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Showing posts from 2016

More Birch, More Crown

The Birch Crown continues apace.  I know this is premature, but I've also knocked together an expansion. An expansion?! you gasp, mouth agape and eyes agog, the veins standing livid in your forehead and your arms as your knuckles whiten on the table's edge, which groans within your grip.  Before you've even come close to middling, much less finishing, the "base game"?! Let me cut you off before you can draw in a huge breath and shout "Blasphemy!" in my face.  The Birch Crown, as it stands, is already modular, and there's no reason suits can't be dropped into the mix, a la Daniel Solis' Trickster series.  But for POD purposes, I want to limit it to seven suits, so that you can have a pleasing 7-symmetry, and also so that the whole thing fits in all standard 54-card measurements (in terms of card sheets, box size, etc), with room for rules and title/cover.  I've had some other ideas for suits, and a few twists on rules, so yes, I'm wo

The Birch Crown

Ahahahaha.  My last post was more than eleven months ago.  In that post, I made fun of the gap betwixt posts.  Some things never change. Cowl & Mask has reached a point that I'm happy with but somewhat confounded by.  I think it's different and innovative (I shall shy away from the grailterm "original") but I haven't had much success in convincing people that it's actually fun, and I'm not sure where (if anywhere) to go with it next.  In the meantime, I've kept up a moleskine notebook of almost exclusively game design ideas, and I've chipped away at various projects. The one I'm feeling best about at the moment, however, is The Birch Crown.  I was playing Cards Against Humanity last year (after a Stanley Cup playoffs game, I believe - and I think the Lightning won that one) for the first time in a long while, and one guy was just running away with the game, and I got to thinking about how to use the core A2A/CAH mechanic for a game.  Add