If you've played Wanderhome around your kitchen table and wondered what Jay Dragon would design next, the answer is bigger, weirder and a lot more wizardly. Steve Jackson Games is publishing Seven-Part Pact, Dragon's most ambitious RPG yet, with the Kickstarter now confirmed for summer 2026.
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Find events near youSeven-Part Pact is a fantastical, ornate TTRPG for three to seven players, each taking on the role of one of the seven most prolific wizards the universe has ever known. The hook is the Pact itself, an ancient binding agreement that gives each wizard a Domain to control, with stars and planets dictating month-long turns and an enormous shared Grimoire that players use to cast spells and rewrite the rules as they go. Each Domain is essentially its own small board game with asymmetric rules, and authority is distributed across the table rather than concentrated in a single GM seat. The Grimoire is a hefty hardback designed to live at the centre of the table.
Dragon's pedigree is hard to overstate. Wanderhome, the gentle no-conflict RPG about animal-folk wandering a healing post-war world, won three 2022 ENNIE Awards including Gold for Best Family-Friendly Game and Gold for Best Cover Art, and was later nominated for a Nebula. Their earlier game Sleepaway also took home an ENnie and two Indie Groundbreaker nominations. Possum Creek Games' Yazeba's Bed & Breakfast, which Dragon co-designed, is widely considered one of the most innovative analogue board game-RPG hybrids of recent years.
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Start organising for freeFor Steve Jackson, this is a significant push into Dragon's narrative-led indie space, following last year's pickup of Wanderhome itself. The campaign launches this summer with no firm date yet, though SJG's Daily Illuminator newsletter is where the launch will drop first. If you fancy something stranger than the usual fantasy fare, round up a group on Backseat Gamer and start the recruitment now.
Sources: Steve Jackson Games | TechRaptor | Bell of Lost Souls
