Daniel Solis

[In the Lab] Further Notes on Dung & Dragons

2012-01-25T22:14:00.000-05:00

I've been on the road a lot the past few weeks, which means I had a lot of time to marinate on some thoughts for Dung & Dragons. I got to thinking about ways to adapt some mechanics from San Juan, Pandemic, and Yspahan. Here are my loose notes from the road.

Welcome to Dragon Ranch Co-op, a group of free-thinking dragon breeders raising the finest dragons, drakes, coatls and winged serpents in the tri-county area. No corporate stakeholders allowed here, just free-range dragons raised the old-fashioned way. There are no managers or corporate execs running the show. Every day, each rancher chooses the duty he or she would like to perform. If others join in, so be it! Of course, getting these people to work as a team can be harder than raising a fire breathing reptile!

OVERVIEW OF PLAY
Each player coordinates their own workforce to perform various duties on the ranch. Inspectors arrive periodically to grade your ranch's performance thus far, in one of several categories. Your goal is to get the best grade across all categories before all the inspectors have arrived. Manage your workforce well and coordinate with the other players to achieve the best grades!

SET UP
Place a Stable card on the table. Place your starting dragon on the Stable. (Dragon cards are oriented vertically on a horizontal Stable cards, so you can see the Stable's info even though the dragon is on top of it.)

Set the bank board to the side. It begins empty.

Shuffle the card deck and deal three cards to each player. If any of these cards are an Inspector, set them aside and draw a new card. Once everyone has three cards, shuffle the Inspectors back into the deck. (The card deck is comprised of Buildings, Skills, Inspectors and Dragons.)

HOW TO PLAY

Choosing Duties
Players take their turns at the same time. At the beginning of the turn, choose one duty for each worker and set that die so that the top face matches your chosen duty. For example, if you want a worker to go on shopping duty, you'd set it to [1]. Keep your choice secret by covering it with your hand. Then, all players reveal their choices at the same time.

Performing Duties
Duties are performed in order of the number noted at the top left of the card. So, shovelers work first, then feeders, then builders, then shoppers, then trainers, then coordinators. If multiple players choose the same duty, the player with the Coordinator marker does that duty first, followed by the player to his or her left, then the next player to the left, and so on, clockwise around the table.

Teamwork
Duties have different game effects depending on how many workers are assigned to the same duty in the same round. Each duty lists effects according to the number of players who've also chosen that duty. For example, more workers shoveling in the same round allows each shoveler to collect more chips than a single shoveler would be able to do alone.

*1 Shopping Duty
Shoppers go into town to bring back new supplies for the ranch. Sometimes they run into an inspector! It's important to draw cards one a time. If you ever draw an inspector card, follow its instructions immediately before proceeding with your turn.

1-2 Each shopper draws one card from the deck and keeps it in his or her hand. The first shopper draws two and may keep one.

3-4 Each shopper draws two cards from the deck and keeps them in his or her hand. The first shopper draws three and may keep up to two.

5-6 The first shopper draws four cards and may keep up to three. No other shoppers may draw cards.

*2 Shoveling Duty
Shovelers remove the valuable dragon guano from the stables, refining it into currency that can be spent to construct buildings, train skills, buy new dragons, etc.

1 The shoveler moves one facedown card from one dragon to the bank.

2-3 Each shoveler moves up to two facedown cards from each dragon to the bank.

4-6 Each shoveler moves up to three facedown cards from each dragon to the bank.

*3 Feeding Duty
Feeders provide food for the dragons. After all, they can't make guano without food! This is also the time when ranchers notice if a dragon is sick. It takes a whole team to restore a dragon's health, so feeders will have to forgo their duties to lend a hand. Otherwise, sick dragons simply refuse to eat.

1-2 Each feeder places a facedown card from their hand on each healthy dragon. OR If any dragon is SICK, one of those dragons is now healthy.

3-4 Each feeder places two facedown cards from their hand on each healthy dragon. OR If any dragon is SICK, two of those dragons are now healthy.

5-6 Each feeder places three facedown cards from their hand on each healthy dragon. OR If any dragon is SICK, three of those dragons are now healthy.

*4 Building Duty
Builders expand and upgrade the ranch's facilities. When you build a new building, place its card in the middle of the table.

1-2 You may build remove one building. Spend the listed chip cost.

3-4 Each builder may build or remove up to two buildings. Spend the listed chip cost.

5-6 Each player may build or remove up to three buildings. Spend the listed chip cost.

*5 Training Duty
Trainers improve the abilities of their workforce.

1-2 Each trainer may place one skill on one player. Spend the listed chip cost.

3-4 Each trainer may place up to two skills on up to two players. Spend the listed chip cost.

5-6 each trainer may place up to three skills on up to three players. Spend the listed chip cost.

*6 Coordinator Duty
The player who chooses this duty gets the Coordinator marker. The player farthest from the Coordinator marker wins ties.

END THE TURN
Discard: Each player has a hand limit of three cards. If you have more than three cards in your hand, you must discard the extra cards.
Healthcare: Each stable lists a maximum capacity for chips. If there are more chips in a stable than the capacity, that dragon becomes SICK. If the dragon was already SICK, it runs away from the ranch. Discard this dragon. Its chips remain in the stable.

INSPECTOR CARDS
Health Inspector grades the health of your dragons. Here is your ranch's current grade in Health.
One healthy dragon = F
Two healthy dragon = D
Three healthy dragon = C
Four healthy dragon = B
Five healthy dragon = A

Building Inspector grades the facilities of your ranch. The inspector likes to see groups of three matching buildings. Here is your ranch's current grade in Building.
One group of three matching buildings. = F
Two groups of three matching buildings. = D
Three groups of three matching buildings. = C
Four groups of three matching buildings. = B
Five groups of three matching buildings. = A

Sanitation Inspector grades the cleanliness of your ranch. Here is your ranch's current grade in Sanitation.
Four chips on any dragon. = F
Three chips on any dragon. = D
Two chips on any dragon. = C
One chip on any dragon. = B
No chips on any dragon. = A

Training Inspector grades the skills of your dragons. Here is your ranch's current grade in Training.
One player with three skills. = F
Two players with three skills. = D
Three players with three skills. = C
Four players with three skills. = B
Five players with three skills. = A

After drawing an Inspector, shuffle it back into the deck.

GRADE MODIFIERS
There are also various cards that can contribute to raising grades in categories. Buildings that contribute to sanitation scores. Skills that contribute to Health scores. The basic idea being that this is a cooperative game with gradients of success, but the axes of success tug against each other.

END OF GAME
The game ends when each category has been graded at least twice. It is possible that a category might be graded several times. As the inspectors get shuffled back into the deck, they appear more and more often, with less opportunity to adjust between tests.

RPGamer: "Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple is Tabletop RPG of 2011"

2012-01-25T06:00:00.000-05:00

January was a good month for Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple and possibly the start of an auspicious awards season for our favorite flying troublemakers. Thebig news is that Do won a fancy schmancy award! Check it:

RPGamer names Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple as RPG of 2011
Whoa. This was totally unexpected, mainly because Do's status as a proper RPG is so tenuous. Still, I'm delighted to share the honor with everyone who helped make the game possible.

Gamehead reviews Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple
This is probably the most thorough review of the game I've seen yet, with special attention paid to the long-term Pilgrimage mode of play. Generally, Do is played as a one-shot, but I'm glad to see some love for the long journey. That's where the coming-of-age vibe really comes out.

And here are some international reviews! Fanzine Rolero reviews the game in Spanish. Rede RPG is a Portuguese site that will soon translate some of the free games on my blog.

ISO Obscure Hero Art for Superhero Audition Placeholders

2012-01-23T10:30:00.001-05:00

So I really want to get some playtesting in for Superhero Audition, but it's clear that it needs some actual visuals on the cards to really get the feel of the game. The silhouettes just ain't enough, but I can't afford all that custom art just yet, so I need placeholder art.

The problem is that if the placeholder art is too recognizable (Batman, Wonder Woman, Superman, etc) that might distract from the game a bit. I need obscure superhero art that would be suitable placeholders for these characters:

Heroes
Chief Irritant
Grouper Man
Canine Chancellor
Superior Lad
Baby Hands McGee
Second Wind
Nightvision & Squint
Scotch Ape
Gold Mime
Chinchiller
Ultra-Lincoln
Vampire Matt
The Critic
Rooster Jones
C Everett Goop
Brother Nature
Bento Fox
Head Count

Heroines
The Honey Badger
Stiff Upper Whip
Professor Pharoah
General Lee Speaking
Pixie Kicks
The Pregnant Pause
Martial Paw
Lightning Round
The Whisper
Cram
Ghost of Tesla
Zoobot
Doctor Dimension
Grim & Tonic
Her-Cules
Luna Goth
Pearl Reckless
Pajamazon

I'd appreciate any help you can offer. Found something cool on DeviantArt? Maybe Project Rooftop? Maybe an old superhero trading card? Send me a link! Here's the ongoing Pinterest board.

Writer's Dice

2012-01-22T13:58:00.000-05:00

These are dice for writers, storytellers and gamers! In addition to the normal 1-6 pips, these dice are etched with six words packed with meaning: BUT, SO, AND, AS, OR, IF. Use them to plot your next novel! Roll them into your role-playing games! Gift them to your gaming buddies!

» Buy Writer's Dice from Smart Play Games [Coming in Late February 2012]
» Download the App for iPhone/iPad, Android, or Windows Phone
» Download the Writer's Dice Guide [PDF]

App Assets for Pebble Rebel

2012-01-21T17:36:00.000-05:00

Ryan Novak, intrepid app developer, has set about programming an iOS/Android version of Pebble Rebel. It's still very early, but I'm building up an asset library for the app now. We're a two-man team, and I'm not exactly super experienced with developing graphics for a digital UI, so this might not be as flashy as some apps you've got now. But the game itself is gonna be solid in Ryan's able programmery hands.

A LOST variant for Survive: Escape from Atlantis

2012-01-19T15:52:00.000-05:00

I played Survive: Escape from Atlantis for the first time the other day. It's a very fun game that feels much more modern than its actual age.

I got some flashbacks to the official licensed LOST board game, which also used hexagonal tiles, but was very, very disappointing. I got to thinking about the little thematic tweaks that would make Survive a pretty good licensed LOST board game. The most obvious one is as follows:

The Smoke Monster
The first shark is instead the Smoke Monster. The Smoke monster begins on an empty land space or an occupied land space if no empty land spaces are available. The Smoke Monster moves across land spaces. The Smoke Monster may not move across or land on a sea space. Otherwise, the Smoke Monster behaves as a shark.

In other words, a land shark. It gives players a little more reason to move people off the island into open sea, even if no boats are available.

Stop piracy. Destroy the boats.

2012-01-18T15:33:00.002-05:00

And because I'm a shameless capitalist, I made a t-shirt! This graphic is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic (CC BY-ND 2.0)

UPDATE: An alternate is now available, for you more verbose types.

Stop SOPA and PIPA

2012-01-18T10:18:00.007-05:00

Is the best way
to fight piracy
to destroy your own boats?

I design tabletop games. You might think I wouldn't have a dog in the fight over internet censorship since my games are probably as analog as you can get. In fact, you'd think the nature of game piracy would actually put me in favor of anti-piracy legislation. Quite the contrary!

Without the active and unhindered exchange of ideas in the game design community, I wouldn't have grown as a designer over the past ten years. Now that I'm a professional, I wouldn't have been able to reach out to dozens of artists, writers, designers, manufacturers, distributors, retailers and vendors as I develop those games for the commercial market.

In other words, without an open internet, my contributions to the economy would be closed. So, I join many others in standing against SOPA, PIPA, and any other legislation that would claim to deter piracy but curtail freedom.

Don't destroy our boats to fight piracy.

UPDATE: Now there are t-shirts, because I'm a shameless capitalist.

Swap Clops

2012-01-15T21:06:00.009-05:00

Clops are one-eyed creatures with lots of personality. You're going to move them around and collect groups with matching faces. Score points by collecting lots of Clops! Score bonus points by collecting Clops with the same likes!

Clops have three main characteristics: Shapes, Faces, and Likes. First, Clops come in three shapes, either circles, squares or triangles. Second, Clops have five faces: Angry (Red), Worried (White), Serious (Blue), Bleeeh! (Green) and Happy (Yellow). And lastly, Clops have five likes: Sunshine, Apples, the Moon, Stars, and Books.

» Development Status: Beta, Dormant
» Illustrations: Kari Fry

Stuff You Need
A supply of 90 Clop Tiles [These designs are very beta.]
2-4 Players

Set Up
Arrange a grid of 8x8 tiles, randomly drawn from the supply. Make sure they're all rotated in the same direction.

Click to enlarge

How to Play
Each player takes turns, starting with the youngest player.

1) Swap two Clops
On your turn, choose two Clops with the same shape and swap their places.

2) Collect Groups of Clops
When you create a contiguous group of four or more Clops with the same face, collect the tiles in those groups. Place them face down in front of you. It is possible to make two groups in the same turn. Tiles only count as a group vertically or horizontally, not diagonally. If a tile has a wall, that wall separates it from its neighbors on the other side, effectively preventing that Clop from joining a group on that side.

3) Add new Clops
Fill the empty spaces with new random Clops from the supply. Fill in each space in order, starting from left to right, top to bottom. If you end up creating new groups in doing so, you do not collect them.

End of the Game and Scoring
The game ends when there are no new Clops to place. Continue the round until all players have had a turn. Then, score points.

You score one point for every Clop you collected.

There is also a +5 point bonus if you collected the most of a single like. For example, if you collected the most sunshine, you get an extra 5 points. If you collected the most Apples, you also get an extra 5 points. And so on, an extra 5 points for each like, if you're the player who collected the most of that like.

The player with the most points wins!

[In the Lab] Dice Pool Action-Selection Mechanic for Dung & Dragons

2012-01-15T00:05:00.002-05:00

Sometimes I think of game mechanics in the abstract, without a theme in mind. Actually, it happens a lot. This time, I got to thinking about a role selection mechanic that was paired with a dice pool. For context, I'm referring to "action selection" games like Puerto Rico, Agricola or Citadels.

Say there are six actions, corresponding to each face of a six sided die. At the beginning of a round, a pool of dice are rolled. When you choose an action on your turn, that action might have a more potent effect if there are dice matching that result. So far, this turns out to be pretty much how Yspahan works.

Now I'm mulling a slight tweak, wherein that dice pool is not rolled at the beginning of the round. Rather, each player has one die with which they secretly choose their action. All players then reveal their selection at the same time. Again, those actions are augmented by the number of matching results. So, part of the game might be coercing other players to follow your lead. Heck, some actions might have diminishing returns if too many do so!

Turn order becomes an important consideration here. I think simply using a "first player" marker and clockwise rotation would be worthwhile. How do you get the marker? Perhaps that's one of the actions! So, if multiple players choose the same action, the player closest to the first marker goes first, perhaps earning a privilege for being first as in Puerto Rico.

As players earn new powers, one of them might be extra dice, so they might choose more than one action during their turn... or double, or triple the power of a single action.

Suspect this makes timing and planning a key part of gameplay, but it would take testing. Further, I am not sure what kind of theme this mechanic best fits.

Perhaps this would work in Dung & Dragons? If the theme is a co-op ranch where members place votes on which duties to perform around the ranch, I can see this fitting that theme well. Basically, you're a loosely collectivist commune. Coordinating your jobs, timing duties and planning ahead definitely fits. Hm!

[In the Lab] Swap Clops

2012-01-13T09:25:00.000-05:00

I've been playing a lot of tile-swapping puzzle games like Bejeweled, Tetris Attack and ShapeShift HD. As is often the case when I play digital games, my mind wanders to how I can make an analog conversion, with new mechanics unique to a tabletop game.

Then I started thinking about the success of Angry Birds. Now, there have been tons of missile-launching video games, but one of the big things Angry Birds had going for it was the personality in each bird and pig. (It's important to note the WORMS franchise was doing the "cute animals as avatars in a missile game" thing for a long time in the 90s.)

And then I stumbled on a weird title. Swap Clops. It was going to be a Pitch Tag for Fred, but I couldn't give it up. I wanted to make something with it. A game about swapping eyeballs among cyclopses? Nah. Maybe "Clop" is a new branded name for the "floating ball with a giant eye" monster archetype. (I heard somewhere WotC has a trademark on the term "Beholder.")

So, Swap Clops is my take on the tile-swapping puzzle genre, adding characters with personality to the mix. Above, you see Kari Fry's concept drawings for the clops. Look for more game notes to come!

Card Layout for Race to Adventure

2012-01-02T18:11:00.002-05:00

You've heard me yap on and on about card game design over the past year.

Well, Fred Hicks and Evil Hat finally called me on it and hired me to do the layout for their new card game Race to Adventure, the card game set in the Spirit of the Century universe. It's an action-selection game where you play Centurions traveling around the world via jetpack, biplane and zeppelin for a global scavenger hunt.

The images above are still in-progress, but give you a good sense of the direction we're heading. It's been a very fast process, starting from a week before Christmas up to the designs you see above. We're on-track to finish up the layout by the end of the month. How's that for a quick turnaround?

UPDATE: I neglected to give proper credit to Christian St. Pierre for the illustrations. He's the one responsible for the all the art you see above. I'm doing the backgrounds, frames, iconography, typography and branding. "I do all the visuals the artist doesn't" is what I like to say.

Take-Back-Toe Wins the Thousand-Year Game Design Challenge

2012-01-01T08:52:00.000-05:00

The winner of the Thousand-Year Game Design Challenge is Take-Back-Toe by James Ernest. It was a close, close decision. All the finalists had unique attributes that made them stand out from the rest. Whether it be sustainability, accessibility, strong community, and just straight elegance, each entry had strong showings in one category or another.

Still, we found the strongest overlapping approval for Take-Back-Toe, a well-rounded abstract with a touch of randomness. We found it intriguing that the game can be played with any forty objects and no board. That mix of specificity and generality is a clever avenue for the game to survive generations as either a commoners' game (with seeds in pits) or an elite past-time (with specially crafted components). It makes the game very portable, too. While waiting in line at an author signing, a friend wanted to learn how to play. A minute later, we ripped up a sheet of paper and played on the floor. I've played with stones (as seen above), cards, and poker chips. It's a hit every time. We replayed this game more often than any entry in the lineup.

Congratulations to James Ernest!

And a thousand thanks to everyone who entered the Challenge – for your entry and for your patience during the long judging period. We're still just a couple of gamers and this is only our best guess at what will survive into distant future. All of the finalists have a great shot at becoming a thousand-year game. I do hope you all continue designing new games into the new year and beyond.

As for the future of the Challenge itself? Well, I'm taking a personal break. I hope the Challenge returns in the future with a larger judging committee. With luck, the Challenge can live on well beyond my stewardship.

And who knows? A Challenge entrant may actually last to the next millennium!

Who I Worked with in 2011 (And who you should hire in 2012)

2011-12-31T10:31:00.004-05:00

It's been a challenging year for everyone. But you know what they say, a challenge is just an achievement yet to be overcome. Wait, is that a thing people say? Well, they should. In 2011, I've had the great pleasure of working with some of the brightest female talent around.

Tara Street was my chief and mentor for the past seven years.
Kathleen Shannon is my friend and professional inspiration.
(Together, Tara and Kathleen are Braid Creative.)
Liz Radtke's art pretty much defines Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple.
Lillian Cohen-Moore edited both Dos.
Tracy Hurley wrote the foreword for Do: The Book of Letters.
Kristin Rakochy generously licensed sketches to Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple.
Mori McLamb drew perfect portraits for Belle of the Ball.
Rin Aiello, whose art for Happy Birthday, Robot! got lots of praise this year.
Amy Houser illustrated most of Do: The Book of Letters.
J.R. Blackwell published her first game (and hired me to design the book).
Lyndsay Peters made custom dice bags for Do's Kickstarter.
Kari Fry draws t-shirts I buy. You should buy, too.
Mur Lafferty hired me in 2010, but she should be in all lists anyway. All lists!

Hire them in 2012. A lot.

Pop and Locke's Last Heist - Game Boards

2011-12-29T07:00:00.001-05:00

These are some thumbnail previews of the game boards in the rough draft of Pop and Locke's Last Heist. If you backed the Writer's Dice Kickstarter for four dice or more, you should have gotten a PDF link on Tuesday. Check your email!

Reddit asks: "Anyone played Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple?"

2011-12-28T07:41:00.000-05:00

Yesterday, a Redditor asked "Has anyone played Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple? Is it any good?" And boy, did we get some nice responses!

rkalajian "The game, along with the physical book itself, are amazing. The mechanics are simple enough to get up and running quickly, and help spur creativity with your stories."

e4mafia "I have played Do with my daughters, ages 8 and 6. They both love it and so do I. Its a great, fun way to spend time together, telling a fun, irreverent story. Its also a great chance to encourage them to write."

stupidgremlin "This is easily one of my top-ten favorite games, and number-one favorite for sharing with people new to gaming, and especially children. I have, since its release, purchased about 12 copies of the physical book and given them away to friends and family as gifts, and they have been well-received."

ios329 "It's amazing. It's a great family game, it's a great non-family game, it's just a great game."

Keep it up, folks! Share your play experience on Reddit.

[In the Lab] Parade-Themed Game

2011-12-27T07:00:00.001-05:00

So I had an idea for a parade game before I realized "Wait, this was Fred's Rafters idea." I was imagining a marching band in a parade, who must keep a very deliberate Left, Right, Left, Right rhythm. If they must turn corners, then they do LRRR or RLLL. That theme works well as rowers working in unison, too. This got me thinking about a push-your-luck dice game with card-based random parade routes. It's a little like Formula D and Death Angel.

The game comes with...

A pawn for each player

7d6 in three colors and custom faces. Three dice with [Left] [Left] [Left] [Right] [Right] [Right]; Two dice with [Left] [Left] [Right] [Right] [+] [+], one with [Double Left] [Double Right] [Left/Right] [+] [+] [o].

The whole group has a deck of cards. Each card depicts a segment of a parade route showing a combination of steps and the size of the audience at that segment. (I imagine a very soft, nintendo-friendly art style.)

MAPLE STREET
[IMAGE: WIDE STRAIGHT ROAD]

  [  ][  ]

[  ][  ][  ]

  [  ][  ]

[  ][  ][  ]

[Audience: 2]

ANGLE WAY
[IMAGE: ANGLED ROAD]

        [  ][  ][  ]

      [  ][  ][  ]

    [  ][  ][  ]

  [  ][  ][  ]

[  ][  ][  ]

[Audience: 5]

In short, each row of the gridded path is half-aligned with the row above and below it, such that you couldn't move directly vertically from one space to the one above it.

At the beginning of the game, create a parade route by drawing three random cards and linking their ends. Play begins with everyone's pawns on the first card, in a space at the bottom row.

On your turn, you first roll all your dice. You may lock one or more of your results and re-roll the rest up to two more times. For each LEFT you lock, you may move your pawn up one row, to the space on the left. For each RIGHT you lock, you may move your pawn up one row, to the space on the right. If you cannot move up, then you may instead move your pawn left or right horizontally, according to the die you locked.

If you roll a [o], that is a pothole and you must stop rolling immediately.

If you make it off the card, you gain one point for the size of the audience on that card plus one point for any +s you kept. If you somehow got through more than one card, you gain points for that audience, too.

If you don't make it off the card this turn, you don't score any points. On the bright side, you begin the next turn at the bottom row of the next card. Basically, you stumbled through this section of the parade and had to rush forward to keep up with the rest.

When all pawns have made it off a card, it is discarded. The next round begins with a new card added to the front of the path.

A "finish line" card is shuffled somewhere in the lower half of the deck. When all pawns cross the finish line, the points are tallied and the player with the most points wins.

The route cards can be customized in a variety of ways. More rows require more rolls, making them harder to pass. Some segments might have power-ups in far corners, tempting you to stray from the path just a little bit and risk falling behind. And, of course, some segments have bigger audiences than others, making them just plain more valuable.

Classroom Activity Guide for Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple

2011-12-26T07:00:00.001-05:00

For all teachers, parents, librarians who want to incorporate Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple into kids' learning: Teacher and education consultant Cassie Krause returns to offer tips and learning opportunities while guiding a whole class through the pilgrims' adventure. Best of all, it's totally free, licensed under Creative Commons from Smart Play Games.

» Download Classroom Activity Guide for Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple
» Also see the Classroom Activity Guide for Happy Birthday, Robot!

Happy Holidays from Megan and Daniel!

2011-12-25T11:49:00.000-05:00

Take care and have fun with your friends, family and fellow gamers! (Many thanks to Kari Fry for the karicature!)

[In the Lab] A Wintery Themed Kids' Game: Holy Smokes!

2011-12-24T08:10:00.000-05:00

These are some loose notes expanding the initial pitch I posted a while back. The premise is that little cherubs are flying around the sky collecting smoke puffs from chimneys. The higher up you catch a puff, the more valuable it is, but the less likely you are to catch it.

The game is set up as shown above. Little house cards are placed on the board along the bottom. Each house will produce one or two smoke puffs in their own color. Your cherubs start at the top of the board, in a space of your choice.

On your turn, you may move your cherub one space up, down, left or right. Then, roll 3d6. Choose one result as the wind. All three result determine which houses will produce puffs this turn.

Wind: Any smoke puffs on the board move up one space. The wind dice determine which direction the puffs will rise. For example, if a puff was on the left space of row 2 and you rolled a 6, then the puff would rise to the 6 space.

