Velocimancer Games

Had a wretched Monday and didn’t get the Out of Mana written in advance.  Have now remedied that so that I for sure have one for next Monday, but since it’s Tuesday how’s about a TTRPG Tuesday? I really enjoyed writing a scenario for The Company RPG, so today I’m just going to brainstorm the concept seeds for a few more possible scenarios. The DOLLIE Reprisal: The ARC team is tasked with securing a Company weapon that has hit the black market; weaponized clones of themselves, a byproduct of their Hall of Mirrors raid. What Music They Make: A Company scientist has reported sabotage at a sonic research and testing site in the far North.  The ARC team arrives to find 23 hours of night, with a rapidly dwindling supply of hostages to save, and an ever-increasing and screaming blood-sucker problem. The Othersun Town: In remote Huang Bai, the border between here and somewhere else has been rubbed thin by government meddling.  The heat hits different, the plants are growing stran...

Hello and welcome back to Out of Mana, a limited run of Mechanic Mondays where I take a look at Magic: The Gathering abilities and postulate a way that mechanic could form the basis of its own game (or serve a larger role as a central mechanic anyhow) despite not having played Magic since high school.  There’s been a lot more, uh, armed insurrection since my last post, so, you know.  Not entirely sure this one’s going to be the well-reasoned erudite entry into the canon that I hoped for at the end of my last entry.  But at least it’s inspired by a more recent ability? And so hopefully it’s a more mature mechanical basis on which to build? Circumventing Hand Size with Partially Purchased Actions In GREEM, you have a default of one and a half actions per turn.  Cards half an action to prepare (play face-down from hand to tableau), half an action to complete (activate a face-down card from your tableau), or a full action to rush (activate a card directly from your hand)...

So I had an Out of Mana entry mostly written yesterday, but the apps for iPhone of Google Drive and Docs (where I write these) was bugging out, so I didn’t get to post it.  I'm so mad about it that I also wrote out another non-OOM Mechanic Monday post for the buffer.  So anyway I’ve finished that post but will leave it til next week, and do a TTRPG Tuesday today. As you may have seen, the DOLLIE Extraction has been announced as one of the missions included in the forthcoming supplement for The Company RPG, Conflict Resolution Guidelines.  If you’ve followed this blog, you watched the components take shape in real time, but I’m really looking forward to seeing the final form, in all its polished and printed glory. Almost more exciting than the fact that I got paid to do games writing is the fact that unlike my last freelance RPG work, I’m proud of the work I turned in, and equally (though this may seem counterintuitive) thrilled and confident that the work I’ve done will h...

‘Allo! I took a week off.  On accident.  It’s fine, I still managed to do 52 entries in 52 weeks, so, cheers to me, huh? Anyway I have half an hour to try and knock one of these out.  The first entry in my Out of Mana series! No buffer, a clock ticking down, an idea pulled out of my posterior, just like I drew it up! Timer as Cost Inspired by Haste, GREEM has cards where the cost to play represents the number of turns between when the card is played and when it becomes active or takes effect.  Stronger cards tend to take more turns to activate, or are limited in how many copies can be in a deck.  The game is one of timing and disruption. So what I’m picturing here is maybe a time travel theme, two opposing chronosorcerers trying to pull off immense feats while undermining and disrupting one another.  Probably cards that let you add, remove, or move around time counters, destroy cards that are at a certain timer count, get more than one card going, activate ...

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...