Velocimancer Games

Hi it's me again! The person who writes this blog! And also, I feel comfortable betting, the person who reads this blog! I'm back this week with another hair-raising bone-rattling one quarter portion just add water of the only thing this blog does lately: Mechanic Monday! I should be easier on myself.  This blog was never meant to be for popular consumption or profit, but rather to get out, articulate, brainstorm and build on my design ideas.  And I’ve nailed that, especially with a weekly habit/ritual that I can reliably fulfill.  Red ocean blue ocean buddy.  Get good at your own thing not someone else's thing.  Anyway, I’m kind of reaching the end of this one-game-focus experiment, I’ve sketched out pretty much every element of Fantasy GM Squared at this point; this will probably be my last MM on this one, at least for a while.  Time to stop talking and start (keep) doing.  And this last one is kind of a weird meta one that I may not actually end up...

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaand We’re Back (A Dinosaur Story) with another installment of nobody’s favourite Feature on the #0 Game Design Blog on Tipper Gore’s World Wide Web, Mechaniiiiiic Mondaaaaaay! This week, we’re going to take a look at - you guessed it - Fantasy GM Squared! It’s almost like I’m trying to focus on one design to the exclusion of others, in order to actually get it to the point where it can be worked on and playtested to a more meaningful degree than my previous designs! Wowzers.  What a concept.  But it’s a good challenge for me to stay locked in and innovate even when I’m not inspired to, as opposed to haring off to tinker on the latest new brainbug to infect my mind.  So I’ll keep on plunging my hands into the guts of this thing. So, what’ll it be today? More of people’s favourite bit of Fantasy: Player Acquisition.  But this time, it’s the other half of the equation - Free Agency! Free Agency Outside of the Draft, there are two ways to acquire Heroes...

Is it a Mechanic Monday if it’s on a Thursday? You bet your ass it is! It’s been a crazy busy week for me, what with work and the theatre company and [my dog] and my poor time management skills and my need to fill every hour with productivity and the smiling oppressive all-crinkling eye of Capitalism and ANYWAY.  Gonna keep work, work, working away at Fantasy GM Squared (maybe I’ll just go with square cards to double-down on that title?) because it’s got the most legs, legs, legs, marketability.  I even made a Google Form to try and harvest data on just what it is that non-gamers most like about fantasy sports, and will try and spring that on people in the coming weeks.  But today, let’s talk about a mechanic, shall we? Here it is: The Front Office! Front Office When a Hero is at the Dedicate level, and the season ends, instead of rotating them again, flip the Hero card over and place it in your Guild’s Front Office.  For the remainder of the game, that Hero, no...

Hey hey hey, it’s the start of the work week, time to prop your eyelids up with toothpicks, winch open your mouth for the caffeine spout, and numb the pain with another episode of MECHANIC MONDAY! Ha ha, light stuff, light stuff, we sure have fun here.  My wife and I cleaned recently (not exactly a KonMari but definitely some purging) and I organized or binned a bunch of old PnP stuff and old drafts of some of my previous designs.  Now, with our guest room / office finally in striking distance of being done, I am of course considering busting out more office supplies and setting up some sort of filing system for the analog manifestations of my prototypes and WIP designs.  A folder for each game, each with its own notebook, the various drafts of rules, feedback from various playtests, etc.  It might be helpful for me to keep projects from getting lost in the shuffle, or it may cause me to feel an unearned sense of completeness as designs crystallize and ossify. ...

Ding ding ding, time for a fresh new helping of MECH AN IC MO N DAY! All aboard “fin heads”, if there’s any ROOM left ABOARD this very full BANDWAGON! Got a chance to playtest R2I Games’ latest project a couple weeks back, and it was a particularly good design. Did some playtesting at @BonusRoundCafe last night, and at one point there were four sets of designers there, and half of us were POC. Pretty rare, pretty nice. Good joint, gracious hosts, great environment. — The worst name for this frog would be Fin Coe (@FinCoe) February 8, 2019 The term “elegance” continues to be a fuzzy, mercurial one that defies meaningful definition, but this game checked off all its points for me in spades.  There’s nothing wasted in that game - it is a series of interconnected, limited systems, with resources, battle cards, and contracts flowing naturally through a player’s engine and back and forth between opponents.  Everything is intuitive and the theme meshes beautifully with the...

Happy Monday fam! Sorry about missing a post last week, it’s been busy at the theatre company, and those issues came first.  Streak broken, but time to start a new one! Not gonna do the long rambling “my earliest memories of my grandmother were of flour-dusted fingerprints showing stark against the dark wrought iron of her teapot” intro today, just gonna dive right into this floating mechanic. Jumping Across Action Tiles In GREEM, a grid of Action tiles is laid out in the center of the play space.  Each player starts in a different corner, their pawn covering up that corner’s tile.  On a player’s turn, they move across as many tiles as they choose, provided they pay the energy cost on each tile.  That can either be a fixed starting amount, or it can be accumulated, or it could come from an Action Wheel.  But to move over a tile, you pay its cost and take its action.  The tile you land on does not require energy, nor does it grant its action.  Only ...

Traditional Salutation! Self-deprecating re-affirmation of the obvious: Title of Segment [Mechanic Monday]! I really like board game apps.  I like that they clean up the bookkeeping, I like the speed with which you can play, which is coupled with the option for guided tutorials over rulebooks.  I really like being able to play without any other humans (Fin Fun Fact! One of Fin’s Fun Catchphrases is: “I’ve always longed for a massively singleplayer online role playing game.”  Fun!) And I like that I can do it all on a mobile device, without a surface, starting and stopping within or between games.  Some implementations I recommend the most? Jaipur, Splendor, Maquis, Medici, Star Realms, Hive, Onirim - to name just a handful.  They’re great, with many positives! They’re also, simultaneously, kind of not great for me.  For all the same reasons.  The faster I learn and get a bunch of plays in, the quicker the novelty wears off.  The staler the play ...