Houses: For each die result, add a new smoke puff of that corresponding house-color to row 1. If a house has two smoke columns, it produces two smoke puffs. For example, you rolled a 1, 3, and 6. So, the blue house makes one blue puff, the purple house makes two purple puffs, the tan house makes two tan puffs.

Capturing Puffs: If a puff floats into a space occupied by your cherub, you keep that puff and score points based on the row in which the puff was captured. Row 1 captures score 1 point, row 2 scores 2 points, and so on. (There will be scoring bonuses for capturing complete sets, maybe?) If multiple cherubs are on a space, the puff is not captured and remains on the board.

End of the Game: I think the way this works out there won't be enough cherubs to capture all the puffs. So, the endgame is triggered perhaps when a certain number of puffs leave the board?

Anyhoo, this feels more like a kids' game, but I still want to make something interesting enough for the parents.

Finalists of the Thousand-Year Game Design Challenge

2011-12-23T11:02:00.002-05:00

Almost a year ago, I announced this challenge in the hopes that new classic games would be created and promoted by designers young and old. You all exceeded expectations. We've spent the past four months reviewing, playing and judging over fifty entrants to the challenge. In the process, we've discovered a few paradoxes in our judging criteria.

The Elegance Paradox
Elegance is a nebulous concept to judge, but we generally kept a mental ratio in mind. [How long it took to learn and understand the basic rules] : [How much we'd want to replay and explore the game further]. For example, you can use "flipping a coin" as a game with a 1:1 ratio. One bit of complexity : One bit of replay value.

Hypothetically, if you had a game with 1:100 ratio, that is a game a easy to learn as flipping a coin with a hundred-times the replay value. If a game had a 100:1 ratio, it would be a hundred times more difficult to learn than flipping a coin but have very little replay value. These are extreme hypotheticals. Most games fall somewhere in the middle, like 5:20, or a game that has enough depth that you're eager to play it for four times the amount of time it took to learn.

Now, before you go thinking we just favored easy games in general, I must confess that we discovered our first paradox in judging this criterion. We felt game that is too easy it didn't have enough depth to reward generations of continuous play. Perhaps those little bits of ambiguity and complexity in Go were what kept it alive for over a thousand years?

It seemed a game needed just enough complexity to make learning the game a meaningful effort without a too steep a learning curve. In repeated play, that initial effort would be rewarded with future skills and confidence.

The Accessibility Paradox
We had a number of entries that required few specialized components, or none at all. We had a couple that just required a pair of hands for each player. Therein lies one of the paradoxes.

For a game to survive a thousand years, does it need *some* degree of fetishism? The care and craftsmanship in a well-made Goban can give the game of Go immense appeal. At the very least, the crafting of specialized objects for gameplay leaves behind artifacts for future archeologists to discover, like the Senat boards discovered in Egyptian tombs.

Then again, Rock-Paper-Scissors and Tag leave behind no artifacts, but are each at least a thousand years old. So yeah, this whole "accessibility and sustainability" thing were more difficult to consider than we originally expected.

The Community Paradox
We both weighed the presence of an active community in our selections, but I think I considered it a little more highly. Even in games where Megan and I didn't really find much replay value, I did take note of how active a community surrounded some of the entries.

Herein lies the third paradox: How much community does a game need now to ensure it'll survive a thousand years from now? Certainly there are thousand-year traditional folk games today only played by specific cultures and rarely by outsiders. For example, Buzkashi in Afghanistan and the highland games in Scotland.

But who knows how many games are mostly lost to history because they never found exposure outside a single culture, like Ullamaliztli of the Aztecs? Thankfully we have the internet to give more exposure to cool unusual games, like Sepak Takraw. And there are even a handful of people in Mexico who still play the aztec ball game, after all.

All this to say that we considered our short list with very deep thought about the specifics of this challenge. We're not just judging a game on its design, nor on its popularity, nor on its elegance, but a combination of all three. We kept asking ourselves, "Of all the entries, is this a game that has the best chance of being played in a thousand years?"

The Finalists
Without further ado, here are the finalists. We each had our favorites, and this list represents a combination of our shortlists.

Take-Back-Toe by James Ernest
Again and again, we returned to Take-Back-Toe as the benchmark for the other entrants. We kept asking each other "Is this more elegant than Take-Back-Toe?" "Is this more accessible than Take-Back-Toe?" James Ernest's long design experience is quite obvious in this game and made it a clear contender. My only reluctance was that James is already a professional in the game industry (and a nice guy to boot), but I hoped to encourage some new designers to enter the field.

Kickbones by Frywire, LLC
Dice are clearly at least a thousand years old, but the history of games exclusively played with dice are a little more murky. At the very least, we had a lot of fun kicking and healing while playing Kickbones. The doubles reference sheet was the only thing that gave us pause and led us to discover the elegance paradox described above. Was that reference sheet a handicap or a boon to the game's longevity? Is the game fun enough to memorize those nuances? Important questions in our judgment.

Turning Points by Joseph Kisenwether
While we loved playing this game, we did have some concerns that its fiddliness could be better suited to a computer. Speaking as humans, we liked the unpredictability and advance-planning it takes to play this game effectively. While the game can sometimes fall into the trap of having one or two "correct" moves, it was great learning the game with Megan. Also, we appreciated Joseph depicting an example game with actual Stone Age components.

Ketchup by Nick Bentley
One of the great surprises of running this contest is discovering the vibrant communities of abstract players and designers lurking in the far corners of the internet. Nick Bentley seems to be quite the celebrity among that community, too. We both really liked Ketchup, especially since it could be played with pencil and paper or with the new board tracker Nick posted later in the year. Unfortunately, we both gave most of the entries with hexagonal boards low rankings in the "Accessibility/Sustainability" category. Hexagonal game boards seem to be more of a modern curiosity, with few examples in extant thousand-year games. Aside from the grid, the remaining components were simple enough and the game was fun enough that Ketchup rose to the top position of all the hex game entries.

Zuniq by Marcos Donnantuoni
We had a handful of dots-and-lines games entered into the challenge. We did have some reservations about including any in the short list, though. The genre is so simple that it's hard to add any tweaks that make the game substantially different from its ancestors. Still, Marcos has done an admirable job of giving the old past-time much more interesting tactical choices. We also loved the portability. Megan and I played this at home, during evening walks and at restaurants. Indeed, we got more replays of Zuniq than any other entry. That being the case, we felt compelled to include it in our short list.

Neighbors by XiFeng
Megan looooved this game. She's a fan of rhythm games in general, while I always struggle with them. It seemed this game would be just fine without the rhythm element but we made sure to play each entry with the rules as written. As such, Megan played like a champ while I fumbled like a goof. Perhaps I had trouble learning the rhythm and hand gestures at the same time? If I practiced the gestures first, I might have had more success.

Numeria by Lloyd Krassner aka Warp Spawn Games
This is one of the few entries with specialized components that actually made me want to create or buy a set for myself. We both appreciated the potential for this game not just as an idle diversion, but as an actual tool for preserving knowledge of math across language and culture. That being said, there are some problems if players have different levels of knowledge of mathematical tropes. Alas, Megan didn't find the game as fascinating, but still give Numeria high praise.

I want to thank all the entrants for their creativity, effort and patience this year. We'll alert the winner in a day or two and make the public announcement on New Year's Day. Thanks so much!

What's Your Excuse?! Party Game

2011-12-22T16:27:00.000-05:00

This is a party game inspired by the classic game "I never..." or "Never have I ever..." The title comes from my ongoing Pitch Tag thread with Fred Hicks. While the original "I never..." is typically a drinking game, I'll leave it to you to add your own drinking rules. ;)

Stuff You Need
2 or more players. Best in large groups.
A pencil and paper to keep score.
A pencil and paper for each player.
A deck of What's Your Excuse?! cards. Prototypes shown below.

How to Play
The youngest player takes the first turn.

On your turn, draw a card. The card lists three "I never..." sentences such as "I never sky-dived from a zeppelin with a rabid wolverine because..." or "I never drove a monster truck in the circus because..." The easy sentence is usually shorter with more basic words. The medium sentence gets a little more specific. The hard sentence is longest, with more specific obscure terms.

Pick one sentence. Out loud to the rest of the group, make up an excuse for why you never did the thing mentioned. Do not actually say the highlighted words in the sentence. You can make up to three excuses.

For example, you're making an excuse for the sentence "I never sky-dived from a zeppelin with a rabid wolverine because..." You could say to the rest of the group "Because I'm afraid of heights." or "Because I never got my blimp pilot's license." or "Because I'm not good around violent mammals."

Now, the other players each write what they think the "I never..." statement is and reveal their guesses to the group all at once. The guesses must be in the form of an "I never..." sentence with three words or phrases highlighted.

For example, the other players guess: "I never hit a dog with a hot air balloon." "I never got rabies from a wolverine on a plane." and "I never sky-dived from a zeppelin with a mad dog."

Scoring
Each guesser scores points for guessing one, two or three of the highlighted words correctly, even if the exact order of their guess doesn't match your card.

You will also get points if anyone guesses one, two or three of the highlighted words correctly. Note: You only score points once for the same word even if multiple guessers get it correct.

Easy
Guessing one word correctly scores you and the guesser two points.
Guessing two words correctly scores you and the guesser three points.
Guessing three words correctly scores you and the guesser four points.

Med
Guessing one word correctly scores you and the guesser one points.
Guessing two words correctly scores you and the guesser three points.
Guessing three words correctly scores you and the guesser five points.

Hard
Guessing one word correctly scores you and the guesser zero points.
Guessing two words correctly scores you and the guesser four points.
Guessing three words correctly scores you and the guesser seven points.

End of the Game
When every player has had a turn, the game is over and the player with the most points wins.

Low-High Dice Game

2011-12-21T07:34:00.001-05:00

A dice game inspired by the stock market (and playing lots of Martian Dice). Roll a bunch of dice and choose which sets to keep. Choose your strategy wisely!

Stuff You Need
Two-to-Six PLAYERS
A PENCIL and PAPER to keep score
Thirteen standard six-sided DICE

How to Play

The shortest player takes the first turn. On your turn, first roll all thirteen dice. Several dice will have matching results. These are called SETS. (A single die result is a set, too.) You must choose a set to keep. For example, your first roll results are 111124445555. The sets are four 1s, one 2, three 4s, and four 5s.

After keeping a set of dice, lock them up in a row. This is called the GOOD TRACK. For example, you could keep the set of four 1s, one 2, three 4s, or four 5s. You decide to keep the four 1s and line them up in your good track.

After keeping a set, you may end your turn or re-roll the remaining unlocked dice. When you re-roll, immediately set aside any results that are equal to or lower than a set you’ve already kept. Lock these up in a separate row. This is called the BAD TRACK. For example, out of three previous rolls you kept four 1s and three 2s. You have six unlocked dice remaining and you decide to roll them again. The results are 112446. You must immediately set the aside the two 1s and one 2 to your bad track.

Out of the remaining dice, keep another set and add it to your good track. You may continue re-rolling as long as you have unlocked dice available or until you choose to end your turn. For example, after losing dice to the bad track, you have the following choices: 446. You choose to keep the two 4s and end your turn.

At the end of your turn, discard one good die for each bad die. If good dice remain, score one point per die. If bad dice remain, lose one point per die. For example, you have three dice in your bad track. That means you must discard the first three dice from your good track. Luckily, you have five dice remaining in your good track, so you get five points this turn.

End of the Turn
After your turn ends, clear your good and bad tracks. Hand all thirteen dice to the next player, who will begin a new turn.

End of the Game
The first player to earn 30 points wins.

Variant
For higher scores and more variance, you can score based on pips instead of dice. When canceling out dice at the end of your turn, do so in ascending order. The lowest results in your good track are canceled out first. Alternately, you can cancel out the highest results first for a lower scoring game.

Strategy
It's tempting to keep the lower results, but those will be quickly negated if you decide to continue rolling. Perhaps that's your strategy, to build up a defense as you pursue larger sets from future rolls. You could also play it safe by just keeping the largest set out of your first roll, but then you might get outpaced by a more aggressive player. Choose your path wisely!

Even More Pitch Tag with Fred and Daniel

2011-12-20T18:52:00.000-05:00

This is the third installment of the ongoing Pitch Tag game between Fred and me. Fred inadvertently takes me way out of my comfort zone, into the world of improv rap battles. It is a scary place. I kinda felt like I was phoning in for a while there. Thankfully I recovered with Two Fast, which eventually became Bombs, Away! There is also some strong potential in Scooter Rebooter and What's Your Excuse?! I'd also love to test out Monkey Gonna Getcha!

Fred:
Spice Trade
Euro boardgame with a Ticket to Ride/Puerto Rico hybrid feel. You're building up a successful mercantile business back at your home country, while building routes around the world for your ships to ply their trade. Occasional misfortune can befall you -- ships lost at sea, cargo that rots in transit, etc. Much of the "resource management" aspect of the game comes from using your limited number of actions each turn to split your attention between developing your business at home and keeping your routes and ships healthy abroad. (I feel like that was a bit of a boring answer, but that sort of game felt like the strongly correct fit for the title!)

Your next challenge:
Nomnomnominee

Daniel:
Nomnomnominee
Who will be the next President of the United States? A wide array of hopeful candidates make for a challenging field, but only one will win. Candidate Ham Sandwich? Candidate Bean Burrito? Candidate Quinoa Salad? Candidate Meatball? Pairs of players work as a team to push their candidate to the top of the straw polls, coach them for televised debates, and keep them fresh during the long campaign season. Play honorably to win the loyalty of your constituents or create a scandal for a rival candidate. The race is on! (Oh man, I love the absurdity of chaotic electoral campaign all swarming around inanimate dishes of food. Ha!)

Your next challenge:
Expedition: Mariana

Fred:
Expedition: Mariana
A near future sci fi larp scenario oriented on creating submarine drama in the deepest reaches of the sea. Intended to be played in the hallway of a convention center: long and narrow. You divide it off into sections with masking tape, each representing a room on the submersible vehicle being lowered into the Mariana Trench. A saboteur is on board, and at various points during the scenario, a section of the sub will collapse/flood/whatever, turning it into a deadly hazard zone for those inside, potentially separating allies from each other, or trapping you in the same room with the saboteur. (Plus... what's that sound coming from outside the hull?) Over time, the space gets more and more claustrophobic, as survivors crowd into the few remaining spaces: they're fixed dimensions, and at some point there's only going to be one room left.

Your next challenge:
My I

Daniel:
My I
The game that puts you in the thick of the illicit identity theft trade. You and the other hackers go on phishing expeditions, trying to score new personal data to trade in the black market. The data has a short life expectancy and quickly loses its value. Will you use the ID to score quick cash for yourself or risk putting it out on the open market? In the former, you risk tipping off the cops but at least you can get better gear for future phishing. In the latter, you lose time and money, but make yourself known to high-level crime syndicates, who offer some protection from authorities.

[Honestly, I wouldn't play this game. The theme makes me feel squicky, but that's just where the title took me.]

Your next challenge:
Beholder Bowler

Fred:
Beholder Bowler
A game played with your spare D&D minis. Take a bunch of Beholder miniatures and get rolling! (You can substitute other irregular spheres if you don't have the Beholder minis handy -- the lumpier, the better.) Lay out a battle mat on the floor, and place up to 40 different miniatures at various locations on the map (each player places one mini, round robin style, until they're all placed). At the beginning of your turn, select one monster on the board and move it according to that monster's D&D movement rules. Then step back to an agreed upon launch distance, and roll your Beholder, scoring points for any miniature you knock prone with your throw. You score one point for a human or smaller sized target; two points for a Large; three for a Huge; and so on. Special bonus points exist for particularly difficult to capsize miniatures (rat swarms, etc) if you should happen to pull it off. (Fictional history factoid: Originally a game played by the folks at the WotC office after hours, became an actual published game when it caught on throughout the company.)

Your next challenge:
Scooter Rebooter

Daniel:
Scooter Rebooter
A fast-moving racing card game for up to 5 players, set in a race between automated scooters. The game begins with scooter tokens lined up in a row at the starting line of the game board. Players each have a small handful of cards: Left, Right, Up, Down, and Reboot, with some customized powers on the cards for each player's unique scooter. These cards also have numbers on the corner.

The goal of the game is not just to win the race, but to score victory points in unique ways like "Collide with a scooter: 1VP." "Spend a whole turn in the lead." "Spend a whole turn trailing behind." Etc.

Players each take their turn simultaneously. On your turn, play one card from your hand. Cards are resolved according to their number, lowest to highest. UP: Move your scooter one length forward. LEFT: Move your scooter one width to the left. RIGHT: Move your scooter one width to the right. DOWN: Move your scooter one length backward. REBOOT: Remove all damage tokens. Special powers on cards include dealing damage like "LEFT: Spikes: On a collision, the target scooter moves DOWN." or "RIGHT: Shield: Ignore collisions from this side." or "DOWN: Lasers: All scooters ahead of you move LEFT or RIGHT, if there is an open space."

The game ends when the lead scooter gets three lengths ahead of the pack or when the trailing scooter gets three lengths behind the pack. The scooter with the most victory points wins!

Also, random events occur if three players play the same card. I think. Okay, time to move on.

Your next challenge:
Rainbow Princess Power

Fred:
Rainbow Princess Power
A LARP scenario with some "magical girl" anime flair. Queen Spectra must marry off her seven daughters if she's to retain her magic for the next thousand years. But her daughters have other ideas. You play the Queen, one of the princesses (Rouge, Bergamot, Goldie, Emerald, Azure, Indigeaux, Violet), or one of the suitors. But whose side are you on? Will you work to ensure all the marriages take place, or will you disrupt at least one of them in the hopes of claiming the Queen's power for your own? And what happens if nobody gets married?

Your next challenge:
Textually Transmitted Disease

Daniel:
Textually Transmitted Disease
A mashup of tag, pyramid schemes and Hit a Dude. To begin, text one or more contacts the following message:

TAG! You're it. Step 1: Forward this text. Step 2: In one hour, tell me how many people followed these instructions.

Add up all the numbers you get in the next hour. That is your score. Share it with the world and compete on a global leaderboard for the high score.

Your next challenge:
Library of Clouds

Fred:
Library of Clouds
Everyone plays zephyr librarians working at the Library of Clouds. A variety of patrons, ranging from storm gods to wind spirits to weather scientists, come through the door (are drawn from a deck) looking for a particular kind of cloud or combination of clouds. Each round the librarians attempt to address one or more patron inquiries, round robin, with clouds (cards) they have in their section (hand) of the library. Satisfied patrons go into each player's score deck as appropriate, and are scored somewhat Alhambra style, according to their type and number in each player's score pile (runs, 3-of-a-kind, etc), whenever a "time to score!" card is drawn from the deck of inquiries. (Kind of derivative; this game needs something that takes advantage of the cloud notion beyond simple color. I'm grappling with the notion of cloud cards having a kind of "freshness" to them, with them dissipating -- or turning into different clouds -- the longer they sit around unused.)

Your next challenge:
Food Court Reporter

Daniel:
Food Court Reporter
A casual game for snarky players in a mall food court. The players quietly observe their surroundings and pitch Onion-style headlines like "Local Man Surprised by Velocity of Ketchup Dispenser" or "Clerk Just Wants You to Pick Something Dammit." The other players then identify the subject of the headline. No points are scored and there are no winners, this is simply a fun activity to pass the time.

Your next challenge:
Rainy Day Robots

Fred:
Rainy Day Robots
A game played at home with the kids when the planned outdoors activity can't happen. Explore the recycling bin (wash those cans and cups), and construct "robots" out of the pieces-parts found there. Lightweight miniatures battles rules are used to govern the last-robot-standing brawl that happens after robots are constructed; household furniture is the terrain. As pieces get blasted off of opponents, the attacker must collect them into his/her own recycling receptacle. Winner determined, if necessary, both by who's left standing at the end and how full your bin is. Once the rain's over, take the recycling out to the curb.

Your next challenge:
Time-Traveler Radio

Daniel:
Time Traveler Radio
A weirdo nomic game about warnings from the future transmitted between two or more friends. Each day, a player sends a message to the other players from 24 hours in the future. He warns the others not to do something or else it will lead to utmost DOOM! When the other players survive the day, the next player sends a new warning, from the new divergent timeline where following the last warning led to utmost DOOM! She warns the other players not to do something else. The game continues for a full round. If all the players survive, they win!

Your next challenge:
Piso Mojado

Fred:
Piso Mojado
Spanish for "wet floor". This is basically Robo Rally with a twist. Instead of Robots, you have goofy people who don't read wet floor signs. You don't program them as you do in RR; you program their environment, which interacts with the goofs as they walk through the area on a predetermined course (Goofikins walks from west to east, and tries to line up with door 2 on the east wall). Each player has an alternative destination they're trying to guide the goofs to through a series of floor hazards and obstacles. If you get a goof to your destination, you score their points. If the goof gets to its destination, it leaves the board and nobody scores.

Your next challenge:
Two Fast

Daniel:
Two Fast
There is a bomb with a lit fuse between all the players. On your turn, pass or roll a d6. If you roll, score the result as points. On every player's turn, record each die result. The game ends when all players pass or if the bomb goes off. The bomb goes off if any player rolls 2nd 6, 3rd 5, 4th 3, 5th 2, or 6th 1. If the bomb goes off, the game ends and both players lose. If the game ends without the bomb going off, the player with most points wins.

Your next challenge:
Big Street Draw

Fred:
Big Street Draw
A game of city planning played with ordinary playing cards. Players take turn drawing cards from the deck, then using those cards to build a street map on the table in front of them (each person gets a map). Players start with empty hands, and can't draw if their hand contains five cards. Players may lay down any number of cards from their hand on each turn as they care to, so long as the placements are legal. The first card played is the player's starting intersection. You can branch off of each edge of an intersection -- cards always in the same orientation, so you have a clean grid -- by matching the intersection's suit or its value. (So if I had the Ace of Hearts as my intersection, I could branch off with hearts or aces.) Your streets can build out the same way, continuing in a straight line, connecting by suit or value. (So maybe I branch from my Ace of Hearts with a Nine of Hearts, followed by a Nine of Clubs.) After a street is two cards long past the intersection, the next card (third past the intersection or more) can be treated as a new intersection, with branches going off from there. If you end up with a full hand (five cards) and can't place any of those cards, your map is done, and you can't draw any further. Otherwise, the game ends when the last card is drawn from the deck and everyone has placed what they can from their hands. You get 3 points for each intersection, and one point for each road segment that isn't an intersection, plus an extra point for any connection made by value instead of suit (since there's only 4 of each value in a deck). You can use a double deck for larger player counts (in which case you get a 2 point bonus instead of one point if you connect an identical card in sequence).

Your next challenge:
The Big Scram

Daniel:
The Big Scram
A game to play with magnets of various strengths. Each player has three magnets. The game is played on a small circular mat with five concentric rings and small key nodes scattered around. The game is played in several rounds, with each player getting a chance to take the first turn.

On your turn, place a magnet on a ring. That completes your turn. Each turn will cause magnets to scatter and move around the board in barely predictable ways. Continue taking turns until no player has magnets left to place. That completes the round, now you all score points based on the location of each of your magnets.

The center circle is worth five points. Each subsequent concentric ring is worth one point less. If your magnet is off the board, that is also worth five points. If your magnet is on a large node, you score double that ring's normal value. If your magnet is on a small node, you score double that ring's normal value.

At the end of the round, all players pick up their magnets and start with a clean board. At the end of the game, the player with the most points wins.

Your next challenge:
The Wellfield Experiment

Daniel:
The Wellfield Experiment
A competitive version of minesweeper. The board is a map of the "Wellfield", a vast area that hides abundant desired liquid resources -- reservoirs of water and oil mainly, though some other rarer things might be found here too. Some of the reservoirs, though, contain eldritch horrors from beyond the scope of history. Seemingly identical to oil at first when inert, once they "wake up" they can start wreaking havoc. Players take turns exploring the board, sinking their wells in various locations, trying to suss out the reservoirs below. Sometimes they'll dud out, hitting only rock -- no points. Other times they'll find a reservoir, and score points based on the type of liquid found and the size of the reservoir (which gets revealed after the tap is made). Oil scores particularly well, but comes with the risk of slumbering horror -- a random chance that any currently tapped oil reservoir will turn out to be the flesh of an ancient horror, causing it to invert its point value and corrupt (halve) the value of any adjacent reservoirs. Game ends when the board is fully explored or when three horrors have awakened, whichever comes first.

Your next challenge:
What's Your Excuse?!

Daniel:
What's Your Excuse?!
It's the reverse of the drinking game "I never..." Each player draws a card with a statement written out like this: "I never 1) sky-dived 2) from a zeppelin 3) with a rabid wolverine." or "I never 1) drove 2) a monster truck 3) in the circus."

The youngest player takes the first turn and states an excuse for why they never did the thing that's on their card without actually stating what's on the card. Towards this end, the excuse always begins with the word "Because..." and can only describe one excuse. For example, "Because I'm afraid of heights." or "Because I never got my driver's license." But a excuses like "Because I'm afraid of heights and blimps and rabies." or "Because I never got my driver's license and I'm afraid of clowns." would be illegal because they list more than one excuse.

The other players each guess what the "I never..." statement is. The more elements they guess correctly, the more points that you both get, as noted on the card. So if they guess "You never sky-dived from a zeppelin with a mad dog." then you'd both get three points. One point for sky-diving, two points for the detail about the zepellin. They got the last detail incorrect, so you don't get those points.

When every player has had a turn, the game is over and the player with the most points wins.

