by TheJoker

Age of Dirt: The Beginning

The history of human (un)civilization is not for the faint of heart, and to understand it a little bit better, we have to go back nearly a decade.

Back then, I had started helping out at White Castle, an Austrian-based game agency. As an aspiring game designer, I was haunted with many ideas, but I could follow only a small part of them. The rest remained fragments in my self-bound game design sketchbook:


The founder of White Castle, Ronald Hofstätter, wanted me to create a game with his and Hugelmann's "Power-Tower", a dice tower similar to the tower in Shogun or Wallenstein). This reminded me of an older idea in my sketchbook: A worker placement game in which workers were sent to areas, or to be precise into small boxes. Once you lost sight of them, the little wooden cubes surely would experience extraordinary things. They were supposed to work where you sent them, but they could also get lost or meet a bear and die a horribl—

I had a dangerous but vanilla fantasy world in mind, and only one thing was missing: a suitable randomizer. The tower brought the last ingredient, and the game soon took on a playable form. A worker-placement game was born, a game whose workers behaved very, very, very stubbornly — one could even say they behaved extremely stupidly — so I made a virtue of necessity and the little wooden workers became wooden stone-age numbskulls. The resulting game, called "Ugha!", played fast and fun, and you could see it as a light satire of the many, at that time fashionable, worker-placement games.

Since the resources were scarce and the workers few, the game created many emotional moments...or should I say frustrating moments? I had already feared and anticipated this (un-)luck element of the dice tower. I wanted to make it interesting for more strategic players (like myself), so I introduced a mechanism that allowed you to shake the tower.


Six years and a few false starts later, I finally connected with the publisher that would bring "Ugha!" to market: WizKids.

Over that time, shaking the tower — while initially a well-received mechanim — started getting more and more criticism from playtesters. The problem was that it was too effective; most of the time all the workers fell out, resulting in an unsatisfying flood of resources for all the players. In order to give only some workers a slap upside…erm, a rap on their fingers and help them on their way, I had to modify the tower.

I gave the players clubs and redesigned the tower (as a mountain) with flaps so that each level could be rattled individually. Now, a few skillful knocks let you show some, but not all, of your workers the way back to your cave.

Age of Refining: The Middle

In 2018, I received a five-page design document of suggested changes for my game. This was a surprise since the game had only six pages of rules!

WizKids had given my game, now called Age of Dirt!, to one of its developers to revise. Perhaps it was wounded inventor pride or I just wasn't expecting it, but I have to admit that I was more than surprised by how much about my almost ten-year-old baby obviously wasn't right — yet looking at some of the suggestions, I could see why the developer had implemented them.

Now, before I go any further, I need to explain briefly what the game is about: I always describe it as a worker-placement game with stupid workers. You play the chieftain (a prehistoric CEO) of a neolithic clan. You send your workers into certain areas to collect resources (or into the love tent for sweet multiplication), but they gather resources for you only when a player "calls back" all the workers from an area. That player throws all workers from that area into "the passage" (the reworked dice tower), then can drum with a club on the tabs that stick out of the tower to "wake up" workers at a specific layer of the tower. (This practice might improve modern work life as well.) You receive resources when your workers come back, no matter which player does the call-back action.


Calling back workers is necessary, but I had always envisioned it as an unfavorable move — something the player would postpone as long as possible, hoping that another player would take care of it for them. In this revision, a small reward was given to the player calling back workers to mitigate the downside and to keep the actions more in balance. I could see the potential and couldn't wait to try this change.

Another request was to make the Stone Age even more dangerous. In addition to the tiger in the plains, they wanted a bear as a permanent predator in the forest. Both could eat your workers unless you built a club to defend your cavemen. The problem: The club is made of wood, and wood could be acquired only in the forest.

Another idea was that during a building action (when you make great innovative stuff out of the wood and stone and herbs), something could go wrong and cause clan members to perish. The game was now less focused and more luck dependent. The workers often died faster than they could get to (reproductive) work, which was certainly thematic, but frustrating for less fortunate players.

In order not to be too susceptible to extinction, they suggested a limit on how many workers a player could lose. The player tableaus had an extra bar with spaces for workers who were not available. These spaces were filled with bonuses you earned when you placed a just-deceased worker there, with the final three being +1 worker. Therefore, one could never have fewer than three workers.

The problem: My test players would take those unavailable workers as if they were available without thinking. After all, those workers were "in their cave". Sometimes you don't just become desperate about the intelligence of your subordinate workers... Well, I confess that I also found it a bit confusing sometimes. Peripheral vision hasn't really improved in the last millennia.

Thankfully the solution was easy: Let's add an extra tableau, a kind of nirvana for the unborn and, uh, for those who returned. We removed the bonuses bit by bit, but added a victory point in the end for having all your workers in play. This made having large clans favorable and kept the love tent more attractive later in the game.

I also had to change the idea of the "dangerous building phase" that I liked in the beginning. The "hazard cost" unfortunately turned out to be more of an advantage than a drawback. When it triggered, you would throw two of your workers into the passage. Anyone who came out below died, so this action could kill your opponents' workers, too. For clans already shrunk to the limit of three, this wasn't a problem as their clan members were now immune to death — and if they didn't come out immediately, all the better since they would bring a resource with them later. This meant that you could get random resources without using any actions.

Again, the solution was simple: Someone HAS to die. (Don't worry, dear reader, I did not go on a rampage.) I integrated this loss as a cost on cards like "Patriaaargh" or "Sacrificave". In order to complete them, one of your workers has to die — the survival of the strongest in a nutshell.

As a human being, but especially as a game designer, I consider fewer rules to usually cause less confusion. I consider fair and simple rules to be desirable, but the not-so-easy part is to have the right simple idea that goes down well with as many players as possible.


Age of Reflection: The End

All in all, I have to say that being confronted with ideas that were so different from mine did me and the game a lot of good. It's easy to reject criticism and suggestions, e.g., a reward for calling back workers, almost automatically even if it comes from many different game testers. (The last sentence certainly doesn't shed a good light on me.) I wanted the game to be played in a certain way, and well, I didn't find it easy to accept another version — or another vision — of my game, but in the end I think it was all for the best.

Luckily, I became adaptable enough to appreciate and implement another great idea from one of my playtesters late in the design phase: What about needing two workers to carry stone? Ingenious! (Remember what I said about having the right simple idea?) It was dripping theme and helped the asymmetrical perception of the areas tremendously: forest was easy, mountains heavy, plains were dangerous, and the love tent a little dirty...

I'm excited that Age of Dirt is finally published. It really feels like I started it an age ago. Over the last nine years, a lot of my playtesters asked for it again and again. This was my motivation to work on it and improve it over the years, the notion that my games would bring joy and fun to the people I'm with, and although some of my thoughts might suggest otherwise, I am appreciative of all the criticism and suggestions.

Johannes Krenner

tl;dr: Fun game — coming soon — ugha — playtesting hard

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by W. Eric Martin

I'm on my way to Germany to attend SPIEL '19 — my fourteenth such outing! — and with that event due to start in a few days, it's time to wind up the previews and head into the views...and then the postviews.

I've been posting SPIEL '19 game preview videos since the day after Gen Con 2019 ended — starting with an overview of Queenz from Bruno Cathala, Johannes Goupy, and Mandoo Games — and many of my pre-Gen Con preview videos also serve as previews for SPIEL '19 given how many companies "release" games at both shows these days.

If you won't be at SPIEL '19, you can pretend you're there by watching the 40+ hours of livestreaming that BGG will be broadcasting from Wednesday, Oct. 23 through Sunday, Oct. 27. We'll have a new game on camera every 5-10 minutes, which is a nutso schedule to attempt, but we'll do our best to keep things flowing, with you getting a sample of hundreds of games so that you can determine what you want to investigate down the road.

If you will be at SPIEL '19, then note that I'm still making additions to BGG's SPIEL '19 Preview, partly due to what fans (and I) have spotted on Merz Verlag's 2019 SPIEL-Guide and partly due to final notes from publishers who have finally decided to make their wares public. I keep saying that I'm not going to update the preview any more, but I think that will happen only once we hit Thursday and the Messe doors open to welcome you and thousands of other visitors. Stop by the BGG booth (5-J122) if you have the chance!

To close out my SPIEL '19 preview videos, here's a sampling of what I didn't have time to cover on camera over the past few months. My apologies to all designers and publishers not covered. I am filled with shame and will try to do better in 2020 — and I do think I did more in 2019 than in 2018, so perhaps my regrets from that year were helpful to me. This will apparently be an annual tradition no matter what I do thanks to the staggering number of games on the market. So many possibilities for play...


Youtube Video Read more »

by Spyros Koronis

The discussion topic is "Introduction". The forbidden letter is "B". Begin.

Chris: There is a saying I like a lot: "Every game has a story." I think the reverse is also true: "Every story has a game." Alice in Wordland is my second design, produced for the SPIEL '19 fair thanks to Drawlab Entertainment—

You used a "B"! OFF WITH HIS HEAD!

Spyros: Hello, everyone, I'm Chris' co-designer. This is my first time designing a game. We're here to tell you the story that gave birth to Alice—

OFF WITH HIS HEAD!

Spyros: ...well, we're off to a good start.

The discussion topic is "How it all began". The forbidden letter is "K". Begin.

Chris: In the fall of 2016, I had a unique experience. It's not something I would easily do again; nevertheless, I came out the other side with unforgettable moments, my first published game, and a brand new project.

A couple of the Drawlab team members and I traveled by car from Athens, Greece to Essen, Germany in a van full of newly minted games (When I Dream, my first design, being one of them). In order to be at the fair on time, we drove constantly, stopping only to grab a bite and refuel. Our poor van Ivan was a real trooper.

I was one of the two drivers, and my co-driver was a very good friend of mine, Spyros Koronis—

OFF WITH HIS HEAD!

Spyros: As Chris' partner on the road, I helped him stay focused and alert, especially at night-time. As we crossed Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary and Austria, we whiled the long hours away discussing all sorts of things, from our lives to our views, hopes and dreams. It really was a bonding, if grueling, experience.

Naturally, one of the most popular subjects was our shared passion for board games. At one point, Chris told me about a game he wanted to make—

OFF WITH HIS HEAD!

Chris: Nice job.

Spyros: Like you're one to talk!

The discussion topic is "The partnership". The forbidden letter is "V". Begin.

Chris: I told Spyros I wanted to create a fantasy-themed game in which players would be restricted in their speech in some way, ideally teaching their teammates a made-up language to communicate, but I hadn't gone much farther than that. From my time with Spyros, I knew him to be a great playtester; he was one for When I Dream, after all. His considerable experience playing games and his quick, analytical mind are to thank for that, I think.

I thought it worthwhile to offer Spyros a "push" or "spark", an opportunity to work with me on a game from the very beginning—

OFF WITH HIS HEAD!!!


Spyros: I had already known Chris for quite some time by that point. I admired and appreciated not only his prowess as a designer, but also his warm personality and fun attitude. I felt truly honored to be offered this opportunity.

SPIEL came and went, and we returned to Greece with our suitcases full of games and our heads full of ideas. We started meeting up regularly at "The Cell", a well-known meeting place for board gamers in Athens, as well as other gaming venues. Only this time, instead of playing games, we set about designing one. It was very exciting—

OFF WITH HIS HEAD!!!

Chris: Really, mate? With the same word as me?

Spyros: Yeah, that was unfortunate...

The discussion topic is "The turning point". The forbidden letter is "P". Begin.

