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...