Your next challenge:
Bookmarks

Fred:
Bookmarks
So, your team has, like, 10 minutes between meetings and there's nothing really productive that's going to happen in that timeframe. So you play Bookmarks. One guy is the caller, and he determines the topic. Everyone else scrambles through their bookmarks only (including stuff like delicious and other bookmarking services if that's their preference) to find a relevant bookmark that matches the topic. No search engines allowed -- this is a test of your personal preparedness with your own collection of bookmarks. Person who produces a judged-as-relevant bookmark first is the next caller. Keep score if you like, but not strictly necessary!

Your next challenge:
Amazing Grease

Daniel:
Amazing Grease
Oink! A game about corralling greased pigs into their pen, for 2-4 players. The game board is an 8x8 grid depicting a muddy pit and one pen at each corner for each player. Each player has three six-sided dice. The game also comes with about twenty little plastic pigs in three colors. To set up the game, drop the pigs onto the board from about two feet. If any pigs fall off the board, put them back onto the board along the edge as close to their original location as possible.

On your turn, you can roll one die and place it on any square of the board. If any pigs are on that square, they move away from your die in a straight orthogonal line as many spaces as your die result. If a running pig hits the edge of the board, they change direction and continue moving in an orthogonal line. If a pig hits one of your dice that's already on the board, that pig sticks to your die. Place that pig on your die.

Thereafter, on your turn, you can either roll a new die and place it on the board, re-roll an existing die that is already on the board, or move a die with a pig on it. A die with a pig on it can only move one space at a time in any direction. When that die reaches a pen, you can drop the pig and count it as one of your own.

The goal is to get as many pigs as you can into your pen. You get one point per pig and +3 points for each set of three different colors of pig. The game is over when there is only one pig left on the board.

Your next challenge:
The Summit

Fred:
The Summit
Short and sweet on this one: The Summit is a Fiasco playset. It's backstabbing corporate politics meets the deadly climb up K2. Ostensibly a team-building exercise. A summit at the summit! But not everyone on this mandatory climb is a dedicated climber (and the self-professed dedicated climbers have a few screws loose). Then there's the bitterness and rivalry over how the Stevens deal went down last month...

Your next challenge:
Monkey Gonna Getcha!

Daniel:
Monkey Gonna Getcha!
A playground game for two teams and an unlimited number of players. One team are the monkeys, the other team are bananamongers. The field has two endzones, like a football field. Monkeys should have a backpack or satchel. You also need lots of bananas, but nerfballs or other random items are fine, too. The bananamongers want to deliver their bananas from one endzone to the other. The only thing in their way is all the monkeys.

When the game begins, bananamongers may start at either endzone and the monkeys start in a group at the center of the field.

At the whistle, bananamongers may move around the field freely, under the following restrictions: Bananamongers may carry as many bananas as they can. Once both feet are outside the endzone, bananamongers may not walk, run or jump while carrying bananas. Bananamongers may throw their bananas at fellow bananamongers, though. Thus, bananamongers can form special formations or relay lines to deliver their bananas across the field.

Meanwhile, the monkeys will try steal and intercept the bananas. Monkeys may run around freely, as long as they keep their arms raised above their shoulders at all times, like a crazy monkey. Monkeys can only lower their arms if they stand still. Monkeys can intercept bananas mid-air or gather them from the ground. Monkeys keep their bananas in their satchels and cannot give them to any other monkeys.

At the final whistle, the bananamongers score one point for every banana they delivered. The monkeys only score points from the individual monkey who gathered the most bananas; one point per banana.

Your next challenge:
Crash the Kobayashi

Fred:
Crash the Kobayashi
An anime-inflected, maybe jeepform game, where the players are part of an elite suicide squad that has infiltrated the enemy's starship (the Kobayashi) and are doing the only thing possible to destroy it: crash it, destroying the ship and everyone on board. As game play progresses, each character experiences at least one flashback that delves into their reasons for accepting the mission. Flashbacks are punctuated by "real time" present-moment scenes where the characters die, share a moment of gallows humor, try to save the life of someone other than themselves, plot a course that avoids endangering major population centers, etc. The scenario ends right at the moment of the crash.

Your next challenge:
Dance Commander VS Lyrical Gangster

Daniel:
Dance Commander VS Lyrical Gangster
A deeply embarrassing and awkward game for anyone but the most extroverted player. Okay, here we go. It's basically your classic improv game for two performers. The audience tosses out a handful of subjects. The Lyrical Gangster raps about each subject as best they can. The Dance Commander interprets the rap into modern dance. At the sound of the buzzer, the players switch roles. Continue until the players die of embarrassment. (Can you tell I find improv a little painful to watch?)

Your next challenge:
All the Tea in China

Fred:
All the Tea in China
Abstract-ish board game. Players take on the roles of great dragons, each associated with a particular type of tea (White, Green, Black to start; may also include Oolong), in distantly historical times before the introduction of tea. Ostensibly the board is a map of China, and the dragons are teaching the people of the benefits of tea. This won't always teach the people in each region to go for *their* color of tea (which scores most points), but it's a benefit to get them making any color of tea a part of their life (scores fewer points). Territories can contain more than one color, but only gain one color per turn. Places where your color has taken hold provide you a bonus to your efforts for spreading into neighboring territory. A final scoring bonus is tallied when all the territories on the map have at least one color of tea in them (signifying endgame), based on a color count (which does go only to the player with that colored dragon).

Your next challenge:
New Sex

Daniel:
New Sex
A wordplay game to idly pass the time. Each player takes turns creating a euphemistic phrase for a sexual maneuver, each one more absurd than the last. Common themes include "reverse," "French," "cowboy," and "swirl." Bonus points if you can explain the etymology or technicalities of the maneuver.

Your next challenge:
Crime Brûlée

Fred:
Crime Brûlée
Master Chefs... Master Villains! Crime Brûlée is the card game of gourmet misdeeds. Players are master chefs (TV stars, big names in restaurants, etc) who know the only way to get ahead is to crush the competition through illicit misdeeds. Drawing from the recipe deck, they get a card that gives a recipe for an outlandish, food-related criminal caper, which they can pull off only if they have the right cards in their hands. Once any of the players completes five recipes, the game ends, and everyone is scored for the recipes they completed (and docked for the ones they didn't).

Your next challenge:
What Are You, Some Kind Of Wizard?

Daniel:
What Are You, Some Kind Of Wizard?
A fantasy variant of Werewolf/Mafia/Resistance for 5-10 players. The play is basically like standard Resistance (short-form, non-elimination Mafia). Students of magic compete against each other in various school events, but some students are secretly agents of evil magic. At the beginning of the game, the players get a unique pair of voting cards with "spell" effects. When you vote, the spell effect is also triggered, usually revealing some small amount of information about player roles or advancing a particular victory condition. After each round, the unique cards are replaced with standard voting cards, then the voting cards are returned to each player. This means players can only use a spell once, but won't necessarily risk revealing their role.

Your next challenge:
Tick-Tock

Fred:
Tick Tock
Competitive hide-and-go-seek, like Marco Polo only where everyone's hiding AND seeking. Each side is divided into Tickers and Tockers. The tockers run somewhere and hide, as do the tickers, then everyone closes their eyes. The tickers shout "tick" and, after a moment, the tockers shout "tock". Then play begins. The tickers open their eyes and take five quick steps (about a second). Then they shout "tick" and close their eyes. When they do this, the tockers can try to make a grab, eyes still shut, to see if they can nab a ticker. If they do, the ticker is 'out'. Then the tockers take their turn, following the same procedure, shouting "tock", with the tickers making a grab. Play ends when all the tickers or tockers are 'out'.

Your next challenge:
Cat Skills

Daniel:
Cat Skills
You've heard the expression "herding cats." Well, those cat-herders were the real deal in the old west. In this game, you play the tough hombres on horseback wrangling herds of tabbies, gingers, and calicos across the great plains to the Catskill Mountains. It'll take seven weeks to reach your destination. You and the other players will co-operate to keep the herd focused and moving. Offer treats, dangle toys and pick up any strays on your way to the mountains. Loose ideas for mechanics: Roll a bunch of dice on a table, each die represents one cat. Group the dice into sets of matching results. The highest set makes the most progress, the lower sets move at a slower pace. The trick is getting the whole herd to stay relatively intact, slowing down the fast cats and speeding up the slow cats. If any dice fall off the table, those are strays. You can bring them back into the herd, but you'll lose time doing so. If you don't bring them back on the same turn they strayed, they're lost from the herd.

Your next challenge:
Tuki... Taku... Tay!

A Christmas Letter to the Pilgrims of the Flying Temple

2011-12-20T07:00:00.001-05:00

You remember Lyndsay Peters of Dragon Chow Dice Bags, right? She's hosting a session of Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple for her family, so she wanted to write a letter just for the holiday season. Inspired by the Island of Misfit Toys, she penned this cute mission for the pilgrims:

Dear Pilgrims of the Flying Temple:

We simply cannot stand one more year of heartbreak. Every year we watch the eight reindeer fly overhead, left here in the snow. Every year we have to tell toys why they're here, and not on the sleigh! It's all because we have square wheels or fly in water. If we have to go one more year without seeing a happy child on Christmas Morning, we might give up on the magic of Christmas… FOREVER!

Please, Pilgrims! Get us on Santa's Sleigh!

- The Island of Misfit Toys

Goal Words
Reindeer
Reindeer
Santa
Santa
Santa
Presents
Presents
Island
"Happy Child"
"Christmas Morning"

Thanks for a great letter, Lyndsay!

The Direct-to-Fan Window in Game Design and Publication

2011-12-18T09:52:00.004-05:00

Comedian Louis CK recently released a statement on his latest venture: 1) Pay a video crew out of pocket to record two shows at the Beacon Theater. 2) Direct and edit the thing himself. 3) Put the thing up for a $5 download with no restrictions.

The result? Over a 100,000 downloads on the first day, more than paying off any expenses incurred during production. By day 4, he's profited over $200,000 "(after taxes $75.58)" Dan Frommer puts that number into some perspective: He’s converted about 20% of Twitter followers, 10% of the “Louie” Season 2 premiere audience, and it’s modest compared to some forms of media. Even Louie CK admits he could've made more from a big media company if he let them do all the work, but that really doesn't compare apples to apples.

As Peter Kafka aptly explains, because Louis CK now owns this whole damn thing, he can use it however he wants. It just so happens, he's selling it direct to fans at a price and value that is in that prime sweet spot for web commerce: Too cheap to bother pirating, low overhead in production and distribution, and available directly from the creator. Louis CK has a window in which to keep on keepin' on, until he decides it's the right time to sell some rights to HBO or a basic cable outlet.

Funny... Louis CK isn't the first to experience the Louis CK window. Nine Inch Nails, Radiohead, and Kevin Smith have all started tapping their devoted fanbase following similar models. Let's use Kevin Smith as a prime example.

Kevin Smith financed his latest film Red State on a super-tight budget of favors and hope. Once complete, he had his own "Louis CK Window" for the movie. If he used a big studio or distributor, he'd end up having to pay millions to mass-market a movie that cost a fraction of that. "No way," said Smith. Or at least, I assume he did at some point.

Instead, he took the film on the road to live screenings around the US and Canada, pairing the screenings with a bawdy Q&As with himself and a rotating cast of friends... and the actual cast of the movie. After a few months on tour, then he decided to release on blu-ray, DVD, yada yada yada.

Within one or two screenings, Smith paid off all the debts incurred from the movie's production – Much like Louis CK covered his expenses of production within 12 hours. Sure, the numbers might not compare to major distribution channels, but if ventures like these are going to make a difference, we have to compare them to actual costs, not to other media. That brings us to games.

In my two published games, I've had the great fortune to experience a handful of "Louis CK Windows" and each case they went in two different paths.

In Happy Birthday, Robot!, I released a free Google Document on the Story-Games forum, solicited feedback and ran some tests at Dreamation to feel out the potential market. That was my first window. I had a Happily, the response was great and I launched my first Kickstarter campaign raising $3k. With the help of my friends at Evil Hat matching that amount and handling production, we were able to turn a profit in the first year. Later that year, I negotiated a licensing agreement to Sandstorm. They'll publish and package the game with a pretty nice advance-on-royalties and the option for Evil Hat to sell off remaining stock from the first run. A win-win-win as far as I'm concerned.

In Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple, I once again partnered with Evil Hat. We kept costs low by doing the layout, writing and editing in-house. We got fantastic art from new artists, spread out over the previous year-and-a-half. I blogged and tweeted about the game incessantly. With all that, we had such a successful Kickstarter campaign that we actually launched at-profit! Thereafter, any PDF or book sold would be pure gravy for both me and Evil Hat. It's unlikely a major publisher will come along with a big check to license Do, but that option is still available in the long-term.

Wow, this is getting to be a long post. I'll just wrap this up by encouraging creators everywhere in all fields to reconsider your options. You can build a strong body of work in public to get an audience who will pay you to do what you do, without necessarily going to a big label. You still can, for sure, but we live in a world where you don't have to anymore. What's more there are partners out there, like Evil Hat, who are eager to participate in the creator-owned, fan-focused model with you.

"Achooooo!" Actual Play of Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple

2011-12-18T07:42:00.000-05:00

It's the holiday season, a time when families get together around the hearth to feast, laugh, and save the world from giant whales. Yup, it's time for another batch of actual play of Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple.

The first AP report comes from new blogger Lizz Schulz at Dice & Daydreams: Ramblings of a Girl Gamer. She's one of the few I've heard of who played A Matter of Roses, so I was very curious to see how it turned out. Well, it did not turn out well for the Queen's eyeballs, that's for sure.

Here's more AP from Harlequin at the Story-Games forum. He also took the liberty of writing up the story in a more narrative format, though all the puking and ear canal travel remains intact. Pardon me while I get some antacid.

Another story comes from Shane Mclean and is all formatted into a fancy PDF! Alas, this poor whale doesn't get such a dignified treatment. After all, when Pilgrims Vibrant Hound, Frank Weasel, and Hairy Bubble come to your rescue, it's fair to expect some allergic reaction.

And finally, a few tweets from @strasa with pictures of his setup and the resulting story. He even wrote his own unique letter just for the occasion!

Want to join in on the mayhem? Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple is 10% off for a limited time. I want to hear more about your actual play! Write it up and I'll round up your report on the blog in a future post.

Previously:
» "Yeah, that happened."
» Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple at Gamekastle.
» New reviews and actual play for Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple

Bombs, Away! Dice Game

2011-12-12T22:02:00.006-05:00

This is a quick "hot potato" game for 1-6 players. There is a bomb with a lit fuse on the table. The longer you hold it, the more points you get. Just don't hold it too long or kablooey!

Stuff You Need
One six-sided die
A pencil
A sheet of paper with the score tracker drawn as shown below.

6 [ ]
5 [ ] [ ]
4 [ ] [ ] [ ]
3 [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ]
2 [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ]
1 [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ]

How to Play
The youngest player takes the first turn. On your turn, take the die. This is the BOMB. You may do one of two things with it.

1) Pass it: Write your initials in the lowest open space on the score tracker. Give the bomb to the player on your left.

2) Roll it: Roll the die. If the result is a 1, write your initials in an empty 1 space on the score tracker; if the result is a 2, write your initials in an empty 2 space; and so on. You cannot write your initials in a filled space.

The bomb explodes if you were unable to fill in an empty spot on the score tracker. In other words, the bomb explodes if you roll a second 6, third 5, fourth 4, fifth 3, sixth 2 or seventh 1.

If the bomb hasn't exploded, your turn is over and you're still safe. Give the die to the player on your left. That player begins a new turn.

End of the Round and Scoring
The round ends if all players pass or if the bomb explodes.

You score points based on the spaces in which you wrote your initials. You score 1 point for a 1 space, 2 points for a 2 space, and so on.

If the bomb exploded in your hand, you lose a number of points equal to that last die roll. For example, if you rolled a second 6, then you would lose six points. (In a game with four or more players, then your neighbors also lose that many points as well.)

The next round begins with a fresh, completely empty score tracker. A new player takes the first turn.

End of the Game and Winning
The game ends when each player has a chance to be first player. When the game is over, add up all your points across the rounds.

The player with the most points at the end of the game wins. (In the highly unlikely case of a player entering the final round with a 56 point lead, that player automatically wins because it would be impossible to overcome that deficit.)

Options
Solitaire: If you play the solitaire game, you do not gain any points for passing.

Multi-Bomb: There are two or more bombs floating around the table. Any players with bombs roll one at a time, in order of age, from youngest to oldest. You all still use the same score tracker.

Big Bomb: Play with a larger die, like an eight-sider, ten-sider, or twelve-sider. Revise the score tracker so the highest possible result only has one space, then add one space for each subsequent result.

Variant Tracker: Revise the number of spaces for each result, increasing or decreasing as you like. Perhaps you want more 6s and fewer 1s?

Notes
This game was a result of a Pitch Tag session with Fred Hicks.

Legolas vs. Gimli Card Game [In the Lab]

2011-12-09T08:50:00.000-05:00

During the Pitch Tag between Fed Hicks and I, i tossed out this idea for a trick-taking card game with a dungeon/tough man/Legolas vs. Gimli theme. The mehanics are mostly inspired by Reiner Knizia's Too Many Cooks. Actually, that's the problem. It just feels like Too Many Cooks with a bunch of other mechanics bolted on. Here are the loose notes, if you'd like to help out with streamlining a bit. Sorry for the wonky formatting, this was typed on the road.

Legolas vs. Gimli
You are all skilled adventurers out to prove your mettle to each other. You'll dive into a subterranean dungeon and mow down hordes of monsters of all kinds. Defeat the best hordes and earn the most points.

SETUP
Give each player a character card. Give each player a set of five mission cards (one each of Stealth, Brute, Magic, Psychic, Escapist, Gambler and Untouchable)

Shuffle the monster cards and 13 to each player (for 4 or 5 players, deal the entire deck; it will not come out even). The rest are set aside for that round. Keep your card faces hidden from the other players.

DECLARE A MISSION
After the cards are dealt for each round, each player examines their cards and selects one mission card for that round. Mission cards should be revealed and declared simultaneously. Mission cards can only be used once per game, so they are discarded after each round.

START A HORDE
The first player draws a card from his hand and places it face down on the table. This is the first GATE of the round. Monster cards get stacked onto GATEs during the game. Those stacks are called HORDEs.

TURNS
Step 1: Add to a Horde
On your turn, take one monster card from your hand. Place it face down on the table atop a horde, following these restrictions.

A. You must follow suit of the horde.

B. If you cannot follow suit, you must play a card of equal or higher value than the top card in the horde.

C. If you cannot play such a card, then draw your highest value card from your hand and play it as a new Gate.

Announce the value and suit aloud to the other players. Gate cards are always worth zero. The running total of values of all cards in a horde is announced aloud whenever a card is played in that horde.

Step 2: Challenge or Pass
You may now choose to challenge a horde or end your turn. Your character card indicates a horde of a certain size that you MUST challenge. If there is a horde above your threshold, you MUST challenge that horde.

A. When you challenge a horde, take the whole stack except for the gate card and reveal the cards' faces. You will defeat each monster one at a time, starting from the bottom card.

B. Each monster deals damage to you equal to its rank. Announce the accumulating damage for each monster. Once the accumulated damage exceeds your defense, return that monster and any remaining monsters to their gate.

C. Line up your defeated monsters in a row in front of you. If you defeated the entire horde, then take the gate card as well, but keep it face down. That gate is now closed.

END OF THE ROUND
The round ends when...

A. The round ends when it is a player’s turn to play a card, but they have no cards remaining.
B. If there are more gates than players.

At that point, all hordes are discarded, as are any cards remaining in players’ hands.

SCORING
After each round, look at the remaining monsters you have defeated. You score VP for each monster as indicated by your class and your mission.

Stealth, Brute, Magic, Psychic:
+1 vp for each monster that matches the suit
-1 star for each trap defeated

Gambler:
+1 vp for each coin
-1 for each card without a coin

Escapist:
+1 vp for each trap taken
-1 vp for each boss defeated

Untouchable:
+5 stars automatically
-1 star for each monster defeated

It is possible to lose more VP than you gain in one round.

LEVELING
When you gain 5 vp, your character advances to level 2, unlocking a new ability. At 10 Vp, your character advances to level 3, unlocking another new ability. It is possible to lose enough vp to go back down to a previous level.

SHOPPING
After scoring, players may shop for new gear. Look at the monster cards you have defeated so far. Each monster has one or more coin symbols. The player with the fewest coins goes shopping first, followed by the player with the next most coins, and so on. On your turn, you may spend as many coins as you like. For each coin spent, you may draw one treasure card, choose one to keep and reshuffle the remaining treasure cards back not the treasure deck. Discard the spent cards.

END OF THE GAME
The game is played in five rounds. After five rounds, the player with the most VP wins.

CHARACTER CARDS
Fighter
Must challenge a horde of 12 or more.
Gains 1 vp for defeating earth monsters.
Defense 1
Level 2: 5 VP: Defense 5
Level 3: 10 VP: Defense 10

Wizard
Must challenge a horde of 10 more.
Gains 1 vp for defeating fire monsters.
Defense 2
Level 2: 5 VP: Choose an element at the start of a round. You may choose to defeat or ignore monsters of that element this round. If ignored, those monsters remain in the horde and are not defeated.
Level 3: 10 VP: Choose 2 elements at the start of a round. You may choose to defeat or ignore monsters of those elements this round. If ignored, those monsters remain in the horde and are not defeated.

Rogue
Must challenge a horde of 8 or more.
Gains 1 vp for defeating air monsters.
Defense 3
Level 2: 5 VP: Double all coin values.
Level 3: 10 VP: Triple all coin values.

Psychic
Must challenge a horde of 6 or more.
Gains 1 vp for defeating water monsters.
Defense 4
Level 2: 5VP On your turn, you can play any card on any horde.
Level 3: 10VP On your turn, you can play any three cards on any horde.

MONSTER CARDS
Stealth - physical, subtle monsters
1 earth trap, .5 coin
1 wind, 1 coin
1 water trap
1 fire, 1 coin
1 earth trap
2 wind, 1 coin
2 water, 2 coins
2 fire, 2 coins
2 earth, 3 coins
3 wind, boss, +1 VP if defeated
3 water, boss, +2 VP if defeated
3 fire, boss, +3 VP if defeated

Brute - physical, forceful monsters
1 wind trap
1 water, 1 coin
1 fire trap
1 earth, 1 coin
1 wind trap
2 water, 1 coin
2 fire, 2 coins
2 earth, 2 coins
2 wind, 3 coins
3 water, boss, +1 VP if defeated
3 fire, boss, +2 VP if defeated
3 earth, boss, +3 VP if defeated

Magic - mental, forceful monsters
1 water trap
1 fire, 1 coin
1 earth trap
1 wind, 1 coin
1 water trap
2 fire, 1 coin
2 earth, 2 coins
2 wind, 2 coins
2 water, 3 coins
3 fire, boss, +1 VP if defeated
3 earth, boss, +2 VP if defeated
3 wind, boss, +3 VP if defeated

Psychic - mental, subtle monsters
1 fire trap
1 earth, 1 coin
1 wind trap
1 water, 1 coin
1 fire trap
2 earth, 1 coin
2 wind, 2 coins
2 water, 2 coins
2 fire, 3 coins
3 earth, boss, +1 VP if defeated
3 wind, boss, +2 VP if defeated
3 water, boss, +3 VP if defeated

TREASURE CARDS
Leather armor: Defense +1
Chain mail armor: Defense +2
hard plate armor: Defense +3
Minion: Discard to reduce accumulated damage by 5.
Net: When another player challenges a horde, you may steal one of his defeated monsters.
Ring of Legend: gain a vp any time a boss is defeated.
Lure: you may play two cards on your turn, in the same horde or on separate hordes.
Earth Barrier: Your neighbors take +1 damage from earth monsters.
Wind Barrier: Your neighbors take +1 damage from wind monsters.
Water Barrier: Your neighbors take +1 damage from water monsters.
Fire Barrier: Your neighbors take +1 damage from fire monsters.
Subtle Blade: Treasure value of each monster raises by one.
Silver Chains: Defeat psychic monsters without taking damage from them.
Jewels of Osiris: Defeat magic monsters without taking damage from them.
Dragon Hide: Defeat brute monsters without taking damage from them.
Farsight Helm: Defeat stealth monsters without taking damage from them.

Pop and Locke's Last Heist - Cover Design

2011-12-06T06:00:00.001-05:00

This is the promotional art and kind of the cover design for Pop and Locke's Last Heist. You can see how the masthead has been fleshed out with all my usual retail foofarah. The background is a collage of various stock elements, too. But the real hero is James Stowe's illustrations of Pop and Locke. I added some cel-style shadows, gradients and teal backlights to really make them feel like part of the scene. Hope I did his illustrations justice!

Pop and Locke's Last Heist - Character Designs by James Stowe

2011-12-05T06:00:00.002-05:00

These are the initial sketches for Pop and Locke's character designs by James Stowe (of D&D for Dads fame). He offered up many different heads and bodies for each character and was very patient with my photoshoppery fiddling.

These are James' final designs in color. Funny thing, I initially directed James to draw Locke with a fork, but it looked a bit more menacing than I expected. That's why she now carries a spoon. I don't know what the spoon does, though. Meanwhile, Pop has a pencil whose point lights up like a flashlight.

To see how this all started, check out my post on the Pop and Locke Artist Style Guide. That outlines the visual references I first gave to James at the beginning of the art process.

Tips for Customizing Hand-Drawn Fonts in a Logo, Title or Masthead

2011-12-03T17:30:00.001-05:00

I wanted to use a nice cartoony font for the masthead of Pop and Locke's Last Heist. Blambot is always a great source for very well-done fonts in a variety of comic book styles. Nate Piekos has been in the business a long time and it's hard to beat the price for his fonts.