Chris: Although we were highly motivated, our initial sessions were not very successful. I had the main hook of "communication restriction", and the thematic justification of an enchantment enforcing it. We were gravitating towards a game between teams of two in which one teammate would have all information but no way to act, and the other could act but have no information. The challenge would be for information to be transmitted from one to the other without conventional language.

We then toyed with various ways one could get instructions across, including a fictional vocabulary, a modular language taught in real time, lines drawn in the air, and hand gestures. However, we were struggling to find a fast, effective, and fun code of communication, as well as thinking of an interesting set of tasks to go with it. During one of our breaks, to take our minds off the subject, I told S— my...friend...about a tangent off my main idea: a deduction game in which we would each have a single letter we were forbidden from using, the goal being to identify the taboo letter of each other based on how they talk.

And that's when it happened—

OFF WITH HIS HEEEAD!

Spyros: Chris' idea reminded me of an anime I used to watch called Yu Yu Hakusho. A minor storyline had the characters facing an antagonist with the ability of "Taboo": He could forbid certain letters, and anyone using a word containing them would lose their soul. Even in the show itself, this challenge was seen as a game of sorts, and it immediately intrigued us. From that moment, our design efforts shifted, centering around this new idea.

The basics were quickly established: There would be a discussion subject and two or three forbidden letters; using a word containing any of them would mean you are out of the round. Favoring a short game, we initially made it last just three rounds, with Chris introducing a time limit enforced by a mobile a— er...feature...to assist with the flow. I divided all letters into difficulty tiers according to their frequency in the dictionary, an effective tool when decoding substitution ciphers—

OFF WITH HIS HEEEAD!

Chris: And we were doing so well...

Spyros: I forgot "cipher" has a "P" in it. Give me a break!


The discussion topic is "Theme and Character Powers". The forbidden letter is "F". Begin.

Chris: Naturally, our developing game needed a distinct theme. Initially, we used wizards and magic as with the previous design, but we soon came up with something better. Spyros re-imagined the "taboo letter" mechanism as a law, one that a king or queen might decree. Obviously, one would have to be mad to pass a law like that. A mad monarch...

Well, there was one who instantly came to our minds: the Queen o' Hearts, a character in "Alice in Wonderland"! It was not hard to imagine the capricious queen inviting her subjects to a tea party and "encouraging" them to make small talk, with anyone breaking her laws losing their head — or, at least, their seat at the party table. It even provided us with a punny title: "word game" + "Alice in Wonderland" gave birth to "Alice in Wordland"!

"Alice in Wonderland" is a well-known tale. This was a bonus to playtesters, but also inspired us designers when it came to the next important point: character powers. I love variable powers in games. They're awesome! It's great when players under the same general rules can still do unique things and play the game their own way. This also gives a game replayability, strategic depth, theme integration, and above all, fun!

OFF! WITH! HIS! HEAD!


Spyros: I was hesitant to include character powers, worrying that they might complicate what I wanted to be a simple game. Luckily, Chris ultimately convinced me and I can't be happier that he did. Introducing this element to the game instantly made it much more interesting and entertaining.

In the beginning, coming up with abilities was much easier than expected. We simply allowed the Wonderland theme to guide us. It's only natural that the Queen can add a banned letter and select the discussion topic; she is the land's ruler and the party's host. Similarly, the Cheshire Cat turning invisible obviously means that he can vanish to skip his turn in a pinch. We were delighted.

Gradually, though, two issues emerged. Number one was balance. In such a short game, powers could — and should — have a great impact on gameplay. The Cheshire Cat's ability, while elegant, inevitably became the benchmark when evaluating new ones. Countless times, an ability was rejected because it was "strictly worse" than the Cat's. It's easy to see why: a turn with absolutely no risk in a game with such a small turn number per player was pretty strong.

Number two was the game's real-time nature. We noticed during playtesting that players rarely used their powers because they were trying to come up with an acceptable word within the time limit. This meant that powers had to be simple and strong enough to encourage players to remember and use them. It took considerable development with our publishers to create easy to use, balanced, interesting and thematic powers, but in the end we are confident that—

OFF! WITH! HIS! HEAD!

Chris: It's getting harder, isn't it?

Spyros: Yeah, avoiding words like "of" and "for" was a real challenge.

The discussion topic is "The Contest". The forbidden letter is "M". Begin.

Chris: "Epitrapezio" is a nation-wide design contest in Greece, with the finals being held in Athens. I always take part as it's a fun way to develop one's creations in a friendly clash with one's friends. Spyros and I participated in 2017's contest. The open playtest sessions that "Epitrapezio" offered gave us the opportunity to receive tons of useful feedback and helped Alice evolve, identifying and fixing a lot of issues along the way. It was then that our game—

HEAD OFF!

Spyros: It was then that Alice in Wordland really hit its stride as a newbie-friendly, yet still challenging design. We also received a lot of positive feedback during the finals, where we received the third Judges' award as well as the People's Choice award. Just like the Cheshire Cat, these results left us both with great big smiles—

HEAD OFF!

Spyros: How much longer do we have to do this for?

Chris: We're almost done, don't worry.

The discussion topic is "Getting Published". The forbidden letter is "N". Begin.

Chris: Some Greek publishers saw our game at "Epitrapezio". We also pitched it to publishers abroad with a home-made video:


Youtube Video

A few replies showed promise, but they ultimately all rejected it. We therefore had to choose a Greek publisher.

I had the best memories of Drawlab from their work with my first game, so I was sure they would do their best this time as well. Although it might take a bit more time compared to other publishers, I knew—

OFF, I SAY!

Spyros: We had zero doubt they would treat the game with care as they, of course, did. From the beautiful art to the multitude of playtests, from the scores of clever ideas to the cool musical teapot timer, they delivered, and we are truly thankful.

OFF, I SAY!

Spyros: I don't care. That was worth it.

Chris: I agree.

The discussion topic is "Conclusion". The forbidden letter is..."E". Begin.

Chris: What?! Uh...it was a long story, but it's about to finish. A lot of fun was had by both of us making this. It's finally all I and Spyros wish for — a quick and fun party game.

OFF WITH HIS HEAD!

Spyros: Um...I'm hoping you will join us at Drawlab's booth for a visit in Wordland! Insanity is not a must, but it helps!

OFF WITH HIS HEAD!

Chris: Whew, glad that's over. Fancy a cup of tea?

Spyros: Sure thing!

Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

I have a few tasks still to do for SPIEL '19, so I must let this video overview of Antoine Bauza's Last Bastion — a new standalone game from Repos Production based on his Ghost Stories from 2008 — also be standalone.

Short take: Last Bastion presents the same challenge as Ghost Stories with a streamlined engine that had us playing without questions about the rules — only questions about whether we would survive.


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by Yaniv Kahana

Super Farmer: The Card Game is the second game that I've had published and the first game that I designed without a co-designer. I wanted to bring something new to the existing "choose a card and pass" drafting mechanism, and that is how "reverse drafting" was born.

What's reverse drafting? On your turn, you pick one card for yourself, but also choose another card for one of the other players.

The Spark

My journey with Super Farmer: The Card Game began in July 2017. After two years of designing with partners, I decided to take up the challenge and go solo, and I began designing alone for the first time. It all started with the strike of a muse that hit me before I drifted into sleep. I was so excited! But first, let me tell you where it all came from.

The inspiration for this design was the popular game Sushi Go! I had tried Sushi Go! with my gaming groups. We always love to play fillers before our main course of the evening, but we all found it too light for our taste. On the other hand, I have always liked this simple and elegant drafting mechanism, which mitigates the luck element and can create interesting decisions, so I wanted to design a drafting game like Sushi Go! that would be a bit more complex, would appeal to gamers as a filler game, and would also be suitable for children and families.

Before drifting off to sleep, instead of counting sheep, lumber and bricks, I'm playing with game mechanisms in my mind — and this is how the idea of "take a card and give a card" emerged. As I said, I was extremely excited about this idea. To be honest, new game ideas always excite me because before I create the system around it and play the game, the potential seems endless.

Version 1: Fun, But Misleading

My first version of this drafting game had numbers and abilities, which created quite a complex game system. The game had a different theme originally and was called "Tussie Mussie". It was a game about a flower festival in which players compete to create the most astonishing bouquets.

A few iterations later, I simplified the game by removing all the numbers and abilities, replacing them with three icons: blooming flower, bud, and gypsophila. (Don't feel bad — I didn't know then what it was either.)


Two templates of the first card designs
First scoresheet design

The first stable version of this design was a classic set-collection game — the more icons you have of a specific flower, the more points you gain. But unlike the next version, you scored every one of your flowers even if you didn't have the most icons of a particular flower. The game was fun, but it was complex, with a scoresheet to mark your score at the end of the game and a points table cheat card.


Second scoresheet design

The playtesters and I loved the game, and we enjoyed the core twist for the drafting mechanism, which created a fresh kind of interaction compared to standard drafting games. Alliances and betrayals were formed throughout the game; some players chose to scratch each others' backs, while others tried to obstruct their opponents' plans.

The team mode was my favorite mode, with each team needing to decide whether they wanted to focus on building their flower displays or interfering and blocking the rival team displays. Team mode is a bit more complex because each player needs to manage two card displays — theirs and their partner's — and tries to understand what their partner needs.

In the end, although the game scoring system was overly complex, players asked for a copy of the game to play with their friends in their own gaming groups, which is always a great sign.

My first public playtesting was two months after I designed the game. I tested it with an audience of children and adults that I hadn't met before at the Dragoncon, and it was one of the favorite games at the convention.

Every Game Deserves a Makeover

After the convention, I stopped the design of the game and worked to prepare the art with the help of the amazing artist Sophie Noga Eden.


The new card designs

I put my game aside and left it alone for a while. A few months before the Spielwarenmesse toy fair in Nürnberg, Germany, I came back to it to see how I could improve it. I like to do this in every design process. I love to come back and look at my games again with a fresh perspective. It usually helps me focus on the flaws of the game and come up with new ideas to solve them.

My first goal was to simplify the game, especially the scoring system. Instead of scoring at the end of the game, scoring would take place each round and only the player with the most blooming flower icons would earn points. The buds would be engine-building points between rounds (as in the basic version of Super Farmer: The Card Game today).

In the beginning, each player who won a specific flower type earned points based on the round played, no matter how many flower icons they had, but when I explained the game to my son and his friends, he asked whether the number of points the winner receives matches their number of flower icons. Well no, it didn't, but wait...that was a great idea! It created an interesting competition between the players — the more you invest in a flower type, the more points you receive for it.

The new version was ready just in time to show at Spielwarenmesse 2018, and at that fair, I got great feedback and ideas from the talented designers Simone Luciani and Daniel Greiner. Their ideas helped to improve and streamline the game. They also introduced the idea of negative points for the wild card, which adds a smidge of interaction between players that I really like as it leads players to create more alliances and to promise to help one another during the game.

Two more important improvements were added later, including the advanced version of buds that created another interesting interaction between players trying to interfere with one another. After the "advanced buds" version, I had three different majorities systems: the flowers, the buds (in advanced mode), and the gypsophila (the game's food), with the player who has the most gypsophila on their whole flower arrangement scoring their biggest group of flowers again.

But it was quite hard to track the amount of gypsophila that you and your opponents had, so I changed it to engine-point building. By doing so, players still didn't want to give other players cards with gypsophila to prevent them from scoring many points, even if they didn't need those cards for themselves.

