Overview
Going into Monster Train 2, we had better connections and had made friends with folks at other studios who had played our games. This gave us an opportunity to reach out to some folks who we were fans of Monster Train to ask if they’d be up to let us work with them as part of Monster Train 2. Fortunately a few of our favorites said yes and so we set to work making these crossovers happen.
We knew the right place in Monster Train 2 to put them was where surprises happen on every run: the ‘event system’ (aka., the Concealed Caverns in Monster Train 1 and Celestial Alcove in Monster Train 2).
We also have some useful tools in this system to make sure our crossovers don’t show up too much, we get to define their frequency against each other, and also we can set it up so they don’t show up in the earliest runs a player does in their career, making sure the player is fully immersed in Monster Train before they start to experience some of these wilder or weirder events.
Richard Garfield Collaboration
Here at Shiny Shoe we are big fans of Richard’s work on Magic the Gathering and other board and card games. Plus he was a Monster Train 1 fan! So we knew when we were making the sequel we had to reach out and see if he’d be up to design a little something for us.
The result was the Wonderous Boxes event! He came to us with an idea where the goal was to make every choice explode into even more options and we loved it. With a little iteration going over theme and implementation it turned into the event you see before you today.
Balatro
The legendary jokers and the Cavendish/Gros Michel are iconic and fun, and since they were passives, fit in neatly as artifacts. The hard part came in balancing their wild powers in the context of Monster Train.
For example, in Balatro, Canio gives a 1X mult when a face card is destroyed. Since we don’t have ‘face cards’ or ‘mults’, we had to break down the core idea of the Canio which is essentially: “Get a bonus on card removal”. Then we translate that idea into the mechanics of Monster Train. As a result, in our game, Canio gives gold whenever you purge a card.
Inscryption
If you're visiting us at PAX East this weekend, you may have noticed a familiar face on the side of the Big Fan booth.
Inscryption also had random events on their map like ours, and we talked about adapting a few options (like the Villagers). Then we looked towards sigils that work similarly to our upgrades, and realized those would be the most natural fit.
Of course, since it’s Inscryption, we needed to add a secret to the event (but we won’t reveal that here). It took our playtesters the course of a week or so to solve it, but with more of you out there maybe it will go faster with a little coordination.
Cult of the Lamb
We knew we wanted to use the Red Crown and let any character ‘become the lamb’. In their game, the Red Crown gives the lamb immortality and transforms into weapons that the lamb uses. So, in our game, the Red Crown gives you Endless and equips the character with a random weapon.
Of course, the Red Crown also comes with your own loyal cultist followers. We knew we wanted to make these followers start off weak, as a tradeoff for taking the Red Crown. But although the followers have very low stats, with 1 attack and 1 health, they also have Multistrike 2, which can make them extremely strong if you decide to strengthen your cult.
Inkbound
A collaboration with our own game! The idea of characters from Inkbound diving into an inkwell and landing in the world of Monster Train has been a small joke we’d tossed around occasionally. In fact, there are already some small nods to Monster Train in Inkbound. So when it got around to Monster Train 2, since we were already doing crossovers, having one with Inkbound was a no-brainer.
We picked a handful of vestiges from Inkbound and updated their mechanics to fit in Monster Train, which was surprisingly straightforward. Nib & Bin are also in the event, who have seemingly entered Monster Train through the inkwell portal. We thought it would be neat to imply that the worlds of Monster Train and Inkbound are connected. Because they technically are, they’re made by the same people!
---
Monster Train 2's collaborations come from our love of fellow deck builders, indie games, and the unique gameplay possibilities they bring to our players. While you almost certainly won't encounter these random events on every playthrough, we hope their presence comes as a fun surprise to spice up your run.