I used 12 Ton Goldfish. It looks great, but there is a common problem with hand-drawn fonts. When you have repeating letters, like the Ps and Os, you can tell they're identical to each other. It's an immediate tip-off that you just used a font without any additional revising to make it work for your purposes.

So, I customized the font in a few ways and I thought I'd share these tips. Follow these in order as you customize a font for your logo, title or masthead. But first, before you even try doing any of this I have one tip. Write the letters yourself! Grab a marker, try a few different tips, write them big, small, on paper, cardboard, etc. See if you can't draw the letters and get them just as you want before downloading a font. If you don't want to go through the trouble, then let's get to the fonts.

You're voiding the warranty.
Before you go tweaking any fonts on your own, a note of caution about the classics – Your Helveticas, Garamonds, and so on. Those are more than just fonts, they're freaking typefaces, drawn to exacting specifications for very particular purposes by master typographers. Adjust those at your own risk. You're better off adjusting fonts that are already hand-drawn. Their organic personalities will much better tolerate your tweaks.

Move the letters around.
Before you try editing the actual letterforms, try moving each one independently of the others. Move them closer or farther from each other. Move them up and down. Change the rhythm and beat and flow of the letterforms to your taste. In my case, I straightened out the letters in my masthead a bit so they followed the same baseline.

Adjust the thicks and thins.
Look at the vertical strokes of each letterform and try widening them or narrowing them. When you do so, make sure the strokes still maintain a relatively consistent width from end-to-end. If the width does change, make sure it does so gradually, without the harsh perfect angles indicative of a computer font. In my case, I made the vertical strokes of the Ps wider than the rest of the letterform. I also moved the counterspace of the Os a little to the top-right so the lower-left stroke is a little thicker.

Rotate, resize, but keep proportions in mind.
If you still want to to customize the font, try rotating an individual letter a few degrees clockwise or counterclockwise. I definitely recommend this for repeating letters in hand-drawn fonts where slight deviations make the whole graphic feel much more authentic. In my case, I rotated the Os and Ps. I also resized the "AND" so it wouldn't be as prominent as the two names. I made "AND" shorter, but kept the horizontal strokes didn't get thinner in the process.

Finally, change the actual shapes.
Once you've done all these edits, you may still want to make some edits to get things juuuuust right. In my case, I noticed these really sharp angles in the A and N in "AND" that just did not fit the flat terminals in the rest of the letterforms. So I cut off those angles to make them flat.

And that's it! In the image at the top of this post, you can see how the original plain font looks compared to the customized version. Doing these little tweaks helps make your logos and titles stand apart from the pack. Just remember, these are tweaks. If you go around stretching fonts willy-nilly, don't tell anyone you were following my advice. ;)

Return of Fred and Daniel's Pitch Tag

2011-12-01T06:00:00.003-05:00

This latest installment of the ongoing Pitch Tag game between Fred Hicks and myself. This time we get psychic spies, sexy male models, ecologically concerned cherubs and a peek inside the thrilling world of competitive canning. As you read through this lengthy list, is there a concept here or in the previous installment that you'd actually want to play?

Fred:
In Her Majesty's Psychic Service
A tight, focused-scenario, plays in a couple hours story-game a la Fiasco. Her Majesty has only one psychic spy in her service. Triple Naught. It's 000's job to ferret out the thought crime, the conspiratorial intent, the absence of respect, and exert a modicum of corrective pressure to the situation. But to do this, 000 has to get close to the problem. Go deep. Go dark. Triple Naught is so secret, even 000 doesn't know who he -- or she -- is. And there we have our scenario: a conspiracy, infiltrated by 000. And our question: who's the crown's inside man? It won't come out until the endgame, when every thought is compromised, when the knives are out...

Your next challenge:
Good Gravy

Daniel:
Good Gravy
The tiny Good Gravy diner is in trouble. If the wait staff, bussers, dishwashers and cooks coordinate to bang out each order in a timely manner, they can earn enough money to keep the diner afloat another day. Earn enough within seven days and they can save the diner!

Your next challenge:
Warriors, Roll Out!

Fred:
Warriors, Roll Out!
Card game. In the dark post-apocalyptic future, the ones who rule the road, rule everything! But getting your warriors out on the asphalt ain't so easy when resources are scarce. Each round, you'll work to build up your base, gather resources, and "launch" warriors once you meet their fuel, food, and gear requirements. Each time a warrior launches, a game effect occurs, some of which might damage the other guy's base. First player to launch X warriors becomes the Road Boss and wins the game! (Other victory conditions might exist as well.)

Your next challenge:
That Ain't So Bad

Daniel:
That Ain't So Bad
A trick-taking game card game with a dungeon theme and mechanics similar to Reiner Knizia's Too Many Cooks. Players are intrepid adventurers competing with each other to see who is the toughest. The cards have numbers and elemental symbols on the back. On the front, details of how much damage is done, who takes the damage, the kind of damage, and any treasure dropped. Each turn, take a card from your hand and drop it facedown into a pile in the center of the table. This growing pile represents a horde of monsters quickly approaching. When the piled cards' numbers total 10 or more, the next player must take the pile. Then the pile is revealed and "combat" begins. Depending on your character class, you earn VP from certain elemental types of damage, and lose VP for others. Some monsters do damage to your neighboring players, too. If the monster drops treasure, you can keep it and earn extra VP or sell it for gold to buy armor. Armor increases the amount of VP you earn from different types of damage, but you only have a few armor slots available. There are also VP bonuses for collecting special sets of treasure, for fighting the most monsters, etc. When the draw deck is empty, the game is over. The player with the most VP wins.

Your next challenge:
Cardiothon

Fred:
Cardiothon
The Marathon Running Game. There's a board representing the course, one square per unit of distance (maybe 42, going with km as the measure, but maybe finer grained) with the players starting at the start line, and a track representing heart rate, with the players starting in the middle. The trick with this game is not necessarily to be the fastest, but to maintain the best pace and heart rate. Each turn players draw two cards. Some of the cards are special events: refreshment stop, second wind, that sort of thing -- stuff designed to do radical things (numerically speaking) to your heart rate in trade for less distance, or vice versa, or let you play two cards, whatever. Most have two numbers on them: heart rate adjustment, and distance. You can get some good short burst sprints, boosting your distance, but they tend to bump your heart rate up considerably. Other cards only adjust heart rate slightly up or down. Slow-pace cards don't add much distance, but can reduce your heart rate considerably. If your heart rate exceeds the ideal upper bound, you get "Winded" and can only play cards that reduce your heart rate until you get back in the ideal zone. If your heart rate drops below the ideal lower bound, you get "Sluggish" and can only draw one card each turn until your heart rate is back in the ideal zone. (One or both of these states might also compel you to discard all your cards, I'm not sure.) You must discard down to your max hand size at the end of your turn. First one to cross the finish line gets the trophy, but everyone who makes it to the finish line is a winner. (You might be limited to a fixed number of Winded events, three strikes and you're out; or you might have a limited number of turns to cure being Winded before you have to drop out of the race.)

Your next challenge:
Holy Smokes

Daniel:
Holy Smokes
A kind of tower defense board game. The board depicts a hilltop in preindustrial London and the big sky overhead. Players control cherubs flying back and forth along the upper edge of the board. The cherubs are trying to clean up the sky of smoke puffs floating up from the chimneys. Each turn, a random chimney releases a random number of puffs. Players use cards to create updrafts, downdrafts, and lateral winds to direct the puffs toward their cherubs. Over time, London industrializes and gains factories that emit even more smoke, as do the moving vehicles.

Your next challenge:
Best in Show

Fred:
Best In Show
The Galactic Overlords have visited your home planet. Congratulations! You've been selected to compete in the annual Induction Trials. First prize is your homeworld gets membership as one of the Galactic Overlords. Second prize is you're conquered. Third prize on down involves disintegration. Two ways to go with this concept: One, everyone plays one of the nonhomogenous governments of a single planet (a la Earth), who must collaborate together despite years of history putting them at odds in order to put their "best foot forward" and win the contest as a unified planet. All of which gets complicated by the alien infiltrators from the other competitors. That might be some kind of an RPG take on things. Two would be the more boardgamey one: everyone plays a home planet, jockeying for ways to best "groom" their planet for acceptance while throwing turbulence at the competitors.

Your next challenge:
Hump Day

Daniel:
Hump Day
A verbal scavenger hunt for two or more workmates on a Wednesday. No one besides the players must know there is an ongoing game, so players should coordinate with each other outside the workplace or via secure communication. To prepare, each player gets their own random list of ten secret words on Wednesday morning. Throughout the day, players engage non-player targets in casual conversation, trying to get the target to say one or more secret words.

A target saying one word is worth 1 point. Getting a target to say two words is worth 2 points, three words is 4 points, four words is eight points, and so on, doubling each time that target says another secret word. Any points scored from a secret word are tripled again if the target shouts the word as loud as possible. If the target grows suspicious or discovers the game is afoot, any players who earned points from that target will lose those points.

The player with the most points at the end of the day wins. Recording an ongoing game is mostly a matter of honesty among friends, but there are some measures players can take to stay on the up-and-up. Players may engage the same target at the same time, though that might tip off the target. Players can also keep a shared log of their successful targets, then follow up on that list once the game is complete.

Your next challenge:
Shingled Out

Fred:
Shingled Out
This might work best as a video game, but works as a board game too. Playing board is a roof, with colored shingles placed on it. Each player has one or more colors that they score for. The goal is to score 3-5(?) shingles in a row (or a column, though that's trickier to pull off and thus is worth more points). Shingles always get inserted into the middle positions of a roof, which causes the shingles to the left (or the right, depending on location chosen) in that row to be pushed over. The shingles that go off the edges of the row are "shingled out", i.e., they fall off the roof and go back to the bottom of the "deck". Combos that get matched are cleared from the board, causing the tiles on the row(s) to slide back inwards.

Your next challenge:
Sexy Time

Daniel:
Sexy Time
The Zoolander party game. A charades-like hack of Dixit. Grab a bunch of index cards and write funny names for model runway walks. "El Tigre." "Blue Steel." "Cold Coffee." And so on. Players take turns being the model. The other players each hand a card to the model. The model shuffles those cards and then lays them out so all players can see them. The model then walks from one end of the room and back, performing one of those walks. The other players must guess which walk the model was trying to perform. If you guess correctly, you earn one point for every player who guessed correctly. So, if you're the only right guesser, you only get one point. If you're one of three who guess correctly, you get three points. Meanwhile, the model earns a point for every correct guess as long as at least one player guessed incorrectly. If all players guess correctly, the model does not earn points this turn.

Your next challenge:
Jam Master

Fred:
Jam Master
Enter (honestly, rather sedate) world of competitive canning! Test your skills at making preserves, pickles, jellies, and jams. The bold ones catch the judges' eyes, but run the greatest risk. Check your seals, sterilize your equipment, and avoid spoilage. The game involves cobbling together increasingly ludicrous canned goods ("canned whupass!") with increasing levels of difficulty. It's a bit like zombie dice or blackjack; you can keep pushing it, dancing as close as you can to spoilage without spoiling the whole batch, to get that one, competition-worthy jar of truly transcendent jam. He who emerges with the most impressive canned jam is indeed hailed as the Jam Master!

Your next challenge:
Dirty Hippy Game

Daniel:
Dirty Hippy Game
At the Burnaroo Music Festival, its hard to come by a good shower. As a matter of fact, there is only one still working! Form a queue of hippies ranging from your basic concert attendee to performance artists to headline acts. All dirty. All hippies. This is basically a reskin of Guillotine. Replace the French nobles with dirty hippies. Replace the stand-up Guillotine with a standup portable shower.

Your next challenge:
Dinositter

Fred:
Dinositter
Sort of a multiplayer defensive card game (could be done as a web game too). Each player has a specific Dinositter (dinosaur babysitter) with specific abilities and disadvantages (T Rex can eat troublesome children easily, but has very tiny hands and is too big to fit into small spaces). They must work together to deal with a steady influx of babysitting challenges (kids, shenanigans, scheduling difficulties), but each has a limited number of "spaces" around them they can allocate to queue incoming issues. Dinositters must work through their queue fast enough, using card draws and special abilities, so that no child gets left behind. Once the Dinositter crew lets a certain number of problems go unaddressed, the game ends, and the crew gets rated on their performance.

Your next challenge:
Ghoulash

Daniel:
Ghoulash
It's a monster mash! All the neighborhood monsters are coming to your party, but how long will they stay? Invite ghoulish guests like vampires, zombies, ghosts, mutants and mummies. Each guest has their own preferences and will change the party in different ways, like making the music louder, eating more snacks, and making guests dance. Keep the guests you invited happy. If the party turns away from an existing guests' taste, they'll leave the party early. Your goal is to keep the party as lively (or deadly) as your guests prefer while making the other players' guests uncomfortable. The party ends at sunrise!

Your next challenge:
Diamond in the Rough

Fred:
Diamond in the Rough
Trick-taking card game. Remove all diamonds from the deck except for the Ace of Diamonds (so, a 40 card deck). Cards on all tricks are played face down; play passes to the left rather than to the winner of a trick. Tricks aren't picked up until a "take!" round is called. A "take" round must be called at the beginning of the turn before anyone has played their card. On a "take" round, cards are played face up, with the winner (who must follow suit on the lead) taking all of the face-down tricks. At the end of the hand, you score one point for each trick you took; double your score for the hand if one of those tricks contains the Ace of Diamonds. The last card played in a hand is always played in a "take" round, but otherwise you can't call a "take" round unless there's already at least one face-down trick on the table.

Your next challenge:
Juicy Jalopies

Daniel:
Juicy Jalopies
A push-your-luck dice and meeple-placement game. Players position their juice trucks at key points around a city, picking up foot traffic and business each day. Players spend cash on rent for premium spots, expanding the menu, buying new trucks, and importing exotic fruits. The public is fickle and their herd-like movement can change from day-to-day. Build your juice truck empire, get well-reviewed, and your business might even get featured on a reality show!

Your next challenge:
Apollo Loco

Fred:
Apollo Loco
Resource management card game. It's the craziest moon-shot ever! In the near future, the total collapse of NASA, plus open-source garbage-powered rocketry, leads to a space race like no other following the detection of rich deposits of unobtainium on the moon. Gold rush fever meets zany antics as players try to cobble their moonshot mission out of common junkyard and household items. Naturally most rockets explode after you launch 'em, so there's no guarantee your first rocket will make it to the moon. Will you launch a risky rocket on the chance it'll help you claim a piece of lunar real estate as your claim? Or will you go slow and steady and build a more reliable spaceship? There are only so many moon-plots available, and it's first (crash)land, first served!

Your next challenge:
Super-Cali-Fragi-Fishstick

Daniel:
Super-Cali-Fragi-Fishstick
A board game depicting a harbor with concentric arcs radiating outward to the deep ocean. Game pieces are little boat pawns. Players launch boats to capture lots of fresh fish to bring back to harbor. The farther out you go, the more fish you catch, but you also run the risk of getting swept away by bad weather or rogue waves. Close to harbor, you have to obey fishing regulations, but at least it's safe. So, yeah, you can venture to the deep ocean, but hope you don't run into the perfect storm!

Your next challenge:
The Great Fire

Fred:
The Great Fire
A board game/RPG hybrid written by Daniel Solis and Jason Morningstar (make it happen), set during the events of the great Chicago fire. On the board game level, there are firefighting crews, exhausted from fighting another fire the day before, trying and (mostly) failing to stop the spread of the fire across the Chicago map. On the RPG level, we explore the stories of the families and firemen caught in its devastation. Who will survive? Will the firefighters be able to save your family? Or will they join the hundreds dead that day?

Your next challenge:
Googly Moogly

Daniel:
Googly Moogly
A test of your Search-Fu! A scavenger hunt challenge using a search engine. The game master creates a set of 100px square thumbnails of screenshots, images or words. The thumbnails can be extreme close-ups, but they should still leave enough information for the Hunters. It's up to the hunters to figure out the search terms that lead to those images. The hunters report back to the game master with a URL. If the URL is correct, the game master unlocks one clue to another thumbnail, of the hunter's choosing. Beware, that clue is revealed to all hunters at the same time, so a hunter must choose wisely. The first to find all the URLs wins!

Your next challenge:
Betiquette

Fred:
Betiquette
A trivia party game. Explore the most obscure corners of etiquette and protocol. (You never knew how inappropriate you've been behaving!) Each round, the players take turns reading aloud from a list of strange but theoretically correct behaviors one must observe. Either one of those is correct behavior and all the rest are made up, or one is made up and the rest are correct. (Which kind of list it is is identified on the card.) Players place bets using their paper money on which behavior is the odd one out. Game ends when everyone but one has lost all their dough, or when the bank runs dry. She with the most cash wins Betiquette!

Your next challenge:
IndigNation: Umbrage Edition

Daniel:
IndigNation: Umbrage Edition
The latest edition of the classic semi-cooperative game of revolution and protest. In the classic game, players represent various factions within a larger revolutionary movement. Factions must negotiate, compromise and and protest as a unit in order to achieve common goals and their own constituents' demands. As the movement grows – from a small protest, to a media event, to a full-blown revolution, and possibly a civil war – the stakes rise sharply with real lives on the line. Some factions want to see that escalation happen quickly while more peaceful factions want take a more moderate stance. The Umbrage edition introduces new agent provocateurs, media tactics, police and military challenges, and whole new factions.

Your next challenge:
Spice Trade

Several Ongoing Pitch Tag Threads on Google+

2011-11-30T06:00:00.000-05:00

Seems like Pitch Tag has really taken off on Google Plus! Here are some ongoing threads.

» Jared Axelrod
» Dev Purkayastha
» Brett Myers

I can already see the challenge of playing Pitch Tag on this channel, though. As the thread ages, it draws fewer new participants to add new life. Eventually the thread fades when the current participants burn out. Granted, that'll happen regardless of the channel, but it seems to happen faster on +.

5 Graphic Design and Typography Tips for your Card Game

2011-11-29T06:00:00.009-05:00

Chris Farrell of Illuminating Games just wrote a thorough critique of card games setting their body text to be so small that they cannot be read at arm's length, let alone across the table. Here's an excerpt, but the whole thing is worth a read for any would-be card game designers out there. (Myself included.)

Break out your copy of the base set of Dominion, and look at the Chapel. This has a text box roughly 3.5cm by 4.5cm. It's got a single line of text. That line of text is 1 (one) millimeter high. 1mm! For me, it's only clearly readable at half an arm's length even in the bright light of day. (...) Compare this to a more sane game like Glory to Rome, where the font size is 2-3 times as large (text is 2mm high, keywords 3mm and usually highlighted). I can generally read Glory to Rome cards across the table, and can certainly see the important keywords. To heap insult upon injury, not only does Glory to Rome have far more legible text than Dominion it also has larger art. San Juan also thankfully starts at 2mm, although it could still easily be larger with no loss of aesthetics.

Here are some tips for designers who want to stay on Chris' good side.

1: If it can be said in fewer words, say it in fewer words.
Alright, before we get into any matters of layout, the first thing you have to do is look at how well you're using your text. Survey all the cards in your game and set a benchmark for the amount of text acceptable on any card. I recommend no more than two or three lines. Whenever I come across a card with more text than that, I tend to just ignore it. There are probably other, easier-to-understand cards available elsewhere and I'd rather get to play than puzzle over a miniature wikipedia article.

2: If it's said repeatedly, say it in symbols.
Depending on the kind of game you're making, you'll probably have certain phrases that come up frequently. Instead of repeating yourself and wasting valuable text real estate, just make a symbol that stands in for that piece of text.

"Deal two damage to any monster. Deal an extra damage to any Fire-based monsters." can be replaced with [SWORD] [SWORD] (+[SWORD] vs. [FIRE]).

"Draw two cards. Keep one and discard the other." can be replaced with [CARD with an X] [CARD with a CHECKMARK]. There is always a danger in overcoding your visual language, but if executed well, it'll make your game more accessible and playable.

3: Set the right style for the context.
The first thing young designers learn is that 12pt Times New Roman is the Devil. Young designers then overcompensate for years, insisting on 8pt regardless of context. We all have to get over that eventually and learn that there is no one golden rule that fits all contexts. A little card is different from a game board is different from a rulebook.

Here's a simple rule of thumb, though. Up close, set your body text at 10-12pt. Arm's length, 12-16pt. Across the table, 24pt. Always make your leading at least 1.5x the text size. And always, always choose a classic, legible font without any flourishes. I personally recommend Trade Gothic or Frutiger, but both have a distinctly modern feel that might not jive with your game's theme. You might be happier with Garamond or Caslon.

And lastly, if you simply must have flavor text, it's okay for that to be 8pt. It's an easter egg, not critical to actual gameplay.

4: Choose the right background.
Most card games have consistent block backgrounds in which you'll find the rules text, flavor text and any other important words. For the sake of efficient production, that background block is kept to the same size, regardless of its contents. That means cards with little text may have lots of unused space, as Chris notes in his critique.

That being the case, I highly recommend first taking steps 1 and 2 to make sure you're using text as efficiently as possible. With that base established, set your background block to fit your text. You can do this manually card-by-card, but that's a bit of a pain. Try setting a thick stroke around your body text style so your text effectively creates its own background.

Alternately, you can use a 0-distance, high-spread drop shadow. Either way, the background should be high contrast with very little texture or pattern that would interfere with the text.

5: Choose the right art.
And last but not least, the remaining 80% of card real estate is probably taken up with some gorgeous art, right? Just make sure the art actually communicates what is said in the text. In the chaos of the gaming table, the text "Firehose: Deal 7 damage to fire-based monsters" might get covered up by some other cards or a nacho or something. But if your art actually shows a bunch of fire elementals getting fizzled out by a firehouse, the message is still effectively communicated.

And that's that! Some simple steps you can take to keep Chris from complaining about *your* card game. Personally, I like the design of the cards in King of Tokyo. The titles are all custom designed and there's plenty of room for the awesome, illustrative art. The actual body copy is still a wordy on some cards and could afford to be larger, but for the most part KoT gets card design right.

"Ideas are like Stars..." T-shirts and Outerwear on Sale!

2011-11-28T06:00:00.005-05:00

"Ideas are like stars – Numerous and dazzling, but it takes a lot of work to confirm life near one."

That got retweeted a lot yesterday. It's been a while since I made a new t-shirt and this spread fast enough that I decided to whip up a quick little design to put on some cafepress stuff. It's now available on t-shirts and outerwear in a variety of colors, sizes, and styles for men and women.

» "Ideas are like Stars..." Shirts and Apparel

More shirts are available, too!

Planning the Utara Kickstarter Pledge Levels and Rewards

2011-11-26T22:17:00.007-05:00

Though it is many, many months away, I can't help but look ahead to the next Kickstarter project: Utara. That image above is the snazzy new branding. The big experiment this time is the backer-generated map of Utara. You've heard me talk about the power of naming rights already. I'm stepping that up a bit this time around. Now, backers can create the world of Utara.

Above is a blueprint for Utara's map. It's a grid divided into about 2400 cells, each large enough for a single Utara die. Backers of certain levels will create and name islands, archipelagos, major landmasses, and greater seas. Here's a loose outline...

Goal: $2000 — That covers a minimum order of 2000 dice from the manufacturer with the same specs as the Writer's Dice. I've had some requests for Utara dice to be a more traditional ivory with black inlay design. I'll look into that, but it'll be more expensive per-unit and raise the minimum goal.

30 Days — This game is a pretty major project for a small outfit like mine. I want to give this campaign a good long time to gestate.

At these basic tiers, I'm following the same buy-in structure as the Writer's Dice campaign, with some bulk discounts for large orders. You can also see how the naming rights grow with each level. I would love to offer a printed game board for the $50 tier and beyond, but I'll have to check on the pricing for production and shipping on that.

$5: Lander – You get one Utara die. Roll it and find your way. All backers also get a printable PDF map of Utara. All backers also get credit and thanks in the official rules doc. [International orders add $1 shipping.]

$10: Docker – You get two Utara dice. One for you and your mate to play Utara Lite. You also create and name a small island on the map of Utara. [International orders add $1 shipping.]

$25: Islander – You get six Utara dice. That's one player's full Utara set! You also create and name a big island on the map of Utara. [International orders add $2 shipping.]

$50: Sailor – You get twelve Utara dice. That's a two-player Utara set! You also name an archipelago on the map of Utara. [International orders add $3 shipping.]

At these elite tiers, I'm offering Dragon Chow dice bags, as I did during the campaign for Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple. The big new thing is the handmade playmat, though. The design for that playmat is something like this, but ideally with a raised lip to keep the dice from rolling too far.

$100: Seafarer (5 Available) – You get twenty-five Utara dice. That's a four-player Utara set! You also name a sea on the map of Utara. You also get a 36" wide flat fabric map of Utara. You also get an exclusive Dragon Chow Dice Bag. [International orders add $6 shipping.]

$250: Mapper (3 Available) – You get twenty-five Utara dice. That's a four-player Utara set! Your name is listed in the center of the map as a cartographer. You get an exclusive Dragon Chow Dice Bag. You also get an exclusive handmade 36" wide drawstring playmat with the map of Utara printed on the inner lining. The whole kit comes in a polished wooden box. [International orders add $20 shipping.]

$500: Traveler (1 Available) – You get twenty-five Utara dice. That's a four-player Utara set! You name the four cardinal wind-spirits along the edge of the map. You get an exclusive Dragon Chow Dice Bag. You also get an exclusive handmade 36" wide drawstring playmat with the map of Utara printed on the inner lining. The whole kit comes in a polished wooden box. [International orders add $20 shipping.]

