What Next? is a co-op choose-your-own-adventure with physical mini-games, out next month

Upcoming board game What Next? will combine the branching narrative of a choose-your-own-adventure story with the physical challenges of a dexterity game - and it’s due for release next month.

What Next? is a co-op game featuring three separate scenarios, each lasting between 40 minutes and an hour. Drums of Koala Cave sees the players’ zoologists washed up on an island and attempt to rescue their colleague. The futuristic Blinky’s Great Escape follows a robot attempting to take a break after 15 years of work, needing to survive their killer colleagues and boss to clock off. Skyscraper Caper involves a superhero escaping the ire of their housekeeper while dodging lasers and frying pans alike.

In choose-your-own-adventure fashion, each scenario will feature a branching narrative, with players able to guide the story by choosing different decisions on a number of cards. What Next?’s unique hook is that the players must complete a dexterity-based mini-game in order to progress.

Success will lead the players closer to victory, while failure adds a peril piece to an increasingly unstable stack of awkward shapes. When the stack falls, the players lose and must restart the current scenario.

The game will include more than 60 different physical challenges, ranging from flicking a puck along a cardboard target and blowing a card across a table to catching cards in mid-air and creating specific shapes. A single playthrough won’t feature all of the possible mini-games, allowing scenarios to be replayed with a different combination of challenges. The box will include over 200 cards, as well as more than a dozen physical items used in the challenges.

What Next? will play with up to four people, as well as allowing a single player to go through the adventures in a solo mode.

Publishing the game is Big Potato, the party game maker behind Obama Llama, The Chameleon and Don’t Get Got. The game was originally created as the final project for a master’s degree in game design, before being picked up by the studio.

What Next? will be released on August 9th, and will be an online exclusive for UK board game seller Zatu until November. The game will cost £40.