Media License project for IDW Games designed by Forever Stoked

The Brief:
IDW wanted to create a light and accessible card game with the X-Files license that would appeal to both casual and die-hard fans of the show while also being an enjoyable experience for players who had never watched an episode. It was decided to leverage the basic structure of the “Everything is Connected” system we had created for their earlier Dirk Gently: Everything Is Connected Game.

The Challenges:
Over many seasons, several movies, comics, and a brief revival the X-Files had created iconic characters, quotes, and moments but it had also created plot lines, conspiracies, and stories that not even it’s most committed fans could keep straight. Varying between the strange, the silly, the scary, and everywhere in between, the X-Files succeeded, in part, by never being just one thing, so how to create a single X-Files experience that delivered what the fans of the show would want?

Our Approach: 
Whether the case involved aliens, angels, flukeman, or bigfoot, at the end of the day, there would inevitably be a debate between Agent Mulder’s wild theories and his skeptical partner Agent Scully about what they were going to put in the official report to their bosses at the FBI. Leaning especially on the unreliable narrator tropes in the iconic episode Jose Chung’s From Outer Space, we decided to focus on the absurd challenge of presenting the fantastical events of an X-Files case in an official bureaucratic report to agents in charge at the FBI. So not only would players take on the role of Agent Fox Mulder as he tried his best to explain the unexplainable without seeming so crazy he loses his job, players would also take on the role of the FBI supervisors themselves having to make sense of a X-File report.

This mix of the bizarre and the bureaucratic with light storytelling for the Mulder player and a sense of paranoia from the bureaucrats afraid of being seen as crazy for accepting a story their fellow colleagues didn’t believe became the core of the X-Files game.

The Game:
After another truly unbelievable case comes to an end, Agent Fox Mulder finds himself in a familiar seat — directly across from his superiors at the FBI. While Agent Scully urged him to tell a story that the panel would accept, Mulder’s need to believe is just too great.

In The X-Files: Conspiracy Theory – Everything is Connected, players take turns as Fox Mulder as he uses the provided clues to explain his conspiracy theory to his FBI superiors. But reputation is everything at the FBI, and Mulder’s superiors are more interested in voting with the room rather than their gut. Mulder weaves together the conspiracy, and the superiors must deduce the way the rest of the room will vote…because the only thing worse than being an outlier is being a nut-case like Fox Mulder.

Success:
The game was a hit with fans of the show as well as casual party gamers. It continues to sell well and the core Everything is Connected system continues to be refined and expanded.

Reviews:
https://geekmom.com/2018/10/the-x-files-conspiracy-theory-everything-is-connected/