Velocimancer Games

The end of 2020 draws near! I’ve done plenty of meta self-analyzing this year, particularly with my quarterly plans.  And perhaps I’ll finish the year out next week with one last one of those, before starting 2021 with my M:tG-inspired series.  But this week I figured I’d do an external look back; on some of the video games I sunk the most time into this year, what compelled me about their design, and which of those experiences can translate over to analog game design. So I dropped some time into Pokemon Shield but I didn’t finish it and I really don’t have much positive to say about the game.  It feels notably easier than any of the previous iterations I’ve played, and not in a scalable-accessibility way.  A weak story was further undermined by low stakes, and the most-lauded part of the game, the Wild Area, failed pretty spectacularly to impress me.  I don’t care about Raid battles, I strongly resented that attempting to catch over-level pokemon was forestalle...

Hello hello.  It’s Friday, and I’m done with work, I figured I’d get this week’s blog post out prior to the last minute.  So I’ve got Meet Me At the Altar blaring and the kettle’s just gone so let’s carry over some momentum! Giving you a sneak peek here to try and hold myself accountable: I’ve been wanting for a while to do a series of Mechanic Mondays where I take M:tG abilities and spin out what they could look like as the primary mechanic of a standalone board game.  I’ve got just a couple other ideas I want to get through before I kick that off - and I’d like to get a buffer of 2 or 3 of those together to start with, to ensure the idea has legs.  Particularly since I don’t actually play MtG myself (although Strixhaven sure seems like a good entrypoint into playing, considering I haven’t bought Magic cards or built a deck since I was a magical high school student myself). Anyhow - that’s yet to come.  For the time being, I still want to write a year-end refle...

Honestly, I just want to get through Mechanic Monday today.  It’s been a long week with plenty of stress and disappointments, and I don’t have much cute noodling to offer for filling in the blanks.  So let’s get to it, shall we? Movement Based On Adjacency Strength GREEM is a 2-player area control game where 25 Markers are up for grabs on a 5x5 grid.  You and your opponent start out in control of Markers on opposite corners of the grid.  On your turn you either move pieces from one Marker or add a piece from your reserve to a Marker you control.  The distance that pieces may travel from their starting Marker are determined by the number of friendly pieces on the starting and adjacent Markers; on a turn, any number of friendly pieces may be moved from one Marker, and pieces may be moved together to another Marker or split up to multiple Markers, but the maximum number of moves is determined by the number of friendly pieces adjacent to the origin Marker.  Con...

Hey it’s Monday would you look at that.  I’m sour because I just spent two hours in a pointless HOA meeting but let’s channel that into something productive, shall we? It’s Monday, so even though I barfed out some game ideas last night, let’s sound the horn for a Mechanic Monday. run horn.midi // Alright so let’s get into it.  I love cards, it’s one of my signature traits.  A known thing.  I also love relative positioning.  Put ‘em together and what do you got? Another way of looking at rectangles supporting rectangles.  Bon appetit. Grid-Based Modifiers In GREEM, players start out with a personal tableau of two Teal cards, one West and one North.  The West Teal card defines a row (Grey cards played to the East of that card), and the other a column (Grey cards played South of that card), with one slot for a Grey card that is in both the row and the column.  Each Teal card modifies its row or column, perhaps enhancing its effect, decreasing its cos...

Oh pickles it’s Sunday night and I haven’t written a post yet for the week. I was also two days late for my Accountability Club email so I think it’s safe to say that the muse just isn’t with me this week. But such is the nature of my mind’s workings, that I’m once again going to jam in something of indifferent quality at the last minute just to keep my streak alive. So I’ve got… nothing.  So today I’m going to give myself a low-chance-of-success design challenge: A Party Game. Oh, I don’t mean I have a mechanic in mind! Heavens no. No I’m just going to write until an idea comes to me! So let’s start big, with that old Experience-First approach. When I think of successful party game experiences, one of the key elements is limited time. A timer removes the potential for analysis paralysis, and does the neat trick of both raising and lowering the stakes. In the immediate term, the stakes are raised because of the limited decision space. In the longer term, the stakes are lower...

