The Saga of El Castigo Nears Release — and the Warnings Keep Coming

It’s the third week of June, and I’m closing in on launching The Turning, the first game in The Saga of El Castigo, on July 1. The final pieces are falling into place, the rules are tight, the artwork is done, and I’m at that stage where excitement and dread battle it out in my head. I’m committed to bringing these games out, to sharing the stories I’ve pieced together from that strange box of photocopies. At this point, no protest, not even from someone claiming to be family, is going to change my mind. Nothing I’ve seen so far suggests this is anything but harmless fun.

If you’ve read my earlier posts—one about the discovery, the other about the mysterious “cousin” named Joe—you know where this is headed.

And now, there’s more.

I still don’t know Joe. We’ve never met. I’ve reached out to long-lost branches of the family tree, and no one has any idea who he (or she?) could be. All I have are their messages—long, rambling, and a little too intense for comfort. Joe appeared after my initial Instagram posts about The Turning and El Castigo, claiming we’re related, claiming they know more about what I’ve found than I do. Maybe they do. But it’s clear Joe isn’t just interested in these stories, they’re consumed by them.

After I shared scans of the letters and notes I’ve been using to build these games, Joe latched onto them like someone starved for answers. After weeks of silence, they resurfaced, saying they’d been out in the wilderness for days at a time, searching for the remains of a town that’s on no map. They keep asking for landmarks, for clues hidden in the papers. But I’ve pored over these documents more times than I can count. The few hints they contain are cryptic at best.

Here’s what I do know about El Castigo:

• The letters describe Mexican families who had lived in the valley for generations, though no one ever explains why they chose such an isolated spot.

• The local tribes weren’t hostile; they traded with the settlers.

• In the late 1840s or early 1850s—maybe as early as 1848 after the Mexican-American War—a group of explorers from St. Louis, led by a missionary, found the valley. Accident or design? I suspect the latter.

• Within a year, they discovered silver. Within another, over 200 people crowded into the valley, building a town around a burned-out hacienda by the river and a church raised by the missionary.

• Travelers needed a guide to reach the town. It was said to be off the Santa Fe Trail, but no maps or letters describe the route. The only named feature? The Mesa, overlooking the valley.

A valley, a river, a mesa. In the Southwest, that describes a thousand places, and rivers don’t always stay put. The timing and the silence in contemporary newspapers baffles me most. No silver strikes reported from St. Louis papers during that era, nothing until California in 1848. Odd, isn’t it?

That’s what haunts Joe. In their latest message, they wrote:

“What you have—those letters, those photocopies—they’re it. They’re the last vestiges of El Castigo. That town was never meant to be found. Never meant to be seen again. But what you’ve got is the only way to find it. The only way.”

It sounded like a warning. Maybe it was. But if El Castigo wasn’t meant to be found, why do these documents exist? Why were they sent to my great-great-grandmother, with pleas to protect them?

I don’t pretend to understand Joe’s urgency, or their fear. And yes, part of me wonders why I’m helping someone hunt for a place they think should stay buried. But I can’t walk away from this now. The story’s too compelling—and it makes one hell of a backdrop for these games.

More soon—including, I hope, Joe’s next letter. Their side of this strange legend deserves to be heard too.

Stay tuned.