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It’s been a tremendously long week, I’ve missed the windows for a Mechanic Monday or a TTRPG Tuesday and I’m absolutely not doing another video.  It is now, somehow, March, so I suppose I could have done a self-evaluatory post for the first quarter of 2021, but I just ain’t got it in me for that level of coherency.  Yes, my usual work does contain elements of a semblance of coherency - all of which will be absent today.  Random game design thoughts:

  • For a future Reverse Out of Mana - a mechanic where surviving something grants you benefits.  So being damaged grants +1/+1 counters? Or being targeted grants protection against that colour?
  • I should go back to the level of initial treatment I did when I presented The Dollie Extraction for consideration, turn that into a template, and flesh out a treatment for the other scenarios that I brainstormed then, as well as the ones from the last couple of weeks.
  • Once I get into the new place, I need one location for all my games, the ones I’ve purchased as well as my own projects.  Get it all catalogued, update my BGG profile, take real inventory and then do another purge, update everything again.
  • A random thought I had for my mono-card buttonshy design, Tablet; you score points based on how many icons you cover up when you place a card - and then the icons left uncovered in your final tableau potentially score points based on majority or # showing.  Should revisit that design, and its non-monocard variants.
  • I do sometimes wonder if the feeding-innovation muscle that I exercise by devoting time to this blog no one reads, comes at the expense of focusing on refining and developing the projects I’ve already identified as having the highest likelihood of getting finished, or at least viable - projects I’ve already spent a lot of time thinking about, writing about, even making playtestable prototypes of.
  • Maybe next week I should do a look back on the last quarter, and get serious about what’s achievable in the next one.  I feel sometimes like I have accomplishments I can point at, and milestones that I hit; other times, I think about how today is the one-year anniversary of my lockdown, and how little I have to show for it, in terms of tangible, completed creative output.  I’ve had other things going on; I’ve stayed alive and accomplished harder-to-measure things; games and plays written by me should have the minimum amount of impact possible on my feelings of self-worth.  But hey.  When you’re tired, the good you’ve done seems trivial, and the potential left unrealized seems infinite.

Cheery stuff, no? Can’t promise next week will be any better, but we’ll be back with more than.  Til next time.

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