Hello hello hello.  Another week, another blog post.  This has been, I think, the most consistent part of the pandemic for me.  So much so that I don’t feel much of a sense of accomplishment for keeping the streak going, AND I’ve run pretty dry on ideas at times, so a real WIN-WIN there.  But I’ve got some ideas for how to fill the rest of the calendar anyway, so hopefully I can bank a good buffer of posts and ideally that would translate to a more regular and sensical posting schedule.  But how about we start with yet another clumpy outpouring this week and go from there? Been lots of Bakeoff in this household lately.  I remember when I took the job as Co-AD of my theatre, an ensemble member recorded a bit where she received a Hollywood Handshake.  I didn’t know what that was, or where it was from, but it was good content for a Giving Tuesday effort so I was over the moon over it.  Sometime after that, I watched the 2018 season of GBBO, although ...

Hello hello, and welcome back to an attempt to pull off a Mechanic Monday! Despite being terribly sleepy and having just written a post yesterday! WoooOOOoooOOOooo! Today I’m going to draw on where I left off; the cousin of ranked-choice voting (and the extrapolated mechanic, 2nd-place prizes), is second-place bids in auctions.  The second-place bid reveals even more of the narrative and the priorities of the bidders of a given lot.  And what the second-place prize is can affect those revelations. The second-place prize could be: The same as the first-place prize, but in a smaller proportion A generic (from lot to lot) consolation prize A unique (from lot to lot, or entirely unique each time) consolation prize What does the dance look like if you want the second-place prize even more than you want the first-place prize? What does it look like the further down the line you award (3rd-place, 4th-place, etc) But what I want to propose for THIS Monday’s Mechanic is: 2nd-place migh...

Well, it’s the last night of the week and therefore my last chance to get a post out.  It’s been impossible for me to get anything whatsoever done for the majority of this week; and it’s only now, once the race has been called, that I’m able to start back up the machinery of my daily/weekly/monthly life.  It’s just been a lot, y’all (I know there is no y’all).  So what do I have? Well, I think I have some Mechanic Monday ideas percolating, but nothing solid, and it’s notably not Monday, so how about the blogging equivalent of heating up a pizza: some loose rambling on a mechanic-adjacent concept. So how about ranked-choice voting, eh? In the real world, it can give us a much clearer picture of the will of the electorate; if ten voters all vote for different candidates, there’s no consensus whatsoever; but if they all give their second place vote for one candidate, that says a lot about their collective will and priorities.  Voting for only one candidate gives no indi...

Heyyyy it’s TTRPG Tuesday.  I should focus on knocking this out before I head out for a long weekend vacation, instead of the Twitter troll raising my blood pressure.  I wanted to do a short post today about the DOLLIE Extraction, as I got together a first draft of the scenario last week and got it submitted for review.  It had been kind of sitting on my To-Do list, and I wasn’t sure when I was going to get around to it.  That’s been the case with so much of my writing/game-making lately: A big slice of executive dysfunction, a paralysis wherein even broken-up tasks feel impossible, insurmountable.  Granted, I’ve felt like this at several points throughout my life, and I’ve developed various mechanisms at different times in order to adapt to and overcome that feeling.  Which is why this week, not only did I get the scenario draft together, I also got a full Fantasy GM Squared build onto Tabletop Simulator.  How’d I manage that? My productivity last wee...

Man, what to write this week? I missed Craft Wednesday, and TTRPG Tuesday, and Mechanic Monday.  Maybe I should just do a little checkin though, and plan for the rest of the month.  Sure! Let’s do that. “The rest of the month” is pretty much non-existent tbh.  Tomorrow is my five(!)-year(!) wedding(!) anniversary(?!), and this weekend doesn’t have a lot of room for design, considering our sexy sexy plans of [grocery shopping, getting COVID tests, and flu shots] and next week we’re driving out to a little airbnb to celebrate, and as a much needed break from work.  So it’s a good thing that I got the first draft of my scenario for The Company RPG in to Logan (forthcoming TTRPG Tuesday post on what got that tied together for a v1.0), but as for my other goal, an Alpha of Fantasy GM Squared, I got screenshots from my collaborators of the prototype components that I’d improvised on the spot, and I’ll need to block out a couple of hours to set those in digital stone (using...

