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Writer's pictureKarl Roe

Where did the theme come from?

Updated: Nov 23, 2020


The very first iteration of the game lacked any thematic basis. There were these worker placement spaces that I made circular more or less because I had an Alvin brand circle template that made drawing them easy. “Hmm,” I thought. “What are these circles exactly?” I literally began thinking of places workers might work and fight that happened to be circular. Apparently it didn’t occur to me yet that I could change the shape of my board spaces if I wanted to. But I’m glad I stuck with circles because it led to the idea of craters on a planet or moon.


Thus a space frontier theme was born. The first few prototypes of the game were referred to in my notes as “Crater Control”, or sometimes as “Crater Command”. However I quickly began researching real life places that had both craters and a potential for human colonization. The obvious candidate that emerged was Jupiter’s moon of Callisto.


“Callisto” remained the working name of the game for several years thereafter. I didn’t change it even after I learned there was already a game of the same title, designed by none other than Reiner Knizia! It wasn’t until about a year and a half ago, right before debuting the game at my first playtesting convention, that I expanded it to “Three Days on Callisto”, which not only made the title unique but also alluded to its night and day mechanic.


Game designers like to debate whether a game's theme or its core mechanics should come first. In this case the mechanics came first--by a little bit. But really it's been a constant feedback loop between the two throughout the design process. How could it be any other way?

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