A new game publisher is all about brain-breaking PC strategy games (and making them easier to get into)

Astra Logical has big plans, unusual backers and is very much for people who get excited about the word "Zachtronics"

Rebots. Screenshot: FlatPoinies, Astra Logical

Heather Jackson is building a game publisher that will focus on the kind of games that used to make her fume.

“I remember the first time that I opened Opus Magnum,” she recently told Game File, referring to the highly acclaimed game from renowned studio Zachtronics (PC Gamer called 2017’s Opus Magnum “[on]ne of the very best puzzle games of the year, if not the decade.”)

“I played the first puzzle and did not finish the first puzzle,” she said. “And then I smashed my laptop shut and I ranted about it to my friend for a while.”

A few days later, after friends bragged to her about their progress, she returned to the game.

“I came back and finished the first puzzle. It was such an insanely satisfying 'aha' moment, and I fell in love with that feeling and kept chasing it in the game”

She wound up a fan of Opus Magnum and many strategy games like it. Factorio. Mindustry. If it’s a challenging systems-based game, possibly involving programming automated assembly lines, she’s into it. 

And now, she’s hoping to position Astra Logical, the new publisher she runs, as the go-to label for those kinds of games and try to create gentler onramps for getting into them. Jackson’s team is going for “systems and strategy games that don’t hate you,” as the company slogan goes.

They’ll even be publishing the next video game from the studio formerly known as Zachtronics.

Astra Logical is being built to be a boutique publisher of a certain kind of game, a genre specialist in the model of the successful upstart publisher Hooded Horse. That group focuses on the adjacent category of city/world-management PC strategy games such as Manor Lords, Against the Storm and Old World. 

Jackson likes that genre-focused model, and envisions creating an ecosystem at Astra for gamers of certain tastes. She believes the approach benefits developers and players alike. For game makers, she said, a specialist publisher can gather expertise about how to solve problems in the creation of relatively similar games. For players, she said, the idea is to bring gamers into a style of game that can be intimidatingly impenetrable maybe with one of the more approachable games in the portfolio first, then introduce them to more complex work.

2017’s Opus Magnum. Screenshot: Zachtronics

Astra Logical has published one game so far, June’s Star Stuff.

On October 7, they’ll publish the FlatPonies-developed Rebots, a first-person automation game that Jackson said has ”Big Satisfactory-meets-Bugsnax vibes. 

Beyond that, Astra Logical is aiming to launch four to six games a year and is actively signing games now, Jackson said.

One game on the horizon will be a new creation from the former Zachtronics team, lead by Zach Barth and reconstituted as a worker’s co-op called Coincidence. (The acclaimed Zachtronics studio had closed in 2022.)

Jackson is vague on details about what exactly the new Zach-team game will be—this is not the official unveiling—but said it will keep in line with Astra Logical’s mission of expanding the reach of the genre.

“What we're working on with Zach on his next title is: What does the most approachable Zachtronics game look like? It doesn't mean it's any less hard, any less systems-driven. But what if we're building it to actually welcome people in?” 

Jackson and Astra Logical both have unusual backgrounds and backing—and have arrived at this point following some setbacks.

Out of college, Jackson worked at Burger King. Not at the register or the deep fryer, but at its parent company, Restaurant Brands International, where she worked in finance and operations. Her main lesson there: “Satisfaction matters.” Put your customer first, she said. 

There was also the whole not-being-McDonalds part of being at Burger King.

“I have massive underdog symptoms,” she said.

A lifelong gamer from Kentucky who singles out Chibi Robo and Civilization as childhood favorites, Jackson long wanted to break into the game industry, had made friends with various indie developers and found herself consulting on the side about contracts and raising money. 

She went to Harvard business school, where she was co-president of a gaming and e-sports club, then landed at Amazon to build a game publishing label.

A chance meeting in 2022 introduced her to a non-profit called Carina Initiatives that is focused on a mission of “building the country’s first cohesive math talent system.” The non-profit, reported $15 million in assets in 2022, the most recent year records are available, with nearly $9 million distributed in grants. 

“They really believe in the resilience of mathematical thinking,” Jackson said of Carina. “They primarily believe in this through games.” Not “edutainment,” she stressed, but traditional video games. 

In 2022, Carina was supporting the non-profit Astra Fund, to help finance games designed to make players think. Funded projects included Arranger, the “role-puzzling adventure” that shipped this past August, and Puzzmo, a collection of regularly updated puzzle games offered through Hearst that are a rival offering to the selection of games offered via The New York Times. 

Jackson joined the Astra Fund in the latter half of 2023, charged by Carina to build a long-running business and convert it to a for-profit publisher, Astra Logical.

That change was inspiring, Jackson said, because it would create a chance to run a lasting, successful gaming business around the type of games she loved.

But it was also painful. “We simply had to restructure,” she said. “We were set up as a non-profit fund with a fellowship and an arm dedicated to supporting the genre. This simply wouldn't sustain our spin out to a for-profit entity.” Astra laid off four people in late 2023. 

“This sucked and certainly was not how I wanted to start my tenure at Astra, but it was a necessary change to become a publisher of games,” she said.

Despite those cuts, Jackson says Astra Logical will now have ample and lengthy support from Carina to succeed.

“Our funders are committed to seeing us build out a portfolio,” she said. “It's not like ‘We're only going to fund you for one year.’ They’re alongside us in this process. And they understand that this is a long term game.

Goals won’t just be profit, she said, but signs that the games are serving the cause of developing people’s mathematical thinking.

“The thing that they're most motivated by and excited by is: How many players can we reach? What's the impact of this portfolio? Can we truly change the way people think?”

She cited Zachtronics/Coincidence’s Zach Barth when discussing the kind of key performance indicators, or KPIs, that’ll matter to Astra Logical and Carina.

“He'll get letters from people who've played his games. Like, ‘You inspired me to be an engineer.’

“Those are the KPIs we really need to track for,” she said. “That's really important to us, alongside our portfolio [return on investment] and our ability to operate sustainably.”

One more Burger King note: For some older readers, the mention of Burger King and gaming might conjure memories of a trio of BK-backed video games offered on Xbox back in 2006. The most famous/infamous was the stealth game Sneak King in which the fast food chain’s royal mascot snuck through a sunny suburban neighborhood to deliver burgers. The games were released well before Jackson’s time at Burger King’s parent company and probably not anything Astra Logical would revisit, but, she mused, “maybe there is an angle for a detective Sneak King [in a] Return of the Obra Dinn style.”