There’s a long history of compelling minigames in narrative titles. Sea of Stars’ Wheels game joins a legacy that includes Star Ocean’s Eso’wa, Witcher’s Gwent, Final Fantasy’s Triple Triad, and many others as a physical game played by the denizens of a video game world.
Ranging from fun distractions to fascinating pieces of worldbuilding and narrative, these games within games flesh out the worlds they’re in by showing how NPCs have fun and relax. In the case of Wheels, the tavern game is both an engaging diversion for the player and ties into the broader world and history of the indie retro-inspired RPG Sea of Stars, in no small part due to the complex machinery used to play the game.
A Wheels set consists of clockwork contraptions set into anything from a bar table to a barrel. Each player’s side has space for two miniatures and five spinning wheels, four are built into the table and the fifth is carried with the player. Symbols on the wheels grant energy for one of the units or the Bulwark, a defensive barrier protecting the player from some direct attacks. The wheels themselves function like dice in Yahtzee, in that they are spun three times and desired results can be locked in place to get the best possible pool of symbols for a round to either attack or defend against the opponent’s hidden spins.
Wheels has additional layers of complexity, including the various miniatures of archetypical fantasy heroes (Archer Mage, Warrior, Assassin, Priest, Engineer, etc.) which can increase in level during each match. The minigame also features the ability to improve the unique player wheel by besting a tavern’s champion. Despite this, the underpinnings of head-to-head Yahtzee remain relatively easy to grasp. From those fundamentals, players can approach Wheels with a variety of strategies from brute force to carefully planned clockwork sieges.
Sea of Stars’ creative director Thierry Boulanger has described Wheels as a fantasy battler with a layer of tactical thinking somewhat reminiscent of Horizon’s Machine Strike. A player can attempt to level their units evenly, tasking a Knight with tearing through Bulwarks while a Mage throws the rarer and more devastating spells. Another might focus entirely on their Mage. A third might play extremely defensively, using Priests and Bulwarks to their advantage. The levels of complexity allow for multiple styles of play on the clockwork tables in Sea of Stars’ bars.
But the unusual inclusion of Engineers among the archers and mages in Wheels’ roster of fantasy archetypes is indicative of its place in Sea of Stars’ world, explained Boulanger in a recent interview with Game ZXC. Engineers and the clockwork nature of the tabletop battler are both connected to the mysterious creator of Wheels: the Watchmaker.
“She is so good at her craft that she can capture the magic in the air and infuse it in the parts that she uses when she builds her clockwork things. She's not just a good artisan, she's an actual magician at it. She's always toiling away, she built a castle where time doesn't pass within. She's not exactly immortal, because if she leaves, she will age, but she just stays there and has been working there forever. She wanted to take a break at some point for some arc of her immortal life, so she invented a tabletop board game. She shipped these add-ons that people can just install on any tables or even a barrel, and it gives you this little tabletop world. Now it's all the rage.”
Without needing to explain much more about the Watchmaker or the people of Sea of Stars’ world, Wheels communicates a culture interested in high-tech clockwork games of strategy over a relaxing drink and an elusive game maker with skill, renown, and resources to spend creating and sending out extremely complicated Wheels game boards to be installed the world over, seemingly as a whim. And, of course, there’s the promise of a strange, timeless clockwork castle somewhere in the archipelago the Solstice Warriors sail.
As for whether players will come face-to-face with the elusive Watchmaker, Boulanger teased the possibility.
“She's kind of like a superstar and not very accessible, you know,” he said. “The rumor is that you may get to challenge the Watchmaker. But that is only a rumor.”
Sea of Stars is available now for PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.