Finding the Perfect Home

I first met Aleksander Redward, the editor of Granna, at Spielwarenmesse 2019. We had a short meeting at which I showed him my games, and "Tussie Mussie" was one of them. I was happy that he took an interest in most of my games, but he also told me that it would take a while before they tested them as they were very busy at Granna.

But then he contacted me after the fair to say that they wanted to publish a card game based on their Super Farmer IP for SPIEL '19, and he mentioned that "Tussie Mussie" might be suitable for it. I was up for the challenge to re-theme "Tussie Mussie", even though I held dear the comment of a friend's mom after she had played this gentle-looking flower game with him: "That was the most vicious flower game I have ever played!"

Aleksander and I started our Skype meetings on Fridays where we brainstormed how to transform "Tussie Mussie" into Super Farmer: The Card Game and which animals to use. I remember Aleksander saying that a cat does whatever it wants, so it should be the wild card...


The Super Farmer animals are back!

I wanted to add the wolf, fox, and dog elements to the game, and I tried a few options, including new cards with new symbols. I found that the best mechanism was the dog icons, which added another logic layer for advanced players.

I was very excited when Granna decided to take the game and publish it so quickly. This would be my second game to be released at SPIEL '19, along with the first game that I had designed,Kauchuk. (You can read more about developing Kauchuk here.)

Super Farmer: The Card Game is one of my favorite games that I have designed and the design that I have played the most thanks to my son Itai, who always asks to play it. This game was made possible through the help and collaboration of many people, from my sharp and loyal playtesters and fellow designers at GravitiX Games who are always happy to try out all my new ideas, even in the beginning stages where the game might be broken, to the amazing work of Aleksander who saw the potential of the game for the Super Farmer line, to my fabulous editor Sally Halon and all the Granna team who turned this game into a reality. Thank you for joining me on this journey.

Now, my fellow gamers, a new journey begins with you. Please share your thoughts and experiences with Super Farmer: The Card Game, and think twice about what you give your opponent...

Yaniv Kahana


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by Thomas Dagenais-Lespérance

The idea behind Wayfinders came to me while I was working on a very different game.

That game, which was called "Storylines", was a story generator of sorts in which you could assemble story bits into larger stories using symbols, then read them afterwards and have them be coherent enough. The story system worked pretty well and produced what I thought were enjoyable stories, but I was trying my hardest to create a game around it and couldn't find the right path. It was an auction game for a time, then a rummy-style game, then many other things, and at some point I gave up and settled for something not unlike Ricochet Robot.

An example of a "Storylines" story. When reading it, you would replace all the words in capital blue letters with names found on character and location cards. This one is going to have a few inconsistencies; can you see why just from the symbols?
In the end, "Storylines" never became a marketable idea and is probably never going to get published, and it saddens me because so many hours were spent on creating it that my stomach aches whenever I see the prototype on my shelves.

However, some good at least came out of that experimentation. In one of my tests, I tried laying out the story cards on the table, and players would take turns either placing one of their tokens on a card, or taking back all of their tokens along with the cards under them. The most efficient way to play would be to place all your tokens before taking them back, but you would run the risk of having the cards you wanted stolen. I really liked that mechanism, but it was a bad fit for "Storylines". I decided to put it aside and go back to it later. This was in August 2017.

Cut to May 2018. I had recently stopped working at FoxMind Games, didn't have a job, and was trying to focus on creating games to pitch at Origins. I thought I would try my hand at making a Splendor-style game as I wanted to do a type of game that I would be able to play with my family, so I decided to bring back the mechanism I had tried while working on "Storylines". I modified it slightly to make it a bit more flexible: Players would place workers in front of resource columns instead of on specific resources so that each worker would always bring home a resource — just maybe not the right one.

To bring the mechanism to life, I thought about having players move around a shared tableau of resources-to-points/abilities/resources converters as that seemed A) fair since everyone would have access to the same options, B) a good way to create tension since players could potentially compete for the same targets, and C) a good way to add replayability since the board was modular. I decided to set the game in Polynesia, with players moving around their boats and settling a tableau of islands.

From my first few tests, I could see the core ideas were working and the game had potential. However, there were three issues that took me a bit more time to fix...

An early version of the resource board. It's been reduced a lot in size since then.

The first issue I encountered was movement. In the first few versions, players were paying for every adjacent movement they made, which made for an extremely slow game. Then, I made it so they could move for free to their own islands, which was better, but it still felt like movement was too constrained. Even more important, it made it hard for players to compete for the same islands beyond the start of the game since the cost of moving to faraway islands was prohibitively high.

The solution to that (or at least the one that felt the best to me) was to make moving to a settled island free, even if it was someone else's island. This freed up movement later in the game and allowed players to always have the possibility to compete for the same islands if they wanted since the cost of moving to X island was almost always the same for everyone. This change also created a nice inflection point and made it so the beginning and the end of the game didn't feel the same.

The second issue was that players didn't feel stressed enough to get the exact resources they needed at the right time because players could accumulate as many resources as they wanted, which meant that everyone was almost always playing all of their workers before taking them back. I initially tried to find an alternative to just setting an inventory limit because it felt too much like the obvious choice. My first idea was to limit players in the use of the resources they accumulated from previous turns so that they would be incentivized to use resources right away if they could, but that proved too complicated for my tastes. After trying a bunch of things, I finally settled on the inventory limit. It remained the most efficient way to achieve my goal, even if it didn't feel the most original.

The third issue was figuring out what would happen if multiple players settled the same island, and whether that should be allowed at all. My first idea was to have decreasing rewards for second, third, and fourth place, but that forced me to put too much information on each island and wasn't super exciting. On the other hand, preventing players from settling the same islands was problematic with four players, and I wanted to avoid having a different ruleset for different player counts, if possible.

That said, I still wanted players to feel like settling an island after an opponent did so was undesirable, so that if someone settled an island they were coveting, it felt like a blow. In the end, I made it so that they would have to give the resources used to settle an island to the first player who settled it. It felt like a nice twist and created a situation in which most times (but not all) it was preferable to change course if someone settled an island before you, which was exactly what I wanted.

An early version of an island tile, which had too much information
As a side note, one of the things I tried to do with the design of Wayfinders was to contrast a fixed and entirely visible tableau of options with a somewhat uncertain resource-collection mechanism. Since it's technically possible to find the objective best set of islands to settle in a particular game (although that set will differ from game to game), I needed to ensure that uncertainty remained as to whether players would be able to achieve their plans. Somewhere in the decision tree of a game there needs to be an unknown quantity for it to be interesting, and with a fixed tableau the unknown needed to be about the resource collection aspect. Maybe those eight islands are the ones that are going to give you the most points on paper, but maybe the right resources to settle them won't be there, so how are you going to adapt? Or the right resources might be there, but what if other players take them before you?

After about a month of development and testing, I thought my prototype was good enough to show publishers, and I went to Origins with it. I was overjoyed to see that multiple publishers were interested in the game, and it actually was a small problem for me since they were all great publishers and I would have wanted to work with all of them.

The prototype I brought to Origins
I ended up signing with Pandasaurus Games, and I don't regret a thing. Development with them was great: They had around fifty different groups of testers submitting test results through a Google form, with new results coming in almost daily, which helped make sure everything was the best it could be. It was a learning experience for me as I wasn't used to getting so much feedback at the same time, and I was initially overreacting to a lot of the issues that were coming up. People are going to have contradictory expectations and tastes, and sometimes an issue is just going to be an isolated case.

Also, it's harder to decipher text-only feedback as you cannot have a conversation with the tester, and you cannot watch the person's body language. That being said, I became better at dealing with the Google form feedback as time went on, and it proved to be a powerful tool.

Wayfinders was in intensive testing for about two months, so a relatively short period all considered. Mostly little things were tweaked — numbers and such. The biggest change was probably reducing the size of the resource board, which proved to be controversial with some of the playtesters, but in my opinion a significant change for the better as it increased player interaction as well as tension around resource collection. After testing was done, things moved quickly, with most of the artwork finished by the end of May or so.

What the game looks like now after the amazing work done by Pandasaurus and Michael Parla. Wow!
The game is finally coming out at SPIEL '19 this October. It's a game that I've had a lot of fun creating, and I hope people will have as much fun playing it!

Thomas Dagenais-Lespérance Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

In Pharaon, a big box game from designers Henri Pym and Sylas and publisher Catch Up Games, you are preparing for your death — or more specifically for your afterlife. Your actions in the world will be judged, and in the end you or someone else at the table will be judged the most worthy player.

Pharaon is set in ancient Egypt, and over the course of five rounds, players take actions in five sections of the game board to improve their standing. In more general terms, you'll start with a few resources, and over time you'll attempt to transform those resources into dozens of points in a variety of ways.

On a turn, you either pass to sit out the rest of the round or pay the action cost of one of the five actions, then carry it out. The action cost is partly determined by a wheel that rotates at the end of each round and partly by the action itself; the combination of these two keeps your choices challenging throughout the game as the cost on the wheel can be used to part of the cost of the action itself. If, for example, the cost to take an action is a red resource and a yellow resource, and the cost on the wheel is red, then you pay only red and yellow; if the cost on the wheel is blue, then you must pay red, yellow, and blue.


The more efficient you are in taking the right actions at the right time, the more that you can do — yet you often need to pay a higher cost to act now because time won't last forever. These action locations are:

• Offerings: Pay the cost on the wheel, then take one of the pairs of offerings on display. Pay an additional resource of the same color, and you can take a third offering.
• Nile: Pay the cost on the wheel and a specific pair of resources (with the former cost possibly being part of the latter), then take the resources indicated and advance one or two of your tokens on the Nile tracks.
• Artisans: Pay the cost of the wheel and three matching resources (again, with the former cost possibly being part of the latter), then draft one of the four artisan cards on display, with you earning endgame points and resources from this card.
• Burial chamber: Pay the cost of the wheel and the cost of the next space on the path of tombs, and you advance to that space, which is worth points at game's end.
• Nobles: Pay one of each of the five basic resources, then draft one of the three nobles on display. Each noble is worth endgame points, with that value sometimes based on other factors, and it has a special power that you can use once, once per round, or constantly as indicated on the card.


The number of actions in each space is limited, so you risk being locked out of an action if you don't take it near the start of a round — yet often you take certain actions in a certain order so that you can do whatever it is that you want to do. Taking a Nile, artisan, or offering action sometimes lets you net resources over the cost — perhaps spending three resources to get four — or at least break even, so you often want to take those actions before drafting a noble or improving your burial chamber. Do that, though, and you risk someone else drafting the noble you want first.

I've played Pharaon three times on a review copy from Catch Up Games, twice with two players and once with four, and I've improved my play over time. In the second two-player game, each of us scored at least thirty points more than in our initial game as we discovered how to work the levers in a more efficient manner, so to speak. Everything in the game design threads through everything else, so you're competing against yourself as much as you're competing against others for nobles, offerings, artisans, the pharaoh bonus, and the actions themselves, which are limited based on the number of players.

For much more on the gameplay and how it all works, check out my video overview:


Youtube Video Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

I've been focusing on preparations for SPIEL '19, including the publication of as many designer diaries and game previews as possible, but plenty of other game announcements are taking place as well:

• Grail Games has already released its own versions of Reiner Knizia's Medici and Medici: The Card Game, and now it's taking the next step that people so often joke about with the announcement of a 2020 release of Medici: The Dice Game. What's more, this design is a dice-drafting, roll-and-write game, so the segment of the audience irked by the prevalence of such things can feel irked alongside those bothered by "X: The Dice Game". A short take on how the game works:

Medici: The Dice Game is a new design by Reiner Knizia that shares the setting and feel of his classic Medici board game, but using dice! Over the course of three rounds, 2-4 players fill their ships with the goods presented at the wharf. They earn money for having the most valued loads, as well as for collecting majorities of the different goods.

