Velocimancer Games

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...

And we’re back (a dinosaur story) with another installment of this blog’s longest-running anything.  It’s Mechanic Monday! (rap horn, rap horn, polka oompha, rap horn)! Get comfy my little Russian bots and sex work algorithmic instances! A while back, someone sent me images of an old board game called Suffragetto.  They were beautiful pictures from a museum exhibit (at the V&A?) showcasing a very early example of asymmetry: One player’s pieces were Suffragettes, who fought to advance to the other side of the board without landing in jail, and the other player’s pieces were policemen, who had the same objective (but captured policemen went to the hospital, which may be that era’s single most badass move in game design).  Of course, as popular asymmetry in games was a long ways in the future (or a suuuuuuper long ways in the past, a la Tafl games and hunting games), the differences between both sides were purely cosmetic; jail and the hospital were two names for mirror...

A rare blog post that's not Mechanic Monday? Gorsh! This is a status update on the state of one of my games, following a playtest event I brought it to.  That game, of course, is fan favourite: The Birch Crown. The idea for Birch Crown came to me in, I think, the Spring of 2015? It was the Stanley Cup playoffs if I recall correctly, and after watching the hockey game at a friend's place, some people started playing Cards Against Humanity.  I groused to myself that it was unfair that the two runaway leaders (a couple who were both playing and obviously knew each other's sense of humour) had the same hand size as the rest of us lowly plebs.  That made me wonder about a catchup mechanic where the prizes you won and your hand size added up to one fixed figure, so that the better you did in a game, the fewer options you had.  # of Black cards + # of white cards always = 7.  As I love card games, I had no lack of ideas for how cards would generate points.  And...

Jesus these Mondays are relentless.  Through absolutely no fault of my own, they continue to happen.  I’ve already called my representatives and left well-articulated arguments against, and now, God help me, all I can do is wait. And write this dreck up I suppose welcome back [no audience found] to another riveting installment of mEcHaNiC mOnDaY! A quick thought on the intent behind this series: I’m writing this for many reasons, not least of which is to procrastinate from writing the play I’m supposed to be working on, but also in reaction to a lot of games writing that’s currently out there, which is very much Applied and not Theoretical.  By that of course I mostly mean commercial.  Amidst this board game boom, there’s an emphasis on getting to a finished product, as we’re currently in a mad scramble to capitalize on this bubble of popularity that I think most of us subconsciously know is due to burst any minute now.  And I don’t begrudge this mindset: It’s...

It’s honestly shocking that I did more than two Mechanic Mondays in a row.  What’s even more shocking is that I’m going to get back on the horse after taking just one week off.  That’s a good skill to have, btw: I used to dream of perfect records, unbroken streaks, only doing things if I was a natural winner at them.  Time and a vast curriculum of failure have taught me how many things you can only accomplish after you fall off the wagon and claw your way back on again. Not that taking a week off for Thanksgiving is - you know what? That’s a whole other topic for another time. Today I want to draw on one of my favourite design inspirations - subverting assumptions.  As with so many things, I first came across this concept by following Daniel Solis.  He has an ongoing hashtag conversation about the assumptions we have about games, and how much rich material there is from subverting just one of those.  Some examples: All cards in a deck must have their card...

So today I’m just going to be a bugbear, just an absolute gremlin about a mechanic that I think is great, and which I understand other people aren’t into, and which I will die before changing.  The nice thing about designing games non-commercially is that, while I do want people to have fun playing my games, there is no force in Heaven, Hell, or anywhere inbetween that could make me care less about whether something will help a game sell or not.  I love a good design constraint, but “that mechanic is not currently popular” is not a good design constraint. So, spoiler alert, the mechanic is different cardbacks in a card game.  As implemented in my design, Cowl & Mask . Now, in this two-player game, each player has the same 7 cards, each of which has one of three cardbacks; Ranks 1 and 7 share a cardback, Ranks 2 & 6 share a different cardback, and Ranks 3-5 share the last cardback.  Cards are played rank-face down into seven head-to-head lanes, so that you g...

