Velocimancer Games

Did I mention that I've started in a new department at my day job? It's true! It's a writing-centric job, which I balked from for a long time, but a tiny amount of time in, it hasn't soured me on writing yet.  If anything, my time on this Earth has led me to think that perhaps a balance can be struck, between being ground beneath the heel of capitalism (in this one, particular instance) and bEiNg FuLfIlLeD, I can hone my writing skills without burning out.  Famous last words! But anyhow, that's one reason that I've been able to catch back up on my podcasts, stay atop my theatre's agenda, and write these very articles, which no one reads.  I don't actually mind that no one reads them by the way.  No, honest! People see my plays and talk to me about them and it makes me want to die, whether they're being positive or negative, so frfr it's nice to just have a quiet little corner of Al Gore's Internet where I get my reps in working both sides of...

Let’s change gears a bit this Mechanic Monday, shall we? I’ve just realized that the format of this site has calcified over time into a particularly sleep-deprived recipe blog, but for unused game designs.  Truly, my fingers are clamped firmly on the pulse of these manic times.  I hope all of you are enjoying these enthusiastic mental rambles, in such a modern format. I just taught a playwriting class yesterday.  I’ve already completed the regular 7-week session, but as it’s a class on playwriting, they are expected to write a play, and yesterday was our midway-point checkin out of the two-to-three months they have post-class to get out a draft.  I’ll meet up with this group one last time in January to read from their completed drafts and to do a little post-morteming of how the process went for them.  Some of them already have drafts completed, some of them may not have one done by the final deadline.  Talking with a few of the students after the session...

Ho man, I get to do so little game design these days.  The busy summer, my theatre, auditioning, hockey, weddings, homeowner diy stuff (yes yes some real champagne problems in there) it has been a taxing… uh… indeterminate length of time.  I’ve been tired for as long as I can remember.  I never did get anything together for that September design challenge, though I did plenty of useful scribbling, and it did scratch the itch a little.  I just haven’t been able to keep up a weekly post for this blog like I’d prefer, or fill notebooks with idea atop idea.  The world has such big problems, and this is such a small thing, but I still feel that tiny absence.  You know? I find myself thinking mostly of my likeliest designs.  Amberlodge always calls out to me, like a comfortable, thinky world, just a dream away.  Runtime Error & Frameshift Mutation could truly be the kind of game I most like to play (which is, of course, very different from good o...

Hey, it’s September! Sanity twinkles on the horizon; is it a mirage of false hope, or the faint honest shine of a distant true beacon? Time will tell.  Things have at least temporarily slowed down enough, and I am for the next ten minutes inspired enough, for me to eke out a chunk of game design thinking.  Since it’s not a Monday, I don’t feel beholden to my usual traditions (lol) and so today will be unabashedly about the arrow of inspiration that has lodged itself in my spongey grey matter.  A new game design contest from Button Shy! Billed by them as a seemingly impossible challenge: An 18-card game with 18 identical cards, and no other components.  They seem to think this is impossible; I think that it’s certainly a limiting constraint, but all the more fun for it.  So this is just going to be a free-for-all of thoughts on some concepts and/or gameplay that could be done with 18 identical cards. Orientation: If you use the sides (4) and corners (4) of a ...

My summer has been undeniably altered by my dayjob.  Nights, weekends, during my “vacations”, I have been at the mercy of an industry that has always been tougher in the summer but has just exploded this year.  It truly has been something. Something hard and terrible. But I need the money. Yay capitalism! Anyway, at my day job, most people have three screens, their laptop and two monitors.  I keep my laptop closed and get by with just two, which makes my coworkers look at me with the respect and fear usually reserved for a particularly smelly shaman.  When asked how I can possibly get by with only twice the screen space my parents had for their actual engineering jobs, I explain that I often take my laptop home to work overtime (Yay! Capital! Ism!) and as I have no monitors at home, I have to do the job with one screen, so two feels like a luxury.  This is greeted by a short jerky nod, not of understanding but of acceptance, and the swift departure of my q...

Another long week, and I should really be trying to catch up to my deadlines for the latest writing gig but I want to see if I can get a Mechanic Monday out under the wire before I succumb to sleep! I’m so tired! Here we go! I’ve been thinking about ways that analog games can feel as worldbuilt as digital games, particularly with regards to having a multiplicity of mechanics.  Because most mechanics require their own components, it’s trendy in modern hobby gaming, Ameritrash aside, to limit the number of mechanics and systems. Heck I’ve waxed full many a moon about how great elegance is as a design constraint and goal.  But maybe solo games, where there’s so much built-in bookkeeping anyway, as well as a history of popularity among grognardy wargamers. Maybe when it’s just you, there’s a little more room for going for mechanic mania without anyone complaining about downtime. So here’s a mechanic! Feels out of place, but that’s fine, I’m barely staving off sleep as it i...