If only zombies could be fit in somehow, or perhaps Munchkin and Fluxx.

• Speaking of which, Looney Labs has given a January 9, 2020 release date for Astronomy Fluxx, the next title in its line of science-based Fluxx titles following Math Fluxx, Chemistry Fluxx, and Anatomy Fluxx.

• To continue with game brand extensions, Dominion designer Donald X. Vaccarino announced on Reddit, "There will be an expansion next year [i.e., 2020], probably first quarter." He added that initial info about this release will likely emerge in early December 2019.

• As is its custom, at SPIEL '19 Lookout Games will have all the titles listed for it in our SPIEL '19 Preview, as well as lots of promo cards, including Expedition to Newdale: The Pfistries, a five-card item for Alexander Pfister's new Expedition to Newdale; seven new Agricola cards that bear a Newdale theme and nine new L-Deck cards; two new cards for Foothills; and "News from Lookout", which includes new Patchwork Doodle cards, a scenario for The Colonists, and more. So many BGG database listings waiting to be made...

• Finally, Upper Deck Entertainment has revealed its plan for expansions to Vs System 2PCG: The Marvel Battles in 2020:

Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

I've already presented an overview of the gameplay in No Return: Es gibt kein Zurück! — a game by Marco Teubner and moses. Verlag — in mid-September 2019 in this space, so let me quote that again before going a bit further:

No Return: Es gibt kein Zurück! ("There's No Turning Back!") is played in two phases, with players collecting tiles in phase one, then scoring their tiles in phase two. People move into phase two at their own pace, and once you go in, you're there for the rest of the game — which might not be long!

The game includes 132 tiles, specifically two sets of tiles in six colors, with the tiles being numbered 1-11 in each color. Each player starts with eight tiles in hand, and you can discard and redraw once before the game begins. On a turn, you either (1) discard up to four tiles in your hand from the game, then draw that many tiles from the bag or (2) play one or more tiles from your hand to a color on your board, then draw that many tiles. You can play tiles of only one color, and all the tiles played must be equal to or less than any tiles of that color you already have in play. You place these tiles in descending order, and you can build at most six rows during the game, one of each color.

Whenever you want, you can switch to phase two. Once you do this, on a turn you either (1) discard up to four tiles in your hand from the game, then draw that many tiles from the bag or (2) clear tiles from your play area to score them. To do this, choose one or more tiles in your play area of only a single color, starting with the lowest valued tile (or tiles), then sum the tiles you want to score. You must then "pay" to score these tiles by discarding tiles of one color from your hand that sum to this same amount or higher. The tiles you discard from your hand don't have to be the same color as the color of the tiles you're scoring. Remove the tiles you paid from the game, and place the tiles you've cleared face down in a score pile. Refill your hand to eight tiles at the end of your turn.

As soon as someone draws the final tile from the bag, you complete the round so that everyone has had the same number of turns, then the game ends. A player's score equals the sum of the tiles that they've cleared minus the sum of the tiles they still have in play. (Tiles in a player's hand are discarded.) Whoever has the highest score wins!

I've now played No Return eight times on a review copy from moses. Verlag (with one of those games being three-player and the remainder two-player), and the game has delivered pretty much what I thought it would: a seesaw feel in which you slowly add tiles to your collection, lamenting the randomness of the bag as you draw not quite the right tiles from it and wavering over exactly how much you want to build before tearing the whole thing apart.

In feel, No Return bears similarities to Lost Cities and Qwixx, two games in which you must take an action on your turn even though the urge to pass sometimes smothers your desire to do anything else. In all three of these games, you're often confronted with the option to commit in a color, knowing that doing so cuts off potential scoring in everything you're leaping over. Do you play the 4 or 5 in Lost Cities, risking a penalty should no other cards appear in that color, or do you throw it away, instead risking your opponent scooping it up for double or triple points and an eight-card bonus?

Opponents can't grab the tiles that you toss in No Return, but all too often you realize many turns later that you could have just played those tiles to your collection since you never drew any more tiles of that color anyway — yet you couldn't have known that would happen, so was it really a bad play? Maybe it was, but with only eight games experience, I feel like I'm still getting the rhythm of the game, something that will change with each player count since you'll have fewer of the tiles passing through your hands and more tiles visible in play to better let you weigh the odds of which action might be the right one to carry out.

For more on the game, here's a video overview I recorded, which shows the size of the tiles and lets you see that the pink and red colors are too close to one another, a problem that has stymied many publishers in many games:

Youtube Video Read more »

Publisher: Grey Matter Games

DEADLY MISSIONS: HALLOWEEN EXPANSION is a fun expansion for DEADLY MISSIONS 5th EDITION that centers around a handful of students from MADAME WARTHOG'S SCHOOL OF WITCHCRAFT AND WIZARDRY FOR GIRLS.

This set features eight high quality original hand-drawn figures featuring front and rear artwork, and includes data cards and background information of the characters for use in DEADLY MISSIONS games. 

The characters are monster-based heroes that each specialize in a different school of magic.  They are: 

• LUCY FER (Ascended), a succubus: Conjuring
• CELESTE, a vampire: Mind Control
• ZOE, a zombie:  Technomancy
• CLAUDIA, a werewolf: Summoning
• FARRAH, a mummy:  Resurrection
• SOPHIE, a specter: Telekinesis
• GLINDA THE GOTH WITCH:  Healing
• The WICKED WITCH OF THE WEST: Conjuring

We hope you enjoy these figures, and hope they work in their way into your games!

Price: $2.50 Read more »

Publisher: Pinnacle Entertainment

Venture to South America in search of the Fabled “Eye of Kilquato!”

Play as Buck Savage, Virginia Dare, Danny Dare, their friend Kator “the Ape Boy,” or Doc Gold, to unravel the mysteries around this famous gem in the heart of the Amazon!

This classic adventure first released in 2003 and now updated for the new Savage Worlds Adventure Edition by Shane Hensley. It contains pre-generated characters, figure flats, map tiles, and more fun than you can toss a piranha at—over 45 pages of content!

The Eye of Kilquato is a Savage Tale for the Savage Worlds roleplaying game system. A copy of Savage Worlds Adventure Edition is optimal.

Price: $9.99 Read more »

Publisher: Evil Beagle Games

One of Michael "The Professor" Surbrook's greatest loves (and that of his friend and editor, Jennifer Shinefeld) is books. He is a bibliophile in every sense of the word, and now he brings that love and knowledge to add to your campaigns.

Designed specifically for people playing 5e campaigns.

Continuing the combination of utility, imaginative content, and deep research found in the Discoveries series, Evil Beagle's resident scholar and master-of-cleverness, Michael Surbrook, brings another useful toolkit to bear for Game Masters who want to elevate their games. In this case, Library Discoveries is a small-but-information packed tome dedicated to elevating the presence of printed information in your fantasy campaigns, including - 

• Tons of information about books - what they are, their historical significance, and their many uses.
• The physical aspects of books and other means of keeping the written word contained for others to read.
• An entire section dedicated to the concept of writing systems - their development and nature.
• A rather significant section dedicated to allowing the Dungeon/Game Master to randomly generate any number of books and documents that might be found in a treasure trove, wizard's sanctum, nobleman's collection, or any library great or small.

Edited by Jennifer Shinefeld; Graphic Design and Layout by Bill "teh ebil bunneh" Keyes. Special Thanks to Joel Sparks.

Price: $1.95 Read more »

Publisher: Zachary Viox

Chajak's Heroni's Guide to Unitopia is filled to the brim with exciting new lands, appetizing plots, powerful deities, and more lore to compliment your home game! The book goes on to include 11 new playable classes, 70+ fresh spells to choose from, over 60 subclasses, a handful of feats, and many more additional options to add to your table.

With this book, you can open your game to an entirely new world never before seen in the history of roleplaying games! The material inside can be used to easily forge a campaign setting and introduce entirely unique play.

Price: $19.99 Read more »

Publisher: Rogue Genius Games

Quality artwork from Everyman Games illustrator, Jacob E. Blackmon!

Full color drawing.

See preview for license.

Price: $1.46 Read more »

Publisher: Rogue Genius Games

Quality artwork from RGG illustrator, Marcum Curlee!

Color and black & white line drawing.

See preview for license.

Price: $1.46 Read more »

Publisher: Mongoose

Hivers III

If this adventure follows on from Hivers I & II then you will be familiar with the Hivers and how their ship exploded in the upper atmosphere at the end of the previous episode.

If you have not played Hivers I, here is a synopsis.

What the average person understands is this:

The world upon which you stand has been suffering a global famine. When things got desperate a massive food convoy was arranged to import food. As the convoy approached the planet it was attacked and destroyed. Most people blame pirates for the attack, some spacers say it was aliens. One freighter survived the attack but was crippled and the crew sucked out into the vacuum of space. A rescue mission was sent out and the freighter brought back to the orbital station even as it was brought to the planet’s orbital station parts of the ship were breaking up and burning up in the planet’s atmosphere. The spacers that rescued the freighter were a team of off-worlders and the freighter’s cargo of thousands of tons of protein powder were sorely needed.

Hivers III

Hivers II finds the heroes investigating a signal being broadcast from underneath the city to a point in deep space.

Although Hivers I is the start of the adventure there is no requirement for the same characters to have played all three and Hivers II and Hivers III could be played in any order. They are standalone adventures in their own right.

Price: $2.99 Read more »

Publisher: Rogue Genius Games

Quality artwork from RGG illustrator, Liz Courts!

Full color illustration. 

See preview for license.

Price: $1.46 Read more »

Publisher: Rogue Genius Games

Quality artwork from RGG illustrator, Jacob E. Blackmon!

Color and black & white line drawing.

See preview for license.

Price: $1.46 Read more »

Drive-Through RPG is an important fixture of the RPG industry. It is the largest consolidated site for electronic RPG products, mostly in the form of PDFs. There has been a lot of discussion about the suitability of PDFs for the delivery of RPG material, and this isn’t likely to be a matter settled any time soon, but the site is now introducing a new format — the Phone PDF.

The Phone PDF format is not a format that the site itself creates, but is a new format that has several common traits, which a few companies have created to show off the format’s features. In general, the traits are:

• Specific format with larger fonts, usually only displaying a few paragraphs at a time
• Bottom navigation buttons with “back” and “contents” links — these move the PDF back a page, or display the table of contents of the PDF
• Heading hyperlinks in the index to navigate quickly to multiple sections of the PDF

Within this format, there is some variation. In this instance, I looked at the Phone PDFs for Masks, Pugmire, and Zweihander. Because of the special formatting of the pages and the larger font sizes, the number of pages increases greatly in these PDFs. The already huge Zweihander balloons to over 2200 pages in this format.

A Tale of Three Layouts

Pugmire has the most “standard” setup of the three PDFs. All of the above bullet points are true of the PDF, and several hyperlinks allow for quick navigation from the table of contents to the various headers in the book. While it is difficult to do an in-depth read of each page on short notice, one particular oddity of formatting I noticed in the Pugmire PDF was the sideways oriented “average monster statistics” table, which is also spread across two pages.

Masks has several custom-built landing pages in the PDF, and has an overall more visual navigation system. There are specially formatted landing pages for topics like playbooks or villain rules, and the book can be navigated by both standard index and newly organized topics pages. The addition of the specialized landing pages still does something similar to the standard additional hyperlinks, but they feel like a more self-evident, guided manner of presenting the same options.

