Lies and deceit: Week 1

Another week, another game idea! This time, I want to work on a social game. There were a few ideas I was considering, but the standout besides the one I settled on was essentially just mafia, minus the roles and plus luck based elements, so I decided to step away from it. I might revisit it as a short game at some point, but I feel like it’s not worth the whole three week period.

So what’s the actual idea for this week? The base concept is that one player has to present a group of symbols in a certain order and match it to another set that is only known by a group of other players. The issue is that only one of these players is actively trying to assist them. The rest of them are trying to derail their task, making them get the order wrong.

Speaking in terms of gameplay loops, the primary loop is not to sort the symbols, rather, it’s to find out which member of the group is actually telling you the truth. The larger goal and secondary loop is assembling the symbols correctly.

As for the flavor, I’d like to imagine it being magically based. Perhaps the main player is a medium trying to conduct a resurrection ritual on a specific spirit, but if they mess up, the evil spirits will be able to attack the medium. The ritual explains the specificity of the task related as well.

In theory, the game sounds feasible, but there are definitely details to be ironed out. Balance will be a large part of the issue, ranging from how to make the job of the helper more enjoyable and feasible to including extra symbols that need not be placed in the final group, but that will come with time and a lot more theory on my part.

Overall, this game is another concept with which I’m pleased. I imagine the gameplay being exciting, at least for the pack of liars and the medium. The fact that a flavor came so readily is also a big bonus.

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Drop Zone

Welcome to week three, which means a new game! I’d like to introduce Drop Zone, the abstract dexterity-based game that asks you to destroy the game pieces!

Design-wise, this one was reasonably difficult. I originally planned for the destruction of the game pieces to have a larger importance to they way you play the game and to be a much more cathartic experience, with more of a zealous tearing method, rather than the more strategic style which I ended up using. I simply couldn’t figure a way to make it a game mechanic without being completely unwieldy. Additionally, tearing paper is not as cathartic as I initially believed it would be, at least when tearing a single sheet, but I’m not going to ask someone to purchase an entire sheaf of paper each time they want to play Drop Zone, as funny as that would be.

I ended up doing away with a few needless things that I mentioned last week, such as the point system. Such a thing would incentivize strategic placement of your tokens but would distract from the interplay between marking squares and preventing your opponents from claiming squares, which I believe already encourages smart token placement.

Overall, it’s a simple game, but the concept is a solid one. I wish I had a little bit more depth to the idea, but that’s the issue with focusing fitting a game to a gimmick. For all you gain in ease of conceptualizing, you lose an equal amount in the depth of the concept. That aside, I’m happy with the result and am pleased to present Drop Zone!

Click the links located below to download the pdf files for Drop Zone, one of which is a readme.

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A destructible game: Week 2

I was preparing a post about how I had no ideas (and actually got several paragraphs into the thoughts on that), but I’ve come up with a solid enough concept. It’s different from the previously mentioned card game concept, but it’s way better than any idea I came up for the card game base.

The planned game is a two player type of game. The board is a grid of 4×4 or 5×5 one-inch spaces which will be arbitrarily assigned values, possibly by the players, dice, or maybe I’ll figure out some elegant and specific design.

Each player gets three or so one-inch tokens that are to be dropped on the board from a inch or two up. When the token lands, the spaces covered by it, even if only partially covered, are counted as claimed, and the points on them go to the current player. The opposing player cannot get points from these spaces, even if they land on them.

The catch is that, as the main idea of the game, is that you can rip your tokens in order to diversify your claims and prevent your opponent from trying to place around that area. The idea is that this brings a higher chance of missing spaces that you desperately wanted. I’ve yet to decide on a limit for the number of rips you can do, but we’ll see as I complete play testing and solidify the rules.

I think that’s all I have update-wise, though it was, for all intensive purposes, a lot. I’m excited by the prospect of the game actually and am glad that the concept hit me before I made the less exciting update post!

I still don’t have a name yet though. Oops.

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A destructible game: Week 1

So, within the new system, I’m releasing an update a week. I’ll try my best to keep it on Sundays, but since it worked out like this, it’ll just have to be a Thursday!

So, the concept I want to explore with this game is the print and play aspect of all of my games. The main advantage that the medium provides is that it’s easily accessible and is extremely cheap, but what if I took advantage of those aspects. If everything is cheap and easy to replace, why not use that to make a game?

As such, I’d like to create a destructible game this time around. It will likely involve cards and dexterity via tearing them, but, on the exact implementation of those elements, I’m not entirely sure as of yet.

As games based off specific gimmicks go, it’ll definitely take a decent amount of brainstorming to solidify a design that implements the gimmick in a way that makes the gimmick worthwhile while also being enjoyable.

It’s important to remember that, if something extraneous is being added, that the experience of it better be worth the trouble of doing it in the first place. Sometimes, the subtlety is not worth the complexity. I’m hoping that I can come up with a solid concept that can deliver that level of fun. We’ll see by this Sunday!