$1000: Ruler (1 Available) – You get twenty-five Utara dice. That's a four-player Utara set! You are listed in the center of the map as ruler of all the islands of Utara. You get an exclusive Dragon Chow Dice Bag. You also get an exclusive handmade 36" wide drawstring playmat with the map of Utara printed on the inner lining. The whole kit comes in a polished wooden box. All players of Utara must greet you with a bow and a courteous "Your Majesty." [International orders add $20 shipping.]

So that's the rough plan so far. Any campaign is still many months away, but it's good to plan far in advance. As I've learned with the Writer's Dice campaign, fulfillment can take a lot longer than you expect.

10% off Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple and Happy Birthday, Robot!

2011-11-25T09:14:00.000-05:00

Evil Hat's webstore has a 10% discount on most games, including Happy Birthday, Robot! and Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple. Same discount applies to PDFs, too.

Pitch Tag

2011-11-23T10:43:00.002-05:00

This is a creativity game for two or more players inspired by word association exercises and writer jam sessions. You can play this game over any communication medium, including in-person, but I find it works best over email, forum or comment.

Stuff You Need:
2 or more players
If face-to-face, a pencil and paper.
If online, any email, forum or shared document.

Setup: Players agree on what they'll be pitching, whether it be story ideas, character ideas, plots, or inventions. Fred Hicks and I like to use Pitch Tag to generate ideas for new games.

Step 1: Come up with a title. When Fred and I play, we'll assume these will be the title of a new game.

Step 2: The next player pitches a thing with that title. When Fred and I play, we pitch games. We can describe the game as deeply as we prefer, whether it's mechanics, story, or influences. The point is to just generate ideas rapidly.

Step 3 and on...: That player then tosses back another title to the first player. Play continues in this way, with each player pitching games and then challenging the next player with a new title. Keep playing as long as you like. Here's an example of a Pitch Tag session between Fred Hicks and I as we generate new ideas for games.

***

Fred:
Small Wages

Daniel:
Small Wages
An InSpectres hack. Budget mercenaries for hire. Consistently win contracts because they're the lowest bidder, but are woefully inadequate for any mission. Nevertheless, they manage to succeed despite themselves. Game mechanics involve bidding to win contracts, but then trying not to go overbudget due to property damages, casualties, etc.

Your next challenge: Christmas Bonus

Fred:
Christmas Bonus
Board game. Players take on the roles of elves in Santa's sweat/workshop, engaging in a festive, holiday-themed cutthroat corporate melodrama in order to be the top elf and win the most coveted prize of all, the Christmas Bonus: a day off. Players can win by building the most toys, building the most complicated toy, and other ways besides; but watch out for the time-suck that is Reindeer Stable Duty -- and the reversals your coworkers will try to heap on you as they climb to victory. In this game of Christmas mayhem, it's all naughty -- no nice!

Your next challenge: There's No Time

Daniel:
There's No Time
An RPG adaptation of the film In Time. Players are rebels against a nigh-immortal oligarchy directly control the economy of citizens' expected lifespans. The rebels must coordinate and plan as best they can to use the time they have available. As mortality ticks away, there is the looming temptation to turn on each other for just a few more moments of life.

Your next challenge: Rafters

Fred:
Rafters
In the world of competitive raft-racing, it's not just about finishing first -- it's about finishing at all! A board game that follows the rough-and-tumble white-water rapids race-course through a canyon, each team is played by two or more players and must coordinate their actions (without communicating) to steer their rafts into the fastest, clearest currents to make it through the course and past the finish line at Camp Kanook. But watch out for the random hazard deck, which can drop trees, rocks, and waterfalls into your path with little warning!

Your next challenge: Gift Horse

Daniel:
[Hot damn. I can definitely design that as a streamlined, all-ages adaptation of Space Hulk Death Angel.]

Gift Horse
An Apples to Apples reskin. The big annual farm festival is coming soon. The horses trot around the ranch trying to figure out what to give all the other farm animals. Each player takes turns being a farm animal while the others take the roles of horses. The farm animal reveals an adjective card that describes the kind of gifts he wants (sweet, healthy, fun, etc.) The horses each have a hand of gift cards (carrots, sugar, toys, etc.) and secretly give one to the farm animal. The farm animal shuffles the gifts, reveals them and chooses one as his favorite. The horse whose gift was chosen gets the adjective card. The first horse to get five adjective cards wins.

Your next challenge: Jasmine Tea

Fred:
Jasmine Tea
A card game. Jasmine Tea is the name of the owner of a detective agency/fortune-teller business. You play her employees; clients come in, and you opt either to read their tea leaves or solve their case (all clients are looking for both). This divides the players into two teams (always two; you can't all do just one thing). Each team must work together to solve the mystery (match a set of symbols on the customer card from cards in their hands) or tell the fortune (reveal what cards the customer card is hiding underneath). Points scored are divided up among team members. The first to score ten points becomes employee of the month!

Your next challenge: OMG WTF BBQ

Daniel:
OMG WTF BBQ
Cooking competition card game. It's time for the craziest barbecue competition ever! You and the other players compete to grill up the craziest meats for hordes of picky eaters. Choose from a wide variety of meats and put together your best plate. Everything from beef to buffalo, frog legs to chicken gizzards. If it comes from an animal, it's going on a plate at the OMG WTF BBQ!

Your next challenge: Baba Yoga

Fred:
Baba Yoga
Baba Yoga is the twisted game of knotty witches. Each player has a set of cards showing various witch body parts contorted into odd positions -- positions achievable only by magic! Each round, a new position card is revealed and the race is on to put your cards together so that your witch matches the picture on the position card. Can you find the right contorted configuration in time? The quickest witch-twister wins!

Your next challenge: Are You My Boo?

Daniel:
Are You My Boo?
You're a ghost trying to scare away the tenants from a room of a haunted hotel. Build up the right combination of scary phenomena and chase away as many tenants as you can. Careful! Some phenomena actually attract thrill-seeking tenants! This is a card-and-dice game. The dice have different scary symbols on them. Each card depicts a different tenant and the things that scare or attract them. Play begins with each player having five tenants in front of them. Tenants move to the left or right each turn, depending on dice rolls. Players try to be the first to clear their room of all tenants.

Your next challenge: Peace Against Force

Fred:
Peace Against Force
A cooperative team-building game where the players try to overthrow a corrupt, militant regime through peaceful protest and activism. Plays a bit like Shadows Over Camelot: the "clock" moves forward inexorably, and your activism can't succeed in garnering the necessary media attention and/or sociopolitical change on every front, but if you pick your "battles" carefully, you can prevail. Instead of a "traitor", you instead have a temptation: the "radical activism" deck -- gets you cheap-at-first boosts on various fronts, but runs the risk of legal entanglements, compromised ideals, and more.

Your next challenge: So Much For That!

Daniel:
So Much For That!
Card game about building a road system. Each card has a road that either bends, branches, ends or goes in a straight line. Some roads have special features like inns, homes or shops. Players try to complete the most valuable roads and claim points. Cards can be played in an organic arrangement, not necessarily in a grid, so long as the road grows. As roads grow, you might get special sets of features on that road, like two inns or four shops. Roads with two- three- or four-of-a-kind are worth a lot of points to whoever can complete it. Any other feature on that road reduces its value. So, if you have four inns on a road and then place a shop there, the value of that road only counts as if you had three inns. In this way, you often have situations where you just say "So Much For That!" when a high-value road suddenly tanks. [Phew! That was a stretch.]

Your next challenge: The Double-Clicks

Fred:
The Double-Clicks
A family game. The Double-Clicks (originally Don Double and Cathy Clicks before their marriage, now plus kids Mouse and Pointer) are a family of browsers with a lot of shopping needs for the holidays and not a lot of time! Each round the family members draw a random set of shopping list items and must navigate the World Wide Web (represented as a board) to get it all ordered so it will be delivered in time for festivus. If you use too many moves to hit all your shopping goals, those gifts show up late, deducting points from your score. Who will be the season's swiftest shopper?

Your next challenge: Culture Shock

Daniel:
Culture Shock
Board game, looks like a giant petri dish. Components are assorted blob tokens in a variety of colors. Players try to form a line of their blobs from one edge of the petri dish to the other. If blobs of two colors ever come in contact, they get shocked and any contiguous groups are removed from the board. Players only score points for lines of blobs touching two sides of the petri dish. Players score one point for every blob in that contiguous group. That group is now shock-proof, so other blob tokens can now be placed on top of it without harm. That also means the group of tokens is out of play for the remainder of the game.

Your next challenge: Cloud City Urada

Fred:
Cloud City Urada
Cloud City Urada! Home to untold riches and hidden terrors. Each player takes on the role of a sky-pirate captain with a small fleet on the outskirts of Urada. You must evade your competitors (and the city's automated patrols) while sending scavenger parties into the city to return with plunder -- if they manage to return at all. Don't run out of crew, and don't get blown out of the sky, and you just might make it home to live like a king! Styled like an anime-that-never-was, of course.

Your next challenge: Designer Drug

Daniel:
Designer Drug
A card-drafting game a la 7 Wonders. Cards have a different ingredient on each one with indicated uses and possible side effects. Chemists compete to file new drug patents to win government contract. Each contract has a typographic themed code name. Contract: Helvetica asks you to create a drug that treats symptoms X, Y, Z without causing side effects A, B, C. Contract: Minion must treat symptoms J, K, L without causing side effects D, E, G. Several contracts are available at any one time. File a simple patent and claim an easy contract right away or try to build up a super-drug that covers multiple contracts at once.

Your next challenge: In Her Majesty's Psychic Service

Fred:
In Her Majesty's Psychic Service
A tight, focused-scenario, plays in a couple hours story-game a la Fiasco. Her Majesty has only one psychic spy in her service. Triple Naught. It's 000's job to ferret out the thought crime, the conspiratorial intent, the absence of respect, and exert a modicum of corrective pressure to the situation. But to do this, 000 has to get close to the problem. Go deep. Go dark. Triple Naught is so secret, even 000 doesn't know who he -- or she -- is. And there we have our scenario: a conspiracy, infiltrated by 000. And our question: who's the crown's inside man? It won't come out until the endgame, when every thought is compromised, when the knives are out...

Your next challenge: Good Gravy

***

As of this post, this particular session is still ongoing. As you can see, it takes you in unexpected directions and forces you to create in an unfamiliar space. I can easily pull two or three games out of this short session alone, which will occupy my design schedule for a month or two. It's a great exercise.

Do: The Book of Letters - In Print for a Limited Time!

2011-11-22T10:22:00.000-05:00

We have a few printed editions of Do: The Book of Letters leftover from the original Kickstarter drive. Previously only available to backers, this first expansion for Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple is 50+ pages bursting with new letters, new secrets of the universe and tips on writing your own letters to the temple. Only available from Evil Hat's webstore. Also features art from Liz Radtke and Amy Houser. Get 'em while they last!

» Do: The Book of Letters [Print+PDF Bundle]

"Yeah, that happened." Actual play of Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple

2011-11-19T08:46:00.000-05:00

Writer's Dice IOU Holiday Card

2011-11-13T13:44:00.000-05:00

Many thanks to Chris Schreiber for offering this suggestion. For any backers who wanted to gift Writer's Dice for the holidays, here's a simple IOU stocking stuffer with a print-and-fold paper version of the dice. The card reads:

"We wanted to deliver Writer's Dice before the holidays... BUT the Kickstarter was too successful... AND our workshop won't have enough materials in-stock until January... SO please enjoy these print-and-fold dice for now."

Furthermore, look for a mobile app to come out soon. We're figuring out the logistics of how to get the app to all backers for free.

» Writer's Dice - IOU Holiday Card

Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple at GameKastle

2011-11-12T06:00:00.000-05:00

Colin Creitz tweeted: "Story Games Day @GameKastle - we played Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple, and here's what happened!"

A lot happened indeed! Most of it to that poor, poor whale.

James Stowe illustrating Pop & Locke's Last Heist

2011-11-11T06:00:00.000-05:00

I'm happy to announce that Pop & Locke's Last Heist features art by illustrator James Stowe.

James is an accomplished and prolific artist in a variety of projects. You might recognize his most recent work in the series of young children D&D character sheets that went viral earlier this year. Check 'em out here!

Like many of you, I was charmed with his poppy, energetic character designs. I'm really looking forward to his new work for Pop & Locke's Last Heist, too.

Thanks so much to everyone who backed the Writers' Dice Kickstarter. You made this campaign more successful than I ever anticipated and gave us the ability to tap such strong talent.

Artist Style Guide for Pop & Locke's Last Heist

2011-11-10T06:00:00.002-05:00

As with any project where I hire an artist, I've put together an Artist's Style Guide for Pop & Locke's Last Heist. This is a document I send out to any prospective artists who will work on the project. It lays out the relevant details of the game, including characters, setting, clothes, etc.

A style guide is helpful for three reasons:

1) Gathering and organizing all this reference material forces you to clearly articulate the visual aesthetic for your game. You might have some image in your head, but you need to share that with others and looking at the same document can help.

2) Searching for this reference clues you into a handful of illustrators who you may initially contact for estimates. Even if you can't hire them, they might know others who will be a better fit.

3) Once artists are hired, they won't have to work from a blank slate. Again, using a common source of visual inspiration saves you both time once you start working together.

You can see a previous style guide I put together for Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple. Your style guide doesn't need to be so fancy as either of these, but a simple collection of images and text is a great way to start a working relationship with your artists.

Wordcount Jumble

2011-11-09T07:01:00.001-05:00

Wordcount Jumble makes a game out of your daily writing session. Play it as you write a novel or participate in NaNoWriMo. It can help take characters to new locations, do unexpected things and interact with other characters in surprising ways.

List Locations, Characters, and Actions
List up ten items in each of the following categories:

Locations in which your story will take place. For example: The deserts of Tatooine. Mos Eisley cantina. The command room of the Death Star. The corridors of the Death Star. The home base of the rebellion. Aboard the Millennium Falcon.

Characters who will be featured in your story. For example: Luke Skywalker, a new hope for the galaxy. Han Solo, the pragmatic rogue. Princess Leia, the rebel leader. Obi-Wan Kenobi, the mysterious elder. Emperor Palpatine, dark ruler of the cruel empire. Darth Vader, loyal right hand to the emperor.

Actions the characters will do in your story. For example: Bond. Argue. Learn. Teach. Fight.

Number-List Each Item
Order the items in each category in a numbered list from from 0 to 9. If you have fewer than ten items in a category, consider which item you'd want to occur more frequently in your story and include those items multiple times in the list. In all cases, lower numbered items will appear in your story more frequently. For example:

Locations
0-2 The deserts of Tatooine.
3-4 Aboard the Millennium Falcon.
4-6 The corridors of the Death Star.
7 The command room of the Death Star.
8 Mos Eisley cantina.
9 The home base of the rebellion.

Characters
0-2 Luke Skywalker, a new hope for the galaxy.
3-5 Darth Vader, loyal right hand to the emperor.
6 Han Solo, the pragmatic rogue.
7 Princess Leia, the rebel spy.
8 Obi-Wan Kenobi, the mysterious elder.
9 Emperor Palpatine, dark ruler of the cruel empire.

Actions
0 Bond.
1 Argue.
2-3 Learn.
4-5 Teach.
6-9 Fight.

How to Play
Now, as you write your novel, keep track of your word count each day. When you're done writing for the day, the day's word count gives you the basic outline of a scene that will happen in your story when you continue writing tomorrow. The locations correspond to the thousands-digit of your word count. The characters correspond to the hundreds-digit. The actions correspond to the tens digit. Optionally, you can use the ones digit as a character to whom your first character will perform that action.

Example: Today, you wrote 2,459 words. Tomorrow, when you continue writing, there will be a scene that takes place on the deserts of Tatooine (Location: 2). There, Darth Vader [Character: 4] will teach [Action: 5] Emperor Palpatine [Character: 9].

Figuring out how to set up, execute and resolve this scene will give you a goal in your next writing session. Even if the exercise doesn't lead to anything useful, it gives you a goal for the day's writing and can help break you out of a rut.

Try expanding and varying the categories, too, like a category for Motivation or for a set of important Objects. You can also try setting your favorite locations and characters at higher numbers, pushing you to write just a little bit more so you can bring them into a critical point in the story.

Particle Panic

2011-11-07T09:15:00.002-05:00

Torus Lab is the world's largest particle collider, unleashing new exotic particles unknown to science. Now the lab is out of control! The scientists must input the self-destruct codes or the unstable particles will endanger the world.

Stuff You Need
1-4 players
A pawn for each player
A six-sided die
Two decks of playing cards shuffled together
Lots of particle tokens

Setup

Shuffle the deck and deal three cards to each player. (Seen at the corners of the above image.)

Cut the remaining deck into six roughly equal stacks. Arrange those stacks in a circle face-up. (Seen in the center of the above image.) Each stack represents a space on the game board.

Each space is numbered 1 through 6, clockwise from the top as shown in the image on the right. Each player's pawn starts at the space marked 1.

Place one particle token each in spaces 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6.

Finally, keep the die within easy reach of all players.

On Your Turn, you can perform each of the following actions in any order, but you may only do one of each in a single turn.

Move your Pawn: Roll the die. Your pawn may move up to that number spaces clockwise or counterclockwise.

Collect a Card: If your pawn enters (or begins a turn) on a space with no particles, you may collect the top card from this space and add it to your hand. All players have a total hand limit of six cards. If you have more than your hand limit, spend cards or share cards until you are at your limit.

Neutralize Particles: You may remove particles from the space your pawn occupies. If you want to remove a particle, roll the die. If the result is 4-6, you may remove the particle. If the result is 1-3, your hand limit is reduced by one and the particle remains. You may remove as many particles in a single turn as you're willing to try.

In the examples above, you just moved your pawn into a space that contains a particle. You roll to neutralize this particle and get a 5. So, you remove the particle from this space. Now, you collect the top card (a heart) and add it to your hand.

Spend Cards: You may spend as many cards from your hand as you like. Each to does different special actions according to the suit.
Spend a HEART to reroll a neutralization die.
Spend a CLUB to add 1 to a neutralization die result.
Spend a DIAMOND to move your pawn to an adjacent legal space.
Spend a SPADE to move a particle to an adjacent legal space.
When you spend a card, place it in a discard stack away from the game. It is no longer in play.

Share Cards: You may give any number of cards to another player as long as both your pawns are in the same space. They may not give you cards.

Enter a Self-Destruct Code: You may spend five cards of the same suit to input a self-destruct code for the lab. There are four self-destruct codes total, one for each suit. In other words, you must discard five HEARTS to enter the heart code, five CLUBS to enter the club code, five DIAMONDS to enter the diamond code and five SPADES to enter the spade code.

Particles Emerge
If the lab has not been destroyed, more particles emerge at the end of each turn. Roll the die twice. The first result is how many particles will emerge. The second result is the space where the particles will emerge.

In the example above, the first die result was three, so three particles will emerge this turn. In the second die result was a five, so those particles are now on space number 5.

If a space ever has more than six particles, the extra particles spill over into the nearest adjacent legal spaces. Distribute those extra particles as you wish.

In this example, more particles emerged than could fit in space 5. So, you decide to move the extra particle to Space 1, which still has plenty of room.

Goal of Play
To win, you and the other players must cooperate to enter all four self-destruct codes before the game ends. The game ends if there is no more room for any new particles; if any player's hand limit is reduced to zero; or if a space runs out of cards.

Design Notes
This game originally began as a thought-experiment in how to play ZOMBIES!!! on a smaller, more claustrophobic board. As a commercial product, I can see the cards more diversified. Instead of dice rolls, the cards might handle particle emergence. They may also offer interesting powers when you have them in your hand. For a slightly harder game, try using land cards from Magic: the Gathering. That means you have to input five self-destruct codes.

Our Judging Process for the Thousand-Year Game Design Challenge

2011-11-06T18:29:00.001-05:00

My wife and I are halfway done reviewing, playing and judging the entries to the Thousand-Year Game Design Challenge. (Asterisks note games we've judged so far.) It's been an interesting experience to say the least. I'm glad we've had a few months' time for this phase, because we needed every minute with our busy schedules. Here's an explanation of our judging process so far.

1. Read
Naturally, the first step of the process is reading the rules of the game. If we can understand how to play the game from a direct reading of the rules as written by the designer, then we'll proceed to the next step. We really do give it our best effort to read and comprehend the rules text. Sadly, in a very few cases, some entries do get taken out of contention in this first step simply because we can't figure out how to play from the text.

2. Setup
We gather whatever game components are called for by the text. In some cases, this is as simple as a piece of paper and a pencil. In other cases, the components are extremely specific, unique or numerous. As you might imagine, we have a LOT of game components in our house. If an entry calls for components so specific or so numerous that we can't assemble an adequate play set, that's a red flag for us. If a household with as many game-bits as us can't put together a play set, it's not likely many others would be able to either. Perhaps that policy is harsh, but we have so many entries that create elegant, fun experiences without unique components that we really have to grade based on that context.

3. Play
And then, of course, we play the actual game. We'll play as many times as we can, so that we fully get a sense of how the game feels and to make sure we properly understand the rules. If the game actually stays fun each time we play, that gives us a strong feeling that the entry is a good contender to win the challenge. Throughout play, we take notes in our little journal (seen above, handmade by Sara Hindmarch aka Repaper).

4. Analyze
We ask each other a few questions in a very informal way. – Would you play again? Did you find it more fun the first or second time? Were the rules clear enough at first? How does this entry compare to the other entries so far? Is it more accessible than the others? Is it more sustainable to produce than the others? Is it more fun than the others? – I'm the more abstract player of the two of us. My wife has the strongest sense of elegance and accessibility.

So that's how we're proceeding. We're on track to finish judging the rest of the entries over the next two months. A few of them require three or more players, so I'll rope in some of the local Durhamites to do some playing and judging of their own.

Writer's Dice Kickstarter Successful! 845% Funded

2011-11-06T08:47:00.000-05:00

Thank you so much to everyone who contributed to this project! It was more successful than I could've imagined. Here are our final numbers:

475 backers raised $8435 in just 2 weeks, a total pre-order of ~1650 dice!

So here's what will happen next: Kickstarter and Amazon Payments are going to charge your pledges from your credit cards over the next week. Most of you have already successfully done so, but a few might have some transaction errors that Amazon will try to resolve until Saturday, Nov 12.

After the pledges are all resolved, we'll place an order for about 1750 dice. We're ordering plenty of extras just in case any get lost in the mail. Once ordered, those will take up to ten business days to produce, according to our vendor. (Usually they're much faster, but we've never ordered this many dice from them.)

When we have the dice here, we'll bundle them up into your individual packages and ship them to you. Estimated delivery for domestic orders should be around the second week of December or sooner. International orders are, understandably, going to take some more time to deliver so I can't guarantee an exact date in those cases.

If anything comes up that would affect our outbound shipping plans, you'll be the first to know. Er… Well, I guess we'd be the first to know. But you'll be the first we tell! :D

Anyhoo, thanks again for your support! Look for more updates as events progress.

P.S. The Writer's Dice Guide PDF and Pop & Locke PDF are still in development. I need to flesh out the former and I just tapped a really great artist for the latter. I hope to send out both PDFs around the time the Writer's Dice go out the door. Again, you'll be appraised of all development milestones. I'm an over-sharer. :)

Get Pop n' Locke's Last Heist with the Writer's Dice PDF Guide

2011-11-02T11:09:00.002-04:00

We passed 500% last night! By popular demand, I'm making a game designed exclusively for Writer's Dice. Pop n' Locke's Last Heist will be bundled with the forthcoming Writer's Dice PDF guide at the four-dice level.

Pop n' Locke's Last Heist
Meet the MacGuffins. During a family reunion on Pop's 80th birthday, a strange light imbued his household objects with spectacular powers. A fork-that-freezes-water. A pencil-that-pierces-any-object. A key-that-unlocks-any-door. Each family member took one object with the promise to do good... promises that were soon broken! Now, Pop and his granddaughter Locke travel the world retrieving the objects from their unscrupulous family members. Will they make it out unscathed or is this really Pop n' Locke's Last Heist?

About the Game
Pop n' Locke's Last Heist is a storytelling game about a grandfather and granddaughter pulling off an elaborate heist, sometimes using household objects with strange powers. The game is played in a series of "beats," or simple statements in an ongoing story. After saying a beat, you roll 4dW (four Writer's Dice) and choose a word to lead into the next beat. If your chosen word appears twice in that roll, your object gains a special charge to do some extraordinary feat. For example, if you rolled AS AS BUT IF, then chose AS, a fork-that-freezes-water could freeze a whole river. Choosing three-of-a-kind and four-of-a-kind leads to even more epic feats!

How You Can Get the Game
Any backer of four dice or over will get Pop n' Locke's Last Heist as a PDF download. As with my other games, the PDF will be available as a full-color PDF and a printer-friendly minimal PDF.

Get it now!

Writer's Dice Update #2

2011-10-29T20:57:00.000-04:00

As of Saturday night, we have 833 dice pre-ordered and we still have a week left in the campaign. Incredible. I just posted this little video above to show how the dice roll. Nothing fancy, just a product demo. :)

Superhero Audition Card Game

2011-10-28T07:59:00.005-04:00

You're voting for your city's new official superhero! You'll test each candidate in a series of elimination rounds until only one hero is left! Vote wisely!
» Development Status: Beta
» Design Notes

Stuff You Need
1-6 Players
10-20 Minutes
A pencil and paper to keep score
A token to mark the First Player
A deck of Superhero Audition Cards

Setup
Each player gets their own set of three cards. One card has a star, the second card an X, the third has a robber. Keep your cards hidden so no one can see what's in your hand. Shuffle the hero cards and lay out a row of seven cards with the hero-side facing up. Place the remaining deck at one end of the row with the crisis-side facing up. The First Player token goes to the oldest player.