It’s late on a Sunday and I’ve gotten nothing together but it’s important to me that I still get something out.  It’s been a packed time, but that’s not much of an excuse.  So, here’s just some random fucken game design thoughts.  Board appetit. HADES as cardboard: So I’ve been playing the sexy gay Greek Myth game, and it’s a joy.  It also has some very tabltetop-y elements.  I love the multiple overlapping currencies, and the Boon system is a fantastic multi-use card opportunity, with cardback by Deity.  The next-room selection situation feels like cards as well, and the roguelike enemy generation.  What the game gives you, really, could be expressed almost entirely via tabletop, with legacy elements for the big picture.  The question is, how to tackle the action-rpg gameplay: what is the player input? My impulse is not to go the Gloomhaven route, but rather to abstract it into something more Pixel Tactics, or even more abstract: something like w...

Well well, a new week.  How original.  I had an idea for a possible Mechanic Monday but it turned out to just be Stratego.  C’est la vie! (Although maybe it could still work if the forces weren’t all set in stone, and player’s had a limited number of reserve forces that they could secretly commit prior to each combat, and also instead of larger forces wiping out smaller ones, they would deal the difference in force sizes as damage) (Also note to self: Each player starts with a different hidden amount of VP/Currency that they have to pay (plus interest) at game’s end, as a way to truly hide who’s in the lead.) Anyway it’s Wednesday, so there’s no time for any of THAT stuff.  Today, I’m going to kvetch informatively about Tabletop Simulator. So, TTS is, near as I can tell, an incredibly powerful and useful tool.  It’s also absolute ass to parse, as someone coming to it cold.  The official guides are largely unhelpful for the designers whose experience is limi...

 Yeah okay definitely didn’t just finish the last post, doomscroll for a hot second, then start in on this one.  Yeah so anyway, today I want to knock out my first actual honest-to-God Mechanic Monday in a while by barfing out some thoughts for Fantasy GM Squared that came to me while I was listening to an episode of Dan Thurot’s Space-Biff Space-Cast where he interviewed TauCeti Deichmann (about Sidereal Confluence, which I am absolutely going to buy the second edition of). I know what you’re thinking: Fantasy GM Squared? That old chestnut? That game from the 2010’s? Isn’t it done by now? Interviewer, go fuck yourself.  I had a brainwave about a way to inject another element of Fantasy Sports into it, so while I don’t know if this would actually help the game, my brainworms compel me to get it down and puzzle it out. Hot and Cold Streaks by Class In Fantasy GM Squared, Heroes may out-perform or under-perform their printed abilities based on how the season unfolds.  ...

You know what I’ve got an idea for a Mechanic Monday I can post tomorrow but I’m staring down the end of a long post-less week and I don’t know if I’ve ever posted about the game idea I had last Christmas for a game that takes place in an Excel spreadsheet, I probably did but it’s been a damn while, so why don’t I take today to apply the Experience-First lens to that design? No dissent? Off I go then! Marginalia (named for the little scribbled words and images readers and authors alike enjoy making in the margins of texts) is a spreadsheet game about letting a demon tempt you with shortcuts.  Inspired by literary-tinged demonology, like in Arturo Pérez-Reverte’s The Club Dumas, Clive Barker’s Mister B. Gone, Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s Shadow of the Wind, or even C.S. Lewis’ Screwtape Letters, as well as the black magic betting game Cordial Minuet by Jason Rohrer, and my own experience doing some very repetitive work as a student librarian’s assistant; the feeling I enjoy and want to emula...

Hahaha what up Google search results.  It’s me, something not relevant to your query, degrading your SEO. You most likely do not want to click this! Anyway, buckle up no one, it’s time for another TTRPG Tuesday. So as I alluded to a couple of days ago, I finally scheduled a meeting with one Mr. Logan Dean, the designer of The Company RPG (and an all around good guy rough all around the edges).  It was an excellent chance to get some real clarity and re-calibration considering the wheels I’ve been spinning on this particular project.  I was heartened to learn that a lot of the work I’ve done so far is usable for the kind of scenario he’s looking for, and pleasantly surprised to learn that the target scope of the project is more manageable than what I’d been planning out.  If anything, it’ll behoove me to scale down a little, and I won’t have as many gaps to fill in.  Here’s my big takeaways from the meeting: Scenario Target Scope: 2k words, 1.5hr – 2hr  Thin...

