Only One Way

A common feature in many tabletop games is that of fractional numbers.  Commonly these come in halves, but they can also frequently be thirds.  There are even games that ask you to use square roots in some situations, so you can really end up with just about any rational non-whole number.

Non-whole numbers aren't convenient to work with in games, so players are most often asked to round these numbers.  Typically, games will have a consistent method of "Up" or "Down" but I remember one 90s era game that had three different rounding methods requested within the character creation process alone:  "Up", "Down", and "To the nearest whole number".

I was never sure if the designers felt strongly about how to arrive at the desired whole number, or if they were just having a laugh.

Die Drop Automata is Knitting

I've always had a bit of a love for die-drop tables. You can do a lot of clever things with them, as they give you several dimensions of data at once and also leave room for interpretation.

When the dice fall on a chart, you have spacial information about where they have fallen, their position relative to each other, various axis of scalar values that might be the size, colour, and face-value of each die.

Art of Fading Light

 As one of my few OMGAM microgames that actually has art, I wanted to give a little attention to it.

The game is about an interstellar starship that follows most of the constraints of our current understanding of physics, though it doesn't necessarily spell all of that out in the text.

The design of the ship its self is a kugelblitz or "black hole starship" design, first imagined by Arthur C. Clarke.  Hawking Radiation from a Kerr-Newman black hole is somehow harnessed and used to propel a rather mind-bogglingly massive ship between the stars at rather immodest speeds.

Tri-fold Map to the Stars

My April 2019 micro-game submission for OMGAM also did triple-duty as a submission to the itch.io Pamphlet Dungeon Jam and Mapemounde.

This means that it is triple-packed with some rather clever things, but it also suffers quite a bit in the compromises it had to make to satisfy the criteria of length, format, and content.  Which is a bit of a shame, as I think there are some kernels of really great ideas in here.  I will probably provide an updated version in the near future, to add some traditional A4 sized PDF instruction sheets.

The basic premise of the game was inspired by Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds, and by the seminal sci-fi RPG Diaspora by VSCA.  The player is in control of a tramp space craft, traveling the stars at near-light speed by virtue of some sort of unspecified exotic engine.

Art of Paper Birds

In a previous post, I said that I wouldn't unpack the specific details of the art choices that went into Paper Birds.

It has been on my mind a bit since then, so I'm giving it a bit of a treatment today.

This was for the Emotional Mecha Jam, so I wanted the art to be both martial and sad.  This was also heavily influenced (as previously mentioned) by the 1965 Nuclear War board game, so some of that Strangelove style dark satire worked its way in, too.

Cozy Copyright Infringement

Look, first of all, it is fair use.  The cover art is original art, distinct enough from the source of inspiration to constitute transformative change.  The references in the text are homage.

The Jam

For this ongoing series on OMGAM2019, we are looking at March's game.  This coincided with the #CozyGameJam hosted by Riverhouse Games.

Cozy games are a really interesting niche.  Most of them aren't particularly ludographic (by which I mean that they tend to lack the sort of mechanisms associated with gamification: quantification, scores, or any sort of strict resolution system).  They tend to be conversations, journaling exercises, or crafty sorts of things.

Real Sums

With Apologies to Pat Benatar

In a landscape of competitive ideas, nomenclature is often the first battlefield.  I'm not writing this to challenge existing ideas, but to re-frame their default assumptions.  Competitive, non-default, second-class ideas ideas often are forced into prefixes that identify them as such:  Non-.  Anti-.

When we talk about Game Theory, "zero sum" suggests the wrong things about default assumptions.

But how many eggs were left out?

I recently spent 566 words of elaborate digressions, studiously not telling you why I think it isn't important how attribute points are allocated.

After that rather irresponsible abuse of verbiage, I thought it might be courteous of me to actually answer the unasked question.

2dF down the line

I was a small child when D&D was "roll 3d6 down the line" for your stats.

Technically that was my first experience with character creation, but the practicality of it was a little different.  By the time my friends and I were playing the games properly, it was a 4d6 drop one, or arrange to suit your taste.  Homebrew (and later official) point-allocation systems quickly became the norm with the groups I played with.

Not Perfectly Folded Birds

Okay, so in the previous post regarding Paper Birds, I talked a bit about how it worked, and the thoughts behind the design.

This is what didn't work.

Origami and Game Jams

February's submission to OMGAM coincided with the Emotional Mecha Jam on itch.io.  

This would be my first submission to a public game jam, so I stepped a bit beyond my normally rough-hewn markdown and cobbled together some free fonts and art in MS Publisher, and put out something that could be printed and played.

Dishes need washing...

Oops, I stopped doing that thing that I started.  The current state of the world and global pandemic not withstanding, it is well past time to get back to it.

I actually did complete one micro-game a month back in 2019, the ones that are in pure markdown are over on github and some that are fully formatted are on my itch.io page with the tag #omgam2019 and I'm indexing blog posts here with a similar tag.

Right now there are not many of those posts, but I'll be making more regularly here until I unpack each of the games.  Some don't need much unpacking, others will get a few more words.

As I go, I will ensure that each game has a markdown formatted outline over on the github repo.  Some of the games that don't currently have a print layout will receive one, at least minimally.  And others might get revisions, updates, and expansions.

All of them will get a few words of explication here, accompanied by meandering tangents.