How To Play
Step 1: The Debate
There is a crisis afoot in the city! Consider the question on the crisis card and debate who you think the other players should vote for or against. You have no real information about the heroes except what's on the cards, so feel free to infer details. Example: Household pets are rebelling against their masters! Who can make peace between the species?

Step 2: The Vote
The player with the First Player token votes first. Turns continue clockwise around the table. On your turn, use your star to vote for a hero OR use your X to vote against a hero. Make sure your cards are face down so no one can tell who you've voted for or against. After voting, pass the First Player token to the player on your left. Example: After some debate, the players cast their votes as shown above. Player 1 voted first, followed by players 2, 3 and 4.

Step 3: The Results
Once all the votes are cast, turn the player cards face-up. You will score one point for every vote on a hero that matches your own. Any opposing votes on that hero will deduct from the available points. If you're the only one to vote for or against a hero, you'll score one point for that hero. Example: The players reveal their votes and score points accordingly...

Player 1 voted for Vampire Matt [STAR], but another player voted against [X]. Those votes cancel each other out, meaning there are zero points available to Player 1 from Vampire Matt. Player 1 voted against Professor Pharaoh [X], but another player voted for [STAR]. Those votes cancel each other out, meaning there are zero points available to Player 1 from Professor Pharaoh. That's a grand total of +0 points for this round. Ouch.

Player 2 voted for Professor Pharoah, but another player voted against. Those votes cancel each other out, meaning there are zero points available to Player 2 from Professor Pharaoh. Player 2 voted against Baby Hands McGee and there were no other votes for or against, so Player 2 gets 1 point from Baby Hands McGee. That's a total of +1 point this round.

Player 3 voted against Vampire Matt, but another player voted for. Those votes cancel each other out, meaning there are zero points available to Player 3 from Vampire Matt. Player 3 voted for Zoobot and another player agreed, so Player 3 gets 2 points from Zoobot. That's a total of +2 points this round.

Player 4 voted for Zoobot and another player agreed, so Player 4 gets 2 points from Zoobot. Player 4 voted against Scotch Ape and there were no other votes for or against, so Player 4 gets 1 point from Scotch Ape. That's a total of +3 points this round.

Step 4: The Elimination
After scoring, the hero who got the most stars moves to the end of the row closest to the crisis deck. In case of a tie, whoever is already closest wins. The hero who got the most Xs is eliminated and their card is placed at the bottom of the crisis deck. In case of a tie, whoever is already farthest wins. (Well, "winning" is relative in that case.) If a hero got opposing votes, those votes cancel each other out. Example: Zoobot got the most stars, so she moves to spot closest to the crisis deck. Vampire Matt, Professor Pharaoh, Baby Hands McGee and Scotch Ape each got one X, so let's sort this out. Vampire Matt and Professor Pharaoh each got a star, canceling out their Xs, so they're both safe. That leaves Baby Hands McGee and Scotch Ape, each with an X against them. Unfortunately for Scotch Ape, he's farthest from the crisis deck, so he's eliminated. His card is placed at the bottom of the crisis deck.

This ends the round. Play continues with a new round from Step 1, with a new crisis revealed on top of the crisis deck.

The Robber Card
During the voting step, you can use the Robber card as your vote. The Robber itself isn't worth any points. Instead, The Robber gives all the available points from the chosen hero to you and no one else. If multiple players place a Robber on a hero, they both get the available points from that hero. However, multiple robbers on the same hero do not count as matching votes. So, if a hero only gets Robbers, it is not worth any points. Example: The example above shows the results of a later round of play. Three players all voted for Vampire Matt. Under normal circumstances, those three players would all get 3 points, but because Player 1 has used his Robber on Vampire Matt, only Player 1 gets those points. In addition, he scores 2 points because he voted against Baby Hands McGee and another player had a matching vote. That's a grand total of +5 points. Good comeback!

How To Win
The game ends when there is only one hero remaining in the lineup. The player with the most points wins!

Design Notes
You can see some influences here from Apples to Apples, the Resistance, and Dixit. It all blends together shockingly well. The one thing I like most about the game is that you can use your old superhero cards or just about any other card from any other CCG as long as it depicts a person or creature of some kind.

#TweetTreasure [Twitter]

2011-10-26T20:00:00.001-04:00

And then there was the time a bunch of people on Twitter came up with a bunch of treasures and magic items under the hashtag #TweetTreasure. Sadly, I neglected to save them all, but a few are commemorated in this Dragon Age Oracle post:

@wordwill: Rod of Misrule: This simple wooden branch, wrapped in twine at one end, compels its bearer to tell lies. #TweetTreasure

@sodmikail: Witch-hunter Ring: Hold the ring to your eye. Peering through it will reveal any glamour or illusion. #tweettreasure

@highmoon: The wearer of the Polyglot’s Earring understands any spoken sentient language except their native one(s). #TweetTreasure

More are saved in this FriendFeed history:

» Photo: CC-NC-SA-BY Ben Beard

Crisis in Superhero Audition [In the Lab]

2011-10-25T20:00:00.003-04:00

You last heard me talk about Superhero Audition in this post, and its numerous extra edits. I've settled on a much more streamlined concept for the game: You and the other players are city council members voting on the city's new official superhero. Voting occurs in a series of elimination rounds, like American Idol. In each round, you have a new hypothetical crisis to base your vote.

A kitten is stuck in a tree! Who would be rescue it most gently?
Aliens steal Earth's moon! Who can bring it back?
An earthquake strikes California! Who can help the entire Pacific coast at once?
Orpheo the Necromancer summons a a ghost army! Who can defeat his magic?
The children's hospital hosts a charity event! Who's most popular with kids?

I asked the crowd on Google+ for some of their own ideas on crises. Nothing is too absurd! You know how silly the Silver Age was after all. I want a wide variety of situations, from small street-level stuff to giant global threats. Here are a few of my favorites, in some cases refined or reworded for consistency.

Chrono-Tom stopped time! Who can re-start it?
Shuteye sprays sleeping gas over the city from his blimp! Who can stay awake?
Cretaceous Z released all the animals from the zoo! Who can round them up?
The President's daughter is secretly a villain! Who can convince the president?
That child is about to be run over by that run away car! Who can save him?
A puzzling series of locked-room murders strike the city! Who can solve them?
Poseidon floods Manhattan as his underwater city! Who can hold back the sea?
An ancient space creature returns to Earth to lay its eggs! Who can turn it away?
Reboot is trying to rewrite history! Who can convince her to leave things be?
A mob boss is on trial! Who can convince the jury to put him behind bars?
Peaceful aliens visit Earth! Who is the best ambassador for Earth?
It's time for the Halloween costume contest! Who wins?
California is falling into the Pacific Ocean! Who can save it?
Pirates boarded the International Space Station! Who can get them out?
Cromax turned the world's leaders into apes! Who can restore their humanity?
Condenso shrinks the heroes to the size of mice! Who can still save the day?

Can you come up with any more crises? I need many, many more.

Photo: CC-BY-NC NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center

Writer's Dice Update #1

2011-10-24T09:23:00.000-04:00

What an epic first weekend! We reached 100% funding in the first 14 hours. Over 200% funded in the first weekend.

As of now, we'll produce at least 430 dice! The next highest quantity we estimated with our vendor was 1000, which would be awesome. Our pace is slowing down now, so I don't know if we'll get that many orders. Who knows? 430 in three days seemed unlikely, too. We'll see!

Survey Question: Which games would you like to see in the PDF guide? I've got Happy Birthday, Robot!, Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple, and Adventures of Baron Munchausen.

Writer's Dice Kickstarter is Live!

2011-10-21T07:38:00.000-04:00

The Kickstarter for Writer's Dice is now live! For a limited time only, you can pre-order your own set of Writer's Dice. If you order two dice or more, you'll get a PDF guide for using Writer's Dice in writing and gaming.

The whole creation process for these dice is documented on this blog. See the initial idea for these dice here. The design for the prototype here. A photo gallery of the finished prototypes here. Budgeting for the campaign here. Making of the video here.

Click the link on the right and pledge your support for Writer's Dice. Thanks!

Prepping for the Writer's Dice Kickstarter: Part 2 - The Video

2011-10-20T07:33:00.000-04:00

So you've heard my usual advice for making a Kickstarter video. All that still applies. Here was my strategy for this video in particular.

I was greatly inspired by Trey Parker and Matt Stone's lesson to NYU writing students in which they shared their technique for outlining a plot. In their lesson, they break out each beat so there's always a "therefore" or a "but" in between. That makes a naturally flowing sequence of events. It's a great lesson and one that fits seamlessly into the main appeal of Writer's Dice, to select the most meaningful words to connect each beat.

Normally, I'd start off a Kickstarter video as if it were a short 30sec commercial for the project. This time, I decided to neatly present that writing lesson into a cute tutorial, something like Common Craft or One-Minute Science. Megan and I brainstormed all the ways we could present this lesson: Stop-motion props? Stock art with silly voices? A sketch with actors in costume?

Finally, I settled on using the papery figures from Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple. You might recognize the girl with hair buns from the examples of play in the latter half of the book. I dreaded the thought of animating in Flash, though. Surely there would be an easier way to do this.

I ended up recording a screencast from Photoshop. I just moved the individual layers around as needed. I hid the mouse and cursor during the export, then I brought together those screencasts in iMovie and sped them up about 2000%... yes, literally 2000%. Essentially, I was using the same stop-motion technique as a Common Craft video, but entirely on the computer. I wrapped up the video with a description of the dice and long close-up shots of the dice prototypes.

The video is titled "How to Write the Plot for your Story" in the hopes of capturing some SEO in the last few weeks leading up to 2011's NaNoWriMo. The whole video is designed to be (hopefully) edu-taining enough to be shared on its own, thus drawing more eyeballs to the Kickstarter campaign.

Prepping for the Writer's Dice Kickstarter: Part 1: Pricing

2011-10-19T18:00:00.006-04:00

In the spirit of transparency, here's the cost breakdown for the Writer's Dice. This is the kind of budgeting and planning you have to do before you launch any Kickstarter campaign.

Production Estimate
Quantity: 100
19mm, .4 oz, Opaque Square-edged Blank Dice, Red
Custom etching on each face
Each die costs $1.75, a total of $175.

Shipping (according to USPS Price List Effective June 6, 2011)
Domestic package shipping up to 3oz (~4 dice + padded envelope) costs $1.71
To Canada, it costs up to $2.24
To Mexico, it costs up to $2.86
Everywhere else, up to $3.46

Pricing Strategy
I want to charge a flat rate of $5 per die, just like the Mathematician's Dice kickstarter. That means the single-die orders are going to be the most costly for us. We'll only have about $1.50 cushion for a single-die domestic order. We'll take At least a 17¢ hit on each single-die international order.

So, we have a couple options here. First, we can just hope we'll have more domestic orders than international and that they will offset our losses. Furthermore, if we have roughly the same turnout as the Mathematician's Dice, the vast majority of our backers will order multiple dice at once. That will further offset any small losses from international orders.

Otherwise, our other option is to charge shipping for international orders. Not sure how the Mathematician's Dice kickstarter afforded not charging international shipping, but I assume they went with the strategy described above and hoped for the best. I think I will do the same. A flat rate for all orders is nice and simple for the customer.

In the Mathematician's Dice campaign, only 83 got a single die. 669 backers got two dice at $10 and 413 got four dice at $20. Assuming The MD team had the same costs as us and these were all international orders outside of North America, those single orders cost them a total of $17.43. The two-die orders got a total profit of $662.04. The four-die orders got a total profit of $3940.02. Their highest tier, $50, only got 60 orders, but each one is a massive profit that more than offset the single orders.

Now, there is a very valid argument to be made in favor of including full shipping charge in the pledge amount, so single orders would be $7. (Essentially charging $5 for each die plus $3 for the shipping.) Then we cut that price down to $10 for two dice. And so on, offering further discount deals at higher quantities. It's a totally valid structure, and one we're weighing, but we honestly just like the no-muss, no-fuss single-price, even if it doesn't explicitly encourage a higher-volume order.

In the end, we'll probably end up with a compromise clause in the single-order pledge tier: "International orders, please add $1." That would suffice to cover the additional expense and still keep our otherwise smooth pricing structure.

This doesn't even take into account the percentage cut that Kickstarter and Amazon will take from the final Kickstarter pledges. But let's set that aside for another time. :P

EDIT: And, of course, after bringing it up with Megan, she immediately came up with an elegant solution. Offer a PDF product at the $10 level to encourage a jump from one die to two. A handy little guide for incorporating Writer's Dice into games and using them in writing exercises on their own. No cost to us, but it would be just enough to spur an impulse upgrade. Nice!

EDIT 2: Okay, we figured out the expenses for the Kickstarter and Amazon cuts. Turns out we must compromise on the $5 flat price in the case of international orders. An extra buck or two for international orders should cover the extra costs.

Writer's Dice Prototype Photo Gallery

2011-10-18T14:00:00.000-04:00

Well, that was fast! Gamestation comes through yet again with super-prompt turnaround I've come to expect.

These dice are a little larger than your average dice, with a satisfying heft to their roll. I am very impressed with the detail they managed to pull out of the lettering. Those thin inner strokes are incredibly fine.

See more pics on the Flickr stream. Now, I can begin prepping the Kickstarter campaign in earnest!

A Reductive Variant of ZOMBIES!!! [In the Lab]

2011-10-17T15:53:00.004-04:00

This idea came out of a brief discussion about ZOMBIES!!! and how it can sometimes drag out too long if the map gets too big. I got to thinking about how you can make a somewhat similar game using no map at all. A circular, claustrophobic, co-operative scenario like a high-tech lab overrun by its undead creations. Hm! Here are some very, very loose notes.

DECON
Torus Lab contains the deadliest viruses known to science. Well, contained. Now, infected staff run rampant through the ring-shaped facility, madly trying to escape. Only the last surviving scientists can find a cure for the four strains of the plague and save the world.

1-6 players
A pawn for each player
A blue die and a red die
Two decks of playing cards shuffled together
Lots of zombie miniatures

Shuffle the deck and deal three cards to each player. Cut the remaining deck into six roughly equal stacks. Arrange those stacks in a circle. Reveal the top card on each stack and place it face-up on top. Each stack is as a space on the game board. Each space is numbered 1 through 6. (Maybe use a post-it to mark this?)

Pawns start at the first space. Place one zombie in each remaining space. Your pawns move per the normal movement rules from ZOMBIES!!!, except that you're moving along the ring instead of on a map tile. You must fight zombies along the way, as per normal combat rules.

When you end your turn on a space that is clear of zombies, you can draw the top card from that deck and keep it in your hand. When you do so, turn over the next card face-up and place it on top of the stack. There is an upper hand limit of five cards.

Once during your turn, you may use cards in the following ways, depending on the suit. You may use as many cards as you wish.

Discard a HEART to reroll a combat die.
Discard a CLUB to add 1 to a combat die result.
Discard a DIAMOND to move your pawn one space.
Discard a SPADE to move a zombie one space.

If a player loses a combat roll, their hand limit is reduced by one.

If you land on the same space as another player, you may give that player any number of your cards. The upper hand limit still applies, meaning that player must immediately discard back down to five cards.

At the end of each turn, 1-6 zombies spawn at a random space. Roll two dice. The red die notes how many zombies will spawn. The blue die notes the space where they will spawn. A space cannot have more than six zombies. If a space ever spawns enough zombies to go over six, split the extra zombies among the neighboring spaces however you wish. Repeat as necessary until all zombies are spawned somewhere on the board.

The goal is to develop a cure for the zombie plague. The plague comes in four different strains, so you must find a cure for each. You can develop a cure on your turn by discarding a full set of five-of-a-kind cards. In other words, you must discard five HEARTS to cure the heart strain, five CLUBS to cure the club strain, five DIAMONDS to cure the diamond strain and five SPADES to cure the spade strain.

The game ends if there is no more room to spawn new zombies; if any player's hand limit is reduced to zero; or if a space runs out of cards. If you cannot find a cure before these events happen, the virus breaches containment and you'll lose the game.

So those are the loose thoughts. It might become a thing by Halloween.

EDIT: As a commenter points out below, this would be better themed as an accident in in the LHC. With that theme, I'd remove ZOMBIES!!!-style zombie movement entirely. Instead of zombies, the danger is widening rifts represented by rift tokens. They stay where they spawn, unless moved by spending spades. Yeeesss. I like this.

» Photo: CC-BY-SA RMTip21

"A lot to love." Wired GeekDad Reviews Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple

2011-10-15T19:00:00.000-04:00

Hot dog! Michael Harrison of Wired GeekDad previously covered the buzz surrounding Do's Kickstarter campaign early this year. Now GeekDad MJ Harnish offers up this in-depth review of the game itself: "...lives up to, if not exceeds, the hype that preceded it and the final product (now available for purchase) is nothing short of beautiful."

» More at Wired: An In-Depth Review of Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple

Writer's Dice Prototype Ordered

2011-10-14T19:00:00.010-04:00

You've heard me talk about Writer's Dice before, but I decided this week I'd bite the bullet and launch a Kickstarter in November, hopefully with enough time to ship out the dice in time for the holidays.

Above is the design for the prototype. As you can see, these dice are still usable as standard d6s. The prototype should be in around the 27th at the latest. If you have some feedback on this design before then, please leave a comment!

Be on the lookout for more updates. This will be a very short campaign, maybe only three weeks. $5 a die. Nice and simple stocking stuffer for the writer/gamer in your life. Get excited!

Bajjutsu Master - Now in Creative Commons

2011-10-13T19:00:00.002-04:00

You can now download a zip file containing the Bajjutsu Master icons and background in a variety of formats. All released under the following terms: Bajjutsu Master Icons and Background by Daniel Solis (http://www.danielsolis) is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/)

Furthermore, the rules text for Bajjutsu Master is also released under the following terms: Bajjutsu Master by Josh Mannon and Daniel Solis is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Both licenses allow you to share and remix either the work, as long as you attribute the original work to its author(s). You are not allowed to sell either work (without the authors' permission, anyway). Otherwise, happy downloading!

» Bajjutsu Master Icons and Background
» Bajjutsu Master Rules Text

[In the Lab] Superhero Audition Card Game

2011-10-12T17:15:00.004-04:00

Woke up this morning with a weird little idea that I am not sure works mechanically. The premise is taken straight out of the old superhero audition gag. A panel of elite superheroes judges a parade of absurd potential recruits. Your goal is to pick the most and least likely candidates to join the team.

Setup and Components

There is a tableau of superhero cards (two per player, but at least six) arranged in a single row in alphabetical order. The superhero cards in the tableau show only the hero's picture and their name, nothing else.

Each player has two superhero cards kept hidden in their hand. Each card depicts one of the superheroes out in the tableau. The cards in players' hands are the same, but distinguished by a different border and orientation so you don't get them mixed up with the cards in the tableau. (Think of these like city cards from Pandemic.)

Next to the tableau is a deck of crisis cards. The crisis cards each describe a different kind of test for the superheroes to face.

Lastly, each player has a star token and a flop token. The star token and flop token have identical backs and shapes, but still have distinguishing marks so you know which player owns them.

How to Play
Step 1: Crisis
Reveal a new crisis card and read it aloud to the whole group. Discuss who would be the best and worst superhero for this crisis. You have no real information about the candidates except their appearance and their name, but feel free to make stuff up.

Examples: A meteor is going to hit the city! We need a host for this children's charity event! Alien shape shifters have replaced the president! The public is turning against superheroes! The supervillains escaped superjail!

Step 2: Recruit
Put your star token on the hero you think is best suited to this crisis. Put your flop token on the hero you think is worst suited to this crisis. Make sure your tokens are face down so no one can tell who you've voted for best or worst.

Example: Player 1 places tokens on Doctor Dimension and Ghost of Tesla. Player 2 places tokens on Ghost of Tesla and Spader-Man. Player 3 places tokens on Doctor Dimension and Spader-Man. Player 4 places tokens on Spader-Man and Vampire Matt.

Step 3: Resolve
Reveal each token. If you own the card with the hero who got the most star tokens, you gain one point. If you own the card with the hero who got the most flop tokens, you gain one point. (If there is a tie for stars, the hero closest to the crisis deck wins. If there is a tie for flops, the hero farthest from the crisis deck wins. Heroes who get only star tokens or only flop tokens take precedence over any heroes with mixed results.) If you gained points, you must reveal that hero in your hand. Otherwise, you can still keep your hand secret. Once scoring is complete, put your hero back in your hand.

Example: Spader-Man is unequivocally the winner of the most stars. Doctor Dimension, Ghost of Tesla, Rooster Jones, and Vampire Matt each got one flop token, so let's figure out how to resolve this tie. Doctor Dimension and Ghost of Tesla are out because they also got star tokens. That leaves Rooster Jones and Vampire Matt. Vampire Matt is the farthest away from the crisis deck, so he wins this tie. So, Player 3 reveals he has Spader-Man and gains 1 point. Player 4 reveals he has Vampire Matt and gains 1 point.

Step 4: Promote
Rearrange the heroes in the tableau, in order of stars and flops. The hero with the most star tokens moves to the place closest to the Crisis Deck. That hero is considered to be in First Place. The hero with second most star tokens (and no flop tokens) is in Second Place, and so on. Next, heroes who didn't get any tokens, or had equal numbers of flops and stars, are arranged in the middle of the tableau in alphabetical order. Lastly, the hero who got the fewest flop tokens is placed next, followed by all the heroes who got more and more flop tokens. The tableau should now reflect the current ranking of each hero. Return all tokens to their owners. Return all tokens to their respective players.

Example: Spader-Man got the most stars, so he moves to first place. Next, Doctor Dimension, Ghost of Tesla, Lady Livery, Nightvision and Squint, and Zoobot either got no tokens or got equal numbers of flops and stars, so they're arranged in alphabetical order. Lastly, Rooster Jones and Vampire Matt each got the same number of flop tokens, so they're arranged at the end of the row in alphabetical order.

Step 5: Trade
All players discard one or both of the heroes in their hand. Once this is done, shuffle the discard pile. Players must now draw cards from this pile to a full hand of two cards. In effect, this is a blind trade. Why would you want to do this? The closer a hero is to first or last place, the more bonus points you'll get if they're in your hand at the end of the game. So if you have a middling hero in your hand, there's nothing to lose. Also, if your hero was in first or last place in the previous round, players may be less inclined to vote for or against that hero in the next round.

Example: Players 1 3, and 4 discard their cards and draw up again from the shuffled discard deck.

The next turn begins with a new crisis card in Step 1 and the rest of the turn continues as described above. The game lasts at least three turns or one turn per player, whichever is higher.

Winning
The game ends after five crises. At the end of the game, you will score bonus points for the heroes in your hand. Score 3 points if one of your heroes is in first or last place. Score 2 points if in second or second-to-last place. Score 1 point if in third or third-to-last place. The player with the most points wins.

Notes
So yes, this is sort of a mashup of Apples to Apples, Dixit, and Who Would Win? It's another one of those games where I wonder if there's enough commercial potential for publishing. I like the simplicity of the superhero cards. Lots of room for cool new artists to get a spotlight and plenty of room for expansions.

There is a problem I can see already: Regardless of the crisis, what's the motivation for anyone to put tokens on any hero but the one they have in their hand? That will result in a persistently even distribution of tokens across the whole tableau.

So, we might need a reason for people to favor any hero besides the one in their hand. One way to do this would be categorizing and quantifying crises into a variety of silos (Physical 5, Mental 4, Social, etc.) and giving the heroes corresponding stats. A crisis would then be resolved somewhere between Steps 2 and 3. Each hero rolls one d6. 4-6 is a success. 1-3 is a failure. A hero must roll as many as times indicated by the Crisis number. Stars and flops give +1 or -1 to each die roll. If the hero gets one failure, they didn't resolve the crisis. The hero with the most failures is eliminated from the game and removed from the tableau.

Making this even more complicated, you could also have heroes who grant bonuses or penalties to heroes to their left or right in particular categories. But that's a little out-there. Perhaps rejected heroes become villains, who augment the remaining crises?

The problem with elimination is that we'd need more heroes at the beginning or reduce the endgame condition from five crises to three, just so there isn't a total overlap between the first placers and last placers.

Anyhoo, this is the general idea.

EDIT: I see two other solutions:

Apples to Apples Solution
There is no tableau or tokens. Only one deck of superheroes cards and a deck of crisis cards. Five superhero cards are dealt randomly to each player.

At the beginning of a turn, one player takes the role of judge and draws a crisis from the crisis deck. The other players offer one superhero card face down to the judge. The judge shuffles the cards and lays them out face-up. The judge decides who would be the best suited to this crisis and least suited to this crisis.

Whoever owned those selected heroes earns one point. Play until each player has been the judge once. Win by having the most points at the end of the game.

Consensus Solution
There is only the crisis deck and the tableau of superheroes. No player has cards in their hand, but they do have their tokens. The tableau is not arranged in alphabetical order and there is no first, second or third place. Play occurs as noted above until Step 3. Here's what's different:

You score points for consensus. If you are the only person to place a star or flop token on a hero, you score one point. If several players placed star or flop tokens on the same hero, you each score one point per token. Star and flop tokens cancel each other out, which reduces the potential score for a hero.