The Zweihander Phone PDF has its own customizations compared to the “standard” elements of the Phone PDF construction. It has a “back” and “contents” button at the bottom of the page, but there are also letters lined up on the right-hand side of the pages, and clicking on one of the links on the side takes the reader specifically to the index, to the letter indicated by the letter touched.

Playtime 

I took some time to use these PDFs using different PDF readers, and using them on phone, tablet, and PC. For anyone wondering, I’m still rocking the Galaxy S7 for my phone, and using a Galaxy Tab 10.1 for my mobile devices. The PDF readers I used were ezPDF reader, Adobe, Foxit, and Xodo on my phone and tablet, and Foxit and Adobe on my PC.

The recommended PDF reader for Zweihander is Xodo, although the “back” button doesn’t respond in this format. I’m also not a fan because if Xodo has a “read out loud” feature, I was hard-pressed to figure out where it is. Additionally, while the Foxit reader works fine for PC, the Foxit app won’t open the Zweihander PDF.

Aside from the above issues, I didn’t notice a great deal of difference between the formats. ezPDF’s default screen usage causes some issues, as the interface often covers the bottom of the page, making it difficult to navigate the buttons at the bottom.

While I haven’t used any of the PDFs “in play,” I did write down a few topics, and then tried to see how quickly I could track down data on that topic. While I can’t speak to use at the table yet, I can say that it was much easier to jump to a topic after a few clicks in all of the formats than it was to use the search function. Part of this is that the format makes multiple hyperlinks a necessary addition to the document.

Between my fingers and the phone cover, I had a few clumsy moments navigating the PDFs on my phone, because the navigation buttons are so near to the external buttons on my phone. Despite this, it wasn’t too bad to deal with, and was less of an issue with PDF readers that aren’t fighting to take up real estate in the same area. The tablet navigation was much easier, with more room to click on links and less potential for accidentally hitting multiple screen items at once.

Clicking on the links by mouse on PC was extremely fast. While the PDFs are formatted for Phones, the additional hyperlinks and contents pages (as well as the landing pages and index shortcuts on some of the PDFs) made navigating the topics fast.

Ghosts of PDFs Past

While the Phone PDF format is new, some of the features are not. Nova Praxis and Titan Effect are both RPGs that have “enhanced” PDFs. Instead of just having a few hyperlinks in the table of contents, both of these PDFs have navigation bars at the top or sides of the pages.

Nova Praxis, specifically, is formatted for a horizontal display, with topics along the left-hand side, and sub-topics that pop up along the bottom of the page for navigation. Titan Effect has a more traditional layout, but there are multiple topics displayed across the top of the page that allow for quick navigation to different sections of the PDF.

My Two Crypto-Currency Bits

My credentials as a “futurist” are probably not particularly strong, but when it comes to mobile access to game data, it has been my feeling lately that proprietary apps that can be tailored to the needs of the game rules being displayed are the most likely way forward. These apps may even incorporate tools like token tracking, dice, or cards that are native to the game being played.

From the various press releases and discussions of this format, it takes a considerable amount of effort to reformat PDFs for this particular style. I’ve never laid out a PDF in this manner, nor have I ever created an app, but I do wonder how much extra effort it creates to move in one direction versus another.

I can’t deny that the Phone PDFs were far more useful for reference than a standard PDF. I have several times wondered if the RPG industry could realign to accommodate the idea there is some worth to publishing rules that are primarily a reference document, versus a core set that exists to introduce and teach the game. While the Phone PDFs released have the same content as the standard rulebooks, the “meta-construct” of the Phone PDF navigation buttons, to varying degrees, merge “reference” to “teaching document.”

Varying Opinions

Reading comments from various gamers over the last few days, I’ve seen comments like “I don’t think this is for me, since I view PDFs on my PC.” I’m wondering if the marketing of this format as specifically for phones is undercutting the advanced navigation tools that the format is adopting.

I have also seen some discussion about the wisdom of creating this format, which is static regarding page size and font, versus epub formats. I’m not an expert in this area, but every RPG epub that I have seen loses some of the trade dress of the game in favor of the flexibility of the format, and while some gamers may not care if the epub of the game looks like other epub books they are reading, sometimes part of the “experience” is to see how the book was designed to look.

This preservation of trade dress is another reason I wonder about the “third way” of proprietary apps. While it doesn’t yet have the full functionality of the desktop site, the D&D Beyond app allows for some of the customizations of font size and page set up, while retaining the “look” of the D&D book from which the content is derived.

The Digital Road Goes Ever On

 I can see them being popular in the “short term,” as others are developing the next generation of data presentation. That said, the RPG industry is very good at hanging on to old ideas for a very long time. 

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I don’t think that Phone PDFs are the wave of the future, but I do think that the functionality of the format may introduce players to options that they want in electronic rules references in the future. I can see them being popular in the “short term,” as others are developing the next generation of data presentation. That said, the RPG industry is very good at hanging on to old ideas for a very long time.

I also have the odd concern that if this format does become popular, it may end up being a potential issue for some independent publishers. While there are more and more tools that allow a single newcomer to produce impressively formatted products at a reasonable price, the amount of time it might take to add the extra functionality, which is largely comprised of a web of interconnected hyperlinks, may end up creating some expectations that can’t be met at the entry-level.

Overall, I’m excited at the increased functionality, and I hope it heralds a change in mindset regarding teaching and introduction versus referencing information, but I wonder if the specifics of delivering this new functionality will prove to be more cumbersome than as yet undreamt of future paradigms might provide.

Read more »

I got a text message a few weeks ago letting me know that my good friend Jim was moving back to town, after 20 years. Jim was the first gamer I met when I moved to Buffalo in the mid-’90s and we played a number of great games together. Then, one day Jim moved away for work, and he never came back. I had honestly never expected him to come back, and we kept in touch over the years online and meeting at the occasional con. Needless to say, his return is exciting, and I started talking to him about gaming with him again, excited to have him join the games we have running. But I also knew that having Jim join a table was going to be a disruption to any game, no matter how cool Jim is and how cool the group is. So I started to think about that change and how it could be mitigated. 

So let’s talk about adding people to gaming groups…

Group Dynamics

A given group of people who game together for any period of time develop their own dynamic which includes things like: 

• A social hierarchy (who leads, who supports)
• Communication paths (frequency, platform, tone, etc)
• Acceptable and unacceptable behavior (missing games, language at the table, etc)
• Conflict resolution (controlled discussions, arguments, etc)
• Shared experiences and stories (important stories to the group, funny things, etc)
• Social touchstones (inside jokes, favorite quotes, etc)
• Playstyle (murder hobos, talk to all NPCs, high drama, rules orthodox, etc)

This can be a thing that a group consciously creates through active discussion and deliberate action (e.g. a group may actively work not to be murder hobos). Other parts will come about organically through interaction (e.g. the day before the game everyone starts chatting online to remember what happened last session). 

The end result of this is that any established game group has a dynamic whether they know it or not, and as long as that dynamic is healthy, it is then comfortable and forms a kind of comfort zone for the group. It is, in essence, how that group plays and gets along. 

Change and Equilibration

So, if an established group’s dynamic is a pond, a new player is then a rock who is dropped into that pond — the result of which is that waves are made for a while and then the pond settles out and accommodates the rock. 

The arrival of a new person into the group will force a change to the group dynamics, no matter what. This is not avoidable. A new person comes into a group with their own thoughts, outlooks, stories, playstyle, etc. They also arrive without the shared experiences, stories, and touchstones that the group has used to bond together. 

At first, much like dropping a stone into the pond, the disruption is large — but over time as the new person integrates into the group (assuming that the person is compatible and the group is not toxic) the disruption becomes smaller, and eventually, the group dynamic equilibrates to a new norm, and a new dynamic forms.

Change is inevitable when a new person joins a group. So the question becomes how you handle the disruption until the new dynamic is formed.

How Much Disruption A Person Will Cause

The first thing you want to consider before you add a person to a group is are they a good fit? What we mean by that is how big of disruption will that person be to the group. Likewise, is the group a good fit for the person?

The way we determine that is by looking at the factors that make up the group dynamic and assessing if the new person aligns closely to the existing dynamic, or if they are radically different. 

For example, if your group has a playstyle of being lawful characters doing good, and the person you want to add only plays evil characters and is a murder hobo, then the disruption will be larger. 

Another example: your group has a de facto leader; one of the players winds up playing the leader character in all your games. The new person you are adding was the leader person from another group. You are likely to have a disruption as the two leaders figure out how to work together.

You can do this exercise alone, by talking to the new player, by talking to the group about the new player, or all of the above. You should go through this exercise. Not every addition to a group is going to be a good one, and not every group is good for a new player.

Determine How Well Your Game Supports Change

The next thing you need to consider is if your current game will support the change of adding a new character mid-game. Some games have an open structure where the characters have a chance to meet new people and go adventuring with them, such as a fantasy game where you return to town before exploring the next section of a mega-dungeon.

Compare that to an ongoing political thriller at an isolated space colony. The addition of a new character will need to be worked in, but also that player has missed so much of the politics and intrigue that came before.

In some cases, you are going to find that the game won’t have a problem adding in another player, but in some other cases you may decide that it’s best not to add the new player to the current game, but rather wait until this game concludes and add them into the next new campaign.

Test Drive

If a new person seems like a good fit on the surface, and everyone is willing, have a one-shot game to let everyone get to know each other. You can start with some socializing before the game so that everyone can get to know each other, and then you can play out a one-shot adventure.

This gives everyone a chance to meet and check each other out, without any kind of commitment. The socializing will help to see if personalities mesh and the gaming will help to see if playstyles are compatible. 

Understand that one game does not reveal everything, but it will help you figure out if it’s worth investing more time to find out. If the game goes well and everyone had a good time, you can continue discussing adding the person, and if the game was a disaster, then everyone can part ways. 

Consent

So if the person seems like a good fit for the group and vice versa, your game is capable of taking on a new player easily, and the test drive went well, you can then have a few discussions. The first is with the new player to see if they want to join the group. The second is with the group to see if they want the new player to join the group.

The outcome of these two discussions needs to be an enthusiastic Yes in order to add the person to the group. If either the new player or the group says no, then it’s a No, and if either is luke-warm or hesitant then it should also be a No. Like everything else with consent, you cannot push through without the consent being enthusiastic. 

I have been in games were we added people and the group or the person was not enthusiastic — and eventually, things didn’t work out. Trust people’s instincts. If they don’t have a good feeling, then it’s likely not going to work (now if that is a self-fulfilling prophecy or not, I don’t know). 

You Seem Trustworthy… 

Adding a new player to a group can be a great thing. Group dynamics are the sum of the people who make it up. A new player can bring about positive changes to a group, and move a group in directions you were not expecting. But sometimes a group cannot withstand the change a new player brings, especially if they are very disruptive. Likewise from the new player’s perspective joining a group can either be very supportive or not. 

The thing we do know is that adding a new person to a group is going to bring about a change to the group. It is naive to think otherwise. By doing a bit of work, not rushing to push someone into a game, and having good discussions, you can make sure that the disruption you do cause when adding someone is manageable and leads to a fruitful new group.

What are some of your disaster stories and success stories about adding new players to a group? Do you test drive new players with your group? What games make it easier or harder to add players? 

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Join Ang, Jared, and J.T. for a discussion about how to use weather in your games. Will these gnomes’ all-weather gear be enough to keep them out of the stew?