Wow I’ve been quiet for a while, huh? Not because I haven’t been thinking about game design, or because my interest has been elsewhere - I’ve just been too fucking busy with my dayjob to write any design or theatre or much of fucking anything! It’s been the fucking worst.  But it’s evening out now, and I am committed to getting back on track with this damn blog. Mechanic Monday has been one of the most consistent pieces of writing I’vd done (loLLLLLLLLLLL) and I want to get in the groove again. So much so that I’m currently typing this on my damn phone. So I’ve been thinking about solitaire stuff again.  After getting together a first proto and playtest of FGM-Squared, but then being stuck alone at my desk for days and nights for weeks at a time, my design brain has been mulling over the maple-distilling game I wrote about on here a few months back (called Amber Lodge at the time, I’m thinking of calling it Amber Mill or Samara) as well as a napkin-sketch of an idea about...

Hahahaha I don’t actually have time to do this today and yet! It’s Mechanic Monday! Today’s a conjecture on something that I don’t even know exists? It’s based on my understanding of what a program can do, and spins wildly off into hypothesis territory from there.  Anyway at my day job everyone has at least two screens.  It’s that kind of workplace.  Three is becoming the norm, I’ve seen people with five.  Which seems aggressively excessive.  And I see a weird number of people using programs that look like they’re for coding? Considering very few people here work in any capacity on anything that would involve code? But it means I’ve long flirted with the idea of playing a MUD right out in the open on my desktop.  Just fire up Darkmists or some other telnet-based text game, and who would know it wasn’t me tappity-tap-tap-tapping away on important company business (once the ASCII art intro finishes scrolling of course)? I already do some shorthand things - t...

This week's Mechanic Monday is uhhhhh a TTRPG Tuesday, totally on purpose and everything.  Yeah! I planned this. Honestly I really struggle with RPGs.  Like so many others, I grew up playing DnD, mostly with other socially- and emotionally-stunted young men.  It gave me an extremely narrow view of the hobby: first as a glimpse into a kind of sandboxy freedom that was still on the distant horizon for digital games; then later as a very bifurcated experience between juvenile wish fulfillment and a miniatures strategy wargame that occupied much more of my imagination.  There were moments of unforgettable, beautiful, hilarious storytelling, sure; but they always felt emergent, rather than a function of the game or its mechanics.  It was tremendous fun, but like I said, its scope was very limited even then, and that boxed-in understanding of what a TTRPG is and what it can do, has coloured my experience down the years.  Working recently on the John Silence RPG,...

It’s super fucken late, but I’m gonna try (day of, nothing pre-written!) to get out a M-M-Mechanic Monday! Thanks for tuning in loyal listeners, despite my radio silence last week.  It was the opening night of my theatre’s latest show, and to say that I had my hands full is putting it laughably mildly.  But that sucker’s open, time to turn my thoughts back toward game design.  Been working hard pretty much every free moment I can steal at work (where I have access to Microsoft Word, because ghetto fab baby) to work on refining the rules for Fantasy GM Squared and getting a prototype ready.  I’m gonna burn my damn eyes out, what with tryna do that ON TOP OF the massive amount of files I’m reviewing as the busy season hits at work.  But c’est la vie! I’m trying to get some mindless copy-paste-formatting stuff done here at home tonight (although it would have been better to have had the mouse and both screens for this task), and the last thing I’ve been fiddling wi...

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 ...

There's this design contest going right now, for games based on Grant Howitt's Honey Heist and Crash Pandas.  The goal? Design a game, digital, tabletop, or text, where animals commit crimes.  I think that's absolutely terrific, and in the next two weeks I'm going to explore three game ideas and see if any of them are worth submitting. Here's my initial framing for each idea: Bootloggers - Beavers diverting goods and floating contraband down the river to distribute for cheap. Footgoose - Dancing is illegal! But these Canadian waterfowl DON’T CARE. Squeak Easy - Prohibition is tough, but these enterprising mice provide a safe spot to enjoy some moonshine and rough company. Today, I'm going to focus on Grant's favourite of these ideas: FOOTGOOSE.  Here's his recommendation: Just replace Kevin Bacon with a flock of squawking geese and whack a dice pool mechanic on there, that’s what I’d do — Grant Howitt (@gshowitt) February 1, 2019 So let...

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...