Welp, it’s the end of the next week! And my teeth are gone, and the ruins of my mouth mostly healed.  Don’t go to Lincoln Park Dental Specialists! That’s enough personal content.  Onto the game design personal content. I’ve been looking back over my posts during this pandemic, from when my world abruptly changed in March, to when things normalized enough that I laid out a Bare Minimum+Ambitious+Realistic plan in May.  Interestingly, I’ve long since hit the “3 months of a game design post every week” milestone, though progress has been much slower than I’d hoped on FFGMGM Beta or an Alpha for another game.  Qualifying that: BURN is my most ambitious design and extraordinarily difficult both to build and to test; I’m very pleased with my fuck-it-all playtest of Amberlodge and all the theoretical work I’ve done but it’s been difficult to synthesize those two things into a full build; FGM-squared has been a great ride in terms of the meetings I’ve had with collaborators,...

Recovering from wisdom teeth.  Wrote this Saturday? Sunday? Forgot to post earlier.  Here you go. Ok, so my teeth are coming out shortly, time to pre-write a TTRPG Tuesday because I used up all my post-vacay glimmers (that would have made for a good Mechanic Monday) on this past week’s post.  So.  TTRPG Tuesday.  As I asserted in my last Company check-in, I don’t think I can complete the scenario - on my own.  And I want to meet with the RPG’s creator before I spend more time going down dead ends.  But I do want to bring more LEGOs to that playtime, and it’s going to be a bit before I can really hold a meaningful conversation with anyone, so let’s get some more things together. First off, I’ve made a crude but serviceable map; mainly it fulfils the basic need I had for a foundation based loosely on reality, that is sized and sectioned interestingly enough for the storytelling purposes but simple enough that it can be changed around to suit future edits...

 Alright, where we at? I’ve just gotten back from a five-day-vacay, and while I didn’t physically work on any of my designs, I did think and talk about them a lot and made some progress.  I guess I’ll just do a roundup of some of those? Mash it together with a progress report? So let’s start with the neglected design of the year, BURN.  I was reminded that the mechanics for this one truly are the most elegant and original out of any of my designs.  In explaining the system (and the inspiration of Spy Games), I got the very helpful suggestion that I may want to offer the Handler player a little more thematic agency, by giving them specific cards/actions they can play that affect the closing of the borders.  So what I’m currently picturing is a set (randomly dealt at the outset?) of one-time-use favours that cost both points to play AND intensify the heat on one or more neighbouring nations, hastening the close of the border(s).  Some of them can even decreas...

Alright let’s pre-write a Mechanic Monday to build up a buffer.  Hello Future! It’s Fin, from the Past.  I have no idea yet about the Dread Scarabs, and have unthinkingly invested all my money into Hope Bonds.  What an idyllic time! Today I just want to brainstorm about Drafting Order as a rubber band mechanic.  Obviously this is relevant to Fantasy GM Squared, but this more popped into my head since the NHL Draft Lottery just happened.  The NHL is an interesting case because it had an expansion team (and subsequent expansion draft, prior to the expansion team getting third-best odds for the regular draft’s lottery) join the league two seasons ago, and will have another one joining the League next season (or the season after that? Maybe? Everything’s all messed up, playoffs should not be happening right now, this is all bad).  And apparently, the protocols in place to put the new teams on an even footing have changed from year to year, sometimes reverting b...

Today I thought I’d look more closely at one of the things I gleaned from my recent build-as-I-go playtest of Amberlodge.  Specifically, the input parameters for Processor cards, and how I need to tailor those to the outputs of the Producer cards.  My confirmation bias had me looking at the cards and continually returning a faulty confirmation of bad logic. The big picture takeaway is that because I was thinking about the resource conversion chain from the standpoint of Ratios, I forgot that you need to divide out the common factors to get the least common denominator, because concentrating a solution (9Water1Sugar) only removes excess (Water), it doesn’t add the target resource (Sugar).  And, consequently, that I need to tailor the input requirements of the Processors, because I’d set them up based on that faulty logic.  A fermentation card that accepts water with a higher sugar concentration shouldn’t be set up to accept 10 units of a solution to which sugar has so...

