❖ Version History ❖

December 12th, 2021
During the weeks leading up to the holiday season in 2021, we had been twiddling our thumbs waiting on The Great Chase to be manufactured. The process was supposed to be completed by the end of November, but unfortunately we were still a few months away from this coming true.

While that was going on, I had also been putting the finishing touches on establishing a storefront for the Librarium Games Website. I knew that we were soon to have products available to sell, and we needed a way to make that happen for our customers! But… we also didn’t technically have much to offer as of yet. So I set my sights on “What else could we sell?” as a brainstorm with Ben.

We would need items we put in the store to somehow be a part of the Librarium Games experience… so, my first thought was to design the T-shirts that we offer for The Great Chase and Calendra, but these weren’t terribly exciting in the ‘interactive’ kind of way. Then, one afternoon while talking with Ben we had a kind of crazy idea.

I have a deep fondness for making sketchbooks from scratch (I rip through sketchbooks all the time taking my notes, so I tend to make them myself). I had been thinking about making another big batch to give some Christmas Gifts, but then Ben had suggested making the sketchbooks into some sort of ‘Secret Society’ experience for our customers. Instantly my eyes lit up and I began thinking about how we might go about doing this:

The Librarium Lore Font Origin Story

Once upon a time 10,000 years ago when I was a middle school student, I had a friend who had been planning on going into the military for cryptology. He was always carrying around notebooks about codes and ciphers, and we had many fun times of sending each other secret little messages that would need to be deciphered.

As a bit of a challenge to each other, we decided to try and make our own ciphers and see if the other could decode what was happening. I wracked my brain for days trying to think of something clever… using all of the examples that he had shown me, I finally came up with an interesting idea: a font cipher, where every vowel is a dot combination, and ever consonant has circles where the dots connect to form words.

To get this to function, I basically assigned each vowel one more dot:
A = •
E = ••
I = •••
O = ••••
U = •••••

Then I re-wrote all of the consonants to contain some sort of ‘o’ shape, where sometimes the dots would appear inside of the ‘o’ and sometimes they would appear alongside the letter. It wasn’t a perfect system, but I was really proud of it at the time.

Fast forward about 20 years, and here we are. A request has been made of me to design a secret society for our customer base, and my first thought was “I wonder if I could recreate the fun of the cipher puzzle for people these days?” Of course, I had long long lost my original notes on the old font idea I had, but the rules were really simple and easy to recreate. So I grabbed a pen and paper and threw down my ideas:

Making a secret Cipher font is really only one part of the fun though… there has to be some kind of way to use this font! The puzzle is what makes it fun for those who try to figure it out. I didn’t want to give people the key to the cipher and have no where for them to use it. However, I also didn’t want to publicly post information that was encrypted anywhere on the website and make it so that no one could ever read it.

Then and interesting idea popped into my head. I could develop a relatively simple web page that was also part of the secret! Anything posted on this page could be written in the encrypted code… and the page could be updated as cool new secrets were going to be released by the company!

Additionally, a portal to this secret web page could be hidden away from everyone pretty easily by not giving users of our website a clickable way to get to this page from the main pages of the website. In stead, they would either need to know the exact web URL, or have a QR code to get there! With this thought, I custom designed the idea of a bookmark that could lead a user to this secret page with a QR code that only appears in the sketchbooks that I would sell through our store! (see the featured image above for this example). This combination of ideas would allow a player to solve fun puzzles like this one:

There was only one major thing missing from this process to bring it home… the “Society” aspect of our secret society. It wouldn’t be as fun of a project / puzzle game for our customers if everything was easily solved… So I hatched an evil but fun idea for our QR code book marks that would come with the sketchbooks. Each bookmark would only contain x5 letters of the x26 letter alphabet.

They would all contain a different combination of the alphabet parts, but only by people working together and submitting pictures of their own book marks could a community be developed for solving the puzzle! I got to fiddling around with my printer and my cricut, and within a few hours I had this functioning idea:

But what does any of this have to do with Phoenix Farm? Well I am glad that you asked.

One piece of flack that I had been receiving for a long time regarding Calendra is that there wasn’t enough lore or back story to the game for people to enjoy in addition to the card game aspect of its media existence.

So, almost impossibly far away from Phoenix Farm’s debut to the world (before the publication of Calendra by at least 8 months), Ben and I started hatching the idea of slowly but surely inviting our whole customer base into being a part of the lore cipher project. We wanted to create a whole bunch of secret information for people to try and puzzle out before Phoenix Farm would ever be published… it might only be a few hints here and there on the website, or in the Calendra Box, or maybe even as much as a small booklet about the game one day.

To be honest, we weren’t even sure how it would happen yet. We just knew that if we started this process now, we would at least be able to come back to it later some day. And come back to it we certainly did! In the time since this idea was hatched many details changed… the secret web page eventually became the Phoenix Farm Lore Book Headquarters, our bookmarks eventually were designed to contain the whole alphabet, and as you’ll see in our next post, a secret card was added into the Calendra Game box to celebrate! Stay tuned for more backstory in our next adventure of the Design Journal!