it whenever you want.

But through heroic items like the X-Ray Glasses, you might have a little more control. (X-Ray Glasses are an inside joke for anyone who grew up with comics of a certain era.)

Here’s what we have so far: Players move around the city and explore locations looking for technology and leads to help them in their quest to take down the big bad!

Secret Identity and Hero Modes

Another thing I wanted was the tension of the secret identity vs hero form. The secret identity is absolutely an essential tool to keep sidekicks out of trouble!

(At the time I was exploring this idea, Marvel Champions had not yet come out, and to my knowledge, it was an original idea to have players go from secret identity to hero and back. I documented a playtest with secret identities six months before Marvel Champions was released, so don’t go saying I copied this idea!

But I also wanted the secret identity mode to be useful; when you go into secret identity, you escape combat, but it’s also a main way to get leads. The secret identity is all about doing research away from combat. When you are in secret identity mode, you get both a lead and a card on your location.

But, of course, while you are doing this research, the bad guys are getting more and more powerful since you aren’t fighting crime. It’s that tension you see in comics all the time! When do I go into secret identity mode to research (and stay out of the bad guy’s way) and when do I go into hero mode to fight crime? That’s a big part of being a sidekick — and a big part of the game.

I still remember a particular scene in The Amazing Spider-Man #18 where Spider-Man changes back to Peter Parker to escape the Sandman.

Those original Stan Lee/Steve Ditko Spider-Man comics (which I read as a young kid) had quite the influence on me. I still remember those scenes! (I didn’t have the original Spider-Man comics that are worth tons — I was just a kid — but the collection of books above.) Peter Parker used his secret identity as a tool so many times in those early Spider-Man issues, so I really wanted a mechanism like this this in the game.

Advancement

One of the most fun parts of Dungeons & Dragons is leveling-up, so I wanted some notion of leveling-up between issues: new powers, new heroic items, new heroes — something to give fun choices between issues! I also wanted to make sure losing wasn’t devastating.

If the players lose an issue, these new elements come out, then they get to try again. I wanted this to be a self-balancing game, with new stuff coming out to help the sidekicks at the right time.

Protection Hierarchy

One of the final pieces of the puzzle was the “protection hierarchy”. I remember reading many Daredevil and Batman comics in which the hero has to work from the bottom up to uncover the network of the Kingpin/crime lord who is running the city.

Typically, the phrase “Stop protecting your higher ups; they don’t care about you!” comes up when the good guys question the underlings. What if that were a game mechanism? What if you couldn’t even take out the bad guys higher up in the criminal network until you’ve “dealt with” with all of their subordinates? What if the subordinates essentially “protected” the higher-ups?

And that’s exactly what the protection hierarchy is in Sidekick Saga. You can’t attack any upper level bad guys until you deal with the subordinates first — but the upper level bad guys can do stuff to YOU because it’s hard to be a hero.

Hacking

If Sidekick Saga features one mechanism inspired by the Robin or Birds of Prey comics, it’s Oracle and her hacking abilities.  

Oracle is a hacker who helps Robin — well, she helps the Dick Grayson Robin more, but that’s beside the point — by finding out information and “distracting” the bad guys with her hacking. How could we represent this idea in the game? Delphi (inspired by Oracle) can hack the bad guys and put them into disarray!

The idea of “disarray” is that the bad guy is so busy dealing with the results of Delphi’s hacks, they couldn’t do anything else. I loved the idea that even if you can’t take out a bad guy, maybe you can keep them out the way for some time. Thematically, the idea of “causing an alarm to go off”, “turning off the power in the building”, etc. are things that a hacker would do. And what do such actions do? Distract the bad guy for a few turns, that is, put them in disarray.

The idea of hacking was further improved by allowing hacking to bypass the protection hierarchy. Delphi can hack the upper level bad guys and keep them from wrecking the sidekicks.

Art

I don’t love the art in most superhero board games. The publishers have gotten great artists, but not artists who get superheroes, who love superheroes like I did. I wanted something different for Sidekick Saga, an artist who got superheroes and embraced that ethic.

One of my favorite parts of working on Sidekick Saga was working with the artists, especially Phil Cho! I adored his art in VENOM Assault, and his Deviant Art page showed that he understood superheroes. I contacted Phil, and he was willing to  help out.

To this day, the cover for Sidekick Saga is one of my favorite pieces of art of all time, maybe because it has such personal meaning to me. Given more time, I would have had Phil Cho do all the art in the game, but I had promised my Kickstarter backers delivery quickly, so I did work with a few other artists to help out.

Cristina Murphy did a fantastic job of stepping up and “matching” Phil’s art. One of my favorite of her pieces is the army of snowmen — so creepy and so what I wanted!

I also had William Liberto help out, mostly with the heroic items as I wanted them to have a similar and consistent vibe, and he did a great job.

Final Thoughts

I am proud of Sidekick Saga as it’s the game I wanted to make, a superhero game with an overarching story! It has exploration, co-operative drafting, every card being useful in one way or another, and ways for the sidekicks to be clever in their combinations. I still play the entire Sidekick Saga at least once a year and am happy that the game unfolds differently every time.

I know Sidekick Saga didn’t have a great critical reception, but I am grateful to all my backers who supported the original Kickstarter and all the people who reached out to me over the years in support. Thanks to all of you!

Richard T. Saunders