I had a twin once. We did everything together. We learned magic, the two of us. I know she’s out there, still doing it…but I lost it. And I haven’t talked to her in years. 

Single player games are a new idea to many role players, and one of the most quickly growing experimental branches of game design. They are some mix of self directed story telling, choose your own adventure, and directed thought experiments.

I find them fascinating and I am on a particular quest to find time to play more of them! Most will ask you to write based on some kind of prompt — in The Gentleman Bandit by Allison Arth, for example, you write poetry as an old West outlaw, based on the cards you draw. In The Beast, by Aleksandra Sontowska and Kamil Węgrzynowicz, you answer leading questions in a journal about dark desires (heads up: adult content). Last month, I played They Stole The Moon, a ritual and story by Aven Elia McConnaughey, which takes you through a story about yourself, your magic, and how we process loss. Today, I played Twain, by J Li, which is currently on kickstarter. All cards on the table, they sent me a promotional copy, which was the basis of this review. 

Twain is a single player game that you play by creating your imaginary twin, the magic that you used to know, and why you don’t talk to them anymore. It’s closer to a larp than a tabletop role playing game, and in it you may recognize the indie small games movement we’re seeing so much of in game jams and on itch.io — it’s a moment, an emotion, and experience; a dream of what might have been; a self guided, self fulfilling prophecy. It’s a game of leading questions and evocative language and holding a mirror up to yourself. When I played it, it became a way for me to tell myself what I needed to hear, and give that telling power. 

To play, you do a little character creation for your twin, and the life moment that broke you apart. Other than that, you play your current self. Then, you go somewhere non-residential to meet your twin. I went to my favorite park.
The single player games I’ve played frequently have some specific engaging task — writing a letter or drawing connections between items on a page, for example — but going out and having this very personal experience in a public place was a new feeling. I was a bit nervous that it would be extremely awkward. After all, here I am pretending to wait for someone that non-game me knows is not coming. I’m having a little bit of my very own Waiting for Godot moment. The trick is, though, that no one else knows you’re playing a game with yourself. I actually found it no more awkward than actually waiting for someone in a park…which was appropriate. 

Your twin is, of course, made up. But you are in the place you are expecting to meet them, for the first time in however long, and doing all the things we do when we’re waiting for someone and anxious if they’ll come or not. You text them. And you wait, filled with thoughts, when they don’t reply. And potentially the most genius moment in the game of tricking ourselves — you set your alarm with your ringtone, so that they “call” without you expecting the ring when it comes. It’s surprising how easy it was for me to fall in to how I’d naturally react in that situation. My particular story felt mostly positive, although I can absolutely see how other stories would not.

The game itself is beautiful and its printing (I had the deluxe edition in my hands) lends itself to the dreamy mystery of the situation. It almost pained me to write on it, and it definitely made me slow down and think mindfully before I marked up the papers that it insisted I write on directly. When I picked it up from the post office, I was surprised to find myself holding a thick square envelope — not what I’d expected since I’d come to pick up a game. Opening it revealed a sleek silver envelope emblazoned “Twain” and with the image and blurb on the back. The game itself is printed on high quality lightly textured cardstock and velum, is beautifully laid out, and fulfilling both by sight and touch. It was a good addition to the experience — and the experience is, of course, what single player games are all about. 

In many ways, we’ve lost sight of what it means to play alone. Culturally we place little value on alone time, day dreaming, or self reflection. Many single player games encourage all of these things, which creating an experience around them. Twain is a beautiful addition to this genre. 

Twain is available on kickstarter now through November 7th. 

Have you played a single player game before? What is your favorite?

 

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I’ve never been a fan of when players just say they want to use X skill, such as, “I want to use Perception to check for traps”, or “I want to make a Diplomacy check with the town guard to find out what’s going on with the prisoner.” Technically there’s nothing wrong with doing that in your games. I’m not here to tell you your fun is wrong or anything. If you like playing that way and it’s enjoyable, then more power to you. What I am here to do is give you a hack that will help you flesh out the game around your skill checks and some of the reasons you might want to implement this fairly minor change to your game if it doesn’t have it — the idea of triggering a skill. See how I bolded, underlined, and italicized it? It’s because I wanted you to notice it. Really I just wanted to make sure I noticed it when I read back through the article. It’s not on you. It’s on me.

What is triggering a skill?

I’m glad someone asked. Granted, I asked myself. I wonder if that makes me a little crazy. Probably. Anyways, to trigger a skill the player should narrate what their character is doing until it becomes clear the character is attempting to do something that would require the use of a skill and they’ve done enough in the game to warrant the skill being rolled. 

But wait. Why not just let people call skills they want to use and let the GM fill in the blanks?

Good question. Here’s a number of reasons.

Providing Options. By narrating through how you’re triggering a skill, you’re giving the GM and the other players a number of ideas and elements to help them react to whatever the die roll is once the skill is triggered. If the game or the GM allows for some wiggle room when failure happens, then the GM has some material to work with to help keep the game moving forward and to have failed states that are more than “nothing happens”.

Character Development. Moments like this show how a character skill set manifests in the actual game world. The description of how someone swings across a chandelier to kick an Ogre Magi in the face and disrupt their spell can show a lot about a character. One player could describe a trapeze artist like performance with a graceful flip kick at the end, while another could describe a leap where they barely grab on with one hand, accidentally let go at the most opportune moment to kick the Ogre Magi, and land. Functionally, they’re the same thing and use the same skill, but show very different characterizations.

Player Engagement. This gives the players another way to engage with the game by having some ownership in telling the story of their character. They can choose to narrate in 1st or 3rd person, or not at all and let the GM or other players offer suggestions for how their character acts. In the end it’s prompting the player to engage in the play of the game outside of the mechanical choices and the die rolls or whatever the game’s randomizer is.

Shared Vision. Pushing players to tell GMs how their characters are doing things, even to just get a little bit more information, helps the GM understand how those characters function.  This helps if the GM needs or wants to narrate something the character is doing after a bad die roll. It also helps in games where the GM has control of the narration post die rolls because it can help guide them to where they can go with the follow up description.

Those are four reasons that seem reasonable.

They are in fact reasonable and have been playtested at tables for, how old am I? Multiply by the leap year, carry the extra month for that light speed travel situation, and divide by my great grandmother’s age… 32 years, give or take a century. All time traveling silliness aside, I hope you give the idea of triggering skills a chance at your table. If you do trigger skills in your games, or do something like it, let us know. We want to know why and how it works at your table. Catch you later. I gotta run so I don’t get this clone thrown in the stew.

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One of the challenges in creating and running a campaign is keeping track of dates. To do this, you need to create a calendar that fits in with your campaign. Not every world will have a 24-hour day or 365 days in a year but it is important to make those choices relatively early in your campaign. Not only does a calendar help track any seasonal changes (if any) but it will assist you in creating your living world.

What use is a calendar?

The calendar assists the game master in a number of important ways. It encourages proactive thinking about your campaign setting. Are there holy days that need to be accounted for? Are there civic (or other) events that occur on a regular day? Is there a common day of rest – religious or otherwise? Are there “truce days” when fighting is forbidden?

This also helps with the task of character ageing, as pointed out in the Gnome Stew article “Character Birthdays and Advanced Ageing” by J.T. Evans, because it allows the game master (or the players) to choose a “birthday” for the characters. Building a calendar can also be a constructive “Session Zero” activity.

A calendar can help establish some fundamental guidance to provide context for your campaign setting. For example, the old Roman or Julian calendar (on which our current calendar is generally-based) had market days set every nine days and certain days each month were considered lucky or unlucky (but not Friday the 13th). The ancient Greeks divided the year into 10 months. There may be different calendars by race (Tolkien wrote that the Elven “long year”, for example, is 144 human years), religion or region.

If you are running a space-based campaign, where there are worlds with different daily rotations and different orbits around their star, you might have to consider the local calendar as well as the “Interstellar Standard” (if any).

Customize your Calendar

You can also decide the number of days in a week or month, or dispense with the idea of weeks and months entirely.

In my own campaign, I have decided to create a calendar of 364 days. I divided the year into four quarters (Spring, Summer, Fall and Winter) of 90 days each with a separate day between these quarters for the equinox or solstice, which is celebrated in different ways around my world. There are a variety of internet sites that provide different names for the months, such as those created by Tolkien or used in other parts of our world.

In ancient Rome, the numbering of years started with the founding of the city 753 years BCE. In mediaeval times, the years of reign by a sitting monarch (the third year of Kind Edward, for example) was used to date edicts, contracts and so on, which made calculating the overall passage of years difficult.

It may be that, as in George R. R. Martin’s Song of Fire and Ice, your world has irregular seasonal changes. An annual calendar is still required, if only to regulate the collection of taxes, the dating of contracts and marking the passage of time.

Calendars reflect your living world

If your world does have seasonal changes, a calendar assists the Game Master in how the seasons work and the impact of these seasons on daily weather. As in parts of our world, there may be only two seasons (rainy season and dry season), or different seasonal variations, such as a three-season Mediterranean/California-type climate. All of these would have a different impact on daily weather (or your daily weather control for advanced sci-fi worlds).

Thinking about the calendar helps the Game Master in the act of world-creation. It also assists in creating a more immersive world for the player characters. Do the characters need to prepare for winter? How does the weather impact the way characters dress? Plate mail, for example, would be extremely uncomfortable in either high summer or deep winter. Would three days of rain affect the ability of massed troops to move? Would drought have implications for your adventuring party?

In any case, creating a calendar for your campaign (or world) is a useful tool. You need not have everything nailed down at the start but it will assist both the Game Master and the players in doing their forward-planning. Make a date (or dates) today!

 

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Welcome to The Indie Game Shelf! Usually, each article in this series highlights a different small press roleplaying game. In this installment, however, I’ve decided to take a look at Kickstarter as a prominent means of getting indie games to market. Plus, to help showcase the wide variety of games available, I want to highlight a few campaigns that are currently underway. Finally, to keep all of this related to the Indie Game Shelf series, I’m going to give readers the chance to help choose a game for a future article!

Kickstarter

There’s no doubt that the crowdfunding model of financing game development, with Kickstarter being a standout in that field, has drastically changed the landscape of the tabletop hobby. Design and production of tabletop roleplaying games has exploded in recent years due in no small part to the popularity of using Kickstarter and sites like it to fund project development, particularly for first-time designers who now have a way to bring their games to market without going through an established publisher, the very definition of publishing an indie game.

For those not already familiar with this model, a brief explanation follows. Designers, writers, editors, artists, printers, technology, materials, and all the other people and tools needed to transform a cool idea into an actual game would cost some amount of money. In the traditional publishing model, that money would come from a publishing house or sometimes a self-publisher, with the funds generally coming from a single source, and hopefully those costs would be recouped once the game was published and sold. In the crowdfunding model, instead of one large investor, the game development is instead funded by tens, hundreds, maybe thousands of smaller contributions, generally consumers who want to see the product available and get a copy for themselves. Kickstarter is a website that facilitates the implementation of this model by giving creators a platform with which to advertise their idea and collect pledges from people who wish to contribute. Crowdfunding allows anyone with a design idea the chance to find people who want to buy into that idea and turn it into a game.

The Story

The leadership at Kickstarter has, in recent weeks, come under scrutiny firstly for firing employees that were organizing a union, and more recently for failing to voluntarily recognize the union. As this news made its way around gaming circles, there was a lot of talk (both from game creators and crowdfunding backers) about boycotting Kickstarter for its anti-union stance. However, (as of the time of this post) boycotting has explicitly been discouraged by Kickstarter United, the union seeking recognition, and instead displays of solidarity have emerged among creators, backers, and employees.