Well, I’ve got a lot of Kamen Rider energy brewing in my head but it’s not ready to coalesce into playwriting just yet (ANY TIME THO BRAIN), so how about I do a little checkin on The DOLLY Extraction for a TTRPG Tuesday? How about it? How? I dunno, truly. So much as I wanted to deliver a finished product all on my lonesome, the cold hard truth of this is that I’m trying to write for an RPG that I’ve helped edit but haven’t ever actually played myself or even seen played.  I can picture and plot out ideal player/gm experiences and come up with some interesting mechanics, but I may have run into a wall, one that is partially just - you know, pandemic doom fatigue jesus christ I’m so tired and I’ve drawn out all my rituals and habits for so fucking long and for WHAT - and partially a ceiling on how far ideas and guesswork can take me without playtesting, a schedule of deadlines, and client directives/feedback.  That was a big part of me losing steam during my work on the misbegot...

A short post today as it’s been a long-ass week and I’ve got a packed schedule for tomorrow so I’m trying to conserve energy.  EDIT: I didn’t get this written in time, and now it’s somehow Sunday again.  Hooray for Time, #1 Bastard Extraordinaire. I did indeed attempt what I set out to do in my last post: I sat down (on the floor!) with my iPad hanging off a chair above me, all my utterly un-matching example components before me, and last month’s playlist in my ears, and I talked to myself and played, building as I went, for a couple of turns, which took about 40 minutes, though my attempt to record myself only captured about 23 minutes of that, because iPad stupid.  It was weird, it felt foolish, and it was still kind of fun, and definitely useful in terms of showing me where the gaps between presumption and reality were.  Some key takeaways: Four actions per turn does not feel like a lot, particularly if you have to spend an action to move things, which feels profo...

Well would you look at that, it’s next week! Feels like it was just last week.  Because it was.  Time is a river that has flooded its banks, and we will all drown in its bitter, brackish tide.  Uh I mean leeeeeeet’s talk about Amberlodge hahahaha. A recent thought that entered my head was that the lodge has been mothballed, so there’s some basic starting trees, storage, and equipment, and several facedown rooms and groves that can reveal new tapped trees when explored or storage rooms or machinery when excavated.  Are there a limited number of rooms? Is it a fixed or variable setup of face-down cards? Decks? I feel this overpowering urge to take the cards I have made, matching/version/compatibility be damned, get a pen, pencil, and several blanks, and just start playing the game into existence, scribbling on cards as they would come into play.  Do I want achievements? Could they grant a separate special ubiquitous currency that can be spent universally across al...

And it is somehow midday Sunday, and I’ve got a house to clean so I can’t spend a lot of time on this.  I started a new playwriting class this week (student, not teacher) and have written about ten pages (??!) of new play so I don’t feel too terribly guilty about not having gotten games stuff written, but I still want to get in a design post for the week.  So seeing as how it’s Sunday and there’s no topic associated with Sunday, I’ll just do a short general update and get on with my day. I’ve chatted recently with a couple of different designers from around town, and it’s been really great to just talk shop with folks whose minds work in a similar but not identical fashion to my own.  Providing feedback on other people’s designs, rulebooks, and prototypes is a good stretch for the creative-analytical muscles, while providing less ego-stress than talking about my own designs.  That being said, it gave me a thrill to bring up my previous post about Fantasy GM Square...

Alright I have written 70 goddamn pages in this blog by now.  It’s the end of another week that has gotten away from me, largely because I’ve been in a lot of goddamn meetings, my work is launching an entire new Resource Center on Monday, I’ve been preparing for a reading of the 38 (???) pages I’ve somehow written on my current play, and which I just heard.  Good news, the pages are very bad! More time for games writing.  Or, I suppose, I could improve the play pages.  We’ll see which wins out. As it’s far too late for a Mechanic Monday or a TTRPG Tuesday, I think I’ll just chat a bit about hierarchy of information today.  And of course let’s frame it in terms of experience.  Now, for a play, particularly one that disregards unity of time and chronological order, you can present information however you please.  I generally tell my students that they need to have an intention that they’re fulfilling, but you could present it randomly, just to be a pie...