Zach Barth is best known as the founder and namesake of the studio Zachtronics, developers of such popular automation/programming games as Opus Magnum, SpaceChem and Infinifactory. (You can find some great lists of "zach-like" games in our database if you're curious to learn more.) This time around he's on Kickstarter to produce an unusual physical game: a set of scratch-card puzzles you reveal as you play.
The Zach Attack! is a box containing 6 different physical games (10 randomized copies of each) which consist of a single card that you'll be scratching spaces off to reveal information as you solve them. You can think of them as being individual logic puzzles, each contained to their own sheet, where you're choosing what spaces to uncover rather than writing numbers in boxes.
The 6 games each have their own unique art and mechanics, covering a wide range of themes: you can evade traps and collect treasures in Danger! in the Temple of Malice, hack a computer system in Signal to Noise (a very on-brand theme for Zach's games), and even "infiltrate a supervillain's volcano stronghold and save the world" in Max Midnight: Better Dead Than Never. There isn't a flashy trailer or much visual information about the games themselves being shown off, but here's what we can see of them so far:
I can make out hex grids, battleship boards, and mazes, teasing how much variety the box will contain. Here's some more info about them from the Kickstarter page:
These games are designed to require logical and strategic thinking, and to take advantage of the built-in tension of scratch-offs: once you’ve scratched, there’s no going back.
Each boxed copy of the Zach Attack! Scratch 'n Solve Puzzle Pack contains 10 different versions of each of the 6 games (for a total of 60 game cards), so that every playthrough is randomized and unique. (If you buy two boxes, each box will contain the same 60 game cards.) Each game takes about 10 minutes to play, which means that there’s around 10 hours of gameplay total.
Solo-play physical games have been gaining in popularity in recent years, and this isn't the first one Zach has designed and produced: I backed the single-player card game The Lucky Seven a few years ago, a tactical experience of maneuvering an elite squad of soldiers around a grid of cards. Since then their company Coincidence has also created the science-inspired card game Chemistry Set. These games often give the feel of sitting and taking your time working through a puzzle, but are more akin to doing a paper-puzzle book rather than staring at a digital screen.
Speaking of videogames, Zach and Coincidence are also currently hard at work on their upcoming title Kaizen: A Factory Story, an assembly-line engineering and optimization game that puts you in the economically-booming Japan of the 1980s. You can look forward to more release date news about Kaizen as soon as we learn more.
The Zach Attack! is available to back on Kickstarter from now until June 28th.
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