It is in the spirit of this solidarity that I would like to highlight just some of the indie RPG crowdfunding campaigns that are currently underway. The last several weeks have seen the launch of quite a few new RPG crowdfunding campaigns, and the collection that follows is just a sampling of what’s currently available. Not only that, but dozens of new games and supplements come up for funding every month. If you’re interested in keeping up with the latest and greatest in indie RPGs, Kickstarter is a great source of both information and games.

The Games

Below are some of the crowdfunding campaigns that, as of this post, are still available to back. They are listed in order from soonest campaign end to latest. Remember that there are even more RPGs out there than the few listed here, not to mention all the gaming supplements and other RPG-adjacent projects like dice and miniatures! The breadth of products available in the indie RPG space is as varied as the hundreds of creators all looking to bring their ideas to life.

Disposable Heroes (Oct 15) – This is a heavily modified Powered by the Apocalypse game that uses a deck of cards to represent a whole collection of ready-made characters in a highly lethal, neon-splashed, futuristic setting. The publisher, Sandy Pug Games, already has a few titles under its belt, but this is their first major physical product offering.

Heart: The City Beneath (Oct 17) – This intense dungeon-delving game by Rowan, Rook & Decard uses rules based on the Resistance system and takes place in the same world as one of RR&D’s earlier products, Spire. This campaign that has already exceeded its initial funding goal, and the additional funds, besides backing common extras like more art and writing, are also going toward a developer commentary podcast and even a game soundtrack.

The Nuadan Chronicles (Oct 25) – This game is a sizable two-volume undertaking detailing a “post-post-apocalyptic electro fantasy” setting featuring strange technology and fantastic magic. The design follows a traditional model and the narrative centers on a mercenary-adventurer party in a dangerous and largely unexplored world. The game is the inaugural offering from Brooke and Jason Junker, the married couple design team at BrokenDice.

Agon (Oct 25) – Agon is a game about epic heroic adventures in a mythic fantasy setting. The publisher, Evil Hat Productions, is perhaps best known for Fate (and many such associated games like Dresden Files), but it is also the production house behind such greats as Blades in the Dark, For the Queen, Monster of the Week, and many more. This campaign is for funding an updated edition of this 2006 classic from designer John Harper, who is not only behind the aforementioned Blades in the Dark, but also the much-hacked free game Lasers & Feelings.

Visigoths vs. Mall Goths (Oct 31) – This self-described “tabletop roleplaying game and dating sim” pits Rome-sacking warriors against 90s spooky teens. This is a self-publishing effort by designer Lucian Kahn who has several titles already under his belt including Dead Friend and Grandma’s Drinking Song (a game featured in an issue of The Gauntlet‘s Codex zine and which is played using an actual onion), but this is his first game design to be launched on Kickstarter.

Haunted West (Nov 1) – This alternate history Weird West game proposes wild west adventures while highlighting heroes in those adventures that have been largely forgotten by our own history. The game posits an alternate course of American history with the addition of fantastical horror elements for a truly fresh take on the Old West. This is the second offering from designer Chris Spivey of Darker Hue Studios who took the indie RPG scene by storm with his previous work, Harlem Unbound.

Ross Rifles (Nov 4) – In contrast to a fantastic alternate history as presented above, Ross Rifles instead deals with an all-too-real and more recent piece of history by telling the stories of soldiers in the Canadian Expeditionary Force fighting in the trenches of World War One. The game looks to focus on the character drama and violence of brutal warfare, life in the trenches, and the terror of no man’s land. This Powered by the Apocalypse offering is the first Kickstarter outing by Dundas West Games, and one of the designers is Gnome Stew‘s own Daniel Kwan!

The Shelf

Just as there’s no shortage of great indie RPGs on Kickstarter, there’s also no shortage of information sources for what’s out there. If, however, you want comprehensive regular overviews, I can’t recommend enough the “Crowdfunding Collection” series on the blog Teylen’s RPG Corner by Jennifer Fuss. Jennifer posts weekly updates on pretty much the whole world of RPG crowdfunding, and for the indie RPG fan, there’s always something new and interesting to check out!

Finally, at this point I normally ask if there are any games on your shelf that you’d like to highlight and to share them in the comments section below. However, since this article already mentions so many games, I want to hear what you’re excited about that has yet to make your shelf! Tell me what crowdfunding game you’re interested in, (whether listed above or not) and I’ll see about highlighting it in a future installment of The Indie Game Shelf! This time we can fill my shelf together!

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It is probably no secret at this point that I enjoy games that have mechanics derived from Apocalypse World. I am often stunned at the variety of play experiences that can come from a very similar set of mechanics. Even games that approach similar genres can often bring out very different aspects of that genre based on a few cleverly worded moves.

The game I’m looking at today is Turn, by Brie Beau Sheldon. It is a game about shapeshifters in a small town, and while you may think that tells you a lot about how this game plays, in many ways the emphasis is on the “small town,” and not the “shapeshifters.”

The Package

This review is based on the PDF version of the game. The PDF is 158 pages long, with black, white, green, and grey color. Pencil drawings illustrate the book, and the bold splashes of green serve to highlight text and images in the sketches. Sidebars and essays are shaded in grey, against the standard black and white text.

There is a two page index, a two page summary of the author’s Script Change safety tool, and a page of special thanks, which also lists several of the game’s playtesters. Each chapter starts with a thematically appropriate piece of original poetry.

Introduction and Some Things to Explain 

The beginning chapters give an overview of the types of stories that this game is hoping to evoke, the core assumptions of the game, and the game mechanics used to do so. Players will be taking the role of shapeshifters in a small town. The shapeshifters are not tied to any existing lore, and this is an important point. The conflict in the game is less about having an animal form that will do things you don’t want to do, so much as it is about being something more than people may be willing to accept, and the tension between the comforts the closeness a small town provides, versus the difficulty in being truly different than others.

While there are many essays in the book that revolve around the topic, because I like to show my biases early and up front, the essay on “Why Small Towns?” is really one of the reasons I felt drawn to review this product. The game is an exploration of why small towns can be both comforting and terrifying, and why its hard to fully shed those aspects of a small town that speak to you. I grew up in a town of 600 people, and feeling the tension between not quite fitting in, but still loving the familiarity, and missing the town from time to time, is something I can keenly feel.

In addition to the most familiar aspect of similar games (2d6 + stat, three tiers of resolution), Turn has a few aspects unique to the game. Characters track Exposure, which is how well others around them notice how different the character is, and Stress. While a character never acts against their will, when a character has a full Stress track, they shift to their other form. Exposure can be positive or negative, which may alter how a character’s special nature is received by those that find out about it.

Characters can also add a Turn die to their roll, if they can justify some aspect of their character that calls for it, and they take stress for doing so. The unique rules often called “Moves” in other similar games are called “Struggles,” because they represent the ongoing stress of juggling multiple natures and managing exposure with the locals.

How Shapeshifters Work and Your Town

The next section of the book elaborates on what the game setting is, and what it is not. There is a deeper exploration of shapeshifters in the actual setting, and how they are intentionally not tied to any real world tradition or mythology.

The interesting dichotomy isn’t that the PCs are the only shapeshifters, but that often there are family lines of shapeshifters, while at the same time, shapeshifting isn’t a thing that most people acknowledge. This means there can be some multi-level societal maneuvering, and for animals that are especially social and also have a structure, this can add yet another layer.

Characters create families, add some traits to them, and connect those traits to a town. Towns have specific themes that emerge, and players create mundanes (NPCs from the town) that are tied to them. Characters track exposure with their connected mundanes, as well as with the town as a whole.

How to Play Turn, Human Roles, and Beast Archetypes

This section contains a discussion of Player Purposes, what is often called agendas in other games with similar mechanics. These stress finding balance, setting goals, and exploring the town.

Creating characters involves picking a Human Role, and then a Beast Archetype. The Human Roles are:

• The Beastborn
• The Heir
• The Late Bloomer
• The Lover
• The Organizer
• The Overachiever
• The Showoff

The Beast Archetypes are:

• Bear
• Bison
• Cougar
• Otter
• Raccoon
• Raven
• Snake
• Wolf

Humans have their own “moves” called abilities, while beasts have “powers.” Humans have stats called Habits, while beasts have stats called Instincts. All of these have an absolute rating, and depending on the struggle being triggered in the fiction, that absolute value might be a bonus or a penalty to the roll. This means that while a character always remains in control of themselves, some tasks are less complicated depending on the character’s form, and if the habit or instinct is a benefit or a bane to the task at hand.

There have been other Apocalypse World derived games in the past that use the structure of “add this to this” instead of having a singular playbook, and in many of those cases, I haven’t been as satisfied with the results as I was with games that had a singular playbook. In this case, I love how the interplay between the person and the archetype drives the story, and it is a really clever bit of design to have the absolute value work for or against a character depending on the context of the roll.

Town Manager Guide

The game moderator in Turn is known as the Town Manager. This section has advice on Town Manager Purposes (the principals of the game), as well as how to manage the information created by the players. Because characters generally don’t come to harm, and can accomplish what they set out to do, the main move that the Town Manager is performing is to assign consequences.

The consequences are broadly described as assigning stress or exposure, revealing secrets, putting town characters in danger, causing damage, shifting relationships, and changing lifestyles. In addition to the general advice, there is a full page, 13 step list of items for a session zero of the game.

Characters move towards their goals by filling in segments of a progress by for complex tasks (not unlike clocks in other games). There is also a gossip phase at the beginning of the session where the Town Manager can introduce potential plot hooks that may or may not be picked up on by the players. Advancement is based on season progression, and seasons progress when multiple characters complete complex tasks.

Now, as we’re about to talk about the long term resolution of Exposure, comes all the gut punches of the game. Exposure is marked as positive or negative. Tallying the positive and negative exposure creates a score to roll when an Exposure track is maxed out. Characters can gain exposure with town characters, animal groups, and with the town itself.

Depending on the Exposure roll, a acquaintance might revile the character, grow distant, or accept them for who they are. When it comes to the town, the stakes are much bigger. The lowest result with the town can have very bad consequences, while the median result can mean that the character is tolerated, but not loved, in the town, once their secret is known. If their resolution gains the best possible result, they may be accepted by the town.

When it comes to getting the worst result when filling your exposure track with the town, the options are different degrees of exile or violent resolution.

I don’t think I’ve often had a game where, upon reading the “end state” of the game, I had such an emotional reaction. It really struck me the finality of some of the results, especially in light of the broader context of the game. The importance of either changing hearts and minds, or never being able to go home again, but reaching a point where nothing would ever be the same, really tugged at my heartstrings, even without playing through a campaign.

Script Change

The final chapter of the game is a summary of Brie Beau Sheldon’s Script Change tool, which in my opinion is one of the best tabletop safety tools you could ever hope to employ. The language used to explain the tool is a little more canted towards how it can facilitate playing Turn, specifically, but I can’t help but gush over this as a great invention.

If you have never seen it before, the tool effectively creates easy to recognize signifiers for pausing the game, moving through content without adding details, or restarting a scene to edit out problematic elements.

Positive Exposure

 While I can’t say that everyone will have the same reaction to explanations of small-town life, Brie Beau does an amazing job with their essays, and I think it’s worth the purchase just to read them. 

