Game Designers Patrick Logan, Joshua Camden, and Whitney Loraine on Invincible: Escape from Mars

The Best Superhero Show in the Universe is now the Best Superhero Deduction Game in the Universe! Invincible: Escape from Mars, based on the fourth episode (“Neil Armstrong, Eat Your Heart Out”) of the hit Prime Video series Invincible, is now available to order online or purchase at your local store. To celebrate, we recently sat down with the game’s three designers – Whitney Loraine, Patrick Logan, and Joshua Camden. Here’s what they had to say about bringing Invincible to your tabletop…

How would you describe the game?

WL: Invincible: Escape from Mars is based on one of the best episodes of Invincible. We thought it was the perfect episode on which to base a social deduction game. For those not familiar with that term, in games, it’s like Werewolf or Mafia, where there’s bad people that are trying to kill or take over the rest of the team. You have two teams: good guys and bad guys. They each have different win conditions. So in Escape from Mars, we have the astronauts or you can play as the heroes. You get to pick your difficulty setting – the heroes have special abilities, but they have a harder win condition, and Invincible is always there. Or you can play as the astronauts. It’s a little bit easier, with every man for himself – you’re just trying to get to the rocket ship and get off Mars. But there are Sequids. Some people start the game as Sequids, but then they are also dealt out throughout the game. You get converted, and no knows. The Sequids are just trying to sneak one person onto the rocket ship. Or, like a lot of social deduction games, if you fail the mission three times, if the bad guys can make it fail three times, then they just win outright. And if the good guys win three times, then they can win faster.

So you’re trying to figure out who got turned into a Sequid. You’re trying to convert them back to human, to shoot the Sequid off, and put them on the human team again. Which is not normal in a social deduction game. That was one of the things that we really wanted to capture. Not “Hey, you’re a bad guy, and if you mess it up, you’re just out for the rest of the game,” but “Cool, we found out it’s you, now you’re human again, you can help the good guys!” But then someone else gets converted. Or maybe you get converted again. So there’s kind of this playful back and forth. “Wait, who’s the bad guy now?” Wait, there’s still two out there? No, there’s still three out there! Who’s a bad guy?!” You’re trying to suss it out, and you have a certain number of rounds in which to do it. If not, at the end, there’s a big final vote. Then you get to figure out who won and if the Sequids escaped Mars or not.

How did the game come to be? How did your partnership with Skybound begin?

PL: So we owned a board game cafe in Lynchburg, Virginia [called Meeples]. We all met at the cafe and started playing games and designing games. Whitney and I have been going to various board game conventions, and she particularly started talking to a lot of different people in the industry. She got one of her games signed with Skybound, Pirate Tails. Then when all three of realized it was the Invincible Skybound. Of course we knew the name. We didn’t see an Invincible board game on their calendar, so we sent them a message to see if they’d be interested in an idea for a social deduction game that we had.

Was this after the show first premiered?

WL: Yeah, this was definitely after the show. It was in the middle of COVID. I don’t remember exact dates at this point. It was after conventions had started up again, because it was at GAMA Expo that we pitched it to them. We watched the show on Amazon when it came out, because of COVID, and then found the comic after that. So we do come more from the board game side of things than comics. But we have enjoyed getting more into those as well.

What were some of the challenges in putting this game together? Was it hard to give it, as you mentioned, that extra dimension that other social deduction games lack?

JC: Yeah, I would say very much so. Our biggest challenge was to how to make it engaging, and how to help make it accessible to new players, and still have the mechanics where you could be a traitor one minute and then not a trader the next minute.

WL: Yeah, we ran into an information problem. We really wanted you to be able to swap sides, again, to make it both accessible to new players and represent the IP accurately. It was really important to us for it to feel like you were in the episode. As we were designing it, we realized that that presented an information problem. If people can swap sides at any point, what are you trying to figure out? Because I’m not going to go through all this work to find out you’re a bad guy if you can just become a bad guy again next round. So that was a lot harder of a design parameter, and we kind of backed ourselves into a corner. We thought a couple of times, “Maybe we should just get rid of that part.” But we were like, “No, this is the crux of the game. This is really important to us. How can we design the game around it?” It took a while. We also found that social deduction games are a lot harder to play test. You know where the Sequids are, and so it was harder to go through the play-testing process with that. But we’re all really happy with where we ended up and feel that we did capture that feeling.

How did you pick the characters that would be in the game, beyond those featured in the episode on which it’s based?

PL: When we started developing this idea, the original intent was for the game to be about Mark and the new Guardians. And about having Cecil be the only one who’s definitely on Earth’s side. So everyone could trust Cecil, and the idea was to put people in Cecil’s shoes, where he’s not quite sure how far he can trust his heroes. That was how the game started, with one or more people being traitors throughout the whole game. We came up with one version that was really fun but felt a little too cutthroat. It didn’t have the heart of Invincible, it felt more satirical, and lacked a realism that Invincible has with its superheroes. It took us a while to realize in episode 4, with the Sequids, there is the whole traitor element, and we could adapt what we were doing to that.

Josh did some research about how the Sequids operate over the course of the whole series, and we said, “Yeah, we can get to really fit the vibe that we’re going for and even lighten it up a bit. So that it appeals to a much broader audience than we had originally intended.” In the end, it turned out we had people who weren’t very good at lying, who really enjoy lying, and the heavy deducing where everything could possibly be, and the people who just take it by the seat of their pants. All of them have been able to enjoy the same game together, which is how it was intended. But it’s kind of a happy accident when you get something that right. [Laughs.]