This opens up a potential for debate, bluffing and "take that." Players low on points can form alliances to create consensus blocs, which might form unbeatable unions. Perhaps if we inject some betrayal temptation?

Perhaps there is a third token, a STEAL token. It does not count as a flop or a star, but instead simply gives you all the points from that hero. It looks just like the other tokens, so you know for sure that anyone with three tokens might not be trustworthy. Fortunately, the STEAL token may only be used once by each player. So, a player with two tokens may not be trustworthy, but you know he won't steal all your points.

EDIT2: And in what might be a way-too-streamlined direction, I could remove Crisis cards entirely. They'd be replaced with the remaining deck of superheroes that are not in the tableau. The question for each round is "Who would pass this hero's test?" Maybe the heroes in the deck are villains and the question is "Who would beat this villain?" There is something appealing about that kind of minimalist presentation.

Les Grouillots - The Leftovers translated in French

2011-10-11T19:00:00.013-04:00

Bonjour! Out of the kindness of his heart, Cédric Ferrand translated the slapstick fantasy storytelling game The Leftovers into French! You can find the whole package on his blog. Merci pour la traduction, Cédric!

» Les Grouillots

Classroom Activity Guide for Happy Birthday, Robot!

2011-10-10T19:00:00.007-04:00

Here's a resource for all teachers, parents, librarians, bookstore staff and who want to incorporate Happy Birthday, Robot! into kids' learning. Teacher and education consultant Cassie Krause offers gameplay tips, extension learning advice, and experience guiding a whole class in a single story. Best of all, it's totally free, licensed under Creative Commons from Smart Play Games.

» Download Classroom Activity Guide for Happy Birthday, Robot!

Designing the Bajjutsu Badge and Desktop Wallpaper

2011-10-09T09:36:00.000-04:00

Above is the time-lapse making-of video for the Bajjutsu badge. This was when it was a simple bi-fold last week, but I stopped recording during the small revisions that came up over the following days. At the end, you can see a quick pan of the current tri-fold version. Also, here's the opening screen as a Bajjutsu desktop wallpaper if you're so inclined.

» Music: CC-BY-NC-SA Fun Electronics

Bajjutsu Master

2011-10-06T08:12:00.019-04:00

With this badge, you are a Bajjutsu Master. Compete against other bajjutsu masters in a contest of arcane powers! Ally yourself with a Bajjutsu clan or seek glory on your own! This game is perfect for when you and your friends are at conventions, concerts or other large gatherings.

» Download the print-and-play PDF. Once trimmed and folded, it fits into a standard clear convention badge holder. Bring it to your next game convention!
» Co-created with Josh Mannon
» Japanese translation by Andy Kitkowski
» Development Stage: Open Beta
» Development History
» Opening call and response by Ryan Macklin

SETUP
When badge-wearing Bajjutsu Masters wish to battle, they begin with the time-honored call: “Only one Bajjutsu Master shall stand!” Those who accept respond “And it shall be me!”

If you have more than two players, you'll play either a melee or a clan battle. In melee, all players act alone. In clan battle, players split into two opposing teams. On your badge, attach a clip to the 6 space of the HEALTH METER. Attach another clip to the 0 space of the CHARGE METER.

PLAY
Every turn, Bajjutsu Masters strike a pose at the same time. Everyone counts "Bah... Ju... Tsu!" and strikes their pose on the last syllable.

Attack
Arms up causes any opponent without crossed arms to loses 1 health, plus an amount of health equal to your charge. Afterwards, your charge returns to 0.

Block
Arms crossed prevents you from losing health this turn.

Charge
Arms down gains you 1 charge this turn.

You may not take the same pose three times in a row.

HEALTH AND WINNING
When a player loses all health, they're out of the game immediately. (Double KOs are possible!) In a melee, the last player with any health remaining wins! In a clan battle, the last team with any remaining players wins!

TECHNIQUES
You have a special technique available to you! It is noted on a small card you can place on the back of your badge. You may only have one technique during a single game, but you may use it as many times as the rules allow. You do not have to reveal the nature of your technique to your opponents until the first time you actually use it. A technique’s effects take place after normal effects are resolved. So, if you lose all health, whatever technique you planned to execute this turn does not happen.

Healing Wind Technique
Arms Up while you have any charge: Instead of doing damage, increase health of all allies by your charge plus 1, up to their full health. Your charge returns to 0. In a clan battle, you cannot heal yourself unless you're the only one left in your clan. In melee, you heal yourself instead.

Stubborn Tortoise Technique
Arms up or Arms down while you have any charge: When you are hit, you lose charge instead of health, until you run out of charge. Then, you lose health as normal.

Fire Form Technique
Arms Crossed while you have any charge: When you block any attacking opponent, the opponent loses an amount of health equal to your charge. Your charge returns to 0.

Void Spirit Technique
Arms Up while you have any charge: Instead of doing damage, all opponents lose 1 charge. If they spent this turn charging, they simply do not gain a charge. Your charge returns to 0.

Winding Viper Technique
Arms up while you have 3 Charge: Your attack only affects blocking opponents. All blocking opponents lose 1 health. Your charge returns to 0.

CLAN STYLES
Different Bajjutsu clans have their preferred opening stance. Each claims that theirs is the best at not telegraphing their intended action to an opponent. The Clan of Man suggests beginning with hands crossed behind your back. The Clan of Dan suggests you stand proudly with arms akimbo. Decide your preferred stance and choose your allies wisely.

HAND VARIANT
Instead of posing, you can use hand gestures. Cross your fingers to charge. Hold out a flat palm instead to block. Close your fist to attack.

You can even use your off-hand to keep track of health and charge. When your health meter is at 6, hold your hand so only your thumb and pinky are extended. That is "6." You can count your health down from there using your fingers.

Keep track of your charge by using your whole arm. When your charge is at "0," let your arm hang naturally. At "1," place your hand on your hip. At "2," place your hand on your stomach. At "3," place your hand on your heart.

By combining arm positions and hand gestures in this way, you can play Bajjutsu Master anywhere, any time.

ANDY K'S TRANSLATION NOTES
The word for "badge" (in this sense, not so much for military service badges and the like) is the English loanword Badge, written as bajji (バッジ). Ji is also the first "letter" of Jitsu/Jutsu (ジツ／ジュツ, or simply the kanji 術) so their combination was an inevitability. And the call to make it Bajjutsu over Bajji-Jujutsu has an epic historic precedent in everyday Japanese word-shortening: Pocket Monsters (the official title!) is "Pokemon", Harris Teeter (grocery store on the East Coast) is known by Japanese locals as "Hari-Chi", etc. The double language hat-tip/pun was too juicy to pass up on.

DISCUSSIONS
RPG.net: Bajjutsu Master as a parlor LARP mechanic
Story-Games: Become a Bajjutsu Master!

LICENSE
Bajjutsu Master by Josh Mannon and Daniel Solis is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Time and Money: My visit to DragonVale

2011-10-05T20:00:00.001-04:00

I'm going to sound a little naive in this post. I'll make observations that might be obvious to anyone who's played Pokemon or FarmVille. I've avoided the genre until now. I had some experience playing an old SNES game called Harvest Moon, which could be considered a great grandparent of the new crop.

Right, I started playing DragonVale as research for Dung & Dragons. They seemed to have very similar themes, but totally different formats, so any insights I could glean from the app might be usable for a board game with some adaptation.

So here's how DragonVale works: Time and Money. You start with an untamed island, a small plot of cleared land, a nursery, and a portal through which visitors arrive on your island to tour. You're guided to buy your first egg, wait a few minutes for it to hatch or spend a gem to hatch it immediately. Once it hatches, you build it a habitat.

Your first two dragons are a plant dragon and an earth dragon. I named mine Celery and Clump, respectively. They are cute, make cute dragon sounds, and you name them, which pretty much means you'll imprint on them if you're susceptible to that kind of thing. Even if not, you'll pay attention to how much cash each dragon produces.

Celery produces almost 30 coins per minute. Clump produces only about 5. Naturally, feed Celery so he grows to produce even more money. Sorry, Clump, but you eat as much as Celery without producing nearly as quickly. Here's the next obstacle: Regardless of what the dragons produce, their habitats have a maximum capacity. Celery produces fast, but his habitat has a tiny capacity. It's the opposite for Clump.

So, next step is to upgrade Celery's habitat, which will take three hours. Three hours! Of course, you can spend a gem to speed things up. Ah, gems. Opiate of the impatient. As far as I can see, there is no in-game way to earn gems. The only way is to spend real money. Thus, like MMOs, an artificial delay becomes the primary way the game is profitable for it's creators. If you're impatient and have an extra buck, you can do well in this game. For everyone else, it'll take some time.

I'm still playing, but I don't know for how long. The lack of a foreseeable endgame is what turns me off. Even so, I am learning something about how to design around resource management, even if those two resources are just Time and Money.

"Astounding... Elegant" MTV Geek reviews Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple

2011-10-04T20:00:00.000-04:00

Slap me in the face for not linking to this sooner. During GenCon, George Holochwost of MTV Geek reviewed Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple:

"I failed to report to the press room at GenCon as early as I would have liked. The reason? I was obsessively reading Evil Hat's new storytelling game Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple... Fans of Nickelodeon's Avatar: The Last Airbender will feel right at home with what Do has to offer."

» Read more at MTV Geek

Designing the Cover of the Third Year of Our Reign

2011-10-03T20:00:00.003-04:00

Above is the first pass at the cover for Third Year of Our Reign, the new supplement for Greg Stolze's REIGN. Each cover in the franchise has shown a different stage in an ongoing imperial dynasty. This time, I got to thinking about one of the young heirs to the throne getting impatient. With a conspiratorial smirk and a ready spear, this young Imperial has deadly ambitions.

In the video above, you can see all the fits and starts that go into my process. At one point, I consider doing another montage composition like the last two supplement covers, but I end up focusing on this one character.

Ideally, those back-and-forths would mostly happen in the pencil-and-paper phase of design, but this is a peculiar situation. I've designed four covers for this franchise already, so I have a large library of strokes and visual elements already made. I'm on a tight timeline for the rest of the year and I've already overcommited. Also, I've had all summer to think about what would go on this cover already.

Consequently, this cover was completed much more quickly than usual. About two hours total.

» Music: CC-BY-NC-SA Butterfly Tea
» Previously: Designing the Title for Third Year of Our Reign

Designing the Title of The Third Year of Our Reign

2011-10-02T15:44:00.000-04:00

Starting a long-delayed assignment from Greg Stolze, the cover of the Third Year of Our Reign, the next supplement for his high political fantasy role-playing game REIGN. The quick video above shows how I've made the titles for each installment of the franchise. Later, I'll show how I create the actual illustrations.

Music: CC-BY-SA PhReyMusic

Writer's Dice

2011-09-29T19:20:00.008-04:00

UPDATE: Writer's Dice are now available on Kickstarter!

Oh, you know, just an idea. Partly inspired by Mathematicians' Dice, Rory's Story Cubes, and this lesson on plots from Trey Parker and Matt Stone.

In that lesson, they talk about arranging the beats of a story. They emphatically recommend that you not join any beats with the words "and then." Instead use conjunctions like "therefore." These force you to explain consequences and examine motivations that enrich a story. Just watch the video, I'm not doing it justice.

But here's a humble proposal for you writers out there. A simple six-sided die with interesting clauses and conjunctions to help you figure out the plot of your story. When Protagonist A finds out Antagonist B is his father, roll a die to lead you to the next beat. This die can easily fit into any storytelling game, too. Heck, the pips let you use them as regular dice.

I've looked at Koplow's catalog (which really ought to be digitized) and not found anything like these. For example, here are all kinds of speech and language dice. Koplow even offers these shape dice, which obviously didn't discourage Rory's Story Cubes from going into production.

So, based on my past experience with custom dice, I'm seriously weighing the opportunity to release a Writer's Die via Kickstarter, in the same model and spirit as the Mathematicians' Dice.

What do you think?

Stupor Market: The Phonetic Food Game

2011-09-29T06:12:00.005-04:00

Here's a fun game for groups at a restaurant, especially if the players have been imbibing a little bit before the game starts.

Stuff You Need
3 or more players at a restaurant or bar.

A pen and two pieces of paper for each player. Leave the first sheet of paper blank. On your second sheet, write each other player's name.

A 30sec timer.

How to Play
All players do these steps together at the same time.

1. On the blank piece of paper, write the name of a food served at this restaurant. Write the food as cryptically and phonetically as you can, in all capitals. This can be a basic ingredient, like fruits and vegetables; or more complex foods, like appetizers, entrees, or side dishes. For example, "lettuce" could be "LAYDUS." "Sweet potato" could be "SWOT PERDERDER." "Chicken noodle soup" could be "CHALKING OODLE SAP."

2. When everyone is done writing, hold your paper up so everyone can see it. You should probably hold it up with your non-writing hand, you'll need your writing hand in a sec.

3. Start the timer.

4. Look at the other players' misspelled foods and try to decipher what they actually are. Write down your guesses on the second sheet of paper as fast as you can, next to the name of the player holding that word.

5. When the timer runs out, put your pen down.

How to Win
One at a time, each player says the actual name of their chosen food.

You score one point for every food you guessed correctly.

Double those points if some of the players guessed your food correctly. Not all the players, not none of the players, just some of the players.

After three rounds of play, the player with the most points wins.

Stupor Market for Couples
For couples at a restaurant, the rules are a little different and much more casual.

1. Each player writes a list of five misspelled foods served at the restaurant.

2. Each player hands the paper to his or her opponent.

3. Try to decipher as many of those foods as possible. Write your guess next to each item.

4. When the waiter speaks to either player, that round is over and each player scores points.

You score one point for every food you guess correctly. Double that if your opponent guessed some of yours correctly. Play as many rounds as you like, or until the waiter kicks you out.

Design Notes
At first, I was thinking about making this a commercial game, with a deck of food cards, a timer, and so forth. I might still do that, but for now I just wanted to get the game out there in a playable form.
» Here's the initial inspiration
» Here was the first playtest
» Here's how I made the title graphic

French Reviews of Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple

2011-09-28T08:00:00.000-04:00

Sounds like Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple is making inroads into France, too!

» Radio Roliste: "It's a kind of Windpunk setting reminiscent of How to Train Your Dragon and the Little Prince."

» Antoine Bauza: "No longer engaged in role play... I try to keep up and listen to the podcast Radio Roliste. It is an episode of the podcast that made me buy the digital version of Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple (and its supplement)."

Merci pour la traduction, Philippe A. Ménard!

Figuring Out How To Design a Logo Title Graphic for a Board Game

2011-09-25T21:48:00.001-04:00

Experimenting with more commercial-style title graphics. One thing I've noticed is that they have lots and lots of outlines. Layer upon layer upon layer. I don't quite have the hang of it yet. Partly, it's a matter of starting with a hand-drawn letterform instead of a standard font. You get more character out of the title and more control over the entire personality. Starting from a basic typeface isn't a bad start, though.

Elapsed time: 1 Hour

» Music CC-BY-SA: Popof – "Friandise"

Emergent Narrative and Imposed Narrative in Game Design

2011-09-24T16:40:00.001-04:00

When I design a strategy game, my primary goal is to create emergent complexity. That is, a game easy to learn, but soon branches into multiple options, deep tactics, and long-term replay value. That's great for a strategy game, especially an abstract strategy game. If your game has a strong theme, your mind starts filling in that abstraction with aesthetic details.

This topic came up in a conversation with Sage LaTorra about For the Fleet. He looked over the alpha draft and had the following comments: "I feel like the game I was hoping for had more narrative than FtF currently does. FtF is pretty much a pushing your luck game with some extra cool dimensions of how and where you push that luck, which I dig. I just like the Zap Brannigan feel so much that I wanted more."

Eventually this settled into the notion of a Mission for each ship. Essentially, each ship gets a mission with three thematically related objectives. Each objective offers additional glory for your ship. Accomplishing the entire mission earns an upgrade for all ships in the fleet. For example:

Objective 1: Start at Sector 1, RAID one Target in each Sector. / 2 Glory
Objective 2: Be the first to WARP to the Imperial Capital. / 5 Glory
Objective 3: RAID the Imperial Capital twice. / 10 Glory
Mission Accomplished: All ships in the Fleet gain Experienced Crew.
Experienced Crew: You may declare three standard actions instead of two.

That is an imposed narrative. It presses a narrative structure on a system that doesn't naturally create one on its own. This is a valid solution, and one with many possibilities for play scenarios. I can see prison breakouts where you're ferrying POWs from the Imperial Capital back to Sector 1. I can see missions that call for you to pillage key Memes from specific Targets, bring them to another Target, so the Fleet can upgrade to faster engines.

Contrast this with Sandy Petersen recounting his first test of Call of Cthulhu's Sanity system 30 years ago: "My players found a book which enabled them to summon up a Foul Thing From Otherwhere. At the moment they completed the spell, the players suddenly chimed in with comments like "I’m covering my eyes." "Turning my back." "Shielding my view so I don’t see the monster." ... I had actually not realized that the Sanity stat, as I had written it, would lead to such behavior. To me it was serendipitous; emergent play. But I loved it. The players were actually acting like Lovecraft heroes instead of the mighty-thewed barbarian lunks of D&D."

That's classic emergent narrative. The rules didn't directly say "Play your characters like neurotic cowards." They simply provided a structure where that was the most natural course of action.

Sage offers some more references: "My points of comparison here are primarily Lord of the Rings card game and Death Angel. I can kind of sum up my gameplay in those games as a story with a distinct ending. My reading of FtF sounds like the narrative summary would always be "We went and raided some planets, then made it back home." (Or "ran our of fuel" or "got stuck")."

Imposed narrative isn't a bad thing, nor is it necessarily preferable to emergent narrative. They're just two very different solutions to the same task. Emergent narrative is simply a more difficult butterfly to capture.

Leo Lalande's New Handmade Procession Set

2011-09-23T15:49:00.000-04:00

You might recall the last time Leo Lalande made physical sets of Procession as wedding favors. He's been hard at work again, making more durable versions of the game. Check out more pics and details here.

The New Haul reviews Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple

2011-09-22T20:00:00.001-04:00

Brent at The New Haul is playing 50 games in 50 weeks. This week, he played Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple!

"After a few rounds, it becomes clear that the pilgrims are regularly getting into trouble, and each player must, while storyteller, balance helping her friends and moving the story along towards its goal... The book’s cover claims that it’s aimed at players 12 or older, but I think it’s ideal for kids as young as 8. It’s basically Avatar: The Last Airbender, without the heavy long-term story arc."

» Read more at The New Haul

What's next for the Thousand-Year Game Design Challenge

2011-09-20T22:22:00.006-04:00

Last January, I announced the Thousand-Year Game Design Challenge unsure of whether anyone would enter. Boy, did that doubt fade fast. The submission period closes with just under 50 entries. Now, we'll review them, play as many as physically possible and try to pick a winner. Here's what we're looking for:

Elegance: The winning entry should be easy to learn, teach and play, ideally playing in under an hour.

Accessibility: The winning entry can be played by most people, most of the time, in most places. Any special props may come from sustainable resources.

Fun/Community: If we like a game, that's great! But even a game isn't our cup of tea, if we see a thriving community of eager players, that's strong evidence that the game can last a while.

And on that note, if you're an entrant to the challenge, your job isn't over yet! Send us pics or videos showing your games being played by real people around the world. Seeing that community will weigh greatly in our judging. So, get some friends around the table and play some games!

Abstract Strategy Games
Portal by Kenny VenOsdel*
Numeria by Lloyd Krassner aka Warp Spawn Games
Coerceo by the Coerceo Company*
Zuniq by Marcos Donnantuoni*
Board Tag by Greg Stolze
Rin by Zhen Wang
Cartography by Benjamin Alan Mohr*
Rush Run Riot by Kelvin Beriguete
Sáto by Kristian Järventaus †
Venn’s Revenge by Louis J. Cassorla
Klon by Antoine Richard*
Take-Back-Toe by James Ernest*
Antipode by Shane Hendrickson †
Charing Cross by Mike C
Saaguan by Andrew Cooke*
Push by Dan Hope
Push by David Gordon Buresh
WarMaze by Mackenzie Cameron*
Nomad by Kirk Mitchell
ZoxSo by David Weinstock
Tricala by Myles Wallace
Muros by Enrique Sánchez*
Turning Points by Joseph Kisenwether
Sygo by Christian Freeling
Hunters & Haunts by C. Casey Gardner*
Flume by Mark Steere
Bluffing Style Chess by Tyler Tinsley*
Ketchup by Nick Bentley*
Yodd by Luis Bolaños †
GUCKOY by Mark A. Tiroff*
Hexiles by Derek Hohls*
Hot Wire by Phil Leduc
Crowns by Sovereign Games*
Kodrek by Joshua A.C. Newman*
Close Doesn't Count by Andrew Juell
Shooting Stars by Magnus Esko*
Bakkhus by Clay Gardner
Spread by Fernando Rivas*
Box by Douglas Hoover
Commander-in-Chief by Paul Miller*
Neighbors by XiFeng*

Social or Conversational Games
Public Secrets by Joshua Curtis Kidd
Pandora's Box by Benjamin D. Stanley
The Movie Game by Tonio Loewald*
F*ckin' Do It Then by Ryan Hughes*
Beloved by Ben Lehman*
Hand Covers Bruise by Andy Clarke and Grethe Mitchell
Rule of Three by Chris Sakkas*
Millennium Saga by Brian Suda*
Liars' Club by Matthew Moore

Dice Games
Kickbones by Frywire, LLC
Drop-Shy by Jonathan Walton

Card Games
Arena of Heroes by Jeremy Southard*

We'll announce the winner of the challenge on January 1st, 2012.

Thousand Year Game Design Challenge - Last-Minute Entries

2011-09-19T20:00:00.001-04:00

Well, we're settled into our new home, so I can finally round up the few entries to the Thousand-Year Game Design Challenge that came in on the very last day.

Kodrek by Joshua A.C. Newman
Indie game designer Joshua says: "Kodrek came out of a game of Human Contact, a science fiction roleplaying game about anthropology. When we needed a game that space pirates were playing in a bar, we started to describe this. After the game, we fleshed it out a little more. A dozen or so playtests later, I'm entering it in the contest and sending out prototypes to my Kickstarter backers who are getting a board."

Close Doesn't Count by Andrew Juell
Andrew offers this interesting abstract puzzler with several thoughts on its longevity. "I would be deeply hesitant to speculate as to how humanity and its circumstances will evolve over the next 100 years, much less the next 1000. Nonetheless. I am far enough below my word limit that I should probably at least explore a scenario or two." Read his entry for more.

Shooting Stars by Magnus Esko
Magnus sends in this lovely little abstract. He says: "Shooting Stars is an abstract strategy game for two players. It takes about 10 minutes to play. The board is the night sky and the players create new stars, shooting them around to spread stardust. The player who can spread the most stardust is the winner." He spends most of the entry discussing strategy, making components, and even suggesting tournament rules.

Liars' Club by Matthew Moore
Matthew provides one of the few entries to the challenge that are almost entirely conversational in nature. This is a social deduction game where you're tasked with divining who's a liar and who is not. A classic puzzle, to be sure. Oh! And Matthew also provided the game in flowchart form.

Bakkhus by Clay Gardner
Clay sends in this lovely game of symbol-matching, stone-placement and tile-flipping.

Spread by Fernando Rivas
Fernando sends in the most technically specific game of all the entries so far. Using a set of polygonal pieces, you form contiguous groups across a field, trying to reach the other side. The twist? The height of the group has an influence in play. Play the Flash demo here.

Drop-Shy by Jonathan Walton
Jonathan sends in this entry in the final hours of the entry deadline. It combines some elements of dominoes with enough open-endedness to cause friendly arguments among players. Oh! And it uses an open-ended number of dice, tossed all at the same time. You know I love that mechanic. :D

For the Fleet's Ship Consoles

2011-09-18T17:10:00.001-04:00

Okay, I said I was putting aside For the Fleet for public alpha, but I woke up this morning with visual ideas. Needed to shake them out or else I wouldn't get anything else done.

The icons are still rough, but I put together these backgrounds and spaceships from some stock art. Took a long time to find good source material, I tell ya.

I was reluctant to use 3d renders since they feel a little less approachable, but hopefully the bright saturated colors help that a bit. Okay, now I'm setting it aside. Too much else to do!

FOR THE FLEET - Alpha Document Release

2011-09-16T08:40:00.001-04:00

FOR THE FLEET
A Strategy Game for Glorious Captains and Short-Lived Crew

» 1-6 Players * 30-45 Minutes * Ages 12+
» Genre: Humor, Cooperation, Push-Your-Luck, Resource Management
» Theme: Star Wars' Rebels, Futurama's Zap Brannigan, Battlestar Galactica
» Game Inspiration: Catan Dice Game, Zombie Dice, Forbidden Island

» Description: You're a Star Captain serving in the ragtag rebel fleet. Your ship is a civilian vessel just barely fit for active duty. Hey, the Fleet takes what it can get. Trash haulers, pleasure yachts, and scrappy shuttlecraft – all against the dastardly Imperial Armada. Cooperate with the other captains to WARP across the galaxy, RAID the Empire, and PILLAGE futuristic resources. Keep your crew alive and bring home glory... FOR THE FLEET!

» Development Status: Alpha - See the current draft linked in the image. This is the kind of rough draft I usually write for any game with lots of little bits n' pieces. At the end, you'll see a long section outlining various cards and components. Not pretty, but it's easier to design and balance at a glance when it's all in text.

For now, I have too many commitments for the rest of the year to dwell on this too long. I still encourage comments for future reference, though. I'll revisit this game in earnest in a few months. For now, read the doc, ask questions, leave comments, and enjoy!

Star Wars as Unlockable Kickstarter Rewards [Guest Post: Kevin Allen Jr]

2011-09-15T20:00:00.000-04:00

Kevin Allen Jr. just posted this on Google Plus, in response to this week's Kickstarter-centric posts. It's all so good I just wanted to share it with you all:

+Daniel Solis has been talking a lot about kickstarter on his blog lately, and he's had my wrapt attention. His most recent post (linked below), gave me a nifty idea.

See I skimmed the title of his blog post in my RSS reader and got an idea of what he was going to talk about but i was WAAAAAY off. (NOTE: What he actually talks about is useful and interesting to anyone who's thinking of launching a kickstarter. I'm not going to talk about that. I'm going to talk about what i thought he was talking about.)

Examining the reward titles/levels Solis whipped up, I got the idea that depending on how far over goal your kickstarter goes you would "unlock" new parts of a games (or other transmedia project's) meta-fiction.

For example: Lets say you were making a game that essentially re-created the experience of the Star Wars saga.

- At 100% success the game play emulates A New Hope. The game is totally complete, and we don't need any more to have a satisfying experience. You play the game, blow up the deathstar, kiss your sister and a wookie gets the last word.

- At 200% success The Empire Strikes Back is brought into play, the game provides ways to incorporate that films darker tone, cloud city, lando, degobah, etc. But it leaves you with a bit of a cliffhanger/mysterious ending.

-Only if the project is funded 300% do benefactors unlock The Return of the Jedi parts of the game. This rounds out the experience, delivers on promises and threats put forward in the first two levels of the game. People will want to get here. You want people to want to get here.

There's a motivation for backers to put more money in after the initial goal has been reached, because now the project they've already invested in will be even richer. Also by adjusting the scope of work to the overflow of funding you will actively be showing people where their additional monies are going (pro tip: people like that).

Using Game Fiction in Unlockable Kickstarter Rewards

2011-09-14T20:00:00.001-04:00

Now, about that $100 price point in yesterday's post. Board games are expensive to produce in small volumes. By being clear that these are rare, boutique prototypes, I hope that price for a physical copy is a little less painful. There is a way around this, though. If the campaign is extraordinarily successful, we could produce prototypes more affordably and pass the savings to the backers.

200%: The Fleet Raids the Fringes of the Empire. $45 backers get the benefits of the Free Citizen reward level. Any backers $50 or over get a digital bundle of the game's raw production files.

300%: The Fleet Leads a Revolution on the Core Worlds. $40 backers get the benefits of the Free Citizen reward level. Any backers $50 or over get a digital bundle of the game's raw production files. This also unlocks a video demonstration of the game.

400%: The Fleet Conquers the Imperial Capital. $35 backers get the benefits of the Free Citizen reward level. Any backers $50 or over will get a digital bundle of the game's raw production files and a video demonstration of the game. The highest backer will also get 20 hours of Daniel Solis' time to do art direction, layout and branding consultation for one project. (Details to be negotiated.)

As you can see, the unlocked rewards here aren't necessarily more expensive to offer. The digital files would already be made for production, so making them available to backers costs nothing extra except maybe bandwidth. The video demo costs time to produce, but also gives an opportunity to show off a good prototype. And that offer of 20 hours? You can do that too if you have some special skills you can offer to one lucky backer.

As you set your own milestones, it never hurts to be optimistic. Want to go as high as 500%, 600%, even 1000%? Go right ahead! Just make sure the unlocked rewards are affordable for you to offer to that many people.

» Photo: CC BY-NC-SA Miguel Villasis

Name Recognition and Personal Investment in Kickstarter Reward Levels

2011-09-13T20:00:00.005-04:00

I'm taking my own advice in a little thought-experiment. Based on consultation with the card game price gurus, I thought FOR THE FLEET might be better suited as a traditional board game with chits, boards and dice. I could use Kickstarter to fund the production of boutique prototypes to demo at conventions and ship to interested company prospects. By current specs, the prototype would include

6 Ship Consoles
6 Ship Pawns
18 Sector Cards
36 Target Cards
1 Home Base Card

1 Imperial Capital Card
54 Crew Chits
27 Bio Chits
27 Pep Chits
27 Fuel Chits

27 Tech Chits
27 Meme Chits
54 Glory Chits
6 Dice

I've advised people to use your actual printed space as an opportunity for limited rewards for Kickstarter backers. That real estate is limited and valuable. It costs nothing extra to print a credit on a board, card or chit, but it means a lot to your most excited community members. Even if you're just printing a book, you could offer small bylines on each page for each sponsor. "This page sponsored by Firstname Lastname." With that in mind, here is how name recognition could be used in FOR THE FLEET's reward structure.

Imperial Drone: $1. All backers are listed in the game's credits on the rule sheet.

Rebel Sympathizer: $10. You will get a print-and-play PDF version of the game, complete with kickass papercraft starship miniatures.

Rations for the Fleet: $20. [27] This pledge provides nutrigel, vitaloaf, and coffee for the rebellion. You can name one of the Bio Resources in the game. Your chosen name is listed on one of the Bio chits. Plus, you will get the PDF version of the game.

Energy for the Fleet: $30. [27] This pledge provides dark matter, compost, and other exotic fuels for the rebellion. You can name one of the Fuel Resources in the game. Your chosen name is listed on one of the Fuel chits. Plus, you will get the PDF version of the game.

Hardware for the Fleet: $40. [27] This pledge provides hull patches, computers and duct tape for the rebellion. You can name one of the Tech Resources in the game. Your chosen name is listed on one of the Tech chits. Plus, you will get the PDF version of the game.

Luxury Items for the Fleet: $50. [27] This pledge provides comics, saucy holo-vids, and adequately sized helmets for the rebellion. You can name one of the Pep Resources in the game. Your chosen name is listed on one of the Pep chits. Plus, you will get the PDF version of the game.

Dangerous Ideas for the Fleet: $60 [27] This pledge provides secret Imperial plans, ancient alien knowledge, and addictive cat videos for the rebellion. You can name one of the Meme Resources in the game. Your chosen name is listed on one of the Meme chits. Plus, you will get the PDF version of the game.

Rebels for the Fleet: $70. [38] This pledge provides wave after wave of crew members for the rebellion. You can name one of the crew members. Your chosen name is listed on one of the Crew chits. Plus, you will get the PDF version of the game.

Free Citizen: $100. You will get a rare, first-run prototype of the game made specially for you by the designer, plus a PDF version. The first ten [10] backers at this level will also get to name one of the crew. [International Orders: Please add $20]

Imperial Overseer: $200. [36] You can name a planet. Your name is listed on its card with the title of Overseer. You will also get a rare first-run prototype of the game plus a PDF version. [International Orders: Please add $20]

Imperial Sector Host: $300. [18] You can name a Sector. Your name is listed on its card with the title of Sector Host. You will also get a rare first-run prototype of the game plus a PDF version. [International Orders: Please add $20]

Fleet Captain: $400. [6] You can name a rebel ship. Your name is listed on the ship's console with the title of Captain. You will also get a rare first-run prototype of the game plus a PDF version. [International Orders: Please add $20]

Rebel Leader: $1000. [1] You can name the rebel's home base. Your name is also listed on its card with the title Rebel Leader. Throughout the game text, any mention of the Rebel Leader will use your name. You will also get a rare first-run prototype of the game plus a PDF version. Your prototype will be signed and numbered by the designer. [International Orders: Please add $20]

Galactic Emperor: $1000. [1] You can name the Imperial Capital planet. Your name is also listed on its card with the title Galactic Emperor. Throughout the game text, any mention of the Galactic Emperor will use your name. You will also get a rare first-run prototype of the game plus a PDF version. Your prototype will be signed and numbered by the designer. [International Orders: Please add $20]

Each of these rewards gives the backer a sense of identity within the game's setting. This helps instill a sense of ownership in the fiction. You can easily do this for books by naming characters after backers. In a game, you can name example players after backers, too.

Tomorrow, I'll talk about how you can use the game's fiction in a different way, to structure the unlockable rewards.

» Photo: CC-BY-SA Kai Schreiber

Maintaining Kickstarter Momentum after 100%

2011-09-12T20:00:00.001-04:00

Sebastian Hickey asks for some Phase 2 crowdfunding advice:

"I used your Kickstarter project as a template for my effort, so apologies for stealing some of your ideas. I hit my funding goal really early, but now I don't know what to do with the project. Do I leave it there, sitting idle, or is there anything I can do to get more funders?"

Congratulations on hitting your goal! That begins Phase 2 of your campaign. Now, look at your production cost estimates and see where you can get volume discounts. Then you can start offering high tier benefits to backers of a lower tier. For those who already backed at a high tier, offer additional low-cost or no-cost benefits like PDFs and other digital goodies.

For example, when Do's campaign started, we only offered books to those who pledged $40. After we we passed ~150% funding, we started offering books to $30 backers, too. After the next milestone at ~200%, we offered books to $25 backers, too. So the $40 didn't feel like they were cheated, we offered them exclusive print editions of the first Do expansion and PDFs.

It's good to plan those milestones before the campaign starts, so newcomers aren't confused about what they're actually getting when they pledge.

Another thing you can do is start sending free product to charities once certain milestones are reached. Make sure those milestones give you enough profit to cover the loss of that free product.

For example, in Happy Birthday Robot's campaign, I sent free copies of the game to schools and libraries of backers' choice. This not only built good will with the game's target audience, but kept the urge to pledge active for the life of the campaign.

Just remember, this is one of several phases in the average Kickstarter life cycle. There may still be unexpected costs once your campaign is over. Keeping up the momentum and encouraging more pledges gives you enough cushion should anything go wrong in production or shipping.

Q&A on Card Game Design, Costs and Prices

2011-09-11T15:28:00.000-04:00

Last week, I sought council from Fred Hicks (Evil Hat), Matt Gandy (Margaret Weis Productions), Chris Hanrahan (Endgame), and Jeff Tidball (Who needs no introduction). I was curious about how price this card game:

Title: FOR THE FLEET
A Game of Glorious Captains and Their Short-Lived Crew
1-6 Players * 30-45 Minutes * Ages 12+
Pitch: Zap Brannigan's Catan meets Zombie Dice.
Description: You're a Star Captain serving in the ragtag rebel fleet. Your ship is a civilian vessel just barely fit for active duty. Hey, the Fleet takes what it can get. Trash haulers, pleasure yachts, and scrappy shuttlecraft – all against the dastardly Imperial Armada. Cooperate with the other captains to warp across the galaxy, raid Imperial targets, and earn futuristic resources. Keep your crew alive and bring home glory… FOR THE FLEET!
Genre: Humor, Cooperation, Light Strategy, Resource Management, Push-Your-Luck Dice Rolling

I already calculated numbers on costs for production, shipping and retail for a small print run. Using SuperiorPOD, here's what I got for a 100-unit small run.

Specs: 72-Card Deck, Full Color, Double-Sided
Deck of 2.5x3" Cards: $5.52 per unit, $552 for 100
A 8.5x7.25x1" box: $1.50 per unit, $150 for 100
with rigid foam packing: $0.60 per unit, $60 for 100
A 7"x10" Color Rules Sheet: $0.30 per unit, $30 for 100
TOTAL: $7.92 per unit, $792 for 100

So I asked the gurus a few questions.

Price and Box Size: If I used a fitted tuckbox, my per unit cost would be $6.57. However, for a product that size, I don't think I could get away with charging more than $15 at most. The larger box increases my per unit cost by over a dollar, but I feel like it psychologically allows an MSRP of $25 or even $30. Am I right?

FRED: Personally I don't think you can easily go over $20 for a simple deck
no matter how overpackaged it is. $25 for light componentry. $30 would
have to bring me a lot of componentry, I think, though 6 dice and
"lots of chips" may be just fine.

CHRIS: $20 is _way_ too high IMHO. In your card count, you have a ton of titles you are competing with that are as much as 25 - 50% less in terms of MSRP. Up your print run, and let volume sort this out.

JEFF: my gut says you can't go higher than $20 for a 72-card game with no additional components. You'll see lots of games with 100 or 110 cards at that price point, but worse than that, your 72 cards are really closer to 60 than to 100 in the eyes of your customers, and those games retail for $12 to $15. That is to say, basically, there's no way you can complete on price with a 72-card game if you're making 100 of them at a time.

MATT: I think it's good to ask these questions now, but I think the cart is getting a little ahead of the horse, based on your current prototype. I'd like to see you refine the game a bit further, to get a better sense of what you're really looking at. As is, I worry that you're working your design around print restrictions, rather than designing the game you want to see.

JEFF: In case it's not obvious, the 1-player capacity is huge. This is a *substantial* selling point of your game. Highlight it in all marketing.

I think the large box might sell more units, but only (essentially) as subterfuge, and at a substantial cost in customer satisfaction for everyone who actually opens the box. Be prepared for every review of your game to include at least one sentence to the effect of, "This is a large, mostly empty box containing a game that should have cost $12."

My recommendation is that you should shoot for whatever physical format for resources that their usage calls for. If they work best as poker chips (for example), don't use cards. Players will find that annoying. Speaking of printing, ODT is a new POD-like card printing option that will have substantially better quality than SuperiorPOD, at a slightly higher price. I'm attaching their booklet of pricing. Check out their small-format cards as an option for your resources. You might also look at The Game Crafter . They've recently rolled out some improved quality printing and componentry, so if you're looked at them before and been appalled, you may be pleasantly surprised at a re-visit.

My suggestion: Compete on awesome. Spitballing: Buy 100 sci-fi-looking metal ammo boxes as the packaging, hand-distress them all with a big metal file and a blowtorch, sign and number them all, make a video of yourself explaining the rules (and hand-distressing the ammo boxes!) and put it on a flash drive that you put inside the box, and charge $50 for the thing. Or $100. Then, in addition to that, sell a PDF version with a few alternate formats of the cards: one for avery nametag labels that fit playing cards well, one for cutting out and putting inside card sleeves, one for… i don't know, little tiny cards that fit on a keychain. Charge $5 or $6 for that. So, anybody who wants to play the game can do it inexpensively, and anyone who wants something Totally Awesome can give you lots of money for it. And in neither of those cases must you compete on even terms with a Mayfair or Fantasy Flight that's printing 5,000 copies at a time.

Components, Costs and Buyer's Remorse: If charging $30, should the game come with more components? Presently, the game calls for players to provide 6d6 and lots of chips for resource tracking. If those components were included, would the cost of production make a $30 MSRP unfeasible? Is $30 too much to ask for a game that doesn't come with everything you need to play?

FRED: Beware that as something with non-printed components, there's no
guarantee without paying for expensive testing that your product is
safe for kids & all that. So this might not be something that'd sell
into/through retail at all.

JEFF: There's no iron-clad liability dodge based on labeling alone, sadly, as the administration that interprets the rules has pretty broad discretion. Probably: You'd get away with it at 100-unit runs. It sort of depends on your tolerance for a low potential of high disaster. Two years ago, GAMA's legal counsel did a presentation on CPSIA, the most recent legislation on testing requirements, and provided a good handout.

Shipping Costs: Any idea on what a ballpark shipping price would be for a product of this size and weight?

JEFF: $5.20 is what the USPS small priority mail flat rate box costs. I'd choose a box size that fits inside it. Getting the shipping box for free is worthwhile. (Compare to shipping box prices at Uline, for example.) Depending on the game's weight, first-class mail could get down to $3.50 or $3.75 per game, but that will vary depending on the zip codes involved, and then you'll be paying for the shipping box as well.

Takeaways
It looks like if FOR THE FLEET is a card game, it will need to be a lot cheaper to produce. This is especially true if it doesn't come with all the components, even if some of the resources were included as additional cards to increase the size and weight of the box.

If FOR THE FLEET is not a card game, the price point can be higher because it would include more custom components and come in a larger box. However, the liabilities of hazards, labeling and product safety testing are cause for some concern. The best I could do to avoid those liabilities would be a print-and-play PDF with components you construct yourself. I might be able to give away prototypes, too, but that's more iffy.

Jeff's suggestion that single-player mode is that much of a selling point came as a surprise, honestly. I know there's a nice demand for good two-player games, especially ones that a couple can play in under an hour. But solitaire games? Huh. Very surprising.

Plenty to think about here. Years ago, I focused on making free games so I wouldn't have to worry about commercial potential. Now I find myself thinking about costs and MSRP for a game earlier and earlier in the design process. Matt's right, of course, it's too early to worry about that when the game is so nascent. Still, this was all very useful information and I thought it would be valuable to you, too.

As a thought experiment, I structured a plan for how I could use Kickstarter to fund production of prototypes, but that's another post.

» Photo: CC-BY Chris Metcalf

Thousand Year Game Design Challenge - August Update

2011-08-31T02:00:00.019-04:00

Phew! It's a busy time over here. We're moving across the country tomorrow, so I have to do a one-day-early round up of entries so far. Here's everything we've received in August as of the 30th! If you enter your game on the 31st, expect to see it in one last round up after we arrive in Durham and have internet access again. But heck, there are plenty of games to check out in this post alone, so let's get to it!

Nomad by Kirk Mitchell
Kirk describes Nomad as "a game of topographical manipulation, balance and nonviolence, inspired by geological strata, Go and other difficult games." I certainly like the materials used in his prototype! Quite lovely.

ZoxSo by David Weinstock
David enters this two-player abstract he bills as a "new ancient" game. David home-produced a run of prototypes for this game, but I let it slide past the "not-previously-published" restriction since it was such a limited run.

Tricala by Myles Wallace
Text rules for Tricala can be found here. I haven't played enough of the mancala family to really figure out the deeper strategies, so I'm curious how we'll handle a version with additional dimensions and colors. Should be interesting!

Arena of Heroes by Jeremy Southard
This is one of the few straight-up card games in the challenge. Looks like this one was already in development (even has a Kickstarter page) and tossed into this Challenge much like a gladiator into the arena. Fitting!

Hand Covers Bruise by Andy Clarke and Grethe Mitchell
This two-person team enters a game based on bluffing and guessing of raised fingers. They say, "We have tried to devised the simplest possible game." I'm surprised there aren't more entries using hands and other elements of physicality, but hey there ya go. This one will definitely be easy to prep!

Muros by Enrique Sánchez
Enrique enters another two-player abstract, this one with lots and lots of bits n' pieces. Multi-colored stones, colors, and so forth. Curious how Megan and I are going to find enough props around the house to play, but it'll certainly be colorful! You can also find a Spanish version of the rules on his blog here.

Turning Points by Joseph Kisenwether
Well, Joseph sure knows how to make a game look like it's been played for a thousand years! Take a look at those sea shells on the beach. The rules are quite minimal, which gives me some hope for emergent complexity. You can also play an online demo on the link above.

Sygo by Christian Freeling
Christian describes Sygo thusly: "Sygo is a territory game based on the Symple mechanism and Go-like capture with an 'othelloanian' flavor. It is designed to be much faster than Go, and finite, and without the ambiguities regarding life, death, multiple ko's, four-bend-in-the-corner and the like, that make its ancestor such a great game to argue about." Example Game | Playable Online

Rule of Three by Chris Sakkas
This is one of the few non-board games entered into the challenge. So far, those outliers have been very interesting variations on storytelling motifs. Chris offers some insights into his thought process in this post on the Story-Games forum. There he also links to a longer document explaining the game and an example game, too. The only document we'll use to judge is the shorter rules doc linked above.

Hunters & Haunts by C. Casey Gardner
Casey didn't just design his game, he also elaborated on the world in which the game exists. Speaking of the game's murky 1,000-year history, he drops little hints of the world of 3091 and some major historical changes between now and then.

Kickbones by Frywire, LLC
Ah, a blissfully minimal rules set! "Kick Bones is a dice game for two players. Each person starts with 25 points. Your goal is to make your opponent's points go below one (1). When it's your turn, you roll the dice. If you don't roll doubles, then you pick one die to add to your points. With the other die, you kick your opponent, and they subtract this amount from their points. If you roll doubles, then you refer to the Specials Sheet to see what you have to do! It's then your opponent's turn to roll the dice."

Flume by Mark Steere
Mark easily takes the prize for the most boastful entry into the challenge. He says, "I haven't looked at the other games in the contest, but, that being said, I'm sure they will all be obsolete in well under 100 years. Never mind 1000. Flume is here to stay, as are many of my games, which I designed for the centuries."

Bluffing Style Chess by Tyler Tinsley
Tyler says, "I'm entering a chess variant because the games that will last 1000 years are the games that we were playing 1000 years ago, just changed a bit by time and taste. This game is more inline with modern values then chess, you win with lies and half truth instead of planing and reason. In 1000 years I imagine this game will still be played face to face with physical pieces, the pieces just have a strange way of changing shape and color to fit whatever game you want to play. That person your face to face with, maybe they are just a projection made from the same stuff as the pieces."

Ketchup
Playable Online
Ketchup is an interesting stone placement game set on a hexagonal board. The quirky part of it is the conditions on which you can place one, two or three stones on your turn. It's playable against human opponents in realtime here, where the game is known as "Ketchup 4.0"

Yodd
Luis describes Yodd thusly: "It's a very elegant connection/territory game with no draws. You can place stones of both colors. The object is to end up with less groups than your opponent. At the end of a turn, there must be an odd number of groups on the board. This is a very intuitive and fluid game. The odd groups restriction spices up tactics in an unexpected way, without interfering with clarity. "

Neighbors by XiFeng
XiFeng has one of the few non-board game entries to the challenge. This one is a hand gesture game in the tradition of Rock-Paper-Scissors. He says, "When Daniel Solis announced the thousand-year game design contest, I saw in it an opportunity and a challenge to design a game that could capture a few of the things that make my favorite games special, in a form that is not encumbered by technology (like video games) or expensive equipment (like change ringing)."

GUCKOY by Mark A. Tiroff
Mark enters the challenge with this game full of colorful stones on a board made of concentric rings, rays, and nodes at the intersections. As with Muros, I suspect that this may be somewhat cumbersome game to construct on our own, but perhaps the actual play experience will justify the setup.

Millennium Saga by Brian Suda
Throughout the competition, I was curious when someone would enter a game that actually takes a thousand years go play. Here comes Brian with this game. "Millennium Saga is a long term game design to draft a poem describing and spanning 1,000 years of history. The framework is to guide the participants into creating a collective work to be publicly performed as a form of oral history." Here is further background information about the thought process in designing it and his inspiration.

Hexiles by Derek Hohls
Derek enters an abstract game comprised of custom shaped tiles with abstract patterns. These tiles form a new kind of deck of universal gaming props with which you can play many new games. Like C. Casey Gardner, Derek constructs a whole backstory behind the creation of these bits n' pieces. As with the other entries that require special props, we're eager to see if the play experience justifies the prep work.

Hot Wire by Phil Leduc
Phil says of Hot Wire: "It is a simple game the requires pencil, paper and a straightedge for neatness. As long as there are study halls and long car or plane rides this game will have a niche. The game is played on a 7 x 7 grid, players connect points of the grid and try not to be the last to draw a line."

Crowns by Sovereign Games
This is one of the few (possibly only) entries that comes from a group! Sovereign Games says of Crowns, "It requires 598 words to explain (plus 307 in this little intro), but allows for more unique games than there are atoms in the observable universe (email us if you’re interested in the math). It’s a kill-the-king type game with a historical battlefield theme, and the rules are quite robust for competitive play. We like to play sets of games, best 3-of-5, to make setup strategy more impactful."

Megan and Daniel on the Road

2011-08-30T19:15:00.000-04:00

We're on the road for the next several days, on our way to Durham. Our internet might not be up yet for a few days after we arrive, so posts will be a little less frequent, too.

Re: The Thousand-Year Game Design Challenge, it's unfortunate timing that our move begins the same day as the last day of entries. But hey, that's how things happen. I'll post a round up of entries as of the 30th tonight and a later round up with the entries as of the 31st. That post will come as soon as we have internet access again.

Re: Game Design: I'll tinker with some stuff for For The Fleet as well as other games in the lab while we wait for internet access. There is no shortage of stuff to work on, so I suspect there will be plenty of new developments to discuss.

Wish us well on the long drive! We'll see you in North Carolina!

Retheming For the Fleet [In the Lab]

2011-08-28T22:24:00.003-04:00

As BGG noted, one For the Fleet's biggest similarities to BSG is the premise. So we need a new theme. I don't want to move away from scifi, though. Folks were really creative with those ships!

A retheming should also explain the victory condition, which in For the Fleet is a little odd. You'd think the victory condition should simply be surviving for X rounds. But in For the Fleet, you're trying to earn X victory points before Y rounds. A subtle difference, but one that should be at least make sense with the new theme.

So here's a quick stab at a new pitch and new theme.

Pitch: It's Zap Brannigan's Catan with a dash of Han Solo. The kind of game where carelessly throw red-shirted henchmen into the harm's way. The kind of game where you might shout "Stop dying, you cowards!"

Theme: You're captains of a ragtag rebel fleet – a mish-mash of antique military ships, smuggling freighters and retrofitted pleasure yachts. You're on a supply run for the rebellion, pursued by imperial forces. The rebel fleet can warp ten times before being caught, so make the most of it!

Altered Terms: The Jump Deck is renamed the Warp Deck, to distinguish from BSG a bit. Instead of harvesting asteroid belts and uninhabited planets, you raiding the empire's ships, colonies and outposts.

Art: I see the art being a bit cartoony, like Futurama meets Team Fortress 2. Exaggerated features, puffed up chests, cunning winks, and evil goatees.