Velocimancer Games

Wow this weather is fucked! Hunker down, chew an orange, take a salt tablet, douse yourself in vitamin D and tiger balm, and enjoy this week’s installment of Mechanic Monday. Funny thing about social deduction games.  Does anyone else get this? Whenever I play Resistance: Avalon, or any other members of the lycanthrope organized crime family, I find myself getting stuck in the role of pretend good guy, and I can’t shake it even after the game’s over.  Like I spend the rest of the evening, long after a winner is declared, trying to stop myself from speaking in pointless friendly lies.  They break my brain! I don’t know why it is, or if it’s related to the way that, despite having a decades-long background in improvisation, writing, and performance, I sometimes struggle with role-playing games.  I think it comes down to the fact that for my brain, games are a particular type of challenge; I tend to go all in for moon-shots and big bets, I’m not the best at playing my ...

Happy Monday! Let’s do the time warp today. My first Gamer’s Game was purchased at Chicago institution, Cat & Mouse Games.  Looking back, I think I was vaguely aware that Games had gotten Exciting, and I looked up where to find a store that would sell these Exciting New Games.  I think for me I ruled out Marbles and then it came down to C&M and Dice Dojo - the Dojo had a difficult-to-navigate website, whereas C&M felt within striking distance, so Cat & Mouse it was.  I walked in and my head exploded.  I’d probably played a copy of Catan, maybe Fluxx, back in college, but apparently I was watching an entire renaissance happen in real time. I remember walking past the new arrivals (which were right by the front door back then, and this was at the now defunct original Bucktown location) and being captivated by a re-skinned version of a game I’d admired from afar in my youth: Netrunner.  Now it wore a shiny new blue and grey box, and had appended t...

This week I’m going to take a look back at my MM posts from 2018 and talk about some of the games that DO in fact implement the mechanics I’m talking about, or that are somehow related to that mechanic.  It’s a retrospective: Let’s see if this even remotely works! Conflict Chips: Again, this mechanic was inspired by the Jinteki faction, so let’s tag ANDROID: NETRUNNER (aww rip), and also the chip-wagering aspect has a touch of IRONRISE in there too.  Why be snobby? Let’s also admit that it draws a bit on ROCK PAPER SCISSORS. Action Wheel: So I’ve only recently had rondel games satisfactorily explained to me, but they do have some things in common with the Action Wheel.  So let’s tag… EMPIRE ENGINE.  My own implementation, of course, is OASES.  It also draws on the WARE/(MAN)CALA family of “seed-and-pot” games.  And action tokens are already in… way too many games to count, but let’s tag ANDROID: NETRUNNER again. Refining: I think SIDEREAL CONFLUENCE d...

Hello there! I completely forgot that Mechanic Mondays are on Mondays, so here it is now to make up for missing it.  This one is very fuzzy and cloudy in my head, so let’s talk through it together, shall we? So there’s this series of books that I think have a lot to like, but which have started to tire me.  It’s the Gentleman Bastards series, starting with The Lies of Locke Lamora.  Now I love rogues and fantasy and heists and worldbuilding and all that.  I love it.  But there’s a funny thing about thievery in fantasy books; it’s usually non-magical, and is therefore typically set up as a mundane foil or counter to magic, an ability that anyone can learn, with practice and charm and sufficiently nimble fingers and loud distractions.  The thing about the Gentleman Bastards books is that after a while, the Thief Tricks became so effective and spectacular as to be comparable to magic, and eventually, indistinguishable.  There’s a scene where someone pick...

What’s that? It is, against all odds and in flagrant violation of basic decency, a Monday again? How even dare it be so.  Fuck this year.  I know it’s traditional to reflect and eulogize and be positive about the year that’s ending but that ain’t me! This year was terrible and next year will likely be even worse WELCOME BACK TO MECHANIC MONDAY ON THE BLOG WHAT A GOOD TIME WE HAVE TOGETHER MY FRIENDS. Today I want to talk about (checks notes) boardless board games.  Now, I’ve always been kind of wiggly about boards in the first place.  Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate a big beautiful map, I like a good illo and some smart graphic design and the feeling of unfolding the chunky flat setting for a battle of wits or what have you.  But perhaps it’s because boards are so foundational (literally, and in every other way) to the genre that I’ve always been drawn to alternatives.  One of my first (possibly my very first?) designs, Flect, was designed to be pieces in...

Happy Christmas Eve! If you’re into that sort of thing.  I’m not, as a rule.  I hate fun.  Which you probably already guessed based on (he gestures broadly at this entire blog).  What are you doing here? Are you hiding from your family? Stuck at retail? Too full of food to do anything but scroll through your phone? Well whatever the reason, welcome.  Welcome.  Let’s talk about another bonkers game design possibility. So one of 2018’s most successful prototypes for me was Fun Harmless Wa - er, Runtime Error.  It’s the fastest I’ve ever built a prototype, and it playtested great, with encouraging, actionable results.  As a reminder, Runtime Error is a cyberpunk deckbuilding legacy game, with the big twist being that any card in your deck can also be added to your tableau, taking it out of your deck and allowing you to use it every turn.  And it’s that last part, the bit that’s uniquely Fin and the only part of the previous sentence that’s NOT ...

Sorry this one’s late fam, but happy belated MECHANIC MONDAY Today I want to talk about something that’s poked its nose into my thoughts every once in a while - a distant great niece of the very hot mechanic, I Cut You Choose.  In ICYC, one player divides up a lot, and the other player(s?) selects which lot to take.  It encourages the Cut player to balance what they want with what their opponent wants, and keeps a game tight throughout.  You can tinker with actions, lot manipulation, hidden resources, poison pills.  It’s a fertile family of mechanics. Now let’s take that, flip it over, move it North, and make it weird. What happens if we take the part where an opponent has agency over your options, and blow that up big? What if you and your opponents exchanged collections (card collections, say, because I’m basic afffff), and made each other’s decks? Or, if that’s too radical, you each build your deck, but instead of shuffling, you order the cards in one another’s...