ABOUT URSACO GAMES

Suros The Board Game is a product of Ursaco Games and was created by myself, John Sellers. The game was in development for many years but not worked on consistently ever. Whenever I would have a new fresh idea I would get back to working on the game, sometimes with a month or even year break in between. My main job is owning a sign company that manufactures yard signs, banners, storefront signage and more. With my sign shop I took it upon myself to create an entire game, including manufacturing on by myself. During play tests I would simply print out new cards at work and take them home with me. I should also mention that my main job at this sign shop was web development, which included a lot of graphic design! So, not only did I create every card, map, tokens and some of the characters, but I also built this cool site to keep everything under one roof! With some cool internet powers I could put the entire rule book online and add new content on the fly whenever I would want to. With all of these things combined this greatly cut down the cost and production time of the board game. What would typically be a year long process of getting proofs from Chinese factories and paying high prices and long wait times for shipping containers, turned out quite different. Games can be manufactured on the fly even if it is just one copy that is needed. And being that everything is done in house, I can proudly say that this game is American made, which is pretty cool!

I would like to thank anyone who has purchased a copy of my game and in turned helped me get some of my art out there in the world. This game is incredibly indie and was never intended to make me rich or anything of the sort. My goal was always to make a fun, accessible game that was filled with all the ideas I could dream up. Knowing that some person out there has my box on their shelf puts a little smile on my face.

Thank you to my play testers who sat down and played my game in the beginning when it was hot garbage and then played again in the end to see how this monster has developed.
• John Fowler
• Michael Radney
• Kayleigh Sellers
• Sam Sellers
• Josh Fry
• Bradley Davin
• Chad Boone
• Reece Martin
• Davis Murdock
• Joey George
• Eugene Lemonds

The art was a unique process for this game as I did not higher a game artist for this project. All of the monster designs were created by Christine Liu, who happens to be my tattoo artist! Many of the monsters are originally just tattoos that I actually got from her. I was such a fan of her work that I asked to put the designs in my game. To make things even more interesting, Christine also created the artwork for my bands album that was released on all streaming platforms. The band is also named SUROS and the art of that album certainly shares some of the same characters and lives in this same "universe" I have created. If you are invested you can check out our BANDCAMP to listen to the tunes.

This biggest influence, which I think is obvious is Kingdom Death: Monster. That is the first boardgames I ever bought actually. After sinking hundreds of hours into a video game called Monster Hunter World, I hopped on the web and searched for board game like monster hunter. Now, hundreds, and hundreds, and hundreds of hours spent with Kingdom Death got my brain ticking on creating my own boss battler game, and here we are! My game has many spinoffs that come from that but if you have played that game you certainly will see the comparisons. Other influences are a bit more nuanced but once I tell you you will definitely see it! The event decks are inspired from the board game Quacks of Quedlinburg. In that game each round give you a weird decision to make. Those decisions are usually quite minor but that extra bit of flavor made such a huge difference for the game. The map system with the circular spaces is inspired by the board game Dark Souls. The weak spot mechanic in my game also is inspired from Dark Souls as that game also has an arc color system that shows weak spots on bosses. The asymmetry of the bosses was inspired by my very favorite game, Root! Initially all the players had different abilities, but much like root, it is hard to keep up with what other players are capable of if everyone functions different. Having the monsters all have different variations makes everyone stay on the same page I decided.