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I really enjoy how this game uses elements that might seem familiar to tell a very specific kind of story. The tenor of the discussion on small town life and both the positive and negative aspects spoke to me, and the way that the game mechanizes tracking acceptance or rejection is very well done. The absolute values that can be utilizes as negatives in certain circumstances is clever design, and this is possibly the best use I can think of for “add X to Y” playbook character creation.

Stress

I have a hard time objectively judging this, so the degree to which the small town struggle to fit in, versus an outsider’s nature may not be as universal to those that didn’t grow up in a small town. While I think it is a great approach for what it is trying to do, for those that are accustomed to the presentation on other Apocalypse World derived games, the terminology and expression of the rules may not feel in line with what has become more standard.

Recommended—If the product fits in your broad area of gaming interests, you are likely to be happy with this purchase.

I can’t help but recommend a game where I got emotional just reading the possible resolutions for a campaign. While I can’t say that everyone will have the same reaction to explanations of small-town life, Brie Beau does an amazing job with their essays, and I think it’s worth the purchase just to read them. Additionally, there are some very clever mechanical tricks to do some novel things with a tried and true formula that wouldn’t be bad for anyone to examine for future development.

Have you ever gotten emotional just from reading the rules of a game? Has any game really spoken to some element of life that is a key component of your personal development? Do you want games to pull on your heartstrings? Let us know in the comments below—we’re looking forward to hearing from you!

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*System Splicing is a series looking to break down tabletop RPGs into mechanics you can apply to other games.  Splicing is about focusing on add-on mechanics rather than entire systems.  These mechanics can set the tone, support the system, and improve your experience, but are not imperative to play.  Through this series, you should be able to one day splice them all together into some sort of wonderfully horrific frankensystem.

D&D 5th ed.

In geek spaces it’s near impossible to talk about tabletop RPGs without someone mentioning 5e, Critical Role, or the plethora of other 5e actual-play podcasts.  So before we get to dissecting the odd and esoteric, let’s talk about the monolith in the room.  D&D 5th, originally called D&D Next, is the latest installment for the most culturally referenced tabletop RPG in existence.  Prior to the majorly popular Critical Role, Dungeons & Dragons has been referenced in Community, Big Bang Theory, Stranger Things, and more.  It’s currently a d20 attrition-based system with a strong emphasis on medium-to-high fantasy heroics.

What makes the system stand out from its previous iterations is its ease of play, accessibility to newcomers, and a streamlined ruleset compared to prior editions.  It has never been easier to get into Dungeons & Dragons than it is today, and 5e has brought in a massive wave of starry-eyed newbies and long sleeping veterans.  So of course, we have to start here.

If there’s anything from 5e you should be jumping to splice outta the system, its going to be the Legendary Actions, as well as the Advantage/Disadvantage systems.

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Legendary Actions

Before 5e, while it wasn’t impossible, it was rather difficult to implement an intimidating boss without using a score of GM tricks.  Alone, a single boss is limited by Action Economy and any group of four or more adventurers could absolutely destroy the enemy before it had a chance to react.  The common GM tricks to handle/mitigate this included HP inflation, adding swaths of minions to the encounter, or just giving the enemy additional actions.  5e took the last point and realized it properly through Legendary Actions.

To catch anyone up, creatures with Legendary Actions are capable of taking these actions either at the end or beginning (in the case of Rezmir, Hoard of the Dragon Queen) of a turn.  They have 3 actions, and often choose from a list of two to four actions.  Some of the listed actions could cost multiple actions, and you regain all actions on your turn.

Legendary Actions add narrative value to the fight, emphasizing the greatness of a boss, and allow them to interact with the party more often.  This is all done without having to artificially extend the fight through massive HP or minions just to let your villain have their moment.

This style of initiative interruption isn’t something entirely new either.  In more narrative games like Powered by the Apocalypse and Dungeon World (moreso emphasized in the latter), the GM acts in-between player actions, turning the battle more into a scene than straightforward combat.  The enemies in these games are constantly interacting with the players and raising the stakes with each hit point taken.  Implementing this in 5e, let alone the plethora of other systems we can use it with only serves to make the fight more engaging.

That being said, despite 5e being the codifiers, I don’t necessarily believe 5e has the best implementation of Legendary Actions in their creatures.

What’s Bad? What’s Rad?

Legendary Actions in 5e tend to boil down to either attacking, skill checks, or perhaps one unique action (often movement).  The epic Adult Red Dragons of lore, at best, can throw down a tail attack, can make perception checks, or do a wingover and fly around.  Vampires, the masters of life and death, can move, make unarmed attacks, and bite.  I think Legendary Actions could be better than that — or at the least flavored better.  Dragons should be able to release plumes of exhaling flame, dealing fire damage and pushing the players backward like 10ft.  Vampires should flavor their simple movement as swarms of bats, teleporting behind the wizard across the field that’s next in initiative, completely shifting the tactical situation at a moment’s notice.

5e does have a few rad cases of Legendary Actions in the game — primarily in Liches and Unicorns.  Liches have the ability to throw down any cantrip they have, as well as a plethora of other options such as Frightening Gaze or their Paralyzing Touch.  Meanwhile, a Unicorn can grant itself or allies +2 to AC, or heal itself when it’s in danger (personally I’d allow them to heal allies as well).  Actions like these keep the identity and spirit of the creature intact and allow you, the GM, to show personality and nuance through them.  Legendary Actions as a whole need to be kept interesting, engaging, and visceral.  Make the narrative itself legendary.

Legendary Actions have a lot of potential that I don’t believe have been fully realized in the current confines of the system.  Personally, I use a much lesser “Villainous Actions” mechanic for direct antagonists that aren’t quite boss level.  These ones I only give 2 actions to, with one of them being “Kick: +5, 1d4+2.  On hit, push an enemy 5ft away.”  In any case where you feel a halfway important NPC is about to get swarmed by your PCs, consider giving them a fighting chance.  This becomes more necessary for the higher number of players you have.

When & Where

Legendary Actions can be implemented in any system that uses a structured initiative.  Nearly every d20 system can use it, as well as systems like Savage Worlds’ card initiative.  This is also doable with alternative structures like popcorn, group, or queue initiatives.  You’re also capable of just adding initiative structures to games that don’t normally have it, like in FATE.  In FATE I tend to just use Savage Worlds’ card initiative and use Stunts in place of Legendary/Villainous Actions.

Done well, Legendary Actions can make your encounters more interesting, more dramatic, and more dynamic.

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Advantage/Disadvantage

If you’ve been playing 5e to any degree you already know about Advantage and Disadvantage.  To sum it up, roll two d20s and take the higher (advantage) or lower (disadvantage) result.  But how helpful is this?  As the chart to the right will tell you, it’s quite a lot.

Attempting to roll an 11 has a 25% increase or decrease in probability, or the equivalent of a +/- 5 modifier, entirely based on your advantage state.  However, in play we don’t simply say ‘you have a +5 bonus to this’, and this subtle choice encourages the players to focus more on the situation that generated this advantageous outcome, rather than the statistics behind it.  It’s rewarding in a meaningful, non-statistics-focused way.

When utilizing Advantage properly, you want to encourage the players to place themselves in positions where they could potentially gain an edge, and not punish them for giving something a try.  I personally use an “Attempt” rule where players can attempt to do creative things like swing onto a chandelier for a height advantage, but it only uses up their action if they succeed.  If they fail, they’re able to still move and act normally.

If they wanted to jump on that chandelier and roll a 10 and fail, I suggest not punishing them with damage or Disadvantage, but they could now be hanging just at the edge of it.  This is where you could give them a choice to still gain advantage by offering a Devil’s Bargain: if you let go, you still gain Advantage on the attack, but you’ll take falling damage.  Disadvantage should only come up during say, Nat 1’s (if you play with critical failure), attacking in bad conditions (heavy rain and wind), or if the enemies impose it on them.

By punishing players for attempting to be creative, you’re just conditioning them not to do interesting things.  It’s just negative reinforcement at that point.  But when you make the normal answer boring, the players will make accomplishing the interesting their mission.

What’s Rad?

While frequent use of Advantage allows players to feel heroic, epic, and successful, I find that proper use of Disadvantage can lead to just-as-dramatic results.  I have a small bag of 24 paired d20’s hidden in my GM bag that I use for my “Volley Pool.”  One of my favorite moves is just opening up the bag and letting all of them roll out as a volley of arrows and scorching rays fall upon the players.  However, since they’re all being flung out at a volley, it’s all at a Disadvantage.  I’ve never loved an expression more than a player wracked with dread, watching closely as I peel away the high rolls, as a glimmer of hope and relief fills their eyes.  This can create tension where there was none and can allow players to really grasp that they might be in a pinch while still providing a safety cushion against it.  Even against an army, the average 7th level wizard with fireball won’t blink — believing they can wipe out the lot — until they find themselves only narrowly evading a wave of two dozen arrows.  Proper use of Disadvantage can be a very humbling factor for otherwise arrogant players.

When & Where

Advantage/Disadvantage can be used anywhere that uses non-narrative dice.  The most common application would be other d20 systems like ICRPG or OSRs like Lamentations of the Flame Princess; however, it can also be used with systems like FATE or dice-pool games like World of Darkness (if you REALLY want to reroll all those dice).  It cannot, however, be used for games based around semi-success; this means Powered by the Apocalypse systems, as well as Narrative Dice games ala Star Wars RPGs/Genesys.  A core element of gameplay in those systems is based on semi-success, or success at a cost — adding Advantage/Disadvantage would only dull the impact and goals of the system.  As an aside, I also don’t recommend using it with Savage Worlds, as the Wild Die itself acts as a unique implementation of Advantage.

I find Advantage/Disadvantage particularly engaging; I would even go on to say it’s one of the best elements of D&D 5e and one of the main draws of the tabletop RPG.  It pulls the game towards healthy narrative structures and acts as a fantastic tool for both GM and players alike.  Whereas Advantage can create triumph, Disadvantage can create dread — as well as hope.

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Di’s Addendum

What about Proficiency?

The ultimate goal of System Splicing is to take a look at the best parts of add-on mechanics and find ways to implement them into other systems.  Proficiency is too imperative to the system identity, as it is written too deeply into the core elements and classes of the game.  If you were to implement Proficiency into a random d20 system you would have to majorly rewrite the system to make it fit.  At that point, you might as well play 5e.

What about Short Rests?

While Short Rests are amazing, it is technically an import from 4e — a system that definitely deserves more credit than most players give it.  The only real change and shift from 4e to 5e were that Short Rests were moved from 5 minutes to 1 hour, making it more difficult to rest in general.  However, it still belongs to 4e so I’ll talk more about it when I get there.

What about Lair Actions?

Lair Actions, while fairly clean and interesting, are ultimately just an additional Legendary Action attached to a list of environmental effects.  Just remember that when you use Lair Actions, the effects are ultimately ‘fantastical’ in nature.  The lair is reacting to the power of the Legendary creature, or perhaps has a series of reasonably magical effects, or a natural environment made active and magical.

With the Adult Red Dragon example (D&D Basic Rules, p.8) you have the dragon’s lair erupting in fire, rumbling with earthquakes, and spewing with poisonous vapor.  This is an environment where all those conditions can happen naturally but are violently stoked by the presence of the dragon.  However, you can have lairs that raise and lower with water, or lairs that have statues that fire off various energy blasts.  Ultimately, however, it’s just a 1/round free Legendary Action.

Wrap Up

I think that’s all I can really say about 5e.  Keep your actions legendary and find several dozen d20’s to keep your players on their toes.  Mind the point of what a mechanic is trying to do, and make sure it fits the game well before implementing them.

~Di, signing out.

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