Velocimancer Games

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...

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 ...

Mid-February 2015.  I haven't posted in eight, ten months? So of course I'm posting again.  Because it's time for the Contests on BGG again. Golly.  It's frightening how much time speeds up the older I get.  Will I miss my future children's lives if I look away? Instead of minutes or hours, will I someday soon lose months and years, slipping away if I loosen my grip or tighten it too hard? ... ANYWAY.  I have still been working on games, the usual dabbling and tinkering and reading and making notes.  I think the real viable project I should bear down on is AaTX.  I've thought about re-theming it, perhaps making it more about exorcising or freeing spirits rather than straight combat, in order to pitch it to Smart Play Games.  I do think that there's something there for Project Smatter (Neon Static Erasure? Neon Static Danger? Neon Static Overdrive? - Perhaps just Neon Hyper Static, with different boards and game modes) - especially as I want to ...

I've made some progress on Project Smatter (Neon Fight? Neon Flights? Neon Static?) but I think it needs more work than I can really give it to make it contest-ready by the deadline.  But we'll see! I really like the game (the big scary change I'm considering making is giving one action per player per turn, instead of two.  Dunno if I'm smart enough to play that game, much less design it) but I frankly don't play Go, Chess, Tafl, even Checkers; none of the heavy abstrategy games.  So I'm sort of paralyzed by that.  And there's only a month left in the 2P contest.  I may just mess with For King and Country, polish that up and submit that. So what have I been working on instead? Probably nothing, right? I mean probably.  Except that I've got this bug in my head for a solitaire 52-card game.  It's inspired by my reading and commenting on a lot of design stuff on the BGG Design forums, and you can definitely see fingerprints from others' (unfinishe...

Today's post is a short one, which is fitting as it commemorates an achievement of no great note, beside personal pride.  Today I wrote up a little more on my BGG thread about Project Smatter, outlining the boards.  Recently, I've been obsessing over whether the boards should adhere to multiples / exponentials of three or two, trying to thematically link the layouts of the boards to overarching numerical motif blah blah blah.  Writing stuff down in the BGG thread, I had contrasting information.  Whatever.  Nail down the basics, talk about some possibilities, but not for too long, because nailing down the basics means you have enough of a foundation to start playing. And after writing it up, with pictures and bolding, that's what I did: I just started playing.  I got out the pieces, I set up the boards, and I started playing myself.  I got confused, so I got out a turn marker.  I got stuck in a back-and-forth, so I restarted with one of my po...

What? Two posting days in a row? Is he back, folks? Is he back? Well, we'll see. I wanted to coalesce some thoughts I've had for a two-player semi-abstract game.  Its working title is Project Smatter, as it involves cyberpunk and chess elements.  Well, chess-ish. That's the thing.  The game as I will envision it will push how we envision abstract games, while also utilizing different mechanics from the oldest games of the genre.  I especially want to play with: Pieces that change into other pieces. Different capturing types: Jumping, a la Checkers Taking, a la Chess Hammer-and-anvil / surrounding, a la games of the Tafl family. An unusual board Right now, it's a 2-player game where each side starts with 8 pieces, all of the basic type - sPawn (Can move 3 spaces, hammer-and-anvil style conversion, turns enemy pieces into friendly sPawn).  Ideally, sPawn can be (optionally) upgraded under certain conditions to become cRooks (Can move 2 spaces, jump t...

As promised, I am come out of hiding.  And today, so soon after my last post (the wonderfully poorly-received Sweet Game), I have yet another complete(ish but largely untested) fast little game design for you! Here's For King and Country, a game to be played between two players, using the standard 52-card poker deck.  I designed it for the Dice Hate Me Loves Cards contest, not realizing that they were looking for games that used custom decks.  As my game used existing 52-card decks, it was not an eligible entry. I'm still pleased by the game, however.  It's a quick, rough thing, but I like the 'spread' mechanic, and it's also an homage of sort to Sid Sackson, and some of my other favourite designers. Anyhow, if anyone's interested, the game can be found here .  It includes the rules and scoring for For King and Country, and also for the 2+ player variant, For Love or Money. Slan!