Today’s Mechanic Monday is a little different, because this mechanic is muuuuuch fuzzier than the last couple.  It’s got a couple different directions it could go, but that potential is less fun than for the Action Wheel or the Conflict Chips because it’s actively getting in the way of my current design.  So today’s post is as much about talking out the problem, as it is sharing something shiny and fun and new. So I’ve been playing a lot of Stardew Valley.  As in, I bought a laptop this month specifically so that I could play Stardew, and so that my wife could play the Sims.  This is my first time buying a computer in… 12 years.  Games, they motivate us! Or something.  My sister plays, and I first tried the game on her Switch when I visited her last month, and a couple of my friends play it, and something that stuck with me was someone describing a playthrough as “I’m just building a maple syrup farm” and honestly that sounded terrific to me.  *I* wan...

Today’s Mechanic Monday is about Conflict Chips! I’ve always made fun of opposed rolls in RPGs, specifically d20’s and the natural 20 auto-succeed. Like I always picture someone standing in front of a skyscraper and going, “I want to jump over this thing, and there’s a 5% chance I will.” It’s a bonkers implication, and also, 20 sides is just SO MUCH variance, especially when 90% of that variance could mean the difference between meeting or falling short of a static target, and 10% of it represents a complete departure from how the other results compare to the target. It’s also guilty of a sin that’s very much under the popular microscope right now: output randomness. You do all your decision making, and then you roll the die to see if you succeed, fail, super-succeed, or super-fail? Good luck, I guess? I think there’s a reason so many mechanics have sprung up to mitigate die rolls - key points, luck points, guaranteed re-rolls, etc. But luck mitigation only goes so far, and the...

What a laughably ambitious title.  A new regular segment, for my regularly updated blog! Although this is my third post of the year, with two whole months yet to go.  What progress! What brilliance! Where am I these days with games? Hmm.  Well I just submitted Birch Crown , Cowl & Mask , and Oases to the Board Game Workshop's Design Contest.  Things didn't go quite as planned (none of the three moved past the first round, and I'm a trifle salty that the judging criteria weren't quite what I expected them to be) but the feedback was mostly useful, and it was a learning experience.  I don't begrudge the entry fee.  But those three, plus D.I.E. Interceptor , are pretty much in a solid state, if kind of shelved for the moment.  I'm happy with where they are, and in no rush to do the concentrated playtests that would be the next stage of development.  Also, they're all a bit fiddly, and not necessarily that fun to actually play.  Which is obv...

Ooh, two blog posts in the same year? What is this, uh (checks blog history) 2014? Anyway, Oases continues to occupy a chunk of my mind.  It's entered into the 2p PnP contest on BGG, and the rules are in a much better place, thanks to some lovely and useful feedback.  In general though, while people are intrigued by some of the mechanical innovations, the design as a whole doesn't particularly inflame the imagination.  I'll have to test the ways in which the Action Wheel ramps up the stakes and the pace, but the design might be stalling out somewhat as being too sandbox-y for me to get to the playtest table.  I'll bring it to Bonus Round (an excellent new board game cafe that just opened here on the Chicago North Side) for the Designer's Night but it may just end up getting discussed, rather than actually played to the end of a game. But the other prototype I'm bringing to the Designer Night is Runtime Error, a Legacy/Campaign style cyberpop deckbuilder. I ...

Yes yes my posts are infrequent.  No one reads these anyway, so it's fine. D.I.E. Interceptor is in a good place.  Might look at making a nice board/bag for it, with the grid, spaces for the Powerup dice, and reminders of the different moves. Cowl and Mask is still where it has been for some time.  I feel like the power-level tweaking I did based on my brother's suggestions, along with the addition of betting, has it at a place where I'm happy with it.  It might see some more playtesting, might not.  It's not as though I have a financial need for the game to go anywhere.  Might look into a budget for some art assets, although I'm decently happy with the Daniel Solis icons I'm currently using.  It's just kind of shelved right now. Birch Crown is still too fiddly.  I think it needs a whole night of playtesting, with me making sharpie changes on the fly, in order for me to get it to a real clicky place. Exploding Snap needs a slight tweak but the...