MagicCarrot.com interviews Creative Team Alpha about their Ultimate Odyssey

Part 4

MagicCarrot.com sat down with Creative Team Alpha in April and talked about the Ultimate Odyssey, Killer Bunnies, and other games. Creative Team Alpha’s fearless leader Jeff Bellinger, Creative Director Jonathan Young, and Product Development Specialist A.J. Pfeifer answer fans’ questions and give tantalizing answers to our Odyssey questions.

If you missed them, be sure to catch Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3.

MC1: Promotional cards notwithstanding, is Odyssey the end of the Killer Bunnies series or will there be a fourth game beyond that?

JB: End!? There’s no such word! We have plans for a fourth game, but we talk very little about that. Odyssey is open-ended. You see, Quest ended exactly where it was always planned to be ended. And Jupiter has a planned end because we’ll run out of planets. [Laughs] But Odyssey is open-ended. Playroom asked for an open-ended game and they got one. So, as long as sales keep going, we’ll probably continue to work on Odyssey. I mean, one can say we’ll stop after the twenty-sixth deck, because the decks are lettered.

JY: Because we’ll die. [Laughs]

JB: He’s kidding. I’d like to officially say that I will not be dying—ever. But the decks are lettered and so after we get to “Z” I don’t know if we’ll just pack it up and do something else. But to answer your question, “yes”, but nobody knows anything about it.

AJ: I think the main thing there with Odyssey is that when Odyssey comes out, if the Bunnies fans really like it, and if you guys really do like it that much, all you have to do to make sure the game stays around is buy the game. As long the sales are good on the game, then that gives us enough to keep making it and keep producing it as long as we can.

JB: Actually, I’m going to disagree with that. We’ll keep producing it as long as it’s good.

AJ: And the sales.

JB: Right, of course. Because I will stop, like I stopped Quest because it was the right time to stop it. If there is ever a time when we think its time to go back and revisit Quest, then we’ll do it, but we’ll do it right.

JY: I’m shaking my head over here: no. Because Quest was developed with that number of booster decks. If you look at the back of the first booster deck, it shows you how many booster decks and that’s how many we did. Oxyx was a double booster deck but the first draft was a triple booster deck. Jeff has so many ideas that he just wanted to keep going and Playroom said we can’t do that, that’s a little too expensive. So a lot of those ideas will go over into Jupiter and a lot of those ideas go over into Odyssey. So we will never run out of ideas. We’ve got lots and lots of ideas for cards, even after doing thousands and thousands of cards already.

JB: Sometimes you just get like a catch-phrase or a title and then we do a card for it. Like I am sure we’ll be saving the cheerleader, at some point.

MC1: Saving the cheerleader? What cheerleader?

JB: From Heroes.

MC1: Oh, see, I couldn’t get into Heroes. [Laughs]

JB: [Laughs] Regardless, we’re going to be saving the cheerleader.

JB: I want to throw something else at you now. Even though Odyssey is open-ended, I would like to point out one major difference Odyssey and Quest and Jupiter is that when you buy a[n] Odyssey booster deck, you will not have to buy the ones that came before it, nor will you have to buy them in order. So, every booster works with every starter and you know, that’s going to help tremendously because, you know, only logically all of the booster decks for Quest, per se, sold in a pyramid structure. If we sold a million Blue, then we’d have to sell less than a million Red and less than that many Violet, and so on, because you needed all of the ones before it and people would jump off at different points. Whereas in Odyssey, you can mix and match. I think that’s a very important point to mention.

AJ: About that.

JB: About that. [Laughs]

JB: That was Playroom’s request and they said “Please design us a game that is out of the pyramid structure.” and so we did that.

MC1: Very good. How will fans know which of the expansion sets to buy for Odyssey?

JB: [to JY] Do you want to tell them about the packaging and the colors and the letters?

JY: Odyssey is developed in six different colors and with six different themes.

JY: With Quest and Jupiter, everybody played with one deck. With Odyssey, you play with your own deck and whoever you’re playing with, plays with their deck. Each color represents a different theme. Each booster deck is lettered, A, B, C, booster deck A, booster deck B, and each color has its own booster deck. So there are six starter “A” decks and six “B” booster decks.

JB: They will come sixty cards to a deck, so they are ready to play. You don’t have to do any building or create. Just open it up and you’re ready to go. Each booster deck, starting with the letter “B”...

JY: For “Bunny”.

JB: … for Bunny, will have thirty cards. Each starter and then every booster in every letter comes out in six different colors. So you pick color or the theme that you like best, and that’s the one you play. Now, AJ can tell you what the colors and what the different themes are.

AJ: A little bit briefly to add on that, is the great thing is that you’re not stuck into whichever color that you bought. So let’s say you bought the yellow “A” deck. By no means are you concreting into buying the buying the yellow “B” deck. You can mix and match as much as you want. When the rules come out and they’re public, you’ll be able to see the interesting little twist that we did that allows you to pretty much throw in anything that you want. Unlike a lot of other games out there. You can pretty much do whatever you want with your deck. Which is, as a Magic player, and a different game player, it definitely makes it a little bit more easy to deal with. As far as the colors are concerned, like Jonathan said, it is broken down into six colors. There’s violet, red, blue...

JY: Yellow, orange...

AJ: I’m trying think of the... never mind.

JB: He’s trying to do them in the right order.

JY: ...violet, red, blue...

AJ: ...Orange, green and yellow. I always get orange and green mixed up. Basically what it is is Violet is elementals, so that would be precious gems and metals that are found. Red is energy, any form of energy. Blue is technology. Green is crops. Orange is animals and yellow is land. Like Lex Luthor said, they’ll always want land.

JB: But the correct order is violet, red, blue, orange, green, and yellow.

AJ: Right.

MC1: Okay. [Laughs] That’s a lot more information than I expected on that one.

AJ: [Laughs]

MC1: Seriously.

MC2: Very cool.

MC2: Another Odyssey question. It was hinted, back when Odyssey was called the New Orleans Odyssey that it would involve VIPs or “Very Intelligent Penguins.” Now that the game is Killer Bunnies and the Ultimate Odyssey, are Very Intelligent Penguins still involved, and if so, in what way?

AJ: Penguins?

JB: What penguins?

AJ: What penguins are you talking about?

JB: Never seen a penguin.

AJ: We get all these emails about penguins. I don’t get it.

JB: I have no idea what you’re talking about.

MC1: Fair enough. [Laughs]

Part 5 of the CTA Interview

Celebrity Bunny - Jessica

Celebrity Bunny Jessica is a companion card (pun intended) to Celebrity Bunny Roger.