Speaking of unconventional ways your PhD in Theatre can be lucrative... you could go on to design what looks like a pretty cool board game.
Recent Illinois doctoral alum B.J. Gailey is one-half of the creative team behind Victoriana, a board game seeking funds through Kickstarter. It’s a cooperative game set in Victorian London, with the objective of discovering which villainous character has decided to wreak havoc and how they plan to do it.
I say “character” but your possible roles and foes can be taken from either history or literature, so Sherlock Holmes and Aleister Crowley can undermine Rasputin’s evil scheme with the help of Van Helsing. Or Nikolai Tesla. Or Wilhelmina Harker.
Good. Times.
While the playthrough videos show that it has plenty to offer fans of Arkham Horror or Pandemic, what is intriguing about this game to me is that for a game that seems to have at least a two-hour play, it actually seems to get more interesting the longer you play. The closer you get to the end goal, the more types of obstacles you encounter. And instead of rolling dice to … roll dice… for the purpose of rolling dice… the game’s progress is strategic rather than random. For each clue you uncover, you have to make choices that can change the outcome of your game, and give you different avenues to explore.
So support local thespians — Kickstart a boardgame!
The second playthrough video, it’s the most interesting. There are others as well.