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Second Person

This game’s concept was a wonderful return to form for the games I like posting on this website. That’s not to say that I’m not proud of the last two or three games I released, but they certainly weren’t exactly what I wanted to be releasing.

Second Person originally started as my desire to make a game that functioned from the second person. Essentially, you would be watching your main way of interacting with the game. I couldn’t find a properly fun way to implement it into a board game, so I decided to look into creating a dexterity game instead, and I think I came up with a winner.

Second is derived from the game “Ninja” some people may have played as a kid. The goal of the game was to strike the opponent’s hands in a single motion while also protecting your own hands, and, from reading Second Person‘s rules, I’m sure that the inspiration is somewhat apparent.

Overall, I’m proud to present Second Person, a team based dexterity game where you play in the Second Person!

Located below is the pdf file containing the rules for Second Person!

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A few welcome changes!

Well, 2020 has come and gone, which is exciting. I’m happy to present a new game, which is featured in the next post, at the start of this new year, as well as a few changes to the way my content production works.

While, in the past, I had a release schedule of one game every two weeks, which I kept up for eleven total games, by the end of which, I was exhausted of creating games and temporarily pursued other avenues of creativity. In other, more simple words, I burned myself out. I also feel like the format was inefficient for what I was actually trying to achieve with the project, which was a psuedo-documentation of the thought process behind making the games.

As such the new format is the release of one game every three weeks, but the Sunday of every week within that period will provide an update on the progress of the project. Here’s the plan.

Week one: I select the specific idea that I wish to pursue and list the possible avenues I will explore in its creation.

Week two: I post a rough ruleset of the game, as well as my thoughts on the state of the game, where improvements could be made, additional things I’d like to add, and similar such items.

Week three: I provide a final copy of the game, ready to be played as is. Following that, I post a list of ideas for games that I would like to try writing and brainstorm possible implementations of the ideas that I have, whether that be gameplay, flavor, a specific weird thing I want to try, or something else.

With a plan laid out, I hope to stick to it and keep myself properly paced to not burn out, while improving my overall process of creation and detailing my thoughts on the creation.

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Tangled Web

Tangled Web is a pen and paper game that’s relatively simple. It follows Snake’s elements of not crossing certain areas and Pac-man’s mechanic of going across the board via the outside, with a hexagonal board.

Located below is the file for Tangled Web.

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Placeholder

Yes, that’s the actual name of the game. I willingly chose it during the design process because I feel it fits the game.

I actually really love the simplicity of this game. The entire document isn’t even 10 sentences long. Most of the design practice here was a ton of playtesting. When a game has rules as simple as this one does, any number of things can go wrong, such as being completely unable to win the game depending on your first move, which was actually a problem at some points of the design process.

I look at it as one of those game theory heavy type games that mathematicians like doing papers on, ridiculously simple but a lot of options that spawn from it. It’s designed for two players and requires a 4×4 board, which you can draw yourself, and nine tokens per player. If you’re looking for an easy game that has relatively high depth, give Placeholder a try.

Located below is the pdf file for Placeholder.

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Duelist’s Wager

Sorry that this game is a week late, but life happens sometimes. Expect to see the normal game this upcoming Sunday though. I’m also rewriting the Luckbinder, because it was dreadfully weak, so that should be out soon as well.

I’ve had this game idea for a while; ever since I wrote Powerdome, I’ve had an obsession with ability-based bluff games, and this was one of the concepts I wanted to try. Drafting characters with special abilities in order to create interplay between both choosing them and empowering them later on was the basic idea. I think it went pretty well all things considered. The character tokens and Boost system are quite elegant in my eyes.

The hardest part of this game was coming up with character abilities that had three qualities: ability to influence how you play your Boosts, ability for your opponent to predict how you’ll play your boosts, and different functionality from the other characters.

Duelist’s Wager is a bluffing game that focuses on your ability to outplay your opponent. With elements of prediction and strategy in both choosing which characters you bring to the fight and how well you’ll equip them to win with your limited resources, you’ll be sure to enjoy how much you can really get into your opponent’s head. It’s designed for two players to fight each other in a duel of pure wits, and with each game only taking around ten minutes, you’ll be able to fit in that “just one more” game in order even out the score.

Located below are the pdf files for Duelist’s Wager, one of which is a readme.

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A D&D Class: The Luckbinder!

For this two week period, I decided to do something a little bit different. Instead of posting a game, I’m gonna post a bit of my D&D homebrew!

I may have not have mentioned it before, but I’m incredibly into Dungeons & Dragons. Outside of writing games, it consumes just about my every waking thought. However, I find that, when I play, I’m at the whim of the dice far too often. A +10 can’t save a natural 1, after all. However, I’ve come up with a solution to this: the luckbinder!

The luckbinder is based around manifesting both positive and negative luck by directly changing the results of your dice and the dice of others.

For the time being, all I have is the basic class, but I’ll be working on uploading the subclasses in the coming weeks, not interfering with the typical game upload schedule this time.

Locate below is a pdf file for the luckbinder class. Take